Learning at Westminster

Larry Summers' next step into education, or being wary of the 'world's best thinkers"

2012-02-06T22:15:00.001-07:00

It turns out that Larry Summers' recent NYT editorial about the future of education was a quiet hint about his new educational venture, the Floating University. (I blogged about it here; thanks to Jules Evans' great blog The Politics of Well-Being for the heads-up about the Floating University.) Summers, Steven Pinker, and other denizens of the America's educational upper-class (modestly self-described as "the world's best thinkers") are launching a new online educational venture, based loosely on the "best course model" of education.

I have no way of knowing how good or durable this initiative will be. The launch video reveals little about how FU will work, preferring to offer snippets of the world's best thinkers passing on nostrums about the great ideas and the value of breaking down disciplinary boundaries. But let me offer two observations:

1. The notion of low-cost online learning has now followed a predictable trajectory, from the first people posting videos about how to play rock guitar through the optimistic period of open learning into an entrepreneurial phase, where people from powerful institutions are competing with innovators to see who controls the market. While it remains to be seen how influential the Floating University will be, the fact that famous professors from Harvard, Yale, and the like have a venture out there may mean that the space is closing quickly for non-powerful innovators.

2. I have nothing against great thinkers starting schools, (and am in fact a huge fan of Alain de Botton's School of Life). But I will confess to being a bit bothered at the vanity of "the world's best thinkers" calling themselves such. The Floating University's teachers are in fact wise and world-renowned. But it is not the case that their wisdom is needed nearly as much as they think. What we know about effective teachers suggests that it is relationships between the teacher and the learner (or whatever else you want to call that relationship) that matters for the student's learning and for her development as a human being. So while learning economics from Larry Summers is undoubtedly a good thing, learning economics with a real human being is a better one. Attribute it to my Intermountain West upbringing and my state university PhD and my decentralist politics but when something is sold to me based on the presence of Harvard, Yale, Bard, and Columbia faculty I have to think it should be opposed on those grounds alone. In the same way that bio-diversity is a good thing in the non-human environment, geographic diversity is a good thing in the human environment.

(Now if only Wendell Berry and Rebecca Solnit would start a school....)

Can Democracy Upset the Structures of Higher Education?

2012-02-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

I am just back from AACU's annual conference in Washington DC. I had high hopes for it, since its core focus was to be about the civic mission of higher education--something I've been passionate about for a long time.

The conference was disappointing--the talk of civic mission hasn't changed much since the 1980s when service-learning exploded in American higher education, and the examples of best practices were tame in comparison with the challenges--cost, access, mission drift, outmoded approaches to leadership, public skepticism about the value of a college degree--that face higher education.

(There were two bright spots: Eboo Patel's call for interfaith dialogue as an act of civic learning, and a few sessions on the intersection of creativity, entrepreneurship, and the arts.)

I've been reflecting on the causes of my dissatisfaction, and I think they come from a single concern. Higher education will have to change radically to respond to the challenges I listed above. The question is what will drive the change? To be too simple about it, there are three potential impulses for change.

Some campuses will change piecemeal, program by program, in response to seemingly discrete forces in the market. Nursing programs, for example, will offer more Doctor of Nursing Practice degrees because there is a shortage of nursing faculty, because accrediting agencies demand it, and because healthcare providers need to find cheaper ways to provide care.
Other campuses will change wholesale in response to powerful outside forces--governments, big organizations, and corporations. We can already see the impact of this source of change in state higher education budgets, legislator critiques of "degrees to nowhere", and the impressive rise of for-profit institutions. In some ways AACU's efforts to shape change fall here, as it tries to link its effort with the White House and other powerful national/global organizations.
Still others will harness the power of democracy as the source of change, in the same way that democracy is changing governments, organizations, and the social sector.

Of the three sources of change, the third is both the most inspiring, most in keeping with the tradition of higher education in the US, and the rarest. And here is where my dissatisfaction lies. For while civic engagement has changed courses, created centers, and influenced mission statements, almost no campuses have become radically different because of it. There have been no significant changes in tuition because an institution got together with its constituents and planned a new way to fund the institution. Campuses haven't found ways to provide more access because real people have demanded it. New majors aren't the result of crowdsourcing, assessment isn't based on public ratings, etc.

The thing that makes democracy powerful is not that it gets things right. Democracy is powerful because it holds out hope that the people who are effected by decisions, systems, and structures, have the experience to identify problems, the wisdom to respond to those problems, and the humility to know that there is no solution to big problems, only an on-going commitment to trying to make things better. So we will know if we have found a way to a democratic future for higher education when we see more instances of programs, structures, curricula, systems, and whole institutions changing as a result of sustained engagement between the campus and its communities. And until then, conferences like AACU's will continue to disappoint.

Which "high touch" practice would you kill?

2012-01-30T21:51:00.000-07:00

Campuses love to tout their high touch approach to education--the small class sizes, one-on-one interaction between faculty and students, mentoring, academic advising, etc. Students and parents seem to like them as well.

But beyond their virtues, there are five problems with the typical list of high touch educational interactions:

They are expensive. Faculty time spent one-on-one with students costs more than faculty time with a bunch of students.
They are not well integrated into faculty workloads. Faculty work is designed around hours in the classroom (and preparation for those hours). Some institutions add research expectations, and most add governance work as well. But how does a campus account for and compensate outside the classroom interaction with students? Hardly at all, much to the chagrin of faculty.
They are not equally distributed among students. Some faculty are open to lots of high touch interaction; many are not. Some students take advantage of the opportunities; many do not. And among those who do not are often students who need it most.
High touch practices are not always high impact practices. George Kuh and the NSSE folks have studied which practices lead to higher student engagement, and by extension better learning. Most of them are curricular reforms (learning communities, freshmen seminars, capstone courses, etc.) Some have high touch as a by-product, but few high touch practices are, in themselves, high impact practices.
Most campuses don't align high touch practices with their missions. All types of schools tout small class size, for example, regardless of whether small classes are more likely to help their particular students learn, graduate, and become who they wish to become. And few campuses ask which practices their students need for success.

So given these problems, it seems like schools ought to be willing to cut out certain high touch practices for providing less benefit than their cost implies. One could study this question, but I think most of us could come up with a few that we would kill right away.

My first choice would be......office hours. Few students use them, many faculty ignore them, and the benefit to individual students is marginal.

Which would you kill?

Why Larry Summers is wrong about the future of education

2012-01-25T21:11:00.000-07:00

Larry Summers is a very smart and very powerful man. And has a lot of wise things to say about education. But one of his notions (which is also shared by Bill Gates) deserves more scrutiny. Summers has argued recently that colleges and universities should back off on hiring faculty because they are content experts. Instead, they should show their students the classes of the best professors in the world. The inevitable result, in his thinking, would be smarter students all over the world since they had all learned at the feet of the best professors. Let's call this view the "best course model."

Now you can see the appeal of this idea. Why not, after all, make the best education possible available to the most students possible? And why limit access to the best professors to the small group who manage to get accepted to the universities where they teach?

Attractive notions, both of them, but hardly likely to result from some sort of massive national screening of courses taught at Stanford, or Berkeley, or Harvard. Why?

Faculty at prestigious universities are rarely the best teachers of their disciplines. They are, instead, the best researchers in their fields, who teach an occasional course for undergraduates. This is not to say that all professors at top universities are poor teachers (think, for example, of Michael Sandel's course on justice), only that the question of quality, which is assumed in the proposals of Gates and Summers, is actually quite complex, and is unlikely to be resolved by picking courses offered by "the best professors."
The main motivation behind this notion is prestige, and prestige is rarely a good motivator for learning. Think, for instance, if through some sort of process it was determined that the best physics teacher in the world was at Dixie State University in St. George, Utah. How many colleges would select his/her course as the basis of their own physics courses? Hardly any, if we can extrapolate from the world of textbook publishing, which is dominated by texts from faculty at top universities (or by textbooks written by committees of faculty from top universities), or from the world of open content learning, which is dominated by the content offered at MIT, Yale, and Stanford, not that shared by faculty at regular colleges and universities across the globe.
Learning is not guaranteed to be the result of watching lectures taught by the best professors in the world. What evidence we have about learning suggests that it happens in active learning settings, where students are responsible for puzzling through problems, struggling through assignments, critiquing each others work, putting theory into action in the community, etc. In other words, watching the "best" courses is likely only to replace a very small portion of what has to happen in order for students to learn. The bulk of it will still have to happen in the interaction of students, teachers, course material, and the real world.
Many of the best courses are idiosyncratic, and apply only in particular settings at particular times. Try to imagine, for example, what the best freshman literature course would look like. What would its content be? Which books would students read? What would they write? Which theories of literature would be welcomed? Which would be shunned? Or try watching the lectures from "basic" courses at MIT and Yale. Many of the professors are wonderful. And most make choices about content which faculty and students wonder about. Gates and Summers can be forgiven for assuming that agreement on content would be a simple thing. Their fields--computer science and economics--may have a more standardized set of assumptions about the content of introductory courses. But most disciplines don't share that level of agreement. And past the first few courses, even the most standardized disciplines give way to specialization based on the interests and assumptions of the faculty who teach those courses.
Standarization, not excellence, is likely to be the outcome of widespread adoption of the best course model. Now Summers is comfortable with a centralized, standardized model, since it is the model that most respects the worlds in which he leads. But as long as education is about helping real students with real aspirations reach those goals, and the varied goals of their institutions, the best course model is an impediment to the development of students as learners and as people.

When cost, quality, and access are in conflict

2012-01-22T11:16:00.000-07:00

People who worry about the cost of higher education often argue that high cost reduces access to higher education. That is undoubtedly true.

But it is also true that low cost limits access. Here is how: When a good school offers a very low tuition, demand for enrollment in that school increases. In this case, schools could do one of two things: increase enrollment or become more selective. Because schools have a limited ability to increase capacity (both because of physical plant and because low cost is almost always a result of finite subsidies from outside sources), they almost always become more selective. And by becoming more selective, students who need access to higher education are often unable to enroll in those top-quality low-cost schools.

US News and World Reports' recent list of the 10 Least Expensive Private Colleges makes this point in spades. The top four schools in this list (which is an idiosyncratic list--it is missing Cooper Union, for example) are good schools and inexpensive. But they are hardly accessible.

Berea College is inexpensive because its endowment--almost 800 million dollars--subsidizes a huge portion of its budget. The BYUs that follow--Idaho, Hawaii, and Provo--get subsidies from another source. When I was a faculty member at BYU Provo about a decade ago, the rumor was that 80% of the budget came from LDS Church funds--mostly the tithing dollars of members. I don't know if that number is correct, but it is certainly the case that BYU is inexpensive because the church pays most of the costs of attending there.

These schools limit access in two ways. First on mission. Berea is dedicated to serving low-income students from Appalacia, the BYUs to serving Mormons. Second, on academic preparation. Here BYU Provo is the strongest example. Its entering freshman class routinely has an average HS GPA of 3.75 and an ACT composite score of 28.

(BYU-Idaho has worked hard to increase capacity to be able to serve Mormons who cannot get into BYU-Provo. It has adopted a year-round calendar, and has recently begun aggressively moving into online education. (Take a look at The Innovative University for the full glowing story. Here are my views on the book.) In doing so it hopes to draw on volunteer faculty--retired Mormons with PhDs who will teach online for almost nothing. Hardly a business model for the nation.)

The stories of these schools share a simple message--reducing cost doesn't necessarily help with access at all. It may, in fact, make it harder for good students to go to good schools.

Why cities are the future for liberal arts education

2012-01-16T06:53:00.001-07:00

There are two main questions about the future of liberal arts colleges. The first focuses on relevance, and wonders whether in an increasingly technological and career-centered world, there is any room for a major that doesn't lead directly to a particular job. The second frets about cost, and wonders whether, in the future, students will be able to afford to enroll in a liberal arts college, most of which, being private, are very expensive.

These are important and useful questions, both of which I have written about in the past. But there is another question we ought to be asking, one which, if schools get the answer right, can help them respond to the first two queries. It is this: Where is the future of liberal arts colleges?

You can start to understand the importance of the question by asking where the present of liberal arts colleges lies. The answer is, by and large, in rural communities east of the Rockies. This is true of top liberal arts colleges like Dartmouth and Middlebury and Grinnell. But it is equally true of little known liberal arts colleges, which are sprinkled by the dozens through the towns of New England, the Midwest, and the upper south.

Those towns were important population and cultural centers when their home colleges were founded, mostly in the 19th century. And for much of their histories, the small colleges mostly enrolled students from the local region. But today, the population of those regions has dwindled, and large public universities have swallowed up much of the enrollment in the state. A a result, small, rural liberal arts colleges struggle to either raise their profiles by competing with nationally known liberal arts colleges on amenities and cost, or they struggle to stay alive. (The parallel with mainline protestant congregations is instructive. Those congregations often planted colleges in the farming towns of the New England diaspora. Now those churches struggle to stay alive in places where the population is aging and shrinking.)

You might also ask where liberal arts colleges are not. They are not east of the Rockies, by and large, with the exception of pockets in Seattle, Portland, and California. And they are not in the burgeoning cities of the sunbelt and West. There is one liberal arts college in Salt Lake City--Westminster College. There is one in Denver--Colorado Christian. There are none in Phoenix, or Las Vegas. There are only a handful in the cities of Texas, Georgia, and Alabama.

This matters for two reasons. First, students enroll in colleges close to home. If the vast majority of the American population lives in or near cities, the vast majority of students will pick urban institutions. Second, cities contain both the employment opportunities and the amenities that make it possible for students with liberal arts degrees to find employment, and for colleges to keep costs low. If you run a rural college and want to attract students interested in theater, and athletics, and restaurants, you have to build them. But if you run an urban liberal arts college, those opportunities are within walking distance of campus.

In fact, if I had to build a new liberal arts college right now, I would build one in the heart of a city. Instead of erecting a gym and a library and a cafeteria and taking on those costs, I would make arrangements with the local Gold's gym, and the public library, and surrounding restaurants for my students to use their facilities at a cost. The college supports local economic development, and connects deeply with the local community, reduces its own costs, and heightens the range and diversity of the learning experiences of its students.

Ten theses on improving quality, reducing cost, and increasing revenue

2012-01-04T13:45:00.001-07:00

The challenge facing small private colleges like Westminster is to improve the quality of learning while maintaining or lowering costs to students and increasing revenue to the college. To date some colleges have been successful with one of these goals, but often at the cost of the others. There are many reasons for this failure, but two stand out.

The first is the assumption that quality is measured almost entirely by inputs--the academic preparation of incoming students, the variety of services offered to students, the amenities provided on campus, the pay of faculty, the reputation of the institution, etc. Many campuses pursue improved inputs as part of a strategy to heighten the prestige of a campus and thereby drive students to it. But all of these quality measures add expenses to campus, which are either absorbed in the budget or passed on to some students through higher prices.

The second is that campuses rarely coordinate the activities that bear on these questions. By this I mean that decisions about tuition and aid are set in one way, decisions about the curriculum, policy, and student services are set another way, and decisions about expenditures in a third. The separation of decision making means that choices, such as those on enrollment, which influence the ability of the campus to provide a quality education, are made apart from those decisions on curriculum, policy, and expenditures which make it possible to assemble a class.

So the question is whether a campus can work simultaneously on cost, quality, and revenue; and if so, under which conditions this sort of work is possible. I believe the three can be linked. Here are ten characteristics, which if they existed on a campus, would make simultaneous work on cost, quality, and revenue possible:

The most important quality measures are outcomes measured by learning--of students, staff, faculty, and other campus constituencies--and by student perceptions of value. Those value perceptions are almost always a function of how much a student paid to attend in relationship to how much the student learned.
The most important cost measure, then, is not price (particularly not sticker price) but instead the cumulative amount that a student and his/her family pay for education. Communication with students before, during, and at the end of their educations should emphasize this point. And influencing this measure should be the key focus for campus stakeholders working on cost issues.
The most important quality measure is time to graduation, since it sits at the intersection of cost,quality, and revenue. In theory, excellent quality education and strong student learning should reduce the cost to students because they are more likely to graduate on time having learned enough to succeed in a future that they desire. And excellent quality and improved graduation rates increase revenue by heightening demand and expanding the capacity of the institution to handle that demand.
There are curriculum policies that cumulatively improve quality, reduce cost, and heighten revenue. Among them are smoothing transfer enrollment, regularly updating the content of the core curriculum (rather than creating new courses to respond to changes in the field), reducing the number of electives, increasing the number of core credits in a major, increasing opportunities for special topics courses and internships.
Curriculum reform should focus on implementing these changes across campus, so that the shape of majors (number of credit hours, proportion of coursework and independent work, capstone experiences, internships) is as similar as possible across the institution. Otherwise, while students in some fields will move more effectively through their educations, others will not. And without similarity across campus, it is impossible to reward faculty fairly for their investments in this process.
Greater similarity in the shape of the curriculum leads to greater efficiency. But it also improves quality by increasing the consistency of faculty interactions with students and preparing students to learn successfully in the college’s particular learning environment.
Improving quality, reducing cost, and increasing revenue can be accomplished while maintaining many sorts of diversity. But it is unlikely to be successful at institutions that enroll students from a very wide range of economic backgrounds and levels of academic preparation. Diversity in academic background creates a wildly fragmented curriculum where highly skilled students (via honors and other special academic programs), and less skilled students (via remedial and introductory level courses) have special pathways to graduation which lessen the efficiency of the curriculum and the effectiveness of common approaches to learning. And wide diversity in economic background means that certain students subsidize the tuition of others, thus lessening the likelihood that all students will perceive the quality of their education similarly. As with the curriculum, then, financial aid should trend towards similarity across campus, with the range of financial aid awards narrowing.
Recruiting should shift towards enrolling students who will be successful with the college’s particular approach to learning, rather than recruiting a wide range of students of whom only a portion is likely to be successful. Note that this does not assume that a college must only recruit academically strong students or only wealthy students (both of which are hallmarks of an input-focused approach to institutional success). Instead, it imagines that schools can position their missions, curricula, and financial aid to align with a demographic that is most likely to be successful in that setting.
Campuses must distinguish themselves as a whole from their competitors (so that, say, Westminster as a whole becomes more and more different from its competitors) by creating greater similarity within the campus (so that, say, there is greater uniformity of experience regardless of a student’s major). Doing so allows the development of campus-wide expertise in a particular sector of higher education instead of developing pockets of expertise in many sectors of higher education.
The effort to improve quality, reduce cost, and increase revenue requires a coordinated approach that spreads over several years. Often, institutions seeking to make headway on these issues start with rewriting their missions. But the approach above favors making headway on key infrastructural matters--curriculum shape, financial aid and recruitment philosophy, common approaches to teaching and learning, time to graduation--as a precursor for creating a mission that has support from stakeholders and systems.

The virtue of holding something back

2011-12-26T10:00:00.002-07:00

American culture today (and throughout much of its history) has made a virtue of holding nothing back. Occasionally this is an act of democracy, for keeping secret what shouldn't be is a bad thing, and keeping power in the hands of a few rather than sharing it broadly is another.

But by holding nothing back, I am talking about a cultural tendency to extravaganza, extremism, and violence; to an economic tendency to spend as much as possible, to keep interest rates near zero, to seek growth for growth's sake; to a political tendency to let the winner take all, to propose grandiose responses, to police much of the world; to a personal tendency to want more, to work more, to imagine that doing more is the answer to any challenge.

When the economy is poor, or the future uncertain, this holding nothing back is tinged with desperation, as if throwing everything we have at it must certainly be the solution to the crisis before us. It makes our culture mean; not solely in the sense of being unkind (though that is certainly the case when a person says whatever is on their mind about an opponent), but also in the sense of being sordid or crass.

For an illustration of what I mean, go see Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Get there early to watch the previews. You will see trailers for Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, John Carter, and Battleship, among others. These are all essentially the same movie, with only variations in locale, accent, and the faces of the bad guys accounting for their different names. In each, some big organization or network hatches an evil conspiracy to destroy the world. The people you would expect to stop this sort of conspiracy are either involved or so incompetent that a small band of fighters are the only ones who can stop it. Fortunately the fighters are strong, violent, smart, and possessed of massive destructive capacities (or able to steal them), and so in the end the good guys win by holding nothing back. No act of violence, no trickery, no weapon is too much. When, in Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson uses a howitzer to save Holmes' life by toppling a light tower which guards an arsenal built to plunge the world into total war, you know that you long ago escaped the world of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and landed right in America, 2011.

So, now, in praise of holding something back. Whatever you think of Christianity today, the origin story, celebrated during the same season as the release of blockbuster action films, is all about holding something back. God holds back, placing the hopes and fears of all the years, in an infant born in modest circumstances to modest people, in a backwater town in a backwater portion of the Roman empire. The story of Jesus' life is similarly modest, with his service and teachings being directed at the lowly, and with him regularly reticent when asked about his power and purpose. It is telling that the temptations Jesus overcomes are of wanting it all--his immediate desired gratified, control of all earthly power and finally the power of God. He resists them by holding back what he already knows about himself--that he is god.

The story of Buddha is similarly modest. He could not become enlightened as an extremist, be it one of wealth or one of asceticism. But his modesty and endurance ultimately led him to awaken, after which modesty remained the hallmark of his preaching and his community of followers. No great buildings for him, no self-aggrandizement (in fact, no self at all). Distrust of dogma and solutions. Just consistency, temperance, and the openness to learning that comes from humility.

We can learn from these stories that holding something back is at the basis of human obligation one to another. To hold something back is to not say the thing that is true but hurtful, it is to ponder things in your heart, it is to have enough in reserve (be it money, or time, or energy, or love) to be able to feed a person unexpectedly hungry, to welcome strangers, to adjust course in light of new insights, to give a bit more when it is needed, to take less than is offered, to demand less than you might wish, to learn rather than simply to know.

Holding something back, (call it what you will--modesty, temperance, prudence, humility, moderation) is a personal virtue. It seems to be an imperative if someone wishes to live satisfied and get to know the transcendent better. It is an educational virtue, for it puts learning not certainty at the heart of schooling. And it is also a civic virtue, lying at the center of people's ability to govern themselves, to solve problems, to imagine a community built on something more than geography, wealth, and power, to trust others.

We could use more of holding back.

In memoriam: Vaclav Havel

2011-12-20T22:38:00.003-07:00

For maybe an hour the big news Sunday was of the passing of the Czech playwright, dissident, and President Vaclav Havel. Then Kim Jong Il died, and Havel's passing slipped out of the news and into the margins.

That is a shame, for Havel's life and work teach two important lessons that we will never get from the death of the North Korean dictator.

Havel was a humanist who retained his humanism as President. While it is increasingly rare for people with humanities backgrounds to ascend to political leadership (unless one retains a romantic view of the law as a humanistic discipline), it is almost unheard-of for them to keep the perspectives of the humanities while in office. Consider, for example, Newt Gingrich, who though once a historian, eschews all of the tentativeness, contingency, and love for questions that makes history a discipline that matters for humanity. In its place he inserts the vague, laudatory references to a few leaders of the past that suggest only that he has read more than we have, so we best shut up. Havel, though, never allowed his political power to eclipse his commitment to the humanities. Perhaps this was because the humanities had cost him so much, getting him imprisoned and leading to scorn during Czechoslovakia's communist period. Or perhaps it is because the humanities are so easy to come by in America today--mandated in schools and less challenging than science--that we have forgotten how valuable they are in leaders.

Havel was also a politician who remembered that there are things more important than politics. In this, his background as a playwright and essayist served him well, and while the rigors of political leadership pressed him he continued to call for space and time in public life to assert the importance of non-political things. In the US we rarely hear this sort of thing from anywhere in public life. One is either encouraged to believe that politics are the most important thing out there, or that much of the rest of life is essentially political anyway, and distinguishable from electoral politics only in the way that power is allocated. For Havel, though, and for a few conservatives and people dedicated to the notion of a good life that extends beyond the political, human life and social relations are much bigger an more satisfying than politics.

We would be wise to recall this fact, and to demand it. When communism flourished people in the West could suggest that it was the only political system that threatened to consume all of public space. But in the aftermath of its fall, it is clear that organized politics, regardless of their ilk, look to seep into those parts of life that are best kept apart from politics--the home, the civic organization, the church, the book club, and the other third places that develop the perspective, patience, discipline, joy, and maturity to keep people free.

My favorite non-fiction works from Havel are Disturbing the Peace and Summer Meditations, the latter written while he was President, but calling for citizens to recall the importance of morality and civility even in the face of political systems that threaten those virtues, either by destroying them or by claiming them as the realm of politics.

Can higher education be anti-poverty?

2011-12-16T15:54:00.000-07:00

Among the disheartening bits of news yesterday was this: that according to the Census Bureau, half of the population of the US is poor or low-income. While there is debate over the definition and meaning of the statistics, they are simply the latest to indicate that income disparity and poverty in the US are high and rising.

One wonders what colleges and universities can do. On the one hand a college education still, on average, is worth a significant amount of money through the life of the graduate. Unemployment is lower among those with degrees than among those without. Many community colleges are deeply committed to job training. And college access as a pathway to economic opportunity is a major issue in higher education.

But job training and access are not the same things as working against poverty. And understanding and reducing poverty are rarely found among college's desired learning outcomes in the way that critical thinking, leadership, sustainability, civic engagement, or understanding diversity are.

Given the ways that colleges and universities work, there do seem to be some clear first steps to mounting an educational attack on poverty. Place the reduction of poverty on the list of a college's goals. Study poverty and work as part of the curriculum, both in majors and in general education. Focus on the application of learning in the workplace. Ensure that entrepreneurship programs are open to students in all disciplines. Guard against the assumption that poverty is solely economic or that wealth is the alternative to poverty. Establish a poverty center that looks and acts like diversity and civic engagement centers. Establish micro-lending programs to aid students. Track poverty as part of alumni surveys. Establish pay scales that narrow the gap between the best-paid and the least-paid employees of the institution. Link poverty reduction to the campus' mission. And keep the issue at the center of the publications, speeches, web content, and reputation of the institution.

Can small colleges support a small future?

2011-12-16T15:06:00.001-07:00

Bill McKibben is among the many people arguing that a decentralized, localist future is our best bet for economic well-being, environmental sustainability, and democracy. Mark Mitchell's summary of McKibben's most recent essay on the topic highlights a couple of interesting trends--a small increase in the number of farms (almost entirely led by an increase in small farms), for example--that suggest that a decentralist future may be in the offing. There are plenty of other economic trends pointing in the same direction. Small-scale production is easier and more common than in the past, locavore restaurants are spreading, entrepreneurship is spreading, charter schools allow a more localist K-12 education, and with the failure of national government on many fronts, state and local politics is more significant now than before.

Taken together these trends (or hints--who knows if they will be trends) suggest a move towards the small-scale in a number of sectors. It is ironic then, that while much of the culture and economy is opening to the small and local, higher education is moving in the opposite direction. Small private colleges and universities are struggling to stay alive. Many of them are pursuing a national strategy to do so, recruiting students from all over the US (and the world) and mimic-ing the curriculum, offerings, practices, faculty roles, and aspirations of large universities and prestigious private schools with national reputations. The particular is out in higher education; the global is in. Put simply, while much of the economy is organizing around small and local enterprises, small, local colleges and universities are trying to get bigger and more national.

The reasons why are clear. Many small colleges are in small, rural locations, where there simply aren't enough potential students to fill the classrooms. Many sectors of the curriculum favor the general, abstract, and cosmopolitan over the particular, local, and concrete. And the PhD programs that train faculty are overwhelmingly in large universities with national/global reputations and orientations. It may be the case, then, that a localist, decentralized future will lack a higher education component to support it.

There are a couple of hopeful signs. Municipalities in Arizona have started funding new colleges in the face of declining state support. These city-sponsored schools, unlike existing big city systems like CUNY, are committed to meeting the needs of the municipality. Localism is spreading on the internet, often impelled by professors (like those writing for Front Porch Republic and Anamnesis). And academic attention to the meaning of place continues apace.

Right now global studies programs are emerging on campuses all over the US, and study abroad programs are increasingly popular. If small colleges and universities are interested in remaining relevant in a localist future, one would hope that they would pair programs in particularism with those on globalism, that study at home would be as important as study abroad, and that their leadership, faculty, and commitments are as strongly to the well-being of the communities they call home as they are to the broader world.

The future(s) of religious higher education

2011-12-10T07:52:00.001-07:00

I have an ongoing interest in the intersection between religion and higher education for many reasons that readers of this blog might have noted--I'm religious myself (or perhaps religiously confused might be more accurate), I'm convinced that some spiritual practices have great potential for secular higher education, and I'm beginning to suspect that faith-based institutions do a much better job on institutional vision and the development of students than their secular counterparts do.

To these reasons let me add one more: that current and historic practices in the creation of churches might provide some insights into ways to respond to challenges facing higher education.

Carol Howard Merritt's post "Ten Church Models for a New Generation" neatly summarizes emerging practices among people wanting Christian churches to flourish. There are five themes that run through them.

First, the church, like higher education, has moved away from the needs of its congregants, either by succumbing to the temptations of largeness and prominence or by remaining complacent while the world changes around it.
Second, that successful innovations are coming in small settings, where the trappings of religion--big buildings, formal worship services--are less important than building a sense of common purpose among those who are participating.
Third, that these new forms of congregations have, in many instances, developed new funding models as well, where the congregation is funded by proceeds from a coffee shop, say, or where the pastor is an entrepreneur.
Fourth, these newly successful congregations emerge from the efforts of a few people who plant a new congregation and nurture it while it grows into something sustainable.
Fifth, while in some new versions technology plays a central role, in most technology is secondary to the broader mission of the organization.

In this list one can see suggestions for institutions of higher education. Particularly intriguing to me is the possibility of college-planting, where institutions of higher education select a couple of people to open what is essentially a store-front version of the home institution, dedicated to the particular needs of the people who live nearby. In a higher education landscape where even small colleges have hundreds of students, and where campuses are nearly always set off from their surroundings, store-front schools would be a place both to reach new participants, to innovate in education, and to build the sorts of relationships between learners and teachers that result in powerful learning.

Given that the trends that Merritt summarizes are emerging from the church, it may be that church-affiliated institutions are the first to move in the direction of small, emergent colleges. But no school should overlook the potential of emergent churches to suggest ways to reach new communities of learners, explore new models of revenue, and reinvigorate the human relationships (and the understanding of those relationships) that were once at the core of what it meant to be an educated person.

Where enrollment management and the curriculum meet

2011-12-04T20:40:00.001-07:00

Three quick stories about the interaction of curriculum and enrollment decisions.

Story 1
At each Board of Trustees meeting the chair of the faculty gets to make a report. At the last Board meeting our chair, the chemist Paul Hooker, noted that it seems like his classes have become bi-modal, with a group of students performing better than ever, and another group less well-prepared to succeed in Chemistry than he has seen in his career. As a result he and his colleagues are spending more time working with struggling students and are starting to think about revising course content to better serve the entire class. Though Paul wouldn't have known it until we spoke after the meeting, his observation matches changes in our freshman class. Years ago its academic profile was shaped like a bell curve, with the majority of students being solid but unspectacular. Now, our class follows almost a perfect quintile shape, with about 20% of the freshmen falling into each of five categories of academic preparation. No bell curve, but a much broader distribution of academic preparation.

Story 2
Four years ago Westminster started an innovative project-based degree completion program in business. In it, students who have an associate's degree and at least 6 years of work experience can enroll in a program that convenes groups of students for short residencies a couple of times a semester. The rest of the work the groups complete on-line, with faculty acting as coaches to the teams. The program is rigorous, aimed at people who want to be executives. The original research suggested that there were thousands of people who met the associate's degree and work experience requirements. Since the program began, though, we have always struggled to fill it, because people with at least 6 years of work are generally not in a position to go back to school, while people who are completing associate's degrees generally don't have the required work experience. Those who do have the combination of interest, education, and experience, take much longer to enroll than a regular student because their lives are so much more complicated.

Story 3
Our Liberal Education (LE) program looks like it will undergo revision at some time in the next couple of years. Our current program has two distinctive requirements--the completion of a speech class and a diversity requirement--that aren't often met in associate's degree programs at community colleges. For that reason, students transferring to the college rarely come in having completed the LE, and our ability to offer a 2+2 program is greatly diminished. The discussions to date about revisions of the LE, though, have focused on surveying the faculty about their views of LE.

None of the stories above is an example of a disaster. In each instance we have, or will, find a way to work through the difficulties born of a system (which is common throughout higher education) where enrollment management and the curriculum rarely meet. But it is worth thinking about why that is the case.

Decisions about the curriculum work their way through faculty committees under the aegis of the Provost. Decisions about admissions and financial aid emerge from those organizations. Those decisions are shared at the President's cabinet, and through the regular conversations between faculty and admissions staff. It is not the case that the two sides of the institution never interact. It is true that they mostly interact in the aftermath of decisions.

There are a couple of results of this lack of connection. The first is that there are often inadvertent but not unpredictable results of decisions. In the first instance above, the growth in the number of very strong students is driven by an increasing prominence, and more recently enrollment, in our honors programs, which for revenue purposes is matched by an increase in students with weaker academic credentials but a greater ability to pay.

The second result is to reinforce the divide between enrollment and academics. In each instance above, since key decisions were taken by one side only, it is simple to believe that that side holds the responsibility for the outcome. And where responsibility isn't shared, it is more difficult to share work.

This is a problem without a solution. In most institutions, the work of the academic side and the work of the enrollment side are far enough apart, and effective enough when operating separately, that there isn't a lot of reason to change. But we could make a small move in the direction of better communication if there was an enrollment manager, the Director of Admissions, let's say, who was an ex oficio member of the curriculum committee or the faculty senate. And similarly it would go a long way if a faculty member served a year-long fellowship in admissions and financial aid--sitting in on discussions about recruitment and contributing to decisions about scholarships. That small bit of shared work could go a long way towards making decisions where the results are not just predictable but predicted, and where the problems that do result get worked on jointly, not attributed to one side or the other.

Can you innovate and focus at the same time?

2011-12-02T16:50:00.001-07:00

You can't bump into an education sage or a political pundit without hearing that the United States needs to be more innovative. Steve Jobs was hailed as a heroic innovator at his death, Arne Duncan is calling for innovation in fixing college costs, Colorado's Governor John Hickenlooper has created an innovation initiative, and President Obama has argued that America must innovate its way out of our economic doldrums.

Institutions of higher education are particularly susceptible to the innovation argument, because they are under fire for being irrelevant, because they are the major location for research in the American economy, and because they have an overwhelming desire to distinguish themselves from each other. But there are at least four major concerns with pushing innovation as a major value in education.

Confusion--though colleges and universities talk about innovation--renewing an older thing to make it better and more meaningful--they often are hoping for invention--the creation of something almost entirely new. The conflation of innovation and invention means that small innovations often lack the appeal and funding they would need to get established, while big sparkly new things get the go-ahead on the basis of their inventiveness.
Integration--as my colleague Ian Symmonds has pointed out, without integration, innovations will lose their luster, remain isolated,and eventually wither rather than change the institution. But unless institutions are purposeful about integration, it doesn't happen.
Leadership--Often innovation is associated with a leader (think Steve Jobs again) rather than an institution or a set of processes. But as with other large institutions, higher education leaders come and go. If innovations are tied to them, or sparked largely in their offices, the spirit of innovation may leave with them, or take on their own idiosyncrasies.
Focus--At the same time that schools are being called on to innovate, quieter voices are calling on them to focus. There is logic in this call, since without focus, many schools on limited budgets will fail to allocate resources wisely or pursue risky new activities to their detriment. And in a crowded market, institutions that lack focus will get lost. Unfortunately, higher ed loves the lack of focus (we even have a name for it--the university). But as Jim Collins argues in How the Mighty Fall, lack of focus is one of the major sins that lead healthy organizations to collapse.

Can organizations innovate and focus at the same time? Of course they can, but to do so, they have to have a particular sort of innovation discipline. The sources of innovation--those institutions, ideas, passions, practices that the institution will apply to a new context--have to be focused as well.

Here is what I mean. Innovation is essentially taking something old and reworking it to be something new. If an institution goes to the same few sources as birthplaces of its innovations, it can count on the innovations having at least some focus at the end. So if a religious university wants to innovate it should comb the memories, writings, speeches, and histories of its religious tradition, looking for some idea that is analogous to the current situation. If a teaching college wants to innovate and focus it needs to go back to the same well again and again--the same philosophers of education, say, or the same peer institutions, or the same sort of pedagogy.

Here Apple and Steve Jobs are instructive. They have few products, all with the same look, feel, and appeal. They have been innovative to be sure, but their focus is even more impressive. Few colleges and universities have that same sort of limited product line and common design. Instead they work incessantly on creating a brand--a logo, a color scheme, a tagline--to somehow make it seem like their sprawling programs and new initiatives feel like they come from the same place. Most brands cannot live up to that task.

In memoriam: Dorothy Day

2011-11-29T16:24:00.001-07:00

The Catholic social activist Dorothy Day died 31 years ago today. We usually don't celebrate the 31st anniversary of anything, but there are at least four good reasons to pay attention to her legacy today.

For the impact she had during her life, Day is one of the least-remembered social activists of the 20th century, even among civic engagement professionals, and this in spite of her impact as an organizer and as a thinker.
Her approach to civic engagement--which blended deep religiosity, a passion for community, clear-eyed views of human nature and the complexity of solving social problems, and skepticism of the power of government--is a good match for American culture today, where mistrust of government is rampant.
Her response to poverty, racism, and inequity--the creation of houses of hospitality and the Catholic Worker movement--would be important examples to both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement if they wanted to turn their frustration into a positive program.
Her political philosophy rooted in Catholic social teachings of distributism, subsidiarity, and solidarity should inspire thinkers and activists interested in local solutions to economic, community, and family challenges.

The best entree to her life and work is her autobiography The Long Loneliness and Robert Coles' biography Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion. A bit of my own thinking about how her legacy could influence contemporary city planning is here.

Can private student loans lead to learning?

2011-11-26T07:54:00.001-07:00

I've written here, here, here, here, and here about opportunities for social entrepreneurs to support student learning and make a profit on education. By noting these opportunities I don't mean to suggest that only the market can improve higher education. But there are ways for creative folks to improve learning and make a living at it; opportunities that are currently being missed.

Here is another--loan money to students to pay for education. Of course I know that this is an old idea, and I of course understand that the federal government does most student loan lending, having taken over control of the industry only a few years ago.

Student borrowing is currently at the leading edge of the critique of higher education, with story after story of students borrowing huge sums of money and either not graduating, or graduating and being unable to repay their loans. These stories share two characteristics--students who borrow at high rates, and who make bad educational decisions.

And the stories are right: student loans are expensive--the going rate being 6.8%, and the rate for PLUS loans and other private loans often being higher. You can borrow money much less expensively for many things--a house and a car, for example. And savers park money in accounts--be they savings accounts, money markets, treasuries, or other bonds--that pay a much lower interest rate, simply because they want secure returns in an uncertain market.

So here is the market opportunity: establish an organization, modeled on micro-lenders like the Grameen Bank, that loans money to students, advises them on how to succeed in school, and teaches them how to succeed in managing their money. (The LDS Church does this on a small scale in the developing world through its Perpetual Education Fund.)

There is plenty of space between the rates that savers get on their savings, and the rate that the government charges on loans, to set a loan rate that is both more affordable and profitable. And there is plenty of space in the market to attach training to these lower-cost loans, so that borrowers successfully move to graduation and support each other in pursuing employment, repaying loans, etc. This is, after all, the micro-lending model: groups of borrowers support each other, and in so doing also improve loan repayment.

Who will be the first to enter? Credit unions could, since they maintain close relationships with local communities, many of which are also home to community colleges. Crowdsourced loan and donation organizations like Kiva.org that raise money for social enterprises could move into this space. And microlenders have the experience and models in place to move quickly as well.

Inside leader/outside leader

2011-11-21T20:11:00.001-07:00

The search consultant leading the hunt for Westminster's next President was on campus today. In the meeting with him that I attended, he asked a standard question; "Does the college need an inside president or an outside president?"

I know of no other organizational type where the inside/outside dichotomy exists. It has some value in higher education, I suppose, if only to indicate where a leader (it needn't be a President--the question was common during the recent Gore School of Business Dean search as well) will schedule his or her time. And it can elicit a view of a candidate's sense of priorities among problems: a self-described "outside leader" thinks a campus needs more fundraising or prestige lifting; an inside leader thinks the curriculum needs work or peace needs to be won between the faculty and the administration.

But the inside/outside way of thinking hides a major truth--that the leader is one person, and as one person, the leader's approach to the outside and the inside will bear each other's hallmarks. A President comfortable with hierarchies will pursue the wealthy and powerful off-campus and communicate mostly with the Cabinet on-campus. A relationship-builder will win donations with a handshake and a dinner while seeking face-to-face solutions to campus challenges. An indispensable leader will want to touch nearly everything regardless of where it takes place. A collaborator wants more committees on-campus and more advisory boards off-campus.

The problem here, then, is ultimately that the inside/outside dichotomy hides from campus the sort of person taking on the leadership role. If the campus is seeking an outside leader, or if the candidate says "I lead inside" the conversation stops exactly where it should start.

Can learning outcomes be Good?

2011-11-12T08:06:00.001-07:00

Having learning outcomes is better than not having them, and if they are measurable and agreed upon, a set of learning outcomes significantly improves a student's learning. By this I mean simply that a course or a curriculum designed to help students towards certain ends--the ability to think critically, or communicate well--is better than one that aims simply for an increase in knowledge, or understanding of content.

But I sometimes hear the value of learning outcomes put more starkly--that they make it possible to create an education that focuses on what a student can do, not what a student knows. Here I have two concerns. The first is obvious. Education is about both what a student knows and what a student can do. Learning is not content-neutral; communicating well in one discipline does not mean that a person can communicate well in all disciplines, in the same way that being smart about philosophy does not guarantee that you are also smart about biology. This objection is largely, I think, about the rhetoric of the learning outcomes movement, not about its actual approach to education.

My second concern is this: that learning outcomes may make an education more practical, more demonstrable, and better. But they may not make it Good. Education, at least in its traditional sense, is not only about what a student knows, or does. It is ultimately about what a student becomes. And if a school is interested in its students becoming something--engaged citizens, moral human beings, disciples of a god, whatever--then learning outcomes aren't enough. The school needs a mission, and a culture, that talk about the ultimate value of education, about what is Good, not simply what is good.

In the absence of that, learning outcomes become techniques or skills. They are useful things to be sure. But highly skilled people without a sense of what is Good have done a lot of damage in this world. And college campuses, for all their rhetoric about making a better world, developing leadership, and transforming learning, are no better than the communities that surround them. In some ways, they are worse.

Great speeches: The generosity of Terry Tempest Williams

2011-11-05T20:30:00.000-06:00

I've heard four great speeches in the past two weeks--three of them at the Federation of State Humanities Council conference that concluded this evening. The speech and its classroom cognate the lecture, have settled into a period of disrepute, and rightly so. Speeches are often given without regard to the audience, and without concern for the learning of the people present. At many events they are simply an opportunity for someone who is rightly famous for something else to remind us why they are not famous for speaking. (Think, for example, of every awards ceremony you have ever seen on television.)

But done well, a speech is powerful. More than many "active learning" pedagogies, speeches have the power to convey an emotion that advances an argument. The activist and writer Terry Tempest Williams does this better than most, using generosity to buttress her view that the only viable future is one based on empathy between humans, other species, and the planet.

Generosity shaped her Federation speech in three ways. First, while her speech included portions of stories she has told many times before, it was clearly assembled during the first day of the conference, and reflected the discussions, concerns, and hopes of the conference. This meant the speech was ragged, but it also demonstrated Williams' humility and concern for the well-being of the event and its attendees. Second, she made sure to acknowledge and thank more than a dozen members of the conference audience with whom she had spoken briefly. The thanks did not come at the beginning, as they do in the ritualized awards ceremony speech. Instead they were sprinkled throughout the speech, and used as supporting evidence for her thesis that active citizens can influence the direction of society for good. Third, she gave a gift to each member of the audience--a lily bulb to symbolize that love for living things could return humans to right relationships with nature and each other.

I've met Williams several times (she is a Utahn). Generosity is essential to her nature. And so the gestures in her speech, which might seem disingenuous coming from other speakers, are natural coming from her.

Generosity is particularly powerful against the dogmatic friends and foes of environmentalism. It reminds supporters that dogmatic positions are inhumane because they lack generosity. And it demonstrates to dogmatic opponents that environmentalists can love people as much as they love the land. In both of these acts Williams' generosity makes deeper engagement possible. Put another way, small acts make a passive genre--the speech--into a spur to activity and learning.

Should affordability efforts pay attention to individuals?

2011-11-03T07:46:00.001-06:00

Many of the efforts to improve college affordability focus on systems and institutions--on ways to reduce tuition, or increase aid, or speed time to graduation, for example. While these paths to lowering cost have different aims and results, they share an assumption--that the effort to increase affordability should ignore individual cases in favor of making decisions based on demographics (family income, for example, or first-generation status, or enrollees) or market forces.

At this point in the year, though, many enrollment offices are making decisions about affordability based on individual cases. In the past two weeks alone, three students have come to our financial aid office to ask for individualized attention--additional scholarships for an international student whose family now faces severe financial difficulty, more work-study money for a student whose income has dropped this year, an exemption to policy on scholarship award timing for a student-athlete trying to graduate early.

These cases have left me wondering about how to think about cases in the context of affordability. Cases matter for morality, because the cases represent real people with specific needs, opportunities, and talents. Should they matter for policy though? And if so, how? I'm not sure I know, but I am confident that policies and rules that do not attend to individual cases fail both in reaching their ends, and in respecting the liberty and skills of the people they are meant to serve.

So, should individual cases matter in efforts to reduce the cost of higher education? If so, how and when?

Can civic engagement build community?

2011-10-25T14:34:00.001-06:00

For years my goal as an educator has been to help students become civically engaged. It is easy to measure that engagement. If people do something--serve, run for office, protest, vote, start a non-profit, sit on a board, write to the editor, blog, tweet--to help the civic realm, then they are civically engaged. And that civic engagement would ultimately build community.

In thinking like this, I was not alone. The bible of the civic engagement movement--Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community--is built around the notion that a decline in civic behaviors leads to a decline in public life. And the principal product (at least in higher education) of this view--the civic engagement center--measures its success by the number of volunteers, hours donated, and service learning classes. The goal of these sorts of organizations, then, is to get programs set up that lead students, citizens, and neighbors to do civic acts, and by so doing them, build community.

I have felt uncomfortable about this assumption--that doing is the goal of civic engagement--for a while. And my discomfort has grown in the past month as I have had the opportunity to keynote two conferences about civic engagement. In each conference--the annual Utah Chapter of the American Planning Association meeting, and the Utah State Board of Education's Social Studies and Civic Education in Utah's Schools event--I ended up arguing that the important thing is not doing (though doing is essential) but developing what William James called "the civic temper." It is the civic temper that leads to community.

The phrase comes from James' essay The Moral Equivalent of War in which he argues that a civilized society needs to eschew war but create something like military service to develop in its citizens "toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty as possible...strenuous honor and disinterestedness;" the hallmarks of the civic temper.

According to Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell, James was inspired by the way that citizens of San Francisco responded to the earthquake and fire of 1906. Without being governed, driven, or told what to do, they began to feed each other, care for the sick, and build a community from the rubble of the city. Their actions, inspired by a sense of empathy, love, and sacrifice, were thwarted by the army and the city government, which moved in and destroyed their efforts in favor of a centralized response to disaster.

That story requires us to ask whether centralized, planned programs can create civic temper, or whether they are more likely to create compliance. (This concern is echoed in Barry Schwartz' Practical Wisdom which argues that rules and incentives--the main tools in the quiver of planned programs--limit the wisdom of people who are driven by them.)

Two of the leading activists and thinkers of the 20th century--Jane Addams and Dorothy Day--suggested that the goal of civic efforts should be to develop civic tempers, not build programs designed to get people to behave civically. Addams' Hull House and Day's Catholic Worker movement were both built around hospitality, communal work, and the development of deep connections between people who have deeply different backgrounds but profoundly similar needs.

Out of the stories of Addams and Day, a set of priorities emerge, which I suspect lead to the creation of a civic temper, and thus to community. They are:

reliance on the moral will of people, not on rules and incentives
aspiring to lead lives of common responsibility and mutual trust, not lives based around doing certain tasks ("service" for example)
the development of formal organizations, not permanent organizations
a focus on replicable outcomes, not scalable inputs. In other words, there are many local ways to get to the goal of community.
Prefer the concrete over the abstract, and the story over "data"
And, finally, seek for love (or what Addams called "ardor"), over anger

All of these virtues do two things--they help people avoid becoming settled in a program or a rigid approach to public life. And all of them contribute to a sense of community among human beings. Let me close by saying a final word about love. In their day-to-day lives people speak about love all the time--of place, of people, of jobs, of a higher power. It is, in key ways, essential for community.

None of this is to say that doing is useless. But doing is most effective when it both aims towards and comes from the civic temper.

Can differential pricing help reduce the cost of higher education?

2011-10-15T23:16:00.000-06:00

From time to time colleges and universities play with a form of differential tuition pricing publicly. Some schools charge more for credits above a certain number to encourage students to graduate rather than hanging on and taking more and more classes. Others charge higher tuition for certain majors--business being the most common. And many, including Westminster, charge different rates for different graduate programs based on the willingness and ability to pay of students interested in those programs. (So, for example, students in the MBA pay a higher tuition rate than those in the Masters of Teaching program.)

Colleges also employ differential pricing in quieter ways--providing different amounts of scholarships and institutional aid to students in order to shape the class and meet revenue targets. And, by raising tuition each year while holding scholarship amounts steady, many schools run a differential pricing model that assumes that the longer a student is enrolled, the more that student is willing to pay to go to school.

That may be the case, but poor retention rates after the first year, and long times to graduation suggest that this model of differential pricing hurts many students. And because schools rely on it in order to meet revenue goals (that is, their budgets are built around the assumption that the gap between tuition and aid will increase as students move through the institution, thus increasing revenue), it is a significant impediment to reducing the cost of higher education.

So what if instead of raising tuition for students each year of their enrolled period, tuition declined as a student moved through the institution? The first year would be the most costly, but each year thereafter, tuition would decline by, say, 5% for students in that cohort. As a result, seniors would be paying 15% less for tuition than they did as freshmen.

There are several potential benefits to this model.

First, it allows individual institutions to reduce costs to students in a way that is predictable and fair.
Second, it rewards students for staying in school, and encourages experimentation in learning throughout the curriculum, rather than supporting the sort of curricular narrowing that usually takes place.
Third, it supports retention through the entire four-year experiment,thus providing stronger revenue.
Fourth, it aligns revenue with expenses. (Here I am assuming that the freshman year, with its focus on advising, counseling, mentoring, learning communities, retention, the co-curriculum, etc. costs the student more per credit hour than do upper division years. I expect this is the case in all disciplines except the sciences where the costs of labs increases through a student's experiences.)
Fifth, it calls new students and their families to really engage in the first year, with the understanding that success in the first year will make the later years less expensive.
Sixth, it changes the onus of timely graduation from the student (who often has to fight through the system to complete in four years), to the institution, who will now have an incentive to ensure that curricula make it possible for students to have significant learning while moving speedily to graduation.
Seventh, done right, it can help colleges simultaneously earn enough revenue and reduce the costs to students of attending college.

The myth of the indispensable leader

2011-10-15T08:08:00.000-06:00

There are two competing myths about leadership, both visible in the tributes to Steve Jobs on his passing. The first is that true leaders are people who follow their dreams; whose vision for the organization comes from deep inside them. The second is that leaders and the organizations they lead should be come synonymous, so that for the span of the leaders' tenure, you can't think of the organization without thinking about the leader. Together these two myths create the story of the indispensable leader, the one without whom the organization could not flourish.

This model of leadership is embraced in higher ed as strongly as it is in the corporate world. Read any presidential search document and you will see a call for a leader of vision who can shape the institution. And talk to any president and you will she that her/his life has been entirely subsumed into the organization, so that, as Westminster's retiring president Michael Bassis said about himself in is retirement announcement, "I have no friends, no hobbies, no life outside of the college."

There is much to object to in this model of leadership. I will quickly note only two of the biggest objections.

The first is that the indispensable leader model is one that makes building a community of leaders, or of creating a culture of democratic leadership almost impossible. Leadership networks, like those driving social change in the Middle East and on Wall St. are impossible in organizations that uphold the myth of the indispensable leader. Without a network, transitions are very difficult, and response to external change can only happen meaningfully through a change in leadership.

The second is that by abandoning his/her individuality, the indispensable leader often gives up the things that are most important to human flourishing--family, friends, service, community, politics, a broad view of the world, connections outside of the organization, love, curiosity, humility, etc. etc. This sort of bargain--one's humanity for one's job--is unethical and inhumane. (I know that many people who aren't leaders have to make this same bargain with their jobs. It is worse for them.) And it is also bad for our civic life, because it narrows the view, the experience, and the humanity of people whose roles push them into the public eye.

Who moves first on cost, access, and quality in higher education?

2011-10-07T11:55:00.000-06:00

It is widely agreed that in coming years higher education needs to reduce costs, increase access, and improve the quality of learning. Setting aside the enormous matter of how to do all of these things, I am wondering today who will move ahead on them.

In a few instances, individual institutions have taken steps on one of the pieces of the cost/access/quality knot. MIT and Yale have made course content freely available online, though doing so has not increased access to MIT and Yale degrees or reduced the cost to degree seekers. A few schools have, in the past decade, frozen or cut tuition, but often for a single year, and to no spillover effect on other campuses. (The recent Seton Hall decision to cut tuition for top scholars seems to be little more than a naked play for a handful of better students, thus continuing the American tradition of making education affordable to those who can best afford it.)

Even if an institution was to successfully move on all three pieces of the problem, it isn't clear that its success would extend broadly enough to actually make a difference for more than its own students. So where are the networks of schools who could make headway on the problem?

First, a word about where they aren't. I don't imagine state systems successfully cutting costs to students while simultaneously increasing access and improving learning. State systems face more and more budget cuts, making tuition increases, not cuts, the rule of the day. And even if they were to get up steam on cost cuts, state systems are too diverse to move together. It is hard to imagine how, for example, how Snow College and the University of Utah could make common cause on this matter. Nor is it likely that the big higher education associations are going to lead. Their memberships are too large and their purposes too much to defend the status quo to really shake things up.

Who can move first then? My money is on regional or affinity networks of colleges and universities, and the organizations that support them. Ambitious leaders of accrediting agencies can make headway on the quality of learning, since they are obliged to certify it. Associations like the Appalachian College Association are in a position to unite regional political and educational leaders around the dual challenges of cost and access. And collections of like-minded schools like the New American Colleges and Universities (since they are dispersed across the US and rarely compete directly for students), ought to pioneer and test new approaches to cost, quality, and access.

If I'm right, then the emergence of effective smaller organizations of colleges and universities will be a sign that American higher education is getting its bearings, and is capable of responding to the big issues before it. Keep your eyes open.

The sad future of the Provo Tabernacle

2011-10-02T09:12:00.002-06:00

On December 18, 2010, the Provo Tabernacle, a historic meetinghouse in the heart of Provo, UT, burned to the ground. Yesterday, the LDS Church announced that it would rebuild the tabernacle as a temple. The response to the announcement was effusive--with civic leaders and church members thrilled that the building would be restored.

Let me dissent. It is a good thing that the building will be rebuilt; it is a bad thing that it will be rebuilt as a temple. The tabernacle was a public building of sorts--owned by the LDS church but open to the community for concerts, meetings, and the occasional funeral of a big-name local. The temple is a private building, open only to certain members of the LDS Church. So while the city will have a sparkling new "historic" building that attracts Mormons downtown to shop, sightsee, and visit; the city has lost a public place--a venue where people could gather to sing, and play music, and talk.

Once, 20 years or so ago, St. Francis of Assisi parish in Provo had a series of structural problems with its building that made it impossible for the parish to hold Christmas services there. The parish moved those services to the Provo Tabernacle, and so on Christmas eve thousands of Catholics and well-wishers celebrated mass in a Mormon building. That will never happen again.

The tabernacle wasn't a perfect community center. Its capacity was a bit large for most local arts groups, and the acoustics were sketchy, and it didn't have much in the way of green rooms for performers to warm up in. Now it won't be a community center at all, though. That is our loss.

Enrollment management, cost, and quality--the questions

2011-09-25T20:53:00.001-06:00

For a brief time the national conversation on higher education was attentive to the relationship between cost and quality, with open learning advocates and technology fans predicting a future where education might be both more affordable and better.

More recently, though, the two matters--cost and quality--have become separated. The smaller stream, focused on quality, has been concerned with findings like those in Academically Adrift which point to the lack of learning taking place in higher ed. The broader stream has focused on the cost of higher education, especially in relation to an economic decline which puts into question the dollar value of a college degree.

There has been little attention to enrollment management in the discussions. This is a shame, since regardless of the direction of the stream, enrollment managers are the ones most likely to have a sense of what preoccupies prospective students and the most likely to have to explain new approaches to education to those students.

So here are several questions about the relationship between cost, quality, and enrollment management, all of which I've been wondering about over my past couple of months in enrollment management::

What is the current relationship between cost and quality at your institution? What should it be? On most campuses discussions about cost take place in budget meetings while discussions about quality reside in faculty meetings, so the two rarely meet. When they do, enrollment managers often are not at the table. For this reason campuses are not always clear about where they stand on this issue, and unclear about which direction to move. That direction needs to be set both by practical considerations (the "is" question) but also by strategic ones that can only be uncovered by asking the "should" question.
Who does attend your institution? Who should attend? Most campus stakeholders have some idea about who should attend their institution, and those views have a great deal to do with where the stakeholder stands on the cost and quality issues. But those views are rarely informed by an understanding of who does attend the institution and why. Often, enrollment managers are the ones with the information that makes a conversation about the demographics of the student body possible.
What does your school mean by quality? What role do students play in that definition? One of the reasons that the conversation about cost has outpaced the conversation about quality is because the meaning of quality is so unsure, especially at institutions where inputs--the wealth and academic performance of entering students, the wealth and prestige of the institution--are not the key measures of quality. Here, enrollment managers seem to be behind the game, largely using input measures as the key indicators of quality. But if quality is about student growth, or about learning outcomes, then an input approach to the entering class gets in the way of advancing an institution's work on lowering cost while improving quality.
Does your school have a coherent philosophy regarding merit- and need-based aid? Over time more and more institutional funds have gone into merit-based aid (academic scholarships) and less into need-based aid. If this shift aligns with an institution's strategy about cost and quality, then it makes sense. But if not (which I expect is the case on many campuses) then not only does enrollment management fail to support the institution's direction, but it cuts against it. If, for example, your school is more costly than its peers, and your students are struggling to afford it, and campus stakeholders believe the institution should be accessible to a diverse student body, then a merit-focus cuts against strategy and culture.
Does your school have a defensible balance between standard aid practices and special sources of aid? Most schools have published aid grids--if you have XX ACT score and X.XX GPA you get a scholarship of $XXXXX. But they also award aid to students for other things--athletics, science achievement, coming from abroad, etc. Many of these special sources of aid advance strategic initiatives, others support new programs, or meet the interests of donors, or seek to open new student markets. It would be naive to think these special sources should go away. So the question is whether the number, size, and frequency of these special sources of aid undermines the main financial aid strategy.
Does enrollment management have a meaningful place in the campus strategic plan? Many strategic plans include enrollment management in an operational role--the plan says to do things X, Y, and Z, and enrollment management will get us enough students to provide revenue to do them. But especially if an institution is serious about making headway on cost and quality, enrollment management has to be an active part of the plan--not just meeting enrollment goals but providing insights into who is likely to attend, why they attend, and who the plan is most likely to serve well.

Institutions with vision

2011-09-20T22:05:00.001-06:00

Over the past couple of months I've written several times about problems with the vision of American higher education. Here I noted that strategic planning seems to drive institutions to look more like each other rather than helping them distinguish themselves, here that the thirst for prestige gets in the way of a serious focus on learning, here that too often campuses try to differentiate themselves on superficial grounds, and here that colleges and universities are not well-situated to respond to the big challenges facing the world today.

On this last point I should note the growing number of colleges that have realigned themselves to respond to climate change and the challenges of sustainability. The College of the Atlantic has been hard at this work for quite a while, as have, in less visible ways, schools like Sterling College, Unity College, and Northland College. All of these schools are doing great work. All of them are also quite small, but all of them have a powerful vision that helps shape the curriculum, learning, and environment of the schools.

I am deeply interested in the resurgence of religious mission in higher education (see, for example, Naomi Riley's God on the Quad, George Marsden's The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship , and Budde and Wright's Conflicting Allegiances) and with it the possibility that colleges and universities will return to serious education about the big issues in human existence. If this effort interests you, take a look at the vision statement for Houston Baptist University. HBU right now is a small but serious college about the size of Westminster. But in their vision statement they aim for nothing less that creating a world-class protestant university, one where all the efforts of the institution serve bigger ends--helping students lead meaningful lives, merging the best of secular and religious learning, and setting the example for other religious universities to follow.

Think what you will about HBU, or about their mission. But the ambition of the school, not for prestige for its own sake but to remake American higher education and American culture, is a big thing. Something all schools should think about as they seek to create authentic visions that stretch them beyond prestige, financial sustainability, and the latest trends in higher education.

Who is most cost sensitive?

2011-09-16T22:37:00.002-06:00

It would be simple to assume that in this period of rising college costs and economic difficulty, the most cost-sensitive students would come from the lowest-income families. But a large portion of those families have been priced out of the market for quite some time, and those that haven't and are strong students continue to have access to strong scholarship and aid packages. (I am not suggesting that lack of access is a good or overlook-able matter--just that the situation is not tremendously different now than they were five years ago for those families.)

So if faculty and administrators at private colleges are looking for a group that is a bellwether of cost-sensitivity, I would recommend not low-income families but a different group--families we call "no-need merit." Prospective students who fall into this category earn some sort of academic scholarship, but because of their family income, they receive no other aid--not Pell Grants, work-study, or institutional grants.

These families are particularly cost-sensitive for two reasons. First, without any additional aid they face the prospect of paying ten to twenty thousand dollars a year for college. Second, no-need merit families are more likely to have a college-going culture, so if the cost at a private college seems too high, they are likely to choose a lower-cost public alternative. Watching the performance of no-need merit prospects, then, is a key way to see the impact of college cost on the size and composition of the entering class.

Hospitality is the thing that we've lost

2011-09-11T10:47:00.000-06:00

Events like September 11th are almost impossible to write well about. So today will be a day of failed blog posts, where writers struggle to say something meaningful knowing all along that nothing can really be said. It is a day for silence and contemplation. More 4'33" than Beethoven's 9th.

Let me just observe, then, that the thing we have lost in the aftermath of 9/11--the thing we miss the most--is hospitality. You see its absence in airports, where goodbyes now have to be said and welcomes made far away from the point of departure. You see its absence in the stiffening of rules and regulations, in the limiting of options, in the officious way we relate in public capacities. It is there in the decline of our public life, our inability to negotiate or be with people who differ from us. It is in our schools, where the notion of home room is antiquated and the most important thing are outcomes. It is in the stiffening of religious belief. It is in the closure of parks, the need to eke every bit of capacity out of tax dollars, and time, and investments. It is in the privatization not just of public services, but of the suffering resulting from unemployment, and loss, and fear.

So ten years on from 9/11, and in the ongoing fallout from the economic collapse, and in a nation where public life has become a zero-sum game, the thing I'll seek is a renewal of hospitality--sharing food, leaving the door open, welcoming people in, and remembering to accept those gifts from others. I'll go to festivals, and parties, and host some myself. I'll look for fear, my own and others', and see if there is a way to replace it with welcome, and comfort, and perhaps something that looks a little like love.

The Washington Monthly College Guide Gets it Wrong, a Little, Twice

2011-09-04T08:59:00.000-06:00

The best back-to-school college guide and rankings, hands-down, are at the Washington Monthly. The rankings actually measure important things--like graduates' contribution to society--rather than wealth, prestige, and the test scores of incoming students. And the accompanying articles are both well-informed and well-written. (For example, this month's "The end of college admissions as we know it" should make anyone who cares about college access hopeful, even while it makes traditional admissions shops shiver...)

This month's college, guide, though, includes two articles that deserve a response. The first, "Administrators ate my tuition" makes the argument that the on-going rise in college costs is due to bloat in the ranks of administrators, and that a solution to the problem might be, as the article's byline puts it, "Want to get college costs in line? Start by cutting the overgrown management ranks." Three points in response:

The growth in the ranks of administrators is due to changes in faculty roles, driven by faculty and by external stakeholders. Faculty don't take on the day-to-day work of managing colleges and universities as much now as they used to because faculty have pushed, successfully over time, to teach and research more, and to do less administrative work. At the same time, external bodies, including the federal government, have heightened requests for data and compliance to such an extent that without a cadre of researchers, report-writers, etc. colleges would be unable to respond to those demands.
All administrators are not managers. The author, Benjamin Ginsberg, seems to believe that there is little difference between an Associate Dean and an Associate Director of Student Life. He is wrong. At Westminster, over the past 5 years the number of full-time faculty has grown more than the number of new administrators. And among the new administrators, only a couple actually spend their time managing. Most spend their time programming--running environmental initiatives, leading trips to the mountains, helping students face psychological difficulties, ensuring that international students get their visas, etc. The need for these tasks, at least at Westminster, comes from faculty, parents, and students requesting these services. And these tasks all lead to learning, something Ginsberg fails to acknowledge. At an institution like ours that has to compete to stay alive, if our key stakeholders request something, we are happy to oblige.
If a college wants to change its faculty/administrator ratio, the first step is not to cut administrators. It is to focus its mission. Until a school does that, it will be impossible to carry out the work that faculty, students, parents, and regulators have demanded. The solution, then, is to figure out how not to be all things to all people.

The second, "The College for-profits should fear" is a positive article about Western Governors University. I like WGU. Its focus on student outcomes, and its innovative division of the work of learning among faculty and mentors (more administrators!) both saves money and can lead to better learning. And it has blazed a trail into online learning that others ought to pay attention to.

But WGU shares two things with for-profits that don't get enough attention. First, though tuition is low, the cost-per-credential (that is, the amount of tuition paid per degree granted) is very high. According to a recent Salt Lake Tribune article, it is around $80,000. The article attributes it to a "statistical anomaly" but it also suggests that WGU serves many students well, but not many of them earn degrees. This point alone is not damning--after all, the students who enroll in WGU are like the students who enroll in most-on-line programs. They work long hours, are trying to switch jobs, and often take time off from school to solve family problems, change jobs, move, or manage life. One of WGU's strengths, in fact, is that its students can do that. But if an institution's goal is to get students a degree and on to life, then WGU has a ways to go.

Second, WGU, like its for-profit counterparts, has recently become a marketing juggernaut. All along I-15, the main north-south freeway in Utah, there are WGU billboards with photos of powerful Utah business and civic leaders--Harris Simmons, Board Chair of Zion's Bank, Mike Leavitt, former Utah Governor--touting WGU. The Washington Monthly article suggests that WGU is unlike for-profits in that it doesn't spend as much of its resources on marketing as does, say, the University of Phoenix. It appears that might be changing.

Pop-up colleges

2011-08-30T21:55:00.000-06:00

For at least the past seven years, retailers and restaurants have been attracted to the pop-up store model. Pop-up, or flash shops allow shop owners to try out new merchandise, new locations, or new designs. And since they are cheap to create and temporary by nature, they allow for experimentation in a way that a traditional store would not.

In the meantime, most colleges and universities continue to offer academic programs in much the same way they have in the past. This is not, by definition, a bad thing. But the difficulty of radically overhauling an academic program, getting rid of one that no longer has a market, or starting a new one in rapid response to student demand puts colleges and universities consistently behind demand for new programs. In the past this misalignment was not tremendously damaging for higher education because there were no external competitors. But with the availability of free instruction and cutting-edge content on the internet, colleges and universities face the prospect of losing out on the intellectual leadership in new fields.

So why not create a pop-up college--a school composed of teams of faculty who create new academic programs, recruit students, run two or three cohorts through the program with the plan to close it down after, say, five cohorts, and then take a year off to develop a new program and another to recruit new cohorts into it.

The financial model would require that the school save enough money over the life of a cohort to survive two years without income from the particular faculty team. The academic model would require faculty to be generalists and learning facilitators, not primarily disciplinary specialists. The programs would have to be deliverable in generic spaces, not spaces that require a particular design. Accreditation would be tough. But the downsides from these criteria would be offset by the possibility for innovation, deep learning, and meaningful collaboration among faculty.

I am not suggesting that all (or even many) colleges and universities ought to pursue pop-up education. But I expect that faculty who get it right could create a new school that delivered high quality learning at reasonable cost and innovated in design, delivery, and administration of the school.

Reflections as America's dullest higher education blog reaches 5000 page views

2011-08-28T09:03:00.002-06:00

Learning at Westminster has reached a milestone of sorts--5000 page views. Of course for the big league blogs 5000 page views come before breakfast. For me it has taken since July 2009.

This is no surprise--I've mostly used this blog as a place to reflect on trends in education, make connections between my work and the non-education stuff I'm reading, and try to figure out what my future (and the future of higher education) looks like. Over two years I've posted nearly 200 mini-essays, and written over 100,000 words. Here is what I have learned:

1. Learning is in danger. Most of the major forces shaping higher education--technology, the cost debate, questions about access, funding danger, and the political climate--are focused on delivering information more efficiently, more effectively, or in a more relevant way. And the force that has the closest link to learning--assessment--is in danger of becoming so rigidly focused on measuring a pre-determined set of outcomes that it overlooks both the importance of growth and the possibility that important things will happen to learners that cannot be predicted.

Fortunately, while learning seems to be slipping out of education, there are more and more ways to learn outside of school. Blogs, mash-ups, the growth in social networks, the re-emergence of home-based manufacturing, the ease with which you can record your own music are all things that support learning and do it in a much more open, student-directed, verifiable way than what happens in schools. What is happening in religion may be what is happening in schooling as well. More and more people are spiritual seekers, fewer are going to church, so churches are in decline. More and more people are learners; is the future of schools like the recent past of churches?

2. Schooling needs a metaphor that works. A great deal of talk about education is built around explicit or implicit metaphors--schools are like newspapers, or factories, or businesses or price bubbles. I'm not sure that any of them fit. But without a way of thinking of ourselves that inspires some confidence and gives some direction, schools will be swallowed by their metaphors.

3. There is lots of room for innovation. Technology isn't the savior, but it does make it possible to start or re-shape schools so that they focus on what the school does best. I expect that the next major trend in higher education and high schools will be specialized schools where students complete general education online and the classroom focused learning is all about the school's specialty--the humanities or music or entrepreneurship or whatever. Schools like that can be cheap, fast, and excellent. And they can be started by subject-matter experts. I'm not necessarily sanguine about this future, since I care deeply about the civic role of schools and about general education. But I would love to start a school focused on innovation and creativity (which I think are two of the four key civic virtues, along with contemplation and humility)

4. The barriers to entry for higher education are falling. There are really only two that matter any more--the certification of learning (that is, proving that the learning that takes place in some new schooling venture is real), and the matter of accreditation. These barriers are two aspects of the same characteristic of higher education--social prestige. That is, the diploma and accreditation bear weight because they have social standing. It is assumed that a diploma from the University of (insert your preferred state or private institution here) is better than a diploma from Bob's Start-Up University; and that regional accreditation guarantees that fact. I am not suggesting that that is not the case. I am saying, though, that if I were a registrar or an accreditor I would be pushing for my peers to do more to show evidence that those things are true, because I predict that the social status on which diplomas and accreditation rest will crumble in the coming years.

What makes us think that education can solve global problems?

2011-08-27T00:05:00.002-06:00

On his blog, Ian Symmonds muses about how higher education is responding to global problems. The list of issues, drawn from Jean Francois Rischard's book High Noon is heartbreaking and incomplete. The assumption behind Ian's question--that colleges and universities ought to prepare students to fix the problems of the world--is both commonplace and reasonable. And almost no one argues that education ought not take on these problems.

But what makes us think that they can be tackled by colleges and universities? In asking this I do not mean to suggest that higher education is ineffectual. I am simply wondering two things: Are colleges and universities the sort of organizations that solve problems?; and Can these problems be solved? I think the answer to both these questions is no.

Here is what I mean; colleges and universities excel at helping students resolve certain sorts of problems--narrow problems in disciplines, problems that respond to experimentation, and personal problems. None of the problems listed in Symmonds post are these types of problems. Instead they are all wide-spread, multi-causal problems without simple solutions.

This is not to say that colleges and universities ought to do nothing. Instead, they ought to focus on three things: (1) helping students to resolve their own problems, (2) framing the problem so that it can be worked on in smaller, more local pieces; and (3) trying out local solutions to certain components of the problem at hand.

So, for example, it is unlikely that colleges and universities will solve poverty. It is too widespread, too intransigent, and too complex to "solve." But colleges and universities can help resolve poverty in their own neighborhoods. And they can help their students avoid poverty.

To do these things, though, higher education will have to be more focused and less given to grandiose rhetoric. While we may live in a global village (or some other version of the "flat earth" world) but our ability to influence society is decidedly narrow. There is nothing wrong with this fact, as long as we acknowledge it. Unfortunately, few colleges and fewer universities do.

Who needs to be oriented?

2011-08-22T06:17:00.000-06:00

This week all four of my children start at new schools. One begins junior high, another high school. One is a freshman in college, and the other a new transfer student.

Of those four, only the freshman in college has an extensive orientation--four days of small group meetings, info sessions, activities, meals, friend building, instruction in rules, assessments, meals, and a convocation with speeches and a gantlet of faculty in academic robes. Parents are part of two days of these events, where they are wined, dined, and oriented themselves to how to be the parent of a freshman.

On the other hand, the transfer student gets half a day, the junior high schooler gets one day where her grade is the only one in the school, and the high schooler gets a two hour assembly punctuated by pizza.

Why is this? Is there some reason to believe that the transition to college is a more significant step than the rest? Is there something about being 18 that needs more transitional guidance than being 20 or 15 or 13?

As a dad, knowing my own kids, their needs, concerns, strengths, and fears, and as an administrator, knowing the goals of orientation, I would certainly assign orientation differently, and according to the actual kids, not their generic transition from one stage to another in life. I think my high schooler needs a slower, longer transition. The transfer student could use a period of guided reflection on how to move ahead at a new, different college. The freshman told me herself that the longer the orientation the more anxious she feels, so I would skip her orientation until after a week of classes. And my youngest, most gregarious daughter would get a couple of parent-teacher conferences one-on-one before launching into her new social life.

Asked more simply I wonder this: if we oriented students according to themselves, not to their grade or school, how would orientation be different? Would it be more effective?

Compromise and reconciliation, democracy and civic engagement

2011-08-14T08:40:00.000-06:00

Whatever you may think about the debt ceiling compromise or the debate leading up to it (and I know most people dislike them), they are less important for the quality of our civic life than what comes next.

This fact seems to have been lost on commentators, who continue to debate the wisdom of the compromise, or the economic impact of the Standard and Poors credit rating downgrade, or what it means for the United States' place in the world. But for our civic life, what we would hope to see after compromise is some sort of reconciliation. In fact, in both religion and civic theory, it is the reconciliation--the ability to recognize changes in oneself, and to work more effectively with others in the future, that is the real benefit of compromise.

Consider this teaching from the Christian tradition:
“You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder,^[a] and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ ²² But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister^[b]^[c] will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’^[d] is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.
²³ “Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, ²⁴ leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift.
²⁵ “Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still together on the way, or your adversary may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison.

Or consider the work of truth and reconciliation commissions the world over who have helped countries emerge from periods of tyranny into something like democracy. (For an old but still moving work on these commissions read Lawrence Wechsler's A Miracle, A Universe.)

In both instances the injunction to reconcile is the basis for future relationships. That is, civic life cannot function with citizens who are unable to talk to each other, or who are trying to overlook (ignore) real gaps between them. And both instances demand that some individuals not just agree to the compromise, but reconcile with their enemies.

Now consider the way we talk about compromise in America. It is widely acknowledged that compromise is essential for democracy. It is also assumed that compromise means that both parties fail to get what they want from the agreement. This is usually true in terms of policy. Neither Democrats nor Republicans got what they wanted in the debt ceiling negotiations.

Our discussions of compromise, though, entirely overlook the need for reconciliation. In fact, all of the sides in the debt ceiling compromise told their constituents that the compromise was a short-term solution and that they would still work to reach their big goals. Or, in other words, compromise was but a short detour from winning their long-term battle.

If you know history you know that this view--compromise now until you can win enough public support to avoid compromise--has a long tradition in American politics. And traditionally it has led to some horrible compromises. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, for example, which gave birth to a mini-civil war prior to the real one.

Our civic life needs two things if it is to avoid the sort of poisonous, ineffective compromises that litter our history: First, a civic movement that is committed to reconciliation in public life, that pushes for relationships and repentance before and after compromise. (Imagine, for example, a law that requires party leaders to meet with a mediator (or play golf together) after every law that passes with a party-line vote.) Second, leaders who are publicly committed to reconciliation as a goal of their public service. It is here that the irony lies. With so many legislators who are publicly Christian, why are so few of them publicly committed to Christian behavior?

The temptations of distinctiveness

2011-08-02T22:20:00.001-06:00

I've been thinking a lot about institutional distinctiveness lately. The nonprofits whose boards I chair are both trying to find their niches in complex sectors of the non-profit world (culture and K-12 education); a big chunk of marketing colleges revolves around crafting a distinctive image of the institution; and job ads for college administrators consistently tout the distinctive characteristics of the school. Distinctiveness is everywhere.

I understand the importance of distinctiveness--potential customers, friends, and colleagues can only find you, and you them, if there is something that distinguishes you from the rest of the crowd. And no organization wants to find itself unable to articulate a vision (think about this tagline: "We do lots of stuff pretty well"), or a niche ("We do pretty much the same stuff as lots of other organizations.")

But the quest for distinctiveness carries with it three temptations that can be as damaging as the absence of distinctiveness. Here they are:

An "arms race" for new stuff: One of the critiques of American higher ed is that it would cost less if campuses stopped thinking they needed the newest or the most unique stuff. That stuff could be buildings (LEED certification anyone?), or programs, or activities. The now-ubiquitous climbing wall is the symbol of this sort of problem--once a campus built a climbing wall. Now no self-respecting campus seeking active students would be without one. (We have two--one indoors and one out).
Imprecise language: The search for distinctiveness leads us to suggest that certain things are evidence of distinctiveness when in fact they are not. Every school I know of touts its small class sizes. Small class size is a proxy for lots of things: faculty-student interaction, welcoming environment, and care for individual students. But when the local Research I, community college, and liberal arts college all tout small class sizes, that distinctiveness marker means almost nothing.
A loss of community: students who are attracted to one thing--a program, a professor, a building--are both more likely to be at-risk, and less likely to be engaged than students who engage with many things. And engaging with many things means that students become part of a community, where they are connected in many places and to many people. Distinction, in other words, can mean isolation. And isolation is neither good for the student nor good for the institution.

How innovative is "The Innovative University"?

2011-07-31T10:11:00.003-06:00

Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring's new book, The Innovative University is garnering significant attention right now, as one would expect from a book penned by Christensen and a book that is organized around a comparison of BYU-Idaho and Harvard University. (Full disclosure--Westminster College is mentioned in several sidebars; I was part of the Westminster group who made suggestions about those sidebars.) Christensen and Eyring's recent Chronicle of Higher Education op-ed, "How to Save the Traditional University, from the Inside Out" has elicited 62 written comments as of 31 July, and several webinars devoted to the book and its argument are pending.

Their argument--that in order to innovate and succeed, colleges and universities need to do more with technology, reduce costs to students, and focus themselves in order to provide to students what they desire while giving society what it needs, is unexceptional. In fact, it happens all the time, as colleges and universities make decisions about starting new programs, discontinuing old ones, and recruiting students who will succeed on their campuses. (And, it should be noted, it is small, focused institutions that, if they don't find a market, are more likely to die.) I would suggest that the authors' central trope, that Harvard's DNA has been grafted into nearly all of American higher ed causing a sort of arms race that prices students out of the market and fails to deliver good learning, is a bit of a stretch. It may be the case that Research I universities, and top-tier (and top-tier wannabe) liberal arts colleges have adopted Harvard-like mission and faculty roles, but the vast majority of public and private universities have not.

But setting this aside, the real question is this--How innovative is "The Innovative University"? At least in their op-ed piece, Christensen and Eyring look towards a future where more specialized institutions (ones that have focused their offerings and their student profile) produce knowledge that meets the needs of their learners, using technology in discovery, dissemination, and learning. (For a great example of this sort of school, plus one that really innovates in its focus on learning, take a look at Roseman University of Health Sciences.) But presumably, students would still take classes, work towards degrees, and engage with the institution over a brief but focused period of time. That is, college education would still look largely the same to students once they matriculate. The main difference would be in the options available to students, and the role of cost and specialization in helping students choose those options.

Such an approach, for all of its virtues, fails to respond to some of the major issues facing education in the US. It does not, for example, do anything to ensure that college-going students are prepared to go to college. It does little to reach the millions of adults who need more education but cannot enroll in college to get it. It doesn't put the interests and passions of students at the center of the learning experience. It assumes that much knowledge exists largely in universities. And it maintains (or perhaps exacerbates) the assumption that learning and knowledge exist in disciplinary boxes, rather than being integrated with each other.

One might imagine an entirely different model of education--call it the Education Maintenance Organization (EMO). An EMO would look like an HMO. Its job would be to provide regular check-ups on the learning and academic growth of young people and adults. EMOs would be made up of generalists--educators who could diagnose needs and provide guidance on behavior. They would develop relationships with their clients. They could prescribe--a focused set of sessions on math for the 10-year old, learning experiences that would develop competency in history for the college-age student, job re-training for adults wanting to shift careers-- and they could provide treatment. Costs would be paid like health insurance--on an on-going basis throughout the lifetime of their members. The goal would be well-being--ongoing learning that serves the needs of individuals, and y so doing, of the broader community as well.

For some an EMO would sit on top of a traditional education--filling gaps, helping parents raise student achievement, providing focus during the summer, helping relate learning to student's passions. For others it might replace some aspects of formal education. But EMOs, whatever their role, would look little like colleges and universities.

I am not suggesting that colleges and universities should disappear. In fact, I think that the reason so few of them are disappearing is that, by and large, they do meet the needs and desires of their students. But if it is innovation we are looking for--not just in content but in structure, role, and location in society, it will take more than focus to get us there.

Being the parent of a transfer student

2011-07-24T10:12:00.003-06:00

The past decade has seen a shift in how higher education thinks of parents. Ten or so years ago parents were hardly a part of marketing, recruiting, admitting, or orienting new students. Then came a period of begrudging acknowledgement that parents were again engaging in the lives of potential freshmen. From this time came the phrase "helicopter parent" and the stories about parents monitoring their college students' homework, calling their faculty, and staying as connected to their kids as they were when those kids lived at home. Now, higher education has, by and large, embraced the role of parents. In enrollment management, for example, a school without a considered approach to recruiting parents is a school that is losing out on enrollment.

That shift, though, has paid much less attention to the parents of transfer students (for a few examples of schools that do give some focus to transfer parents look here and here--mostly information on the dates and times of orientation). This is, in part, understandable, since the reigning assumption about transfer students is that they are more mature, older, or have not had actively involved parents, hence their college path from one school to another. But the increasing number of students entering community colleges, and the fact that now nearly one-third of college students transfer, suggests that we ought to be paying a lot more attention than we do.

I have unexpectedly become the father of a transfer student. My oldest daughter, about whom I have written from time to time, made a slow and difficult decision to leave the private university she attended in California and enroll at Westminster. As I reflect on my role in her decision, here are a few things I've learned about the role of parents in transfer students' lives, especially those transferring from one four-year school to another.

The decision about where to transfer is harder than the original decision about choosing a college. Choosing a college as a high school senior is a decision shaped by opportunities. Thousands of schools are possibilities, and most offer similar majors, aspirations, services, etc. The transfer decision is much more constrained. The courses a student has taken, the student's major, friends, habits, and debt load all constrain the decision. And that means that selecting a new institution is much more challenging. The pieces (course offerings, transfer evaluation, financial aid, etc.) are harder to fit together.
The decision to transfer is psychologically difficult. My daughter was both quite unhappy at her previous school and quite connected to a few of the people there. And as a student with high aspirations, the decision to transfer included a feeling that she was betraying friends, abandoning possibilities, and wasting opportunities that she would never have access to again.
The decision to transfer is financially risky. The financial risk in our case was limited because I am fortunate to have a wonderful tuition benefit at Westminster. But many schools set academic scholarships for transfer students at a lower rate than for new four year students. And since many transfer students will not live on -campus, the cost of housing, food, and transportation are less predictable.
The exiting school can significantly impede a student's ability to transfer. My daughter's university in California charges money to withdraw from courses, hides information on how to do it, and provides essentially no advising to students struggling with the decision. So the host school both sets some of the reasons for considering transfer and does almost nothing to help in the decision.
Things that should be simple are incredibly hard. Have you ever tried to send scores from your AP exams to a new school? Much harder than you would think (for example, you have to have your AP student number, the four digit identifier of your potential new school. Then you have to make a phone call to request that AP send the scores to your potential school--you can't do it on-line.)
The parent's role is more complicated. Since I was involved in helping my daughter choose her original school, the advice I gave then, and my ability to give meaningful advice, are both in question. And since my daughter is two years older and significantly wiser than she was when she originally made a choice, the things she wants and needs to hear from me are different. Our discussions have been both harder emotionally, but also more professional and focused. And as a parent who has watched his daughter struggle, grow, and suffer, the stakes feel even higher the second time around.

The role of consultants and vendors in enrollment management

2011-07-15T18:38:00.000-06:00

One of the major differences between enrollment management and other parts of colleges is that enrollment management relies heavily on consultants and vendors to do its work. We develop prospects with help from one vendor, analyze data with another, use a third to develop our publications, and employ several others for smaller parts of our work. Consultants help shape our strategy, test our messages, and improve our workflow. And a great enrollment management consultant, Ian Symmonds, is my guide and mentor as I learn my way into this work.

None of this should be surprising. Enrollment management is a results-driven business that relies heavily on data to make decisions. And it is a business that has changed rapidly in the last 20 years. That change has made space in the market for businesses with specific expertise. And if those businesses can demonstrate return on investment, then it makes sense to contract with them, rather than expanding the college's fixed costs by hiring full-time employees to do that work.

One surprising thing about the field, though, is that consultants and vendors are also the source of most of the research about recruiting, admitting, funding, and enrolling students. Compare data about enrollment management with data about the next step in the student's experience--the freshman year--to see the distinction. Data about the views of freshmen comes out of the higher education research institute at UCLA. The epicenter of ideas about curriculum and retention in the first year is the first-year experience project at the University of South Carolina. And learning about the first-year emerges from peer-reviewed journals and academic conferences.

By contrast, summaries of research in enrollment management are more frequently compiled by vendors, as in the case of this report put out by Noel-Levitz. The best-known experts in the field are consultants, be it Symmonds or George Dehne. And the list-servs, best practices, and conferences are sponsored by companies who sell products and services to colleges and universities.

There are several reasons that this is the case. Enrollment management as currently practiced is new--perhaps only 20 years old. Therefore graduate programs that produce researchers in other fields haven't grown up yet in enrollment management. The rapid change in the field makes it possible for individuals or small consultancies to gather and distribute meaningful data. The competitiveness of the field, with dozens of colleges battling for top students makes practitioners less willing to share information among themselves. And the nature of enrollment management--as practice more than discipline or skill--means that campus-based professionals aren't situated in a position to make the sort of generalizations that are the basis of academic research elsewhere in higher ed.

One wonders what this means for the future of enrollment management. Will it eventually become an academic discipline with its own literature, faculty, etc.? Or will it leave the university entirely, and become an outsourced service in the way that food service, bookstores, and security are now?

Is enrollment management a skill or a discipline?

2011-07-13T22:05:00.001-06:00

Two weeks ago I began another unexpected posting in an administrative role at Westminster College--Interim Vice President for Enrollment Management. As you might imagine, I've spent quite some time contemplating whether anything in my previous experience has prepared me to be effective until the college hires a long-term VP with experience and expertise in enrollment.

The short answer is, of course, yes. I've been at Westminster for five years now; that experience has certainly familiarized me with the campus' culture, stated goals, and implicit values. I know how our budget process works, I've recruited undergraduate and graduate students, and I've worked closely with many on the staff in Admissions and Financial Aid, the main areas of enrollment management.

My own favored approach to work is becoming solidified as well. I like to get people around a table to make decisions, I prefer framing the issue and then listening over having others frame the issue and present pre-determined options, I believe that building connections leads to unexpected responses to hard problems, I am confident that focused attention over time leads to better responses than quick decisions. I would rather talk face-to-face or email over placing a phone call. I am comfortable with an ever-changing array of issues, programs, and opportunities coming up each day.

Having said all this, though, I can't help but feel that Enrollment Management is a foreign country and I've just arrived without a visa or language skills. Or in other words, my preparation has left me unprepared.

There is an ongoing debate in education between "content' and "skills" people. The content folks argue that high school teachers (for example) ought to be trained largely in their disciplines, and their goal ought to largely be about helping students learn content. History teachers should know their history; history students should be judged by their comprehension of history.

The skills folks argue that there are certain abilities--critical thinking, writing, leadership--that can be learned in any discipline, are essential for success in the real world, and ought to be the goal of education. In this worldview, content is secondary to skills--it is the message and skills are the media.

My own reflection, and the research on content and skills, suggests that both camps are in error. A content-only training is exactly what leads many university professors to be inept educators. They know their disciplines, but they cannot convey their disciplines in any comprehensible way. And skills-focused training runs up against the obvious fact that skills are context specific. Writing in history, and poetry, and cosmology are radically different things. Being good at one does not mean the writer is good at another.

So if neither content nor skills rule, how does one work with any success in a field outside one's own? I have no deep insights. But I have observed that skilled enrollment managers, like the man whose departure occasioned my temporary appointment and the colleagues I now work with in Admissions and Financial Aid, are practitioners before they are anything else. Their jobs are about replicating the practices that have led to success in the past, ensuring that others do the same, and being mindful of when changing contexts make those activities suddenly obsolete. Solving problems in a practice-based setting is not about coming up with a solution. It is instead about changing behavior to see if those changes lead to different results, while knowing all along that the vicissitudes of time and place mean that all "solutions" are temporary.

These characteristics of enrollment management practice make it both fascinating and frightful. And so to go along with practice are a set of attitudes--the expectation that failure is always possible and always correctable, the willingness to accept responsibility, the temptation to hide mistakes until they fester, a fascination with trying new things.

Is your school more like a newspaper or a pub?

2011-07-05T17:32:00.001-06:00

More to muse on from Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus...

Shirky argues that old media, like newspapers, are on their way out as a model for making money on information. Nothing new here. But arguing from the analogy between a bar and social media, he suggests that social media can make money for content providers. After all, people can drink more cheaply at home than in a bar, but they choose to go to a bar anyway because of the conviviality, social connection, and sense of common purpose that can grow in a bar (and in other third places, for that matter). In the same way, people gather to use social media because it provides them a sense of common purpose, and are willing to pay for that opportunity, or at least look at advertisements that pay for that opportunity. To borrow from the title of Richard Putnam's follow-up to Bowling Alone, there are some things that are done better together.

Colleges and universities operate on implicit models. It is frequently remarked that higher ed (and K-12) is built explicitly on a factory model. But the closer analogy is not a factory, but a newspaper. Newspapers, like colleges and universities and factories, are efficiency-based, low profit-margin businesses. But newspapers and colleges and universities share something that not all factories embrace--the creation of new content. After all, a newspaper that ran the exact same story day after day would fail. A factory that produces the same widget every day succeeds. For the past four generation, it has been the creation of content by faculty members that has been at the heart of the "colleges as newspapers" educational model.

Both colleges and newspapers, though, may be overtaken by quicker, cheaper ways to create content. And some of that content will be produced in bar-like settings where people collaborate to create. In this setting, the concern is not how to produce content more quickly or cheaply, but how to help their publics make meaning (including establishing the value and quality) of the content swirling around. Here is where the pub analogy helps. Pubs are meaning-making venues where people pay to make that meaning. The value-add is the setting and the interaction that a good pub with a good clientele creates.

So, some questions to think with: How is your school like a newspaper and how is it like a pub? What is your school doing to become more like a pub?

Cost, quality, and freedom, or, can you crowdsource an education?

2011-06-27T08:22:00.000-06:00

In Cognitive Surplus Clay Shirky argues that the invention of movable type had three impacts on intellectual culture: it reduced the cost of publication, increased people's freedom to publish, and initially, lowered the quality of the things that were published. Over time, though, the increase in freedom brought about an increase in creativity, innovation, and learning. The sum total of the quality of published things has never returned to the glory days of publishing--there is much more dreck for sale today than when monks carefully illuminated manuscripts. But we are substantially better off as a culture, and people who want to publish are better off as well.

For educators concerned about the cost and quality of education, there is much to learn in Shirky's brief account. Two things come immediately to mind. The first is that colleges and universities cannot make meaningful progress on cost and quality without asking serious questions about freedom--Who will shape the curriculum? Under which rules? Who will decide what is good?

The second is that the key voices in this discussion need to be the potential producers of learning. By this I do not mean that students ought to choose. Nor do I mean that faculty or administrators ought to be the source of innovation in learning. Instead I mean that regardless of role, people who see themselves as creators of learning should be the ones who create it.

Shirky makes this point too, as he notes that technology makes it possible for people who were once only consumers to become collaborators. Online this means bloggers and coders and social entrepreneurs and all the other people who band together to jointly solve problems or have fun. In education I suspect this means crowdsourcers--people who can call together experts in many fields--both content and delivery--to create custom educations. You might imagine a day when colleges and universities collaborate with their students to pull together courses and learning experiences from around the world, leading to an education that is cost-effective, high-quality, and, in the political sense, free.

The Priceline model for choosing a college

2011-06-23T23:11:00.000-06:00

I met today with a group of enrollment managers at the NACU conference at North Central College. One told the story of a father who came to the financial aid office on his campus and said "I have $xx,xxx dollars to spend on higher education for my son each year. Make me a deal." This scenario was quickly called "the priceline model" of higher education.

This story is enlightening for what it tells us about debt, decision-making, and the place of higher education in the economy. The people in the room agreed that this scenario would become more common in the near future, in part because of the cost of private higher education, in part because of the New Frugality, and in part because higher ed is no different from the rest of the economy where consumers are seeking more customized, personalized pricing and experiences.

How would a priceline model influence higher education? It would do three things, I think. First, it would shake the prestige nonsense out of higher education selection. If a consumer of higher ed were to select parameters (location, field of study, NSSE scores, etc.) and then offer a price, students would end up in one of the thousands of good institutions in the US, but almost certainly not in the ones that use price as a proxy for prestige.

Second, it would encourage innovation on the margins of higher education. New higher ed providers might "compile" an educational experience for students, putting together a set of classes from disparate institutions, united by advising, or an internship, or something else. The result would be a college degree that met the consumer"s demands by building an institution from scratch. Or providers might go in seriously for differential pricing (a history degree would be cheaper than a business degree, for example) or disaggregated pricing, so that instead of paying tuition for classes, you pay instead for a certain amount of faculty time for each class, or you select having a mentor in one class but not for another.

Third, institutions would lose the relationships that often bring students to campus and keep them once they arrive. Instead, the decision to choose a college would be made almost entirely on cost.

Would this make for a better learning education for students? Would it improve or diminish the quality of colleges and universities?

Blogs to love

2011-06-14T14:07:00.001-06:00

Here are several blogs worth reading, all of which focus on education, community, and the search for a good (or at least viable) life:

Front Porch Republic: Its tagline says it all: Place. Limits. Liberty. The conservatism of FPR's writers is bracing and clear-eyed--no promises that a set of tax cuts or free-trade agreements will solve the world's ills. Instead, a willingness to examine ills, local or global, in the context of the limits of the earth, and the limits of human beings.

The School of Life: A British gathering of academics and civic innovators, who've set up a location for learning that does some of what schools do, but does it in a particularly thoughtful way. Take a look, for instance, at today's post about the creation of healthy minds.

The Politics of Well-Being: British journalist Jules Evans' regular examination of the search for well-being. He mixes a nose for trends just emerging (positive psychology, for example) with pithiness and neo-aristotelianism.

The Big Society Watch and InCommon from the Davenport Institute at Pepperdine University: The Big Society watch traces Great Britain's experiment with Tocquevillian social change in modern Europe; InCommon looks at civil society in California.

Cato Unbound: Most blogs purport to show diversity of thought and real intellectual engagement. This one actually does. The exchanges on typical libertarian topics (the limits of government, for example) can get to be inside baseball quickly (unless you are deeply familiar with libertarian and conservative political thought), but the exchanges whose titles promise dullness, like this one on the impact of free parking are excellent. My current favorite is the discussion of the political scientist James C. Scott's work.

The Becker-Posner Blog: Wherein two of the smartest economists in the world write consistently clear and challenging essays about big issues in American life. Great stuff, especially for folks trying to understand the market from the perspective of people who understand the market and still admire it.

Buddhist Geeks: Regular podcasts from Buddhists who work in the high-tech world. Full of insights about systems, change, the ways of organizations, personal transformation, and social change.

Taken together these blogs are evidence both of the rich learning and community that can emerge on the web, and of people who have gotten well past the superficiality of the current discussion of politics, government, and the good life. All are worth following.

How do we get there from here?

2011-06-07T19:52:00.000-06:00

Yet another article, this time in The Atlantic, about the higher education on the verge of a major reconfiguration. The outline is the same as usual--higher ed costs too much, is accessible to too few, and produces too little learning. And technology is the answer. The examples are the typical ones as well--MIT's open course initiative and the Khan Academy.

I agree with the author that higher ed needs to be reworked, and that the framing of the issue--how can we get better learning at lower cost in ways that respond to the needs and desires of students and society?--is the right one.

But that is the easy part. It is simple to diagnose the disease, much harder to fix it. Here is why: "free' alternatives like OpenCourse Ware or Khan Academy aren't free--they are either subsidized or make no money. For-profit options are expensive too--they charge students a premium for convenience. Private non-profit institutions have budgets based on expensive tuition (though the level of tuition discounting means that budgets are not nearly as high as one would think). Any move to offer a less expensive education runs up against the fact that the institution runs on a small margin at very high tuition. And inexpensive public institutions are subsidized, at capacity, and too poor to devote resources to vastly improving student learning. In short, most colleges and universities, public and private, are resource poor. They don't have money to experiment, nor do they have R&D operations.

So how do we get to high quality, low cost education from where we are now, in the real world? Are there incentives that exist for the leadership and faculty of private institutions that will encourage them to cut costs and maintain quality? What are those incentives? Are there different incentives for low-cost providers who are operating at capacity?

My view (which will be no surprise to readers of this blog) is that existing institutions will not be the leaders here. It will be new colleges and universities who will figure out the cost/quality formula first. (Take a look at this proposal for a new university in England. High quality, but high cost also.) Reformers need to work to lower the barriers for new entrants. They key barrier? Access to federal financial aid. The students who will desire low-cost education are those with little money to invest in their educations. But start-up colleges and universities lack the accreditation that gives them and their students access to financial aid. No financial aid, no students, no new institutions.

Public schools are dead, long live public education?

2011-06-07T19:14:00.000-06:00

Keeping a charter school running means constantly responding to change without the infrastructure, finances, and administrative depth of district schools. Lose an English teacher in a district high school, and there are others who can step in. Lose one in a charter school and you have no such backup. Enrollment drops by a few students in a high school of 3,000 and it is barely noticeable. Lose a few students in a school of 250 and you are in budget difficulty.

So when the Utah legislature passed a law last session requiring all public schools to allow students to enroll in online courses offered by preferred providers, and stipulated that portions of the weighted pupil unit (the per-student state funding) go to those providers, there was little outcry. But for a charter school like City Academy, the prospect of a few thousand dollars leaving our budget every time a student chooses an online course is troubling, because it makes it more difficult for us to pay for the teachers, building, and resources needed to support the student when he or she is in class.

I will leave it to others to determine whether this law is good or bad. I expect that it is morally neutral, and may provide opportunities for innovation in public education. But the thing that has gone unremarked is this: that this move, more than anything that has happened in the past ten years, is likely to weaken public schools even while it may strengthen public education.

Here is what I mean: allowing state funding to follow student class selection creates a revenue stream for providers of classes, not diplomas. Thus a future is possible where a student takes a math class from one provider, a history class from another, and a science class from a third. The experience of school disappears; all that remains is taxpayer supported coursework, made whole, if at all, by parents, advisors, and students themselves.

Public schools may be on the way out; we will have to decide whether the public education that replaces it is what we desire.

Restoring the value of Directed Studies

2011-05-07T11:19:00.000-06:00

A small but consistent part of my job as Dean is approving Directed Studies courses. In nearly every instance, the course is a solution to a problem in the system--a student can't graduate without taking a course that isn't offered during a particular semester, or the two courses a student needs to graduate are offered at the same time, or a student needs to re-take a course offered only by a professor with whom s/he has had a falling out. No one likes Directed Studies courses in these situations--neither the students who have to fit in an additional course in an already hectic term nor the faculty who get no compensation for offering the course. (Not to mention that learning often stumbles in these courses because they emerge at the last minute and are built around a syllabus that assumes classroom interaction, not one-to-one discussions.)

The "solve a problem" approach to Directed Studies is fine in individual cases, but done too frequently it hides near-misses in the system. As Catherine Tinsley et al point out in "How to avoid catastrophe" in the April 2011 Harvard Business Review, leaders are tempted to count near-misses as successes rather than as signs of potentially catastrophic break-downs.

While Directed Studies courses don't signal the same sort of impending disaster as, say, problems at BP's Deepwater Horizon well, they do signal that the curriculum may have too many different classes in it, or that student advising fails to ensure that students move rationally through their majors, or that student demand outpaces capacity in key areas.

Now all of these problems are big and expensive and therefore perhaps better to treat with Directed Studies courses than with thorough-going changes. But if colleges built Directed Studies into their curricula, they could actually improve student learning, deepen faculty satisfaction, customize learning to the interests of students, and support innovation.

Suppose, for example, that a college radically reduces the number of electives in a particular major. Instead of requiring students to choose elective classes (where demand is unpredictable), the department instead requires that students take Directed Studies courses on topics of mutual interest from three faculty in the department. In turn, faculty teaching load would include Directed Studies--perhaps 18 hours of classroom and the equivalent of 6 hours of Directed Studies (or perhaps 12 to 12 if a campus really wanted to support customization and innovation). Finally, the demand and supply for courses would be managed on an electronic exchange--faculty posting the topics they would most like to teach about; students posting the topics they would most like to learn about--a sort of curricular dating service.

In this scenario Directed Studies courses are a benefit to the system, not the sort of melancholy task that occupies the time of Deans trying to do right by students in a system that isn't working quite right.

In Praise of Business Education

2011-04-20T11:10:00.001-06:00

These are, we are told, dark days for business education. The economic downturn has been laid at the feet of business schools too caught up in teaching theory to inculcate ethics. Employers complain that business schools fail to provide them with students who can complete the most basic tasks--writing clearly, speaking well, working with others. And most recently, business schools are bearing the brunt of the criticism growing out of Academically Adrift, which suggests that standards are low, teaching is poor, students are unmotivated, and that business fields have become the major of last resort for students hoping to slip through college without troubling themselves to learn.

As a historian serving for this year as the Dean of the Bill and Vieve Gore School of Business at Westminster College, I have three responses to these complaints:

First, at least during my entire education career, business schools have been magnets for these sorts of complaints. My fellow history majors looked down their noses at business school students who just wanted to get through and get paid. Later, when I became a faculty member, my colleagues and I looked with jealousy at the big salaries paid to business school faculty and graduates. And we complained in the halls about the business students in our general education classes who could not find a passion for important things like the social history of British colonies in the Americas.

Second, many of the supposed faults of business schools--large classes, lecture-oriented teaching, disengaged students, shrinking amounts of homework--were not pioneered by business schools. Instead they are the creation of colleges and universities enamored of what John Tagg calls "the instruction paradigm"--an approach to education that focuses entirely on educational efficiency, or in other words, getting as many students as possible into and out of classes. Sir Ken Robinson's recent speech (made into a video that has gone viral) is only the latest demonstration of the soul-killing futility of such a model of schooling.

Third, these criticisms of business schools miss both the innovations in business education that are now leading change in higher education, and the new generation of business students who are transforming the goals and curricula of business schools across the United States.

Let me start with business students. While there are certainly students who have selected business because it is an "easy" major (in the same way that students fall into other "easy" majors--sociology, english, history--pick your favorite) the business students I have met at Westminster tend to be ambitious, focused, and intent on improving the world they find themselves in. Fifteen years ago when I started leading civic engagement efforts on college campuses, I was most likely to attract students from the social sciences. Today, those students come from business. They have discovered the transformational power of social entrepreneurship, they understand the way that the world is a complex system, and they believe that business fields are the ones best prepared to empower them (and their fellow-citizens) to respond to the economic, environmental, and educational crises before us.

Nor are all business students upper-middle class white kids intent on maintaining their status through high-paying jobs. Business is a field that attracts non-traditional students, first-generation college attenders, students of color, and others who are looking for a way to craft better lives for themselves.

In business schools that are paying attention to changes in education and the business world, those students are met with curricula and pedagogy that are as good or better than that found anywhere else in the university. Here is what I mean:

Outcomes--Many academic programs are designed around classes and then, almost as an afterthought, they add desired outcomes. Many business programs are designed with the outcomes in mind, and then the learning experiences are built to lead students to those outcomes. In the Gore School, our MBA was built after long conversations with alumni and local business leaders led us to agree on a set of outcomes. Then the courses were built to add up to those outcomes. The result is a curriculum that reinforces itself, where every class adds to student understanding of a range of topics, not just a single subject. When we have learned about gaps in student performance, as with writing a few years ago, we have adjusted the curriculum to respond.

More radically, in recent years we have created two project-based programs, where rather than taking courses, students work through a series of projects. Those projects lead them to the outcomes. The programs are competency-based. That is, students graduate when they can demonstrate competency in all of the program areas. No competency, no graduation. The result is programs where students can demonstrate their business acumen, not just demonstrate that they have taken courses on business topics.

Pedagogy--While many business (and non-business) schools use traditional lectures as their teaching method, more and more of them, including Westminster, focus on teaching that leads to learning. By this I mean that our courses require students to get a hands-on learning experience. They work through cases, do live consulting projects, build businesses, serve internships, and solve real-world problems. They can do this because their faculty are both academically qualified and experienced in the business world. Our students may not be able to rattle off complex formulae or theories at the drop of a hat. But all of them graduate with real experience in the business world.

Relationships--While it is not the case that small class sizes guarantee excellent learning, at Westminster we have been able to use small class sizes to build strong relationships among students and between students and faculty. The result is a learning environment where no student can hide, and where no student is ignored. This is good educational practice, to be sure. But it is also good business practice. In a work world where more and more jobs require people to work in teams, to respond to complex problems, and to innovate rather than replicate what has been done in the past, an education focused on ensuring both support and accountability is essential.

I do not mean to suggest that Westminster, or any business school, has "solved" the problem of business education. Nor do I mean to suggest that all of the critiques of business schools and business students are wrong. But I do think that the sort of education that good business schools provide their students is the sort of education that all students need. The proof, perhaps, is in the results. Last year, accountants with a Westminster undergraduate business degree passed the CPA exam at higher rates than students from any other school in Utah. Westminster's D.A. Davidson investment team consistently is one of the top five in the US at making gains in the stock market. And for the past two years, Gore School of Business seniors have significantly outperformed expectations on the CLA--the very assessment tool which has sparked the furor about business education in Academically Adrift.

These are small things all. And the number of students participating in each is too small to generalize about all Gore School of Business students as a whole. But at the very least they suggest that not all business education is broken. In fact, it may be very good indeed.

Why are liberal arts colleges expensive when the liberal arts aren't?

2011-04-09T21:52:00.001-06:00

NITLE just held a conference on the uses of technology in the liberal arts. One key theme of the conference was that liberal arts colleges are headed for disaster because their business model is broken. Inside Higher Ed's summary of this conference theme is full of the language of crisis. NITLE's hope, of course, is that technology can help reduce the cost of education at these schools, and therefore save them. (Because, presumably, without liberal arts colleges people would cease to learn the liberal arts. A questionable assumption, but the theme for another post.)

But what the article seems not to ask is this: Why are liberal arts colleges expensive when the liberal arts aren't? After all, the lowest labor costs are to be found in liberal arts disciplines: a historian is cheaper than a finance professor; an english prof earns less than a PhD in nursing. The liberal arts require no costly infrastructure (except for the sciences, but the goals of science in higher ed are so far from the liberal arts that they hardly belong in the same institution). Because of the sort of practices that lead to learning in the liberal arts--discussion, writing, service-learning, group projects, etc.--it is conceivable that classes in the liberal arts could have larger enrollments than those in professional disciplines and achieve the same learning value. And because of the focus on human development in the liberal arts traditions, student support infrastructure could be less costly.

So the short answer to the question is this: Liberal arts colleges are costly because they aren't really liberal arts colleges. That is, over the years, liberal arts colleges have adopted the budgets, infrastructures, faculty roles, aspirations, and curricular specialization of comprehensive or research universities.

These things are almost impossible to put off once a school adopts them. And so the alarms sounded at NITLE and in many other venues are likely to be true. There will be liberal arts colleges that die because students can't afford them. But there is irony here, because once liberal arts colleges die, their place in the market could easily be filled--by liberal arts colleges.

The perils of prestige

2011-04-06T12:57:00.000-06:00

This article, in the Washington Monthly's outstanding College Guide, tells the story of George Washington University's rise from an affordable private university in a dreary DC neighborhood to one of the most expensive universities in the United States.

GW's story is one that gets played out in smaller degree on campuses across the US. In order to attract more students, colleges and universities build new buildings, form new teams, hire more faculty, and mimic the goals and cultures of the richest, most prestigious campuses in the US. The result is, on the one hand, rising prestige, and on the other, rising costs.

There are all sorts of reasons to wonder about the wisdom of a prestige-focused path to institutional success. Most of them are obvious--there isn't a bottomless pool of families able to afford such schooling, and moves towards prestige don't necessarily lead to better learning are two of the most compelling.

But a third is equally important--in nearly every instance, colleges and universities on the prestige track give up focus and mission for prominence. (The story about GW is full of such losses of focus.) This need not be the case, of course. A campus could seek prominence by offloading all programs that are unlikely to attract attention, or by getting rid of all departments that are unlikely to become nationally prominent.

That schools do not seek prominence through focus teaches us a couple of things about American higher education. First, the pursuit of prestige is really a form of hedging bets, of trying out lots of things in the hope that some will be successful. Second, while apologists for higher ed in the US like to point out the "diversity" of institution types, there is really only one that matters for prestige--the research university. You can have big ones or small ones, but if you want a prestigious campus you need new buildings, a wide range of programs, faculty who publish a lot, and outcomes that are as much about prominence in and connection to the world of wealth as they are about learning.

That world of wealth and prominence is in key ways a zero-sum game--only so many people get to play. And so the prestige path is likely to be a winner for a few campuses and a loser for lots more. But without alternative models of success in higher ed, colleges and university leaders anxious to improve the lot of their schools will struggle to propose something other than the things that George Washington University has done so well.

on-campus work and retention

2011-04-05T10:13:00.000-06:00

This year, as every year, our campus is looking at retention. Our institutional retention rate has crept up over the past several years; it was 79% last year, our best number ever. As we break down the data, there are two factors that predict retention more than any others--level of previous academic performance, and working on-campus.

Previous academic performance is no surprise, since it tracks with what we know about success in college--if you have done well in school in the past (which is often a factor of high socio-economic status and family culture) you are likely to do well in the future, and likely to say in school.

But on-campus work is different. It doesn't depend on high SES. (In fact, getting a job on campus often depends on having a lower-than-average SES). It is a factor that the school itself can control. Compared with the expense of other retention efforts, it may be relatively cheap. And work can, in fact, have a meaningful impact on learning. (Westminster has begun requiring all on-campus jobs to specify how the job helps students achieve the college's learning goals.)

Students who work on campus at Westminster as freshmen are 6 to 10 percent more likely to be retained than students as a whole. On-campus work isn't a panacea. Schools in the Work Colleges Consortium (where all students work) have retention rates that range from 36% to 82%. But a campus interested in investing in retention would be wise to put its money in student jobs.

Why are there no reality shows about education?

2011-03-30T06:18:00.002-06:00

It struck me part-way through watching my third consecutive episode of Swamp People that while there are reality shows about alligator hunters, junk buyers, truck drivers, coupon cutters, and pawn shop owners (actually two shows here) there are no reality shows about education.

If you are among the many that believe reality shows are a sign of the impending cultural apocalypse, or if you believe education is too serious of a topic to be serialized on the History Channel, then this news must cheer you.

But if you are a fan of reality TV, or if you like the way reality shows take overlooked parts of society, show the nuttiness of the people who inhabit it, and then demonstrate how that nuttiness is in fact part of a lifestyle that has meaning and dignity, then the fact that you can't spend a season tracking the progress of Ms. Johnson's 8th grade pre-algebra class, or sitting in on the weekly meeting of Dean's Council must make you wonder.

I don't have some Great Theory of Culture that explains this fact. And there is a lot of media attention to education, both in a fictionalized (Glee, High School Musical) and documentary (Waiting for Superman) format, not to mention the endless discussions about fixing education that emerge any time a legislature sits or an executive stops trying to solve the worlds problems long enough to focus on our own.

But the absence of reality shows about something like education, where every day teachers face the equivalent of surprisingly dangerous alligators and discover a human analogue of the $10,000 guitar hidden behind a pile of junk, must have some explanation. I would love to see yours.

Here is mine. Both reality show producers and education leaders believe that education is too important to show on television. For reality show producers the question goes like this: Why would we produce a show that might turn out to have an unhappy ending? For education leaders it is the same question, asked a different way: Why would we trivialize something as serious as the crisis of education by putting it on TV?

Behind both of these questions is an assumption that education is broken, and only major, systemic overhauls can do something positive. No one wants to relax to that on TV.

But we know that many parents are satisfied about their kids' education, even when that kid is enrolled in a "failing" school (it is the equivalent to the case that while most Americans distrust congress, most like their own representative). And we know that educational success is tied to a bunch of context-specific things--home life, access to books, the enthusiasm of the teacher--that don't give themselves easily to system-wide fixes.

It is exactly those context-specific things that make reality shows interesting. So if we see several education reality shows emerging on TV in the years to come, it will be a sign that education leaders and media producers have come to better understand education as something like hunting alligators--hard, interesting work done by people who aspire simply to decent lives and the chance to do what they love with people they like. That would be a good sign.

Learning from Learnable.com; or starting a college and getting paid

2011-03-26T08:31:00.001-06:00

Over the past couple of years I have blogged several times about what it would take to start a college or university today:

Here and here I posted about the notion of "Charter Universities"--where states would adopt the model used for charter schools to encourage innovators to provide higher education as well.

Here I mused about whether an "emergent" model of change could lead to the creation of a college.

This essay noted some of the "mysteries' in education--things we don't currently do well--and proposed ways to arrange a school that made money by responding to them. And this one wondered how you could monetize learning as opposed to classes. These posts have mused about ways to make use of open learning resources. And this one suggested that private universities ought to start junior colleges.

Having said all this, there are essentially 3 big barriers to starting a college or university today. The first is the cost associated with building a campus. Even schools like the University of Phoenix that rent their buildings have significant space costs. And the cost of building a new campus, especially one that includes science, would be enormous. The second is accreditation. Without accreditation, students cannot get federal financial aid, and without accreditation, diplomas have almost no meaning. But getting accredited means many years of work, years during which whatever students you can gather have to take it on trust that their expenditures will produce something that has meaning.

People who have responded to these two issues have often done it by focusing on supporting learning online. The most famous example today is Khan Academy--a learning center than began on YouTube and now boasts thousands of videos on discrete topics in math, science, and other areas. Khan Academy has hundreds of thousands of fans, and just got an infusion of money and support from Bill Gates.

But these free online learning models have not resolved the accreditation problem, and in fact aren't really interested in becoming colleges or universities. And they often run on a non-profit model, where they rely for funding on donations.

All of which makes the recent re-launch of Learnable.com more interesting. Learnable is the first site I've seen that allows producers of learning content to get paid by the users of that content.

Looked at one way, Learnable is like Etsy.com, a site that allows craftspeople to sell their wares. Looked at another way, though, it is a combination learning management system and back office for a college or university. With Learnable, then, a group of people who want to start an actual college or university have access to the resources to run the school, manage the courses, and handle much of the financial end of the business. I wouldn't be surprised to see new, small colleges and universities pop up on Learnable, either as a supplement to regular face-to-face courses, or as the platform for their entire institutions.

Do incentives for organizations work better than incentives for individuals?

2011-03-25T16:35:00.000-06:00

In the past week the Department of Education has clamped down on one sort of incentive for enrolling students in college and increased support for another. Taken together, the two moves make we wonder whether incentives are better at the individual or organizational level.

In this "Dear Colleague" letter, the Department of Ed ruled that it is improper for colleges and universities to provide financial incentives to employees for recruiting and enrolling students. Among the activities that cannot be incentivized are:
Targeted information dissemination to individuals; Solicitations to individuals; Contacting potential enrollment applicants; aiding students in filling out enrollment application information (p.8)

These rules, and others related to financial aid in the same document are a response to a scandal that blew up a couple years ago in which ethical lapses in providing financial aid grew out of cozy relationships between financial aid officers and private lenders.

Four days after offering this guidance, Ed announced a competition for nearly 200 million dollars in grants to encourage colleges and universities to enroll, retain, and graduate more students from college. The NYTimes article announcing the grant was called, "Incentives Offered to Raise College Graduation Rates."

In noting the almost-simultaneous banning and encouraging of incentives I am not trying to make a point about inconsistency in the Department of Education. Instead I am wondering about the proper location of incentives.

Some recent work by Dan Pink and separately by Barry Schwartz argues that incentives are relatively ineffective at getting individuals to behave well over an extended period of time. At the same time, donors are offering ever larger prizes to organizations that can solve problems, be it creating a privately funded space ship or raising high school graduation rates.

One wonders, then, about what incentives do for organizations that they do not do for individuals. Are organizations more likely to behave ethically with incentive money than individuals? Do incentives to organizations lead to sustainable changes in behavior when they do not for individuals? (Here the evidence would seem to say no, at least as indicated by the number of good educational innovations that disappear as soon as outside funding disappears.) Is the impact of incentive money weakened in organizations since it is distributed broadly, while it is focused in individuals? And finally, can donors and funders expect that incentives will bring about the sort of changes they hope to see?

Can the curriculum lead to retention and graduation?

2011-03-19T07:42:00.000-06:00

This article in Campus Technology highlights the efforts of California Lutheran University to retain more of its students. The university is rightly proud of its efforts, which have increased retention five percent in the past five years.

Their approach should be familiar to anyone who has worked on retention in the past decade--a mix of one-on-one outreach to students, strong support in the co-curriculum, a focus on students at-risk, and a robust data effort to ensure that no one falls through the cracks and to verify assumptions about what works and what doesn't. I expect that a similar mix, deployed with more or less effectiveness, exists on any campus that has worked to improve retention. Where there is variation, it comes in implementation and student characteristics, not in approach.

I suspect that this approach, though, has just about reached the limits of its effectiveness. Here are a few reasons:
1. The focus in higher ed is shifting from retention to graduation. The Gates Foundation, the federal government, and the various states are now pushing an obvious point--that one major goal of education is to graduate from college. Most retention efforts, on the other hand, focus on first-to-second year persistence. And while there have been moves towards sophomore year experiences and other extensions of the retention model, most individual components of retention efforts can succeed without moving the overall graduation rate one bit.

2. Retention efforts fail to engage large portions of the campus community. By this I mean two things: first, that most students are not the focus of retention . Upper-division students don't usually get considered. Nor do students in the broad middle--those who are doing well. Second, retention work fails to engage most faculty. Certainly those who teach freshman seminars or learning communities classes play a role. And so do faculty leaders--deans, honors program directors, freshman advisors, etc. But unless yours is an unusual campus, the number of faculty for whom retention is another nice program (or something to be offered up for budget cuts in difficult times) is large.

3. Retention efforts do not influence the curriculum as a whole. Retention work has influenced key segments of the curriculum. First-year seminars often exist to help retain students. So do learning communities. And at the outer edge, some campuses have redesigned their General Education programs to focus, in part, on retention. But few majors have been redesigned to retain students. And in fact, the trend towards requiring more hours in the major may work against retention.

So the question--what can be done in the curriculum to both retain more students and get more of them to graduation?

A few thoughts:

1. Hold departments responsible for retaining and graduating declared majors. Again, if your campus is anything like the norm, department chairs and deans cannot tell you which majors retain declared students. Nor is there any attention to the data showing what movement from one major to another looks like.

2. Make sure there are enough sections of upper-division classes so that retained students can move through expeditiously.

3. Enrich the portion of the curriculum that sits at the transition from GE to the major. Too often the first class in the major is also a large service course for the institution. Or students come to it willy-nilly, some in their first semester in the major, others after exploring upper-division courses

4. Ensure that there is a narrative to the curriculum--a reason that one course follows another, a story that all students and faculty can tell that describes why they are where they are in their course of study, and why the next step makes sense.

I am sure there are many more ways that the curriculum (here I am distinguishing from pedagogy) can lead to retention and graduation. But whatever they are, certainly institutions must be moving in that direction. Retention is no longer enough.

The difficult present and hopeful future for accreditors

2011-03-12T06:46:00.002-07:00

Since attending the NWCCU annual meeting, I've been thinking about the future of accreditors and accreditation (a bit of that thinking is also available here). Clearly, accreditors will be under pressure from federal and state governments anxious about accountability and hungry for greater influence over higher education. They will also be under pressure from the market--from for-profit schools, alternative models of accreditation, and thinkers who argue that our system is broken in part because it cannot regulate itself.

Readers will note that these locations of pressure--government on one hand and the private sector on the other--locate accreditors as part of civil society, that third sector that stands between private interest and governmental interests. Accreditors, though, have rarely taken this position, often preferring either a quasi-governmental role (creating and handing out regulations, ensuring compliance with the rules) or a consultative role (dispensing advice to individual campuses using a semi-proprietary process and working in an environment of confidentiality).

If accreditors were to embrace their position as part of civil society, they would continue what they currently do. But they would also do more of the following, all of which, in my view, would strengthen accreditors and higher education while maintaining some measure of independence from capture by government or private interest.

1. Build and mobilize networks. NWCCU has 162 member institutions from all institution types. There are obvious networks to be built here--among all campuses, among similar campuses, among campuses in the same region--and obvious issues to mobilize about (more on which below). Accreditors haven't generally done this sort of work because of their tradition of working with individual schools. There is space, though, for coalitions of schools to influence policy, coalitions which could be built relatively simply from within the ranks of regionally-accredited schools.

2. Support commonly desired outcomes. In the past 20 years accreditors have moved away from demanding that member schools embrace certain practices to demanding that schools define and achieve their own missions. At the same time, the policy discussion has moved the opposite direction, with calls for nationally standardized tests, improved retention and graduation, greater affordability,clearer links with K-12, and better learning. Accreditors could lead in these areas if they embraced a set of minimum standards. If fewer than 50% of your students graduate in 6 years (say, for example), you immediately get first an infusion of training and support from your accreditor and, if that doesn't help, censure from that accreditor. Such rules will, I expect, come from the federal government if they don't come from somewhere else.

3. Develop research and advocacy emphases. Accreditors sit on huge data sets that, if analyzed well, could tell us a great deal about the practices that lead to success and failure on most of the issues facing higher education. Part of living in civil society is to use these data to make public arguments--in the press, before congress, in public fora, at academic conferences--about what works.

4. Support experimentation with mission and institutional design. As I argued in my post about strategic planning, institutions of higher education are coalescing around a certain set of outcomes and certain approaches to them. (Why, for example, do most community colleges (or any other sector for that matter) provide similar offerings, on similar campuses, at a similar price?) What experimentation there is with institutional design and mission comes either from individual campuses or from new entrants in the market. Accreditors are uniquely positioned to identify gaps in the market and support responses. They have both the data and the influence to encourage campuses to step into new niches in the market. Or in an even more radical possibility, they have the membership and access to the wisdom of enough people that they, themselves, could incubate new institutions of higher education. Schools in a region in general do a poor job of graduating first-generation hispanic students? Why couldn't the accreditor, using its networks to catalyze the effort, design a new institution to do just that?

If accreditors took up any of these suggestions seriously, they would come to look quite different from their current guises. But they would also be in a position to shape the discussion about higher ed and push relentlessly for improvement. We certainly need more institutions in civil society to do just that.

What does strategic planning do?

2011-03-03T16:52:00.000-07:00

I have spent the past two days at the Northwest Commission of Colleges and Universities annual meeting in Seattle. NWCCU is Westminster's accrediting body. It also accredits most of the community colleges, universities, art schools, seminaries, and other institutions of higher ed in a broad swath of the North and West of the United States.

The annual meeting gives a good sense of the preoccupations of higher education, of which there seem to be four: student learning, staying accredited, responding to change, and strategic planning.

These last two are in particular tension. At a breakout session yesterday, campus after campus reported that it had recently hired a new president who, in his/her first year, had embarked on creating a new strategic plan for the campus. Accreditors, including Northwest, essentially require strategic plans in order to stay accredited. (Northwest requires that all campuses have a mission, core themes, and core theme objectives which are then reported on as part of the accreditation process.) In fact, the prevalence of strategic planning as the first step in a new presidency or a new accreditation cycle suggests that there is some sort of group-think at play, or that institutions are seeking safety in the form of a strategic plan.

I say this in part because when everyone is doing something, on principle, one ought to choose to do something else. But i say it also because the other theme at the meeting was the rapidity of change facing higher ed. State after state is slashing higher ed budgets, student demographics change rapidly, for-profit institutions are rapidly taking up market share, leadership turns over again and again. These changes force campuses to refigure contracts, rework budgets, seek new markets, adjust capacity--in short, to make things up as they go along.

One wonders how much a strategic plan, which is at its heart an effort to predict a future and then assess an organization's ability to bring that future about, helps in responding to change. At least some of the literature on strategic planning suggests that the answer is not much. Strategic plans, in this line of critique, ultimately make institutions look largely the same (witness the convergence of learning goals around the same themes: critical thinking, respect for diversity, civic engagement, etc.). And they do relatively little to improve the bottom line.

In fact, it may be the case that the most valuable aspect of creating a strategic plan is, well, creating the plan. It is uncommon for institutions to take the time and convene stakeholders for a meaningful conversation about their passions, interests, worries, and goals. Strategic planning does this in a way that can, if done well, win some common views about purpose and process. It can, in other words, help build community. But that community sometimes slips away once the plan is done, as people fall back into their routines, the institution works out its plan, and everyone hopes that rapid change doesn't upset things.

Erika Beck, the Provost of Nevada State College, made this point in her remarks at today's conference. She noted that NSC was created in 2002, in the salad days of Nevada's economic boom. The campus received a large plot of lands and took on an ambitious goal of becoming Nevada's mid-tier university. Faculty built the place from the ground up.

And then the economy fell apart in Nevada, with state funding for higher ed falling 32% since 2008. even while enrollments are up by 40%. Beck noted that NSC had been able to adapt, but not because of its strategic plan. Instead she pointed to the benefits of being a young, still relatively unformed campus (a 'start-up" she put it). As a start-up the campus could still play with work roles, combining jobs that wouldn't otherwise go together. Faculty and administrators worked together on responding to budget cuts because they had built the campus together and shared a sense of common purpose. And faculty took the downturn as a chance to innovate, not retrench.

This of course does not mean that a strategic plan is useless. But it does suggest that strategic plans can limit flexibility and take the place of the sort of relationships that allow communities to succeed in the face of crises. or perhaps it is the other way around. A strategic plan can be a way to build community. But it can also be a substitute. And if it is, then when change happens, the plan won't help.

Academically Adrift: Doing assessment at small colleges

2011-02-26T07:35:00.002-07:00

Academically Adrift has reignited the debate about the amount of value that attending college adds to a student's learning. Its conclusions--that many students do not learn much during college, and that that fact is due to the low requirements for the amount of student work are both sad and unsurprising.

The book's reliance on data from the CLA has received much less comment than its conclusions. This is due, in part, to the fact that over time the CLA has become a non-controversial assessment tool. But it is due also to the fact that few people outside higher ed know how the CLA works on a particular campus. For our campus, though, the CLA, regardless of what is says about our students' performance (and the news is sometime quite good), is always of questionable value.

The CLA purports to measure the "value-add" of a college by giving students a real-world critical thinking and writing challenge, and then measuring how students perform on that test in comparison to how the CLA (using a sophisticated algorithm) predicts they should have done. If senior students perform better than predicted (both by the performance of freshmen and by their own aptitude scores), that improved performance is the "value-add." Schools receive a report from CLA that breaks down student performance by field of study, and that compares the college's value-add to that of other institutions. Institutions are free to do with the data what they want. In my experience what they most want to do is see how they stack up against their peer and aspirant institutions on the "value-add" measure.

Westminster has used the CLA for six years. Each year's report is met by the same reactions. First, whether our value-add is high or low, we always wonder what that measure is due to. Because the CLA reports data only at major and campus level, and because it is a cross-sectional study, it is never possible to be sure what causes student performance gains or losses. Is there a particular class that made our philosophy students a year ago stand out so much? Is there a particular gap in the liberal education curriculum that lead our students to perform poorly on the "make an argument" portion of the test? Did some change in advising or curriculum have an effect? Do we just happen to have an outstanding bunch of freshmen whose scores make our senior's performance look bad? How would we know?

Second, and most importantly, our results are always compromised by small sample size.One year we were able to get the entire graduating class of philosophy majors to take the test. They performed very well. But there were six of them, so the statistical significance of the findings is in question. Some years we are only able to get 14 nursing majors to take the test, and so we have a huge standard deviation. Every year there are outliers who either make our scores look great or make them look awful.

The message here isn't that the CLA is a bad tool, or that Academically Adrift's conclusions are dubious. It is, instead, that small colleges and universities are poorly served by assessment tools that sample, aggregate data, and make comparisons at the campus level. The numbers in our sample groups will always be too small to be trustworthy, and the unit of measure (the entire college experience) too large to do something about.

Instead of these sort of abstract measures, small colleges and universities need to become much more serious about tracking and influencing individual student performance over time. There is no reason why a campus could not administer a measure of student learning each year to each student and track that particular student's performance. Then, if a student performs poorly on critical thinking, the student's advisor could recommend a particular course, or a particular shift in study habits, to respond.

The assessment mantra of small colleges should be something like this: Disaggregate, don't aggregate. Do longitudinal studies, not cross-sectional ones. And most importantly, assess the learning of students as real living human beings, not as part of an abstraction of how the entire institution is doing.

Such steps will make it harder for small colleges to play in the rating/ranking game that measures like CLA and NSSE allow. But it will allow small colleges and universities to be able to link assessment and learning in the lives of individual students--the thing we say we do right now.

Portfolios as a tool to respond to the big questions about private higher education

2011-02-22T22:17:00.003-07:00

It is not clear what higher education will look like in a decade. Or, to be more precise, it is clear that higher education will be even harder to describe in 10 years than it is today. There will be more varieties of schools, more ways to get degrees, more degrees available, more disagreement about higher education's values, and more debate about the value of higher education. Some well-regarded schools will be shuttered; schools that you've never heard of will surge to prominence.

But while the higher education environment of the future is hard to describe, the questions that will form that environment are clear. Campuses will distinguish themselves by how they respond to these questions, and by the tools they choose to craft their responses. By choosing to use portfolios to support, track, and assess student achievement of Westminster's college-wide learning goals, we are selecting certain responses to these questions. in turn, those responses can help distinguish a Westminster experience from those at other colleges and universities. A portfolio system, then, is nothing unique. But the way we use it at Westminster will allow us to bolster our claims of uniqueness while strengthening those portions of the learning experience that we do best.

Here are the big questions:
Which students will an institution choose to serve? There is a disjunction between the major trends in college-going and the sorts of students that many private colleges and universities hope to recruit. More and more college students will be first-generation students, or students of color, or from low-income homes, or returning to school after a career. Many will need remediation, and many will face added difficulties staying in school. At the same time, most private colleges and universities will compete for two other classes of students--those that can pay a large portion of private school tuitions, and those whose prior educational achievement adds to the prestige of the institution. These students may be more likely to be retained, but their number is relatively small.

Adopting a portfolio for all undergraduate students allows Westminster to aim for a broad range of students, because the assumption of portfolios is that they help students demonstrate their growth over time. Doing so allows us to shift the conversation away from demographic characteristics and towards the fit between students and the learning environment of the college.

How will those students learn? Prognosticators assume that this is a closed question--that in the future more learning will take place via technology. This is undoubtedly true, but hardly meaningful, since educational technology has always tracked with technological innovation in society. The bigger question is whether students will learn only in one way, and only in the classroom; or whether their learning (or the learning we count) will be various and take place everywhere.

By investing heavily in the learning environment--in undergraduate research, and civic engagement, and environmental programs, and global learning, and student life--Westminster is wagering that learning will be varied and constant. And by requiring a portfolio for all undergraduate students, the college is arguing that students need to be aware of and responsible for the varieties of their learning.

How will they demonstrate their learning? Colleges and universities have a long list of ways for students to demonstrate their learning--tests, papers, projects, presentations, lab reports, reflections, performances, etc. Students, at the same time, often say that while they learned a lot in class, the most significant learning in their lives took place outside the classroom. This is undoubtedly true, and undoubtedly difficult to demonstrate.

A portfolio system attached to the college-wide learning goals makes a bold claim--that learning inside and outside the classroom can, with the right measures in place--be demonstrated in the same way. Artifacts provide evidence for learning whether they come from a class or a club or an act of civic engagement. And reflections require students to make connections between the artifact and the learning outcomes, showing how learning outside of class is equivalent to that from within.

What role will faculty and staff play in that learning? While the phrases "sage on the stage" and "guide on the side" refer to two main varieties of in-class faculty behavior, it is the case at Westminster that faculty play a much more complicated role in student learning. A faculty member, through the entire course of her interaction with a student, is a recruiter, an advisor, a mentor, a teacher, an antagonist, a colleague, and an evaluator. Increasingly staff members play a similar range of roles.

The temptation in higher education is to specialization--to decoupling these roles in order to be more efficient. A portfolio system, though, helps to link those roles, since it asks students to make connections across their experiences and asks faculty to facilitate those connections rather than focus entirely on classroom interactions.

How will campuses innovate? Some campuses innovate relatively little. Others focus largely on finding efficiencies in their systems, but do relatively little innovation in the academic setting. Still others locate innovation largely in the creation of new academic programs. And many of the most innovative campuses innovate in silos, so that individual innovations do not add up to something in common.

Portfolios should strengthen the innovation culture at Westminster in two ways. First, they help students draw together their experiences with innovative programs--so that, for example, they see how participation in the Westminster Scholars program, their concern for environmental sustainability, and their majors go together. Second, they will help the campus see where innovation needs to take place. If the quality of work in, say, the "leadership, collaboration, and teamwork" learning goal is relatively small, it signals that the college needs to strengthen its work there. Or if portfolios show us that learning is particularly robust in "global consciousness, social responsibility, and ethical awareness" then we know that we have an advantage in that area.

How will campuses demonstrate their value to stakeholders? This is perhaps the biggest question for the institution as a whole. Parents, students, funders, legislators, employers, accreditors, and campus members are all asking whether college is worth the cost. A portfolio system allows a deep response to this question. It helps students identify how their college experience as a whole was valuable. It demonstrates to employers what graduates can do, not just what they know. It shows legislators, funders, and friends what the results of a Westminster experience are, and it portrays concretely the college's ability to live up to its strategic plan and mission. In this way, then, portfolios allow a new richness in the way schools sum up their work, for they give us evidence, in a common format and on common themes, of the power of a Westminster experience.

Public places, contemplation, and E. B. White

2011-02-18T14:54:00.001-07:00

My friend Diane VanderPol, the Director of the Giovale Library at Westminster, wisely pointed out that libraries have bucked the decline in public spaces. In response to my last post she wrote:

I hold out hope for one public something: libraries! In the economic downturn, public libraries have seen increases in numbers of visitors, check outs and program attendance. During the very eras that saw a decline in the private fraternal orders, civic groups, etc, public libraries- as municipally and regionally supported entities full of paid professionals- thrived. Public libraries= the quintessential third places and the last hope for public something!

Diane's is an important insight because it highlights an exception to the rule of public decline. But it is even more interesting because it hints at an important but under-appreciated role of public spaces--they are a venue for communal contemplation.

Thinking of public places as refuges goes against most of the literature on those locations, which focuses on their ability to spark deliberation and engagement between citizens. Think for example, of Robert Putnan's Bowling Alone which uses individual action in public spaces as a metaphor for the decline of community life. Or consider Christopher Lasch's The Revolt of the Elites, which laments the decline in public dialogue that has accompanied the decline in third places.

Recall for a minute, though, those types of public spaces that have flourished in the past 20 years--libraries, spas, yoga studios, coffee houses, and trail systems. They all provide people the opportunity to be alone in public. When I run on the trails near my house I often see other runners. We always greet each other but never stop to talk. When my wife and I stop at Starbucks we are surrounded by other couples who engage in quiet conversation, and by individuals alone with newspapers or iPods. Spas fill up with people getting massages or manicures in close physical proximity, but they may never speak to each other. Yoga classes consist of rooms full of people enacting what has been for millenia a contemplative practice. And when I have had enough with my office and the pressures flowing through the computer and phone, I get up, walk across campus, and enjoy the peace of being quietly surrounded by dozens of other people who pay me no mind.

I have no great wisdom about why this is the case. But it is true that those places that once provided contemplation--churches on one hand and homes on the other--have lost their ability to do so. Home is either a riot of engagement--getting kids to lessons, rushing to make a meal, cleaning house, watching TV while online--or a place of genuine alone-ness. Churches (at least in the Protestant traditions) have moved away from quiet, solitude, and thoughtfulness to electrified music, non-stop talking, and enforced interactions. So perhaps we must get into public now to find the conditions we need to be alone.

E. B. White, author of Charlotte's Web and essayist for the New Yorker made this point in 1948 when he wrote, "On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy." His insight was a simple one--it takes being around others to experience the solitude that makes us well. Some public places do that, and we should be grateful for them.

Is there any hope for public anything?

2011-02-18T06:20:00.000-07:00

Both at the federal and the state levels, the same questions I raised about the future of public higher education can be asked about the future of the entire public sphere. With the need for significant budget cuts and the anti-government views of most leading elected Republicans, it is not at all certain that the organizations we see as stalwarts of public life--schools, cultural organizations, arts organizations, social service providers--will continue to be vigorous. And if they do not, it is an open question whether our common lives will diminish with them.

There is a history here, one that we ought to attend to. As recently as the 1960s government played a relatively small role in supporting third places and non-governmental organizations. The public sphere was populated with some non-profits, but even more with a wide range of fraternal organizations, public houses, civic organizations, parks, etc. that received almost no federal funding and very limited state funding.

Most of those organizations have been in decline in the past 40 years. And they have been replaced by a new breed of non-profits, distinguished both by their focus on a single issue, and by their receipt, in one way or another, of tax funds. Those same non-profits have benefited from a more generous class of donors, some of whose gifts are driven by tax breaks. The receipt of tax funds, the specialization in particular issues, and the increased need to cultivate donors has led to a professionalized non-profit sector, one that employs a large number of people, and that relies on continually growing budgets to move its work forward.

The economic downturn and now, the thirst to cut government budgets, thus hurt the public sphere in three ways. They undermine government funding for non-profits even while donors are less able to give, they endanger the jobs of a large number of professionals, and because the public sphere and the non-profit sector have become almost synonymous, they threaten the infrastructure of public life.

Of course many non-profits will survive, but those that do will rely ever more heavily either on a dedicated tax funding stream (as, for example, providers of drug treatment who contract with governments), or upon the largesse of a small group of rich donors.

This is not entirely a bad thing in the long run. I expect that entrepreneurs will step in and find ways to run arts and culture organizations on a fee-for-service, not a donation basis. The internet will replace the work of many employees in the non-profit sector (it is noteworthy, for example, that civil society organizations have played almost no role in the recent rebellions on Tunisia and Egypt. Their organizational roles have been taken over by twitter and by ad-hoc on-the-ground decision-making). And small-scale volunteer work will return to churches and evanescent neighborhood organizations. But between now and the long run, the public sphere is in decline.

Is there any hope for public higher education?

2011-02-13T11:10:00.000-07:00

I work at a private, non-profit college. I have many good friends, though, who work in the state system of higher education in Utah. And I know many other people working in public higher ed around the US. Most of my friends in private higher ed say they would not move to a public college or university. And most of my friends in public higher ed feel a certain measure of despair about the future.

Why is this? Because states like Nevada and Utah face a series of tensions--between limited capacity and increased demand, between budget cuts and increased costs, between a desire to respond to the market and the desire to maintain academic tradition, between higher ed leaders wanting autonomy and legislators wanting control, between traditional models of education and shifting student approaches to learning, between a public mission (serve the common good, strengthen civic skills, etc.) and a private mission (get good jobs for students), between declining quality and increased desire for prestige--none of which is easily resolved.

(I should say that private higher ed faces its own challenges, most of which rotate around cost, access, and quality.)

One can hardly imagine a "solution" to this set of problems (though there are plenty of attempts at it)--some single thing that if implemented would provide better, more responsive, less costly, more accessible education to a greater number of students.

But the fact that there is no solution points at least to a set of changes in the tone, organization, and goals of higher ed. We would be well-served by a greater humility, a willingness to be honest with the public about the challenges facing higher education. We would be well-served by legislators and leaders letting go of control, rather than increasing it.

There is increasing evidence that complex problems require small, distributed responses and clear feedback on the effect of the response. This is the insight of markets, ecosystems, and democracies. It should be the insight of educational leaders as well.

school choice, school accountability, and the public purposes of education

2011-01-24T21:38:00.002-07:00

I work at a private university, I am board chair at a charter school, and my kids go to public school. Why? Because I believe that multiple types of schools make it more likely that students will learn. But I also believe that multiple types of schools are most likely to move our communities towards the public goals that most people express for education--civic engagement, global competitiveness, personal responsibility, etc.

In the educational system that exists in most places in the US, the state controls most of the educational infrastructure, but the ends of education are generally private in that they focus on preparation for careers and on allowing students to study what they wish. There is a required curriculum to be sure, but no common outcomes (besides, at the K-12 level, passing a couple of standardized tests).

So I'd like to make a common sense proposal. In a time of limited resources, limited capacity, and huge need for more, improved education, let's stop fighting about which type of school is best. And let's end the false debate between school choice and public accountability. The needs are too large for a doctrinaire "solution" to education's problems.

Instead, let's do two things:

(1) Make student access to education easier by radically expanding where students and their families can spend education dollars. Or, in other words, states ought to quickly and massively expand voucher programs, both at the K-12 and higher ed levels.

(2) In order for those funds to be spent at a school, let's require that the school prove that its students are moving towards the public goals of education--that they understand the history of the nation and the community, that they serve, that they create, and that they know how to do math and science. No evidence, then no access to public funds.

What are the likely results of such moves? In the short term, some chaos as students and resources shift within the system. In the longer term, three things; first, more students in the schools where they want to be, second, more variety in school type, and third, though the state would own less of the education infrastructure, greater attainment of the educational goals that are in the state's best interest.

Civility, tragedy, and silence

2011-01-12T17:21:00.001-07:00

Two days before the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, one of our MBA students, Julie Ann Jorgenson, was killed in an auto accident.

Representative Giffords' shooting has elicited endless comment and discussion, most of it asking whether immoderate rhetoric leads to immoderate action. The debate itself has become an emblem of the question, with all sides claiming the right to be aggrieved and highlighting the flaws in their opponents positions. The President is compelled to speak. All sides agree that the question is something we ought to talk about.

Julie's death was a tragedy--unexpected and unfair. Her funeral was two days ago. There were tributes to Julie, but little talk about the questions raised by her death--is life fair? who is to blame? what can be done to ensure it never happens again? Instead, the funeral was a tribute to her faith, and a time to express sadness and loss in song, and in prayer, and in silence.

In the Book of Job, within a few verses Job, a "perfect man", had every earthly thing taken from him--his wealth, and his children, and his health. His wife urged him to curse God and die. Then he scraped his boils with a potsherd and sat in the ashes.

Three friends heard of his suffering and traveled to be with him. "And when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted up their voice, and wept; and they rent every one his mantle, and sprinkled dust upon their heads toward heaven. So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great."

Once the seven days passed Job's friends interrogated him and Job responded with courage before them and before God. But those friends sat with Job in the ashes for a week, saying nothing in the presence of his grief.

Silence is an under-rated civic virtue. It is one that pays tribute to tragedy, that acknowledges the inexplicable, that reminds that words are insufficient for most of the most important things in life--love, joy, pain, awe, suffering, sadness, transcendence, and death.

I know that there is some sort of civic duty that compels journalists and politicians and pundits and public servants to speak about public tragedies, to offer an opinion on everything under the sun. But there is an equal human duty to fall silent before the suffering of others and rather than explaining, sit in the ashes and bear witness to grief.

Data sets, kids, and liberty to learn

2011-01-07T17:23:00.000-07:00

The desire to "solve" the problems of education often elicits what could be called the "dream of the perfect data set." The dream goes something like this: if we could somehow gather and organize all of the data we currently have we would see the solution to our educational problems.

You don't always hear the dream expressed as baldly as it is in this video, though. In it, Jeff Edmondson, the President of Strive (an organization whose motto is "Every Child, Every Step of the Way, Cradle to Career") suggests that if we could somehow aggregate all of the data we have on kids we could set up systems that help them to full educational attainment, health, and success.

Edmondson's vision is noteworthy for two reasons:

1. it assumes that data speak clearly, and that aggregating data makes it more likely, not less, that we will understand the solutions to problems.

2. it assumes that it is OK for a person or people to look at all of the data and make decisions for the child--assigning the child a doctor, or a mentor at the moment the child needs it.

Both of these assumptions are troubling, the first because it imagines that at the individual and aggregate level, data are unambiguous, or that you can reason straight from data to a solution; the second because it proposes some sort of enormously powerful and wise organization who can implement the suggestions of data in the lives of kids.

Any parent would blanch at these suggestions, because they are false, because they propose that children in need should be open to systematic surveillance, and because they imagine that children and their families fail to make decisions about their lives based on good reasoning.

Edmondson argues near the end of his talk that it is possible to support "every child every step of the way." Even if that were true, would it be wise? Would children be better of because of it? Would they be smarter? Wiser? Healthier? I doubt it. I want children and their parents to make good choices as often as possible, and systems of schooling should encourage that. But once they insist they know the right decisions, then they step beyond an educative role to something much scarier, and perhaps much less effective as well.

How does age matter in education?

2010-12-30T16:44:00.001-07:00

As I write my house is full of kids--three of my daughters (ages 12 to 18) and four of my nieces and nephews (ages 2 to 8). I am the only adult here. I've been watching the kids interact, and seeing the mutual pleasure they find in being together. Much of their play is about learning--how to play a particular video game, how to make lunch, how to keep track of each other, how to make sure that everyone is having a good time.

Their presence (and a recent conversation with my wife where she pointed out that we are potentially grandparent age (since two of our own children are now over 18) and that she would welcome the presence of some little kids around the place--yikes!) has me thinking about age and what it means for learning.

When my kids were smaller they went for a year to a non-graded charter elementary school called Sundance Mountain School. (It continues to this date, though under a new name, Soldier Hollow Charter School.) I was never sure how good the learning was in a formal sense, but in terms of practical experience, there was something wonderful about 5 year olds and 12 year olds learning science and math together.

In this now-famous talk, Sir Ken Robinson makes the point that among the industrial-era absurdities of schooling is that students are grouped according to their "date of manufacture" rather than some more educational commonality (or difference). It is among the practices that squashes the creativity out of people.

It seems like colleges would be a place where we could learn about the roles of age in learning. After all, most classrooms include students with different dates of manufacture, and particularly in schools where there are many non-traditional students, the age gaps can be quite significant. But there is no reform movement or pedagogical approach (that I know of) that attends to age (with the possible exception of freshman learning communities which group students by age, sometimes to the frustration of faculty who think it makes the classroom "too much like high school.")

Is it the case that once a person reaches, say, 18, that age no longer matters and therefore we make nothing of in in higher education? Are we losing potential learning by just assuming that the age system (which, for example, mandates that you have to be between 17 and 19 to start college) makes sense? Is there some reason to accept things as they are?

Emergent education, or, Can friends start a college?

2010-12-27T09:06:00.002-07:00

There is a long tradition in American civic life--one that I love. It is the tradition of small groups of people, friends often, co-religionists sometimes, bonding together to respond to a social problem. Many things might come out of that response--laws, for example, or organizations, or movements, or communities. But at the core, these responses have always been organized around an ethos of friendship.

The intellectual history of the tradition runs from Tocqueville through Mary Parker Follett and Jane Addams to Jane Jacobs and Myles Horton and Ella Baker to Steven Johnson. The organizational history runs from frontier towns to community organizing and social settlements and folk schools to the civil rights movement and into the movements of today.

Today some of the most important thinking and organizing in this tradition is coming out of evangelical Christianity under the umbrella of "the emergent movement." Emerging Christian organizations have eschewed mega-churches and literalism and are focused on building Christian community out of questions and friendships. Doug Pagitt puts it this way in An Emergent Manifesto of Hope: "The emergent imagination is at its most basic level a call to friendship--friendship with God, with one another, and with the world."

When we talk about trends in education today, we tend to focus on structure and infrastructure: charter schools, standardized testing, technology, for-profit higher ed, assessment and accountability. There is some value in this. But in doing so, it masks the cultural changes that are going on in schooling.

One major cultural tendency is towards standardization, efficiency, and systems. That tendency runs through all of the structural trends in education--systems of charter schools, national tests, system-wide adoption of technology, etc. It is largely about measuring outcomes to create a one-size-fits-most way of education. It values the involvement of parents, students, teachers; but largely as choosers. Pick this school or that one; select this curriculum or that. Leadership is traditional--one person or a small group of experts in charge. Elected or selected.

The other cultural tendency is towards emergence, relationships, and ecosystems as the basis of education. Where the systematizing trend focuses on choice as involvement, emergent education focuses on co-creation as involvement. It can be seen in charter schools, those started by collections of parents and educators who want better options for "their kids." It underlies the way that home-schooling is no longer a parent teaching her/his own kids at home, but instead a network of parents taking that role, and meeting to share curriculum, go on field trips, or expand educational offerings. It is hidden in some portions of the open learning movement and in some versions of technology-enabled education. It is behind collaborative creation of curriculum, and behind efforts to improve advising. It creates flat organizations and has little organizational structure. People lead where they can lead--they play the role they seek (and are best prepared) to play.

One wonders, though, if it has any chance in higher education. One would hope so, since higher ed is the home to some of the worst results of big, efficient, standardized education. But I know of no instance in the recent past where a group of friends got together to talk education and ended up starting a college. This sort of thing happened a lot in the 19th century, where many small towns had their own locally grown colleges. Can it happen today? Can a college emerge?

10 reasons why general education should come at the end, not the beginning, of college

2010-12-23T09:05:00.000-07:00

Nearly every campus in the United States front-loads general (or liberal) education. At many schools, students take all of their GE courses in the first two years on campus. Even those schools whose GE programs include upper-division courses place most of the GE credits in the freshman and sophomore years.

Here are some key reasons why schools should consider reversing the GE/major sequence:

1. Students arrive with an inherent mis-understanding of GE. Several years ago my colleagues at BYU and I polled freshmen on their views of GE. Most thought it was a continuation of high school. Of course, many students treat the courses as a continuation of high school.

2. More and more students bring AP credits with them to college. Those credits routinely count for GE courses, thus causing havoc even with the best-designed GE curricula (or if a school decides to accept AP credit only for placement and credits toward graduation, then the AP/GE problem breeds resentment).

3. Passion leads to engagement and retention. Most students coming to college have some passion in the curriculum. Front-loading GE defers real engagement with a student's areas of passion, replacing it with courses that the student may not engage with.

4. Faculty mentoring is essential for engagement and retention. And the more closely that mentoring is attached to a student's passion and major, the more durable and meaningful the relationship. Some students find their mentors in GE. Many more find them in their major.

5. Employment prospects depend on working in the field prior to graduation. More and more employers expect that their new hires have meaningful work experience prior to hiring. Placing the major at the end of the curriculum means many students do not get that meaningful work prior to graduation because they are not prepared for it. Completing the major by the end of the junior year gives students a year to begin working in the field (be it in paid or unpaid jobs) prior to going on the market.

6. Employers want students with GE skills--communication, critical thinking, teamwork, etc. They are generally disappointed in what their new employees bring. There are two curricular reasons why this is the case. First, most of the GE skills get practiced in the first two years of college, but only vaguely or implicitly reinforced in the major. Second, many of these skills are discipline-specific. Placing a substantial portion of GE after the major ensures that the student will be able to connect their major to the GE skills they practice at the end of their college experiences.

7. GE is about making connections across the disciplines. When students don't know the disciplines, they are hard to connect. Students know little about the disciplines in their first couple of years. And they certainly don't know enough to connect their area of passion--their major--to the disciplines until after substantial engagement with that major.

8. Students need an opportunity to sum-up prior to going into the world. A key part of GE is reflecting on learning, summing up and taking stock of how one fits into the world. With a GE-first model, that sort of purposeful, curriculum-based summing up is rare.

9. Colleges need a chance to make their case to students. Most colleges and universities believe that important things happen to students in GE. They become more mature, they join the human conversation, and they understand how life at a particular college helped shape them. These beliefs are by-and-large true. But if GE is doing this in the first couple of years, by the end of the college experience the student may not associate these outcomes with the college, but instead with the major. If colleges want to hang onto their alumni, GE at the end helps.

10. Students are ready to engage with the big questions at the point of graduation. Anyone who has taught a freshman seminar and a senior seminar on the same topic knows that the discussion and learning are richer at the senior than the freshman level. If GE is in part about these big issues--justice, community, truth, beauty--then the time to focus on them is when students are ready. Or in other words, at the end of their college experiences.

Generosity, debt reduction, and civic life

2010-12-22T09:57:00.000-07:00

Rates of personal debt and corporate debt are in decline. Rates of personal savings and corporate savings are up. Banks are "sitting on" (whatever that means--odd phrase) over one trillion dollars of excess reserves; corporations 3 trillion.

The decline in indebtedness is generally seen as a good thing--a reassertion of the old American value of thrift, a marker of the end of "consumer culture." I understand this. And I am pleased that banks are re-capitalizing. But I wonder what it means in the context of this fact: in this difficult economic time, rates of personal giving are down, (see also here and here) even while need is up.

Of course the simplest explanation is that people's budgets are tighter, and so they can give less. Or its variant, that with unemployment at 9.6% there are simply fewer people who can share their wealth. I am willing to accede to this argument. But only up to a point.

Because one thing underlies both debt and giving--the belief that making a promise to another entity about our future behavior is a good thing. Taking out a loan is, at its most basic level, a wager that things will be better in the future. You make that assumption by connecting with an entity--a bank perhaps, but as often a family member or friend--which is willing to invest in you on the assumption that things will get better too. (After all, no one loans money on the assumption that it will not be repaid.)

Generosity carries the same assumption--that in giving, both the recipient and the giver will be better off. The improvement takes place in three places: in the life of the recipient, in the life of the giver, and in the relationship between the two of them.

So when lending and giving are down, there are impacts beyond the economic ones. And key among those impacts is the effect on civic life. When there are fewer connections to other people, civic life becomes coarser, less intertwined, more selfish. We certainly see this in politics; if the decline in giving and lending is being occasioned by a decline in the willingness to wager with others on a better future, we will soon see it in our communities as well.

risk, risk management, and learning

2010-12-21T16:13:00.000-07:00

Bryce Bunting, Derek Bitter, and I have been thinking together about the role of risk in learning. In this midst of thinking about risk, I came across Peter Bernstein's book Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk.

Bernstein argues that risk has a history, one that is tied up with the mathematics and concepts of probability. Before the notion of probability, the future was either radically certain (you did what had always been done, you went to heaven if you were good or hell if you were bad) or radically uncertain (one day, unexpectedly, you died). Probability allowed people from the renaissance on to predict with some certainty the outcome of an action, and then to decide whether to pursue that action based on how much risk they were willing to take on.

When educators talk about the importance of risk in learning, they generally mean that by asking a student to do something with an unknown and potentially scary outcome, they get deeper learning. In a recent TED talk, for example, Diane Laufenberg describes how she asks students to research, plan, and carry out projects that respond to real world problems. These are risky activities--hosting an election debate, for example. She makes a strong case that there is better learning in these activities than in rote learning, or in learning where there is a single right answer to a problem.

Well enough. But in thinking this way, educators take a pre-probability view of risk. Or in other words, educators focus on the role of uncertainty or indeterminacy in learning. Educators value uncertainty.

Students, on the other hand, live in a world of probabilities. They are risk managers, constantly adjusting their priorities, time, and relationships in order to get the best likely outcome. Hence the questions about what will be on the test, or whether there is extra credit; hence the requests for an extra point here and there. In doing these things, students are managing their risks, gathering information that will allow them to more accurately predict the results of their actions. Students value strategy.

What does the strategic orientation to risk among students mean to teachers? Do you derail the strategic orientation by doing away with grades? Should schools offer only one course at a time so that course gets the student's entire attention? Or are there ways to take advantage of student risk management to get good learning?

Can experiential education teach wisdom?

2010-12-19T08:58:00.001-07:00

Real world experience teaches two things (at least)--how to do something and, over time, how to make sense of that thing in the world. The "how to make sense" part, in morally complex settings, becomes wisdom.

So, for example, when a first child is born, her parents learn how to parent--how to feed and clothe and comfort and educate their daughter. But they also learn harder things--how to discipline, how to choose between competing needs, how to suffer because of and with the child, how to find joy.

Or, as Confucius purportedly put it: By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

Experiential education (as separate from experience) focuses overwhelmingly on how to do things. So, for example, if you want students to learn how to run a genetics experiment, then have them run an experiment. They will make mistakes (because doing something is riskier than learning about something) and those mistakes, together with a smidgen of success and guidance from the teacher, will become understanding of how to do something.

But does learning in this way also make students wise? I have been around variations of experiential education for most of my career, but I cannot think of a time when I, or anyone else, focused explicitly on wisdom as a result of our service-learning, or undergraduate research, or simulation, or group project (or whatever the experiential education happens to be.)

Occasionally wisdom shows through in student reflections, but it almost always has to sneak through whatever the assigned reflection is. And increasingly, it seems, reflection focuses more on content acquisition than about the student becoming better acquainted with how she wants to be in the world.
Consider the typical reflection prompt: "What did doing X teach you about [the topic of the class]? Or even the widely used ABC model of reflection; "How did doing X affect you? How did it influence your behavior? how did it change your cognition?

I don't have good ideas about learning wisdom through education, let alone experiential education. Outside of schools, wisdom comes from religious practice, or from failure, or from age. Does it come from anywhere inside of schools?

Seeking the Vice Presidency of the United States in 2012

2010-12-10T21:39:00.004-07:00

With Sarah Palin's new reality show and the posturing over tax cuts, don't ask/don't tell, and the START treaty, the election season of 2012 has begun. And so I believe it is time to announce my candidacy for the Vice President of the United States.

Why seek an office that has been unfavorably compared with a "bucket of warm piss"? Why not seek the "leader[ship] of the free world"? For one, seeking the presidency is an act of tremendous self-regard. For another, once a person declares for the presidency, then the focus is on that person's prospects and personality, not ways of working or orientation to the world. And more significantly, by starting with the Vice Presidency and building a group--prospective Secretaries of State and Treasury and Defense--voters will have the chance to consider the entire team, not just its most prominent member. So I'm recruiting for the "minor" positions. We will get to the presidency when we have some time.

What will we do? We will not speak of "the American [anything]." No mention of the American people--there is no such thing, just shifting coalitions of people living in the United States. No "American economy." The economy is a complicated system stretching around the globe and focusing in towns and neighborhoods and homes. There is no line where the American economy ends and others begin.

We will not suggest that the choices are "either/or". Everything is "neither/and." For example, the current debate is not about a tax cut for the wealthy or about creating jobs. It is about both. And about neither.

We will not take responsibility for anything that we are not responsible for. Nor will we blame anyone or any other party for something. The President does not fix or ruin the economy. No one has that much influence. We live in an interconnected world--at best we can shake one part of the web. So we ought not to be too proud of our ability to actually do things, or too quick to claim that our opponents have done something.

We will not solve problems. Problems, at least serious ones, don't get solved. They get worked on, and the solution leaves other issues still to work on. Governments don't solve problems, they pick their favorite version and struggle against it.

We will raise taxes and cut programs because our government is both too poor and too big. We will become increasingly unpopular and be happy with that.

We will point towards a future where groups of people can work on the problems that they favor at the level they can work on them. We will be libertarian in politics and communitarian in organization. We will expect that the government of the United States will remain a defender of the liberties of the people who reside in its borders and the setter of aspirations. But it will not run the programs or make the decisions about how to get to those aspirations. So we may want all 18-year olds to graduate high school. Excellent aspiration. Let communities and schools and parents start working. In other words, more judiciary, more rule of law; fewer laws, smaller executive branch. Government as accrediting body.

We will hope for a future where the United States is a big Switzerland--prosperous, free, democratic, neutral, and less concerned about its place on the world stage and the use of power than about helping people and nations work out their difficulties even if it makes us seem weak.

I am of course jesting--a person like me has no chance of becoming Vice President. A platform like this, that focuses on rhetoric and process, means close to nothing in our system. And a plan like this to circumvent the electoral circus and the hubris of the Presidency stands no chance. But I am serious about the future I would like to see and the pathway to it. Anyone interested?

what can a screaming doll teach a 15-year old?

2010-12-10T14:55:00.001-07:00

For the past week my 9th grade daughter carried first a sack of flour dressed like a baby, and then a computerized baby doll with her 24 hours a day. The experience is part of the curriculum of Teen Living, a course required in the Utah state curriculum.

The express purpose of this assignment is to make caring for the baby doll so onerous that teens do not get pregnant. To this end, caring for the sack of flour means the student has to wake up at 2 AM each night and carry it around the house for 15 minutes. The computer baby comes with a key that gets taped to the student's wrist. At random times throughout the day and night the doll starts screaming. When it does the student puts the key in a slot in the doll's back. It immediately stops crying, but the student must hold the key there until the doll cries again (usually between 5 and 15 minutes) at which point you pull the key out and the doll quiets for another couple of hours.

The screaming doll anti-pregnancy project is remarkable for two reasons. First, it requires an enormous accommodation on the part of the school, where all day long for months on end kids carry sacks of flour or screaming baby dolls to class. In a school culture where a word out of turn or a t-shirt with an offensive slogan can result in suspension, the school's willingness to allow the dolls is incredible. (The patience of parents and siblings is equally noteworthy. We made our daughter sleep in the basement, since the noise of the doll woke the entire family each time it cried...)

But the project is also fascinating for the amount of trust it puts in experiential education to change teen behavior. I have no idea whether there is any data on projects like these, but school superintendents and legislators must be confident enough in the doll's power to pay for the things.

One wonders why this is the case. After all, aside from this and driver's ed, there is no other place where the school mandates that students learn by doing. So is there something about danger (of pregnancy, or dying in an auto accident) that makes the schools trust experiential education? Or is there something about the power of embarrassment, either by a screaming doll or a poorly driven car, that educators think will help students learn?

In a comment on a previous post, Derek Bitter wondered what risk in the classroom might look like. Here is a real example--the risk of having attention drawn to you used to discourage risky behavior. But it raises a further question--can risk teach what you want it to? In my daughter's experience the answer is a qualified no. When we talked about what she learned she mentioned that she learned patience and a bit about how tiring it can be to care for a baby. Did she think it would keep kids from getting pregnant? Not really, she said.

Carrying the doll went pretty well until one night at her band concert a fellow band member stole her doll. he kept it from her, stuck it in his pants, humiliated her. When I got to the show she was in tears. Risk doesn't always teach the lesson we think it will.

Imagine there's no...leader

2010-12-04T09:26:00.001-07:00

What if there were no Department Chairs. Or Deans. Or, for that matter, Presidenst, Provosts, or any of the cabinet-level VPs that are part of today's higher education leadership. Is it possible for a college or university to succeed without titular leaders?

In asking, I am not complaining about any of the leaders at Westminster. Our campus is fortunate to have a leadership slate that is both hard-working and unusually committed to the institution. But it is the case that at one time or another most faculty and staff have wondered about the usefulness of the leadership corps, both here and on every campus. And many have speculated that it is leaders, not faculty and staff, who stand in the way of real innovation and real quality in higher education. So it is worth asking what conditions would be necessary for campuses to imagine there's no leadership.

The business school at Westminster is called the Bill and Vieve Gore School of Business. It is named after Bill and Vieve Gore, alumni of the college and later the founders of W. L. Gore and Associates. Gore is renowned both for its products (Gore-Tex being the most famous) but also for its organization and culture, both of which are designed for innovation. One of the features of the organization is a lack of hierarchy almost unheard-of in corporate America. There are a few "leaders" but most associates play significant leadership roles in proposing, designing, and building products. So there is certainly no hierarchy. (For a great book on organizations like Gore and their strengths, take a look at my friend Jeff Nielsen's The Myth of Leadership: Creating Leaderless Organizations or my colleague Melissa Koerner's blog, "High Performance Organizations." )

When recruiting new MBA students we often run them through a case on Gore, both as an introduction to our pedagogy and to draw a connection between Gore and Associates and the Gore School of Business. A couple of evenings ago I led the case discussion at the recruiting event. Doing so evoked some of my own interests in self-organization and the ways that social movements can emerge without formal leaders. (Take a look at Steven Johnson's Emergence or Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, or, if you can find them, my obscure book chapters on educational change, "Neighborhoods and Networks" and "Making Moral Systems of Education.")

That same day, the management faculty and I began to talk about how to select a new chair of their department--the existing chair is taking another assignment at the college. Doing so is no easy thing, since all of the faculty are busy, some have other administrative loads, and few are interested in the combination of tasks that a department chair carries. It is the overlap of these things--talking about Gore and looking for a department chair--that raised the question about whether higher ed institutions could flourish without leaders.

So how do you come at the question of whether colleges and universities need leaders? Two ways come to mind--first by asking what those leaders do that would not happen in their absence, and second by wondering whether colleges and universities have the sorts of cultures that support leaderless-ness.

So what do higher ed leaders do? They may be involved in providing vision or setting strategic direction, though in higher ed those things are usually set through a long collaborative process where "leaders" often take a behind-the-scenes role. More frequently they resolve disputes, make decisions based on policy, build friends for the institution, serve as a sounding board for faculty and staff, watch over budgets, attend to academic and co-curricular programs, and most importantly, share information that advances the institution. Without a long exposition on each of these roles, I will simply point our that nearly all of these tasks could be done without formal leadership, if the organization and systems and culture were right.

But are they? Almost certainly not. And here is one of the real ironies of higher education. The cultures of colleges and universities are laissez-faire, especially on the academic side of the house. Faculty have wide latitude to teach, grade, select courses, and make plans. (In fact a big part of leadership in HE is to find ways to merge the individual interests of faculty into a more-or-less coherent education for students.)

We often think of this arrangement as an example of leaderless-ness, or at least flat organizations. But it is exactly this culture that makes "academic leaders" necessary, for the laissez-faire culture of higher ed means that little of the work of academic leaders gets done unless someone is assigned to do it. Information doesn't get shared, connections do not get made, programs get overlooked, etc. So the culture of higher education tends to be flat, individualistic, and disconnected; the culture of HE leadership exists to overcome that disconnection.

Now it is worth asking whether the current model of academic leadership enables disconnection or responds to it. Likely both. But given the external requirements on leaders--from donors, parents, students, accreditors, and others; it is unlikely that the changes in campus culture will be able to come from them. So if faculty and staff are interested in reducing the leadership layer, perhaps the first step is for them to find more ways to work together, taking on more of the tasks of leaders so that the need for leaders falls away.

Risk, failure, and the relationship between student and teacher

2010-11-22T22:39:00.001-07:00

A couple of weeks ago my friend Bryce Bunting argued that risk is essential for learning on his blog Musings from an Amateur. Bryce's point is well-taken. Risk often heightens learning because it demands greater focus from students. And it is true that schools often avoid risky moments and so limit student learning.

It is worth wondering why schools are risk-averse, avoiding moments where students are held up for public scrutiny. (Public scrutiny is a key part of risk in Bryce's formulation.) I think there are two reasons: first, risk entails the possibility of public failure, and second, most students lack the sort of relationship with peers and teachers that make risk and failure into ways to learn. In the absence of these relationships, failure leads to humiliation or to punishment.

As I was thinking about risk and failure, I came across this article at Tricycle.com. There, Bonnie Myotai Trace argues that:

In order to work with a teacher, there needs to be a student. We often skip over this: It’s easy to waste time going through the motions of entering the room for a face-to-face teaching, but to not really be a student—to just be someone who wants to debate, or to prove something. Often, a real spiritual meeting is not available even though the bows have been made. Yet once a student develops, it is inevitable that a teacher will appear in their life. They create each other.

This is an interesting notion--that students create their teachers by the level of preparation, focus, and practice they bring to the learning setting. A poorly prepared students creates a teacher who focuses on that poor preparation. A well-prepared student gives rise to a teacher who can guide and shape that student.

Of course the relationship works the other way as well--a prepared teacher can help create a prepared student. So what does this imply for the possibility of creating risk that results in learning? That teachers and students must both be practicing risk, and that that risk-learning must be done in public.

This is a rare thing in the classroom--faculty often take risks, but much more frequently in writing or among peers than before students or in the classroom. So how do people who care about student learning create a learning environment that favors risk? Is there anything to be learned from religious practice (the student-teacher relationship in Buddhism is the context of the quote above, and the rest of the article has plenty of suggestions about spiritual practice and learning)? From innovative corporations? (WL Gore and Associates, the namesake of the Gore School of Business, celebrates failure as a key component of innovation.)

"Where there's mystery, there's margin"

2010-11-20T09:20:00.002-07:00

A couple of days ago Bob Frankenberg spoke to Westminster's chapter of Delta Mu Delta, the business student honor society. Bob is the Chair of Westminster's Board of Trustees, a venture capitalist, and an innovator in computers and networks who has been involved in most of the major shifts in computer memory and networking in the past 30 years.

His talk focused on the need for students to keep learning throughout their lives in a society where the half-life of information and skills is about 4 years. But among his pieces of advice was this; "Where there is mystery, there is margin."

The mystery/margin insight is not a new one of course. Anyone who innovates in a business has discovered a mystery--how to shrink computer memory, for example--and made money off it, because by understanding the mystery that others don't, they are able to supply products that others demand.

But that formulation got me thinking about my previous post on making money on learning. Educational entrepreneurs, by and large, are focusing on a single mystery--how to deliver schooling to a bunch of students in a way that makes money. And they do it, by and large, through enrollment and systems management improvements. So, if a school can enroll more students, or deliver schooling at lesser cost, then they can make money. (Or perhaps more accurately in the k-12 environment, they can capture more of the education subsidies that make providing schooling financially feasible.) This is the insight of nearly all of the new educational ventures that have sprung up in the past decades--the University of Phoenix, for example, or Green Dot and KIPP schools. The biggest effort in this direction comes from the Gates Foundation, which is focused on improving the access and completion systems that get kids from high school into college. Their attention is turned to the huge systems--community colleges especially--that school millions of students each year. Now in each of these instances, lots of learning takes place, it is true. But the essential business model is around schooling, not learning.

I have no interest in criticizing any of the above innovations. Their work is important and their successes meaningful. But I do want to think more about the learning mysteries. So what are they?

1. How do you engage students in learning who are not engaged in schooling?
2. How do you reach those potential students?
3. How do you provide that learning in a way that is inexpensive enough to be welcoming to low-income students and families, but remunerative enough that you can make money off the learning?
4. How do you ensure that learning takes place?
5. How does that learning translate into the credits and degrees that the learners will need to show the educational and employment systems?

How do you provide learning that makes money by responding to these mysteries? Here are some thoughts:

1. While there are tons of people (many of them young) who hate school, most of them love learning about something. For many of them, that something lies in the arts and humanities, or in sports. They love music, or art, or writing, or dance or video games. Or they love skateboarding and snowboarding and football and martial arts and dance. Most schooling-focused efforts place these passions on the margins so they can focus on an academic core. But a learning-focused effort would start with arts, humanities, and athletics, not think of them as a distraction.

2. Learning is an intensely social, relationship-focused thing. Or at least, the sorts of learning above are like that. So whatever solution you choose, it cannot be simply based on learners sitting alone watching clips on YouTube or taking classes on MIT's OpenCourseWare, or taking online courses. It is not that learning fails to happen there, just that it is deficient learning. or put another way, learning in isolation and schooling are close relatives.

3. The two key fixed costs in schooling are physical facilities and personnel. (These are the major fixed costs outside of education, as well.) Innovators outside of education have gotten around these costs by using technology, it is true. But they have also gotten around them by using franchises and distributorships. Learning lends itself to this model as well. If, for example, you want to find a business that reaches across ethnic and class lines, take a look at Amway or NuSkin. They have representatives everywhere, who make money on selling but also on inviting new distributors into the system. If you want the reach of learning to be broad, and to get into communities where a representative of a college cannot speak authentically, then a distributor/franchise structure works better than building schools. And it resolves some of the personnel cost issues associated with schooling.

4. Because learners will need to translate their learning into credentials, the formal evaluations of learning ought to be done in part using tools that help with that translation. Here I am thinking about AP, CLEP, IB, and other sorts of tests that are accepted for college credit. Such an approach both allows for systematic measures of quality across distributors and helps work around the accreditation problem and leads students into the formal systems of schooling, which I hope it is clear, I believe have substantial value. (Or put another way, a student can learn through a passion for video games, but cannot be learned unless s/he can do math and understand history and know how to learn and how to become what s/he hopes to become.)

What does this look like in the real world?

It starts with places that already make money (albeit only a little) on learning--people who offer piano lessons, or teach art, or host writing groups. Martial arts studios and driving schools. Their offerings expand and become more sophisticated so that they attract teens and 20 year olds. The learning places then expand their offerings more to include formal instruction leading to AP tests. So a music school would eventually offer music theory courses, a game shop eventually graphic design, etc. As students succeed with those passion-specific tests the schools expand to offer more traditional topics--English or History example--that could also be assessed through standardized exams.

The central value would be in the connection of what are now disparate efforts. The company--let's call it Play and Learn--would build a network of people offering the intro lessons. It would also provide curricula, training, and the business infrastructure. As learners became more sophisticated, their learning would be more centralized--so that Play and Learn corporate would offer the direct instruction on AP preparation, sparing the piano teacher from having to become an expert on music theory. That higher level instruction could easily be delivered remotely, with open content materials. At the same time, expansion of the company be distributed--either through franchises or distributorships.

As students progressed pricing would rise (this is already the pricing model for these learning on the margins sorts of places), with substantial fees associated with the AP or other college credit granting exams, since they provide a cost -savings over having to pay tuition for college classes.

Let me close by saying that for me the ultimate benefit of this model is not financial but social and educational. We know that there are millions of people who do not get the education they need because schooling does not work for them. And we know that colleges and universities lack the capacity to serve all of those people who need college educations. And we know that nearly everyone is passionate about learning something, and that such learning provides personal satisfaction and public good.

Any takers?

Can schools make money on learning?

2010-11-13T23:02:00.000-07:00

Ask educators what their schools produce and they will answer "learning." After all, any school worth its salt advances a set of learning outcomes, teachers teach to help students learn, tests try to gauge learning, and students say they learn. But no school I know of makes money on learning.

I find this odd. Nearly every viable business makes money on what it produces. Stock brokers make money by buying and selling stocks. Psychotherapists earn money by providing therapy. Fruit growers sell fruit. But schools make money by enrolling students.

This is the case whether a school is taxpayer-supported or not. Public schools receive tax funds based on how many students enroll. Private colleges (like Westminster, for example) receive tuition funds based on how many students enroll for how many credit hours. Both get additional money from grants and donations, but these sources of funding are not directly related to learning either.

You may respond that I am being obtuse--that a school cannot survive economically if it does not produce learning. There is some truth to this. After all, a student will stay to graduation only if she perceives that she is learning, and if enough students fail to learn a school may fail. But even in cases where failure is possible--under NCLB for example--many parents keep their children enrolled in schools that fail to produce learning (measure by standardized tests, I know--hardly a good measure but still...) And even among colleges that disappear, death does not come because of an absence of learning but instead because of an absence of enrollment.

Why does this matter? First, because if learning does not elicit income, then the economic incentives for the school are wrong. (Interestingly, this is the case even for the most market-focused schools--for-profit colleges, for example, or those places where vouchers are available.) One need only look at colleges who have increased enrollment through high discount rates to see that enrollment-focused income can impede learning.

Second, paying for enrollment sends the wrong incentives to students as well. It indicates that the best unit of measure is full-time enrollment, since they get the most academic credit for their dollars. But full-time enrollment may be the worst thing for learning, especially if it puts students at financial risk.

Third, it limits innovation. If more learning led to more income, then the incentive for schools would be to try create more learning better and faster.

Fourth, it blunts reform. Consider the four main reform efforts in American schooling, K-16--active learning, access to education, focus on choice, and focus on cost. Each carries in mind a model of education where income to schools is based on enrollment. The active learning folks, for example, imagine that students will learn more but that they will stay in school for the same amount of time. Cost-focused people call for quicker time to graduation or the reduction of frills without considering the effect on the viability of schools, etc. etc. And so whatever their reform ideologies, their efforts exist in the context of traditional schooling.

One has to look outside traditional schools altogether to find examples where learning is the source of income. But there are examples. Consider music lessons, where as a student gets better at the instrument (or put another way, learns more) the student pays more for learning--choosing a more skilled teacher, for example, and attending lessons more frequently.

Or consider dance and martial arts academies. They often offer free lessons for the first month. Students who learn that they hate dance or karate drop out early on. But those who like it sign on for more. Learning gets linked with success and pleasure, and before long, the student is part of a performance team and parents are paying a substantial amount of money for lessons, uniforms, and travel. At some point the student becomes so good that he is invited to teach as well, starting usually with the beginners.

I do not mean to suggest that schools ought to restructure their sources of income so that they earn nothing if students don't learn. But it would be interesting to see the effect of lower costs for introductory classes, or full tuition payment only coming after students demonstrate their learning, or a collaboration between reformers who are working to change the incentives in the system so that learning, not enrollment, is the heart of what any good school does.

Quality of life and the future of the academy

2010-11-13T14:48:00.001-07:00

It is worth wondering whether anyone will want to be a college president in 20 years.

(The same question holds for CEOs, college football coaches, and elected officials--all professions that are ever more stressful and ever less likely to feed the passion that led the person into the field in the first place.)
This is partly a demographic concern. According to research by the Council of Independent Colleges, the median age of college presidents is 62, and of chief academic officers, 59. An ever smaller percentage of CAOs want to be presidents, and so the pipeline to the presidency is shrinking to garden-hose size.

It is also a quality of life concern, I would imagine. At least half of the presidents and CAOs who talked to our Senior Leadership Academy group said that a cabinet position is a 24/7 job. The other half intimated the same, and the fact seems to be borne out by the lives of the college presidents and provosts I have observed.

Most of the changes in higher ed over the past 10 years seem to have added to the workload of senior leaders. The intense focus on fundraising eats into evenings and weekends. The broader range of services offered students demands more attention and adds more complexity. Financial problems add more worry, accountability more stakeholders, technology the expectation that senior leaders will be always accessible.

To date the main response to this situation in the US has been to pay academic leaders more as compensation for their additional workload. One doubts, though, that ever-higher salaries will provide strong enough incentives to give up ever greater chunks of time. And even more seriously, one wonders whether a 24/7 lifestyle for the president, provost, cabinet, Dean of Students, center directors, counseling staff, and others across the campus is a sign of a healthy institution.

In saying this I am wondering about two things. The first is whether it is healthy for individuals in these roles to work in this way. There is no evidence that an institution gets the best work out of employees who are constantly on-call (a fact borne out in conversation with these people, who often note that they are exhausted, stressed out, and under-prepared for the issues at hand). Nor is there evidence that the generation that follows mine will be willing to work 70 hour weeks for a college or university.

The second, though, is what work cultures like this say about organizations. Can they cultivate the sorts of people and learning that they claim to do? By expecting this level of commitment are institutions losing out on the sorts of employees would would in fact add the greatest value to the institution?

These are pressing questions if only because we are apparently at a moment of great change in higher education and so the question of work is as much up in the air as are the questions of cost, learning, and the legitimacy of higher education. So perhaps the best way to come at the question of quality of life in the academy is to imagine a new institution that both responds to the future needs of higher education and is host to a healthy work culture.

What would a good learning/good work college look like? Here are a few notions:

rituals will matter--rituals mark key moments in learning and development. They also signal breaks--changes in practices that renew people and institutions. Consider, for example, Lent and Ramadan, and the way that fasting creates meaning for communities. Colleges could consider their own fasting rituals; all courses but general education courses would be suspended for a month, for example, or all staff would take a meaningful retreat. Sabbaticals will be briefer, but they will also be more common and more significant. Skip your sabbatical at your peril.
mentoring will be more important--when you talk to people about what they love in education they always mention two things: working with students and learning themselves. Mentoring relationships do just that. In fact, it may be that mentoring, not courses or credit-hours, would be the core competency of good learning/good work institutions.
more planning at the beginning--by this I mean that students in a good work/good learning school would need to choose and commit to a course of study, a way of learning, and a set of outcomes early on. (For example, I want to study history through a series of individual research projects that will be measured by the publication of my work in a scholarly journal.) This sort of planning both allows for more mentored learning, but also opens the possibility that students will complete their course of study in a briefer period than they do in a regular institution.
more community, less campus--every college employee I know values the opportunity to work from home. They are more productive, and often more connected during that time, even if they are present for less time. As learning is more easily facilitated by technology, and as people build richer connections with colleagues, it seems likely that college and university staffs will be able to work remotely more and more effectively.
more lectures--if students will learn more on their own, and work more on their own, then the number of things that need to be conveyed to students will decline. Those that remain--the rich traditions of a place or a discipline, the institution's body of common knowledge, etc.--can be presented more efficiently, through larger lectures delivered by eloquent people.
more co-curriculum, more focused--I am a big fan of learning in the co-curriculum. I think it is routinely more important than classroom learning for the human and humane components of higher education. A good work/good learning school will demand student participation in the co-curriculum, but will not offer the whole range of co-curricular activities. If the school is focused on environmental sustainability then the co-curriculum focuses there. If it is faith-based, then the co-curriculum is faith-centered.
learning, not the institution at the core--There are a number of "leader-less organizations" out there. They all lack a person in ultimate charge. Higher ed may want to try such a model, organizing around distributed leadership. In many ways HE is primed for this, in that shared governance is already decentralized. But there are workload and learning implications here as well. The workload implication is that you don't need the president or the provost to be at everything or to vaidate everything. The learning implication is that it is consensus on outcomes, not the authority of the institution, that validates learning. Such a model shares responsibility for leadership and learning more broadly. But more importantly, it puts a common definition of learning at the core of the learning enterprise.
more mission--Ultimately, good quality-of-life institutions will have to make decisions about what matters and what doesn't. Only clear missions can do that. In their absence, colleges and universities are tempted by every new trend. Or they temporize making decisions about what to cut. Or every decision about every new thing has to be vetted as a one-off, unique opportunity. All of these things take time, and all of them carry the likelihood of expanding the amount of time it takes to manage a successful college.

Searching for the future leaders of higher education

2010-11-09T17:46:00.000-07:00

A week ago the search consultant coordinating the hunt for a new Dean of the Bill and Vieve Gore School of Business was on campus. He spoke with the faculty, the staff, administrators and students about what they were looking for in a new dean. In the middle of last week we posted a job for an Assistant Professor of Strategy. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday I attended the Senior Leadership Academy, a year-long seminar for mid-level administrators hoping to take cabinet-level positions in the next few years.

We are by all accounts in the middle of a huge restructuring of higher education, as demographics, economics, technology, and advances in pedagogy replace higher education as we have known it with a new higher education--one more focused on outcomes, on learning, on accountability, and on engagement--all delivered in a more efficient and cost-effective manner. If these changes are to be guided in some way by leaders of higher education, one would think that the discovery, recruitment, job descriptions, qualifications, training, compensation, and expectations of leaders would reflect those changes. In key ways they do--for example, our position description for the faculty spot is more attentive to diversity and sustainability than it would have been even five years ago. But in more important ways, the search for future leaders of colleges and universities seems to be unaffected by changes in higher education.

Consider the qualifications expected of Deans, Provosts, and Presidents. In nearly every instance, the expressed qualifications are the same--lengthy experience in a discipline, steady movement through the ranks, and increasing familiarity with key components of the college--fundraising, budgets, athletics, personnel, assessment, etc. In sum, leadership in higher ed is a combination of academic expertise and leadership experience.

This would be a perfect combination if higher ed was unchanging. But in fact the leaders of the future are likely to dwell less on content and more on pedagogy, less on traditional divisions in the academy and more on connections across the academy, less on fundraising and more on revenue creation, less on advising and more on mentoring, less on teaching and more on learning, less on rules and more on processes.

Who is likely to have these skills? Student development people who have spent their careers managing residence halls, mentoring students, and creating learning outside the classroom. Civic engagement types who have learned to collaborate, develop partnerships, and link learning to public purposes of higher education. Entrepreneurs who know how to make money from an idea and some human conncetions. Tech folks and process people who have figured out how to be both efficient and flexible. Lumpers, not splitters. Systems people, not institution people. Mission people not market people. Global folks and local folks, not state folks or national folks. People who have moved around in their careers, trying out lots of different things, not people who have moved up in their careers, following a straight path to the top. People, in fact, who disavow the notion of a "top" in higher ed, be it in the power of the presidency or the prestige of the Ivy Leagues.

The good news for the future of higher education is that a lot of the people I met at Senior Leadership Academy have exactly the skills I described above. The bad news is that the academy produces relatively few of those people even today. Or rather I should say that those people may emerge in the academy but they struggle to find a home. They are outliers in their departments, the work on the margins between divisions, they are prone to move from one initiative to another. So perhaps the first challenge for today's leaders is to look out for such people, to give them space to flourish in the institution, and to acknowledge their work.

Face the future, don't fix the past

2010-11-05T08:06:00.000-06:00

From time to time one of my bosses or colleagues will point out that I have made (or presided over) a mistake. I have discovered that I have a not-always-healthy response to such a discovery--I try to fix the past before (or rather than) facing up to the future which includes the error.
Of course fixing mistakes is not a bad thing in itself, especially when it can be done easily and when the fault for the error lies entirely with me. But when the error comes out of a process that is appropriate, fair, and agreed upon, an effort to fix the past implies not just that an error has happened, but that the process and by extension the people involved in the process, have some failing. This may or may not be true, but it is hardly a good thing to imply.
I read a book a few years ago called Turn Towards Everything. The book ended up being a pretty abstruse discussion of Buddhist philosophy and practice, but the title has stuck with me as a way of facing up to the future. And so I have begun to wonder what it would look like if rather than defaulting to fixing the past our (my) first step was to face the future that includes the result of the error. It may not be so bad. A face the future response would focus on (1) improving systems, (2) developing the skills of people, and (3) communicating more clearly--none of them bad things. Conversely, a fix the past response would include (1) going back on an agreed-upon process, (2) implying that participants in the process were underprepared, and (3) imagining that the outcomes of all errors are (or should be) fixable. I am certain that this last list is less desirable than the first.

Service (to the college) as a way of learning

2010-11-05T08:03:00.000-06:00

There is no more basic assumption in service-learning than that serving is an act of learning. By this we mean two things--that serving is a way of developing both the server and the recipient of service, and that service is an act of humility, an acknowledgement of one's own lack, not an act of pride, or capability, or abundance.

On campus, though, we tend not to think about service (as a category of faculty work) in this way. Instead, service is both a sacrifice and a demonstration of skill. To be asked to sit on a search committee, for example, implies both that you will give up your time and/or that you have very particular skills to contribute to the committee.

This assumption about service to the college has important implications for the role of the dean, who is often the assigner of tasks like committee service. It is nearly always the case that when I assemble a committee, i am seeking the most highly qualified people to serve there. (I am not alone in choosing in such a way. Every administrator I know does the same.) I have realized in the past couple of weeks that in doing so I am both impeding faculty from learning about the workings of the college and from improving their own set of skills.

This is a particularly troublesome mistake to have made, since our college offers very few systematic opportunities for development. There are lots of opportunities to get involved in the life of the campus, to be sure, but they are nearly all based on interest and by extension expertise. So, if I have interest in sustainability I am a prime candidate for service on the sustainability task force. But we do not have a system by which all faculty and staff face tasks that fall in the "service" category for which they are underprepared. As a resultthe institution fails to help faculty and staff develop the campus-wide perspectives, new sets of skills and the humility that comes from such service.

(The final irony in my oversight is that in serving as Interim Dean of the Bill and Vieve Gore School of Business I am in the midst of one of the rare cases of service as an opportunity for growth available on our campus...)

the perils of pithyness; more on capacity and technology

2010-10-30T07:48:00.000-06:00

On pithiness
Having long prided myself on running a dull blog doesn't always protect me from saying dumb but dull stuff. That is what happened in my last post, which I started as a way of thinking about capacity and infrastructure issues, but which I ended by trying to be pithy. An anonymous commentator caught the enormous holes in my "cheap schools + cheap technology = deep learning" formulation. That person wrote:

Gary,
Your equation lacks one main thing. Quality teaching. And as soon as you add words like quality, the price goes up. So then it is not cheap.

Add to all this the difficulty one has with determining quality. Quality as posed by the other author could be about time on task. But some would argue it is about content knowledge (which is why k-12 teachers now must pass Praxis content tests) or about engagement or community based.

If we could borrow from some of your other posts I would develop a new equation that looks like this:

quality teachers + appropriate contexts + useful technology = deep learning

to which I can only say "Anonymous, you are absolutely right. Thanks."

On capacity

I have been thinking more about the capacity problem in the context of my own community. Three things are true: 1. we need more educational capacity to reach anything like the goal of having a fully educated workforce; 2. there are no empty campuses sitting around waiting to be populated; 3. there is lots of excess capacity sprinkled throughout the community. Given these three facts, we ought to think about how to take advantage of the capacity.

Here is what I mean. In my town, there is a perfectly serviceable theatre that sits empty in the downtown area. Across the street here and there are unoccupied offices and an un-used gym. Every town is the same, especially in those areas that were once small towns but have been swallowed up by sprawl (or passed over by it), leaving the downtown area decimated.

Why couldn't a college or university take up that excess capacity, even as it is sprinkled around? After all, the one thing that technology can surely do is connect disparate places. So while good learning almost always has a face-to-face component, that doesn't mean that a college has to be contiguous to get that learning. Offer a theatre program in Pleasant Grove, business classes in the empty space on Main Street in American Fork, and humanities courses in the meeting rooms of the Orem Public Library. The result is that higher ed fills in some of the excess capacity (in much , the way that Clay Shirky thinks we can leverage the small bits of excess capacity in the days of busy people to jointly solve big problems), expands its reach, and still provides the sort of face-to-face interaction that many potential students desire. In this scenario, higher ed flows into the open spaces, the unused buildings, and the openings in people's lives, rather than forcing them to flow into ours. And higher education does its part to strengthen both the intellectual and built infrastructure of our communities.

Cheap schools + cheap technology = deep learning

2010-10-25T12:58:00.001-06:00

This piece at Slate is a reminder of how a particular breed of techno-enthusiasm sometimes runs roughshod over experience in American education. Amanda Ripley notes that the best-performing students in the world go to school in classrooms that look a great deal like classrooms in America only, well, less-snazzy. That is, students in South Korea, or Singapore, or Finland sit in rows at desks oriented toward the front of a classroom where a teacher stands. In Ripley's telling, most of these classroom include little, if any, technology. And what technology they include is used for assessment and providing instant feedback to students and teachers, not for learning. Ripley argues that the main distinctions between excellent schools and poor schools are the skill of the teachers (in leading countries most teachers come from the top third of academic performers, in countries like the US the percentage of teachers at the top of their classes is much smaller), and the amount of time spent on task, not access to technology or the design characteristics of the classroom or school.

Now there are a number of ways to explain away Ripley's insights. They may apply only to k-12 settings, not to higher education. Or she may be taking a snapshot of a practice that has worked exceedingly well up until now but is about to collapse. Or they may work well for educational systems focused on performance on tests, but not for those focused on creativity. Or it may be the case that classroom design is largely irrelevant, and that students in the right culture and context could learn as well seated cross-legged in the grass as they do in rows of desks.

I'm not sure any of these explanations really tell us anything, in part because they overlook the key problem with classrooms--we don't have enough of them. That is, the problem facing education in the US (including higher education) is a lack of capacity. In Utah, the state has set a goal of having 66% of adults with a higher ed degree or certificate by 2020. To do that, colleges and universities will have to not just account for the ongoing growth in the student population but also add capacity to graduate an additional 190,000 students. (Given retention rates, the number is actually much higher. Something like 250,000 additional students will have to enter the system to get an additional 190,000 graduates.)

Some people hope to use technology to increase capacity, and that may be part of the solution. But the findings about the settings where students learn well should remind us that technology-driven learning won't do the trick alone. The capacity issue is a huge one because schools are big, expensive, and permanent; and colleges and universities are even bigger, more expensive, and more permanent. What we need is some sort of compromise--technology and capacity together.

Fortunately, the two could align in higher education. The future might look like this--colleges and universities build cheaper, plainer, more temporary buildings, or they take over unused space in the community--warehouses, empty office plazas. (At the extreme you could imagine pop-up schools in the most capacity-challenged areas--schools designed to last only a year or two and then move to other areas of need.) They build no technology into the building except wireless. Then professors and the students go at it, constructing the courses and the learning out of the content available on the web, and building the sort of relationships essential to good learning in any setting.

Cheap schools + cheap technology = deep learning.

Is it possible to be an intellectually serious administrator?

2010-10-24T21:29:00.000-06:00

I'm not sure this is the right question. I don't mean, by asking it, to imply that the administrators I work with are intellectually un-serious, or that intellectual seriousness is an important characteristic of administrators. (In fact, if one were to rate it, it would have to fall somewhere below "flexible," "tireless," and "good-natured" on the list of desired qualifications.) Nor am I sure that "intellectually serious" is exactly the thing I am wondering about. That thing might be closer to "intellectually wise" than intellectually serious.

The thing I am wondering about is the virtue or characteristic that allows administrators to put things they face into perspective and context, and to make decisions based both on immediate demands and that perspective and context. And it is also the thing that allows administrators to weather their own inevitable mistakes, expedient compromises, failures to communicate, and flights of fantasy in a way that maintains the respect of the faculty, staff, and students. This cluster of virtues I am calling "intellectual seriousness."

The day-to-day life of an academic administrator works against this these things in two ways. First, it demands an intense, sun-up to sun-down focus on the job itself. Most days the first thing I think about is work, and the last thing I think about is work, and in-between it is thinking about work that lurks in the interludes between episodes of actual work.

Second, within that focus on the job, the actual work is undisciplined. It is almost impossible to focus for extended periods of time on a single issue. One hour a meeting may be about curriculum, followed by a quick talk with the college attorney, and then on to a budget discussion, followed by recruiting a student and then lobbying for resources from the Provost. Tossed in may be hallway questions from faculty, and a quick unexpected discussion about assessment, and a call from the CTO.

In contrast, a life of intellectual seriousness is structured in exactly opposite ways. While the administrator's life is narrowly job-focused, an intellectually serious person is curious, her life focused on asking questions, on determining context, on learning the literature. And while the day-to-day practice of an administrator is undisciplined, the life of an intellectually serious person is disciplined--blocks of time put away for teaching, for research, for intellectual attention.

Of course an intellectually serious approach to the life of the college may not do much good for keeping the college flourishing. But given that most administrators were once intellectually serious in their fields, it is worth thinking about how to bring aspects of that former life into the practice of administrators. Much of the weight will fall on those administrators to be sure. I, for one, am appallingly poor at setting aside time for disciplinary focus. So are all of the administrators I work with. I don't know where their minds are before they get to work and after they get home, but my sense is that most of them keep mental companionship with their jobs all the time. These may not be bad characteristics. In most instances colleges and universities get a lot of good work out of people like these, who give themselves over to the hard work of running the institution. I wonder, though, how many institutions miss big opportunities because their administrators have embraced undisciplined focus as a way of work.

Writing this has put me in mind of Kermit Hall. Hall was an important legal historian whose work I studied when I was working on a curriculum revision for the American Heritage Program at BYU. I stepped down from that role to become the Executive Director of Utah Campus Compact. The state Board of Regents invited me to speak to a meeting one spring, and I found myself sitting next to Kermit Hall, who had the year before become President of Utah State University. In a quiet moment I told him how much I admired his work, particularly the Oxford Companion to American Law, which had come out during his presidency at USU. He told me that when he began his administrative career he also began to set aside half a day every week to work on scholarship. He maintained that practice through his presidency at Utah State and through his time at SUNY-Albany where he went after leaving USU.

Hall died of a heart attack while swimming at Hilton Head at the age of 61. He was on vacation at the time. I never worked closely with him--I have no idea what sort of a President he was to work with, or what his institutions missed because he was a scholar. But he was an intellectually serious as an administrator, and that, from my perspective, was a good thing.