Why "Should everybody go to college?" is the wrong question

Whether asked directly or implicitly, the question "Should everybody go to college?" plays a big part in current discussions about education in America.  It is lurking behind talk about access to higher education, views about it drive responses to MOOCs, it is implicit in doubts about the value of higher education, it shapes the little indignities of life in high school (as when the already poorly named SEOP--student education opportunity plan--takes on the name CCE--college and career ready--so that legislators and administrators can signal their unwillingness to take a stand on the question.)

That said, "Should everybody go to college?" is the wrong question, both because it doesn't help us think clearly about education and because it pushes to the side exactly the people who are meant to be served by that discussion--parents and students.  Here is why it is a bad question:

1. Only people on the margins can give a clear answer to it--"yes" or "no".  But even worse, everyone else has to temporize--yes in this instance, but no in that.  Such temporizing immediately turns an important conversation into an argument about definitions and categories.
2. As soon as it becomes a discussion about categories, it is actual students who disappear.  In their place are groups of students, who should follow one path or another based on the position of the person answering the question.
3. The question answerers (or at least the main voices in the debate) tend to be people who have administrative or financial, but rarely personal interest in the answer.  That is, they tend to be people with official roles in the education system facing off against people who want to change the educational system.
4. On the other hand, the question leaves the views and voices of families and students at the margin.  They don't have the financial or organizational presence to weigh in on such a big question.  Instead, they fit into a box--"You took college prep courses and got good grades and can afford college?  Well, then college is for you--move ahead."  Or, put another way, the question turns people who should actively be shaping decisions into acceptors of decisions/categories made in advance for abstract versions of them.

Is there a better question to use in its place?  I prefer, "How important is college?"  Here is why:

1. It is a question that places students and their families at the center of the discussion, because it can be answered from personal experience and belief in specific ways.
2. It is a question that is as meaningfully asked of college-goers as of non-college-goers.  After all, lots of  students in college place the importance of college below other things--family, jobs, skiing.  And lots of people who aren't in college place college high in their list of priorities.
3. It is a question that requires families and students to think about school/work/life balance.  In other words, it places college into the real lives of students rather than making college-going an activity separate from the rest of life. 
4. It is a question, the answer to which can lead to real action.  Regardless of your view on "should everybody go to college?" almost no one can do anything to move opinion one way or another.  But the question "How important is college?" has immediate and actionable (sorry, I hate that word) consequences.
5. The question moves power away from central authorities towards the level--personal, family, and community--that is most immediately effected by the decision.
6. It is a question that places educational policy and innovation--be it MOOCs, or the creation of new institutions, or financial aid, or scholarships, or admission requirements--in the service of actual human beings, instead of the other way around.  If your big thing is MOOCs, then your answer to "Should everybody go to college?" serves MOOCs.  But if your big question is "How important is college?" then you have lots of tools at your disposal to shape the answer to the actual needs and desires of actual people.   MOOCs for some, community college for others, liberal arts colleges for yet others.

The standardization of student recruiting

In the past week, my 16-year old daughter received letters from the University of Miami, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Denver, and Texas Christian.  There is nothing unusual about strong private universities trying to recruit an academically promising high school junior. But the arrival of these letters, and their contents, say a lot about the standardization of student recruiting.

Here is what I mean.  My daughter hadn't received mail from any schools in about a month.  Then, in one week, a flurry of letters.  This can only mean that the schools sending letters are all using the same vendor to manage their name buys and the early search phase of recruiting.  That fact is borne out by the fact that the letters all look the same--they all tell my daughter how promising she is, and they all offer her a special publication (hints on how to have a successful campus visit in one; suggestions on choosing a college in the others).  All ask her to log-in to access the information, and provide her a special log-in and password to do so.  Three ask her to complete a "quiz' to determine her top major choices.  Even the layout of the letter and the envelope look the same.

The gaps in the letters are as interesting as their contents.  They contain very little about the institutions, their missions, or their distinctive programs, and this in spite of the fact that these schools are actually distinctive.  RPI is a great technology school, Miami is in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, the University of Denver offers great programs in business and diplomacy, and Texas Christian is, well, Christian.  But unless you were a very well-informed high school junior, you would never know that from the letters.

What does it mean when significantly different institutions recruit students in ways that blur the differences between them?  It means first of all that student recruiting, as with many other parts of enrollment management, is becoming standardized, with the assumptions behind standardization being driven by vendors. Among those assumptions is that the first step in recruiting prospective students is to entice them with praise, promise them access to special information, and get them to provide information for the school's recruiting database, which in turn makes it possible for the institution to launch a concentrated marketing campaign at the student.

One has to wonder whether this approach is good either for students or for institutions. Is it likely to connect students early with schools where the students are likely to flourish?  Does it provide important decision-making information early enough in the process?  Does it create authentic relationships between students and potential schools?  And for institutions, does it make sense to put distinctive missions, programs, locations, and other institutional characteristics in the background?

 I would guess that the answer to most of these questions is "no."  Which raises another question--if these practices don't make sense for students or colleges and universities, how long will we, as enrollment managers keep them up?  Probably as long as vendors encourage them and we, out of anxiety about our ability to enroll enough of the "right' students, agree to do so.

What I've learned by always voting for losers

With only two exceptions, I have voted in every election since I turned 18 in 1984.  And with equally rare exceptions (a couple of referenda and city council elections; Obama in 2008) I have voted for losing candidates every time.

You learn a lot when nearly every vote you cast is for the losing side.  Here are a few things I've picked up:

• If you are a localist or a communitarian, you have no chance of winning an election.  When I say this I mean simply that I think that local communities are the basis of a healthy civic life, and that decisions about civic issues should be made by the people who are most effected by them.  Philosophically, both major parties have threads that align with localism--Catholic social thought, particularly about subsidiarity, and Burkean conservatism on the right; the reflexive praise for grassroots activism, the New Left, the "buy local" movement on the left.  But to get to the level of elections, candidates and platforms have a tendency to push decisions up the political hierarchy, not down it.
• Voting is important, politics are important, elections  are not.  By this I mean simply that voting and politics are symbolically significant because they ask people with differing views to come to some sort of resolution about an issue.  Much of the rest of our lives do the same thing--we are always working to make decisions with others in our families, churches, schools, etc.  But elections often poison this natural  impulse, because they do not encourage joint decision-making, instead focusing on individual choice-making. Civic life, and major issues, are never about simple yes or no, this candidate or that choices.
• The most troubling part of elections is not campaign spending, or attack ads, or any of the things that point to division between partisans.  It is instead the shared commitment of leaders in both parties to proclaim that their candidates (particularly for higher office) have within them the ability to solve problems.  When Mitt Romney said he knew how to turn the economy around; when Barack Obama said he would already have done so were it not for the recalcitrance of the Republicans, they were both wrong.  Their statements were not lies as much as they were delusions.  One person, especially in a democratic system and a market economy, cannot "fix the  economy."  It is not amenable to control, whether in good times or in bad.  Individual decisions matter, it is true.  But their reach is small, and no amount of blaming or chest-thumping can change that.
• Fortunately, while elections are important for political parties, they are less important for the quality of community life. I live in an overwhelmingly Mormon, pro-Romney neighborhood.  I voted for Gary Johnson for president.  The day after the election, my position in my neighborhood was unchanged.  People who thought us strange before still think so; our kids still have their friends; I still wonder how to be a useful member of my community, I still long to feel a part of something, to contribute to the common good, to find a supportive place in the res publica. 

Voting again for losing candidates doesn't change that at all.

The Mormon Church's Massive Educational Experiment

There have been few bigger announcements in the past decade from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints than the one it made last Sunday--that young men could leave on missions at the age of 18, and young women at the age of 19. (The previous policy allowed young men to leave at age 19 and women to go at 21.)

The LDS Church made the decision in order to increase the number of missionaries and smooth their departure by making it possible for young men ( who make up the vast majority of missionaries) to leave on a two-year mission immediately after completing high school.

Time will tell whether this move increases the number of missionaries, and whether it has a positive impact on the number and quality of missionary work (though my bet would be yes to the first question and no to the second).  But the move also raises major educational questions.

For institutions in Utah, the big question is where they will go to replace the freshmen who would have enrolled in college before leaving on a mission under the old policy, but who will now go directly into mission work from high school.  Some schools (like BYU and UVU) will lose massive portions of the men in their freshmen classes.

For learning though, the questions are even bigger.  The experiment that the LDS Church has undertaken is this: will young men who serve missions be more or less likely than before to go on to college?  And, will those young men who go to college be more or less successful as students if they skip two years of education between high school and college?

There has been almost no discussion of this matter in the press.  The only nod to it came in the Salt Lake Tribune's sports section, where coaches and student athletes both agreed that going on a mission first would make student athletes more successful as athletes.

Setting aside the tiny handful of LDS young men who are college athletes, I expect that we will see the following impacts of this policy:

1. Top students who are also active members of the LDS church will be fine in college after serving a mission.
2. Decent students who are serious about their futures will also do well in college--the maturity that they gain on a mission will bolster their self-management skills and help them do better in college.
3. Mediocre students, and those in the new college-going demographics, will be slightly less likely to go on to college, and among those who do go to college, more likely to struggle in college.
4. Students who would not have gone to college before the change will not go to college after the change either.

On number 3 above, the recent report from College Board about the levels of college preparation of SAT test takers is instructive. Only 43% of SAT test takers are prepared to succeed in college.  This means that 57% of SAT test takers, (and presumably a higher proportion of those who don't take the test) aren't ready to succeed academically in college.  Among that number will be many Mormon young men, who, if they serve missions, will have let at least 2 years pass between graduating high school and entering college.

The gamble the church is taking is that mission service will help young men develop positive personal and educational maturity that outweighs the losses in learning and focus that come from spending a substantial time out of school after leaving high school.  That seems unlikely.  But if it is the case that taking two years off from formal education makes young men more likely to succeed once they return to schooling, then the world of higher education should take notice.

What does the history of newspapers suggest about the future of higher education?

Worriers about the future of higher education sometimes suggest that American colleges and universities will follow newspapers in their rapid fall from great prominence to insignificance.  They extend the analogy one step further, arguing that it is technology that will make brick-and-mortar colleges as irrelevant as the newspaper itself.  The proof  is the rise of online course content, which has supposedly made learning free in the same way that social media has made information free.

As analogies go, this one has provoked relatively little discussion, by which I mean it is taken as an absolute falsehood or an absolute inevitability rather than an opportunity to think.  This is too bad, because a fuller look at the history of newspapers suggests a far more interesting set of opportunities for higher education than for newspapers.

Let me start with a thumbnail sketch of the history of newspapers in the US, dating back to the 19th century  (rather than the 2000s where most of these stories start).

In the 19th century, the United States was  a newspaper nation. By this I mean four things:

•  first, that the nation was awash in newspapers, with hundreds circulating in New York City alone; 
• second, that newspapers reflected the nation's political and ethnic diversity in that they spoke for particular groups or viewpoints rather than trying to objectively report news; 
•  third, that most newspapers were local or parochial in outlook, and 
• fourth that their parochialism and ideology formed a key component of the American democratic system, in the same way that local bosses, ethnic networks, and civil society did. 

Several things weakened the position of newspapers in American society and civic life in the 20th century.  The availability of information via other media (radio, TV) was one.  Another was the rise of national newspapers, both that handful of newspapers with national influence (the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and much later USA Today) and in the national perspective of local papers, whose lead stories increasingly focused on the national rather than the local.  A third was the emergence of objectivity as the goal of reporting, replacing as it did ideology.  And a fourth was the decline of major American cities, which had been home to the majority of newspapers.

The industry's response was consolidation, as represented by the emergence of investor-held major newspaper chains, and by the sharing of operations between ostensibly competing papers.  So, by the end of the 20th century and before the attack of the internet, the newspaper industry was centralized, profit-focused, homogeneous, and already in decline.

Contrary to the regular narrative, then, newspapers weren't toppled by the internet. They were toppled by consolidation, by nationalizing their viewpoint, by seeking profits for investors rather than for owners, and by failing to respond to media who had copied them. If anything, the internet re-created in electronic form the model of news that existed in the 19th and early 20th centuries--hyper-local, ideological, biased, parochial, and democratic. Radio has done the same. And TV is on the same path.

So what might this history of newspapers suggest about the future of higher education?

 First, that if higher ed is in decline, it is in decline on a path that is wildly different from that of newspapers.  Newspapers were in decline in number and readership long before the internet.  Both the number of institutions of higher education, and enrollment in college, is on the rise, and has been for some time.

Second, that organizations that sponsor colleges and universities--states, churches, donors, etc.--ought to oppose consolidation and homogenization, preferring instead diversity, localism, and ideology as the basis of colleges and universities.  We will certainly see declines in enrollment at some schools--rural liberal arts colleges, church schools closely tied to declining denominations, decent small schools with curricula pretty much like dozens of others.  But we will also see the emergence of new institutions, only some of which have the internet as their sole delivery model.  Witness, for example, the emergence of health and wellness-affiliated colleges and universities, set up to respond to the needs of particular industries; and sustainability-focused schools, intent on responding to our environmental crises. My guess is that the next wave of institutions will focus wholly on the new college-going demographics.  A few schools will emerge entirely online, but those who survive will find an online niche, rather than becoming the facebook of online education, particularly since there is yet to be a good business model for such types of schools.

(If I am right and that the future of higher ed is more diversity in institution type, in ideology, in content area, and in delivery, then we will also need to see a greater diversity in pricing.  Colleges tend to price themselves in narrow bands, with most state institutions of a particular type offering similar tuition charges to students, and most private institutions offering tuition in alignment with their peers.  Older schools are close to locked into this pricing model; but new schools will be free to charge what their markets bear--most of them probably less than today's norms, but some much more.)


In short, I am arguing for a decentralized, localist, less-regulated, less-objective future for higher education, both as a means of keeping the system as a whole healthy, as a way of ensuring that people who want an education can get one, and as a way of ensuring that higher education can provide the sort of civic spark that newspapers once did.

This, more than the warning that place-based schools will die in an online onslaught, is the lesson that the history of newspapers has for the future of higher education.

Why legibility is better than transparency

In the political sphere, transparency is a hallmark on democracy.  But in education, transparency, or making all possible information available to all possible users, confuses as often as it helps. For students legibility, or making it  possible for them to read where they are and where they go next, is more valuable than transparency.

Consider these hallmarks of educational transparency--the campus map, the course catalog, and the tuition and fees list.  Colleges and universities place maps showing all buildings on their websites and at key points on campus.  But students, parents, and visitors are constantly lost.  Why? Because the map provides too much information.  No one really needs to know where all buildings on campus are located.  Instead, they need to know how to get from where they are to where they are going, something that maps do only with difficulty.

Similarly, the course catalog aims to encapsulate all information about a campus' curriculum and graduation requirements.  But students consistently make poor choices, misunderstand policy, and emerge from the catalog more confused than less.

And tuition and fees lists aim to make students and their families aware of all potential costs of attending an institution.  But those tables are generally ignored, in lieu of parents asking a straight-up question--"How much will it cost to attend your school."  To that question we have few good answers, since costs of attendance are variable and odd, given the way that schools rarely charge round figures for anything.

Forbes journalist Patrick Spenner gets it right in his recent blog post, "Forget Engagement, Consumers Want Simplicity." There, he argues that marketers who aim to engage potential customers in too many ways--social media, frequent campaigns, personal contacts--instead trip them up.  I find this increasingly true in student recruitment, where improved marketing tools allow us to contact prospective students dozens of times over the three years prior to enrolling as freshmen.  Some students love the attention, but most ignore much of the interaction, or worse, disconnect early in the process.  (Enrollment managers talk increasingly of stealth applicants--students who apply to the college without us knowing about them.  But the truth is that there are few stealth applicants.  There are instead students who were in the recruiting pool at the outset, but disconnected until they ultimately applied.  They are "simplicity seekers" not stealth applicants.)

The best example I've seen recently of legibility (or in Spenner's terms "simplicity") is at Utah Valley University.  At UVU, all major educational buildings are linked, so that you can walk indoors from one building to any other.  UVU has made huge improvements in helping students and visitors get around--not by posting more campus maps, but by simply posting signs hanging from the ceiling at any juncture between buildings.  Those signs include simple information--the name of the next buildings down any possible path, and an arrow showing which hallway to follow.  The boundaries between buildings are simply marked by the purpose of the building ("business' or "liberal arts" for example) being spelled out in the carpet.

Anyone can get around UVU's campus, then, if they simply know three things--that all buildings are connected, that you can find your way by reading signs, and the name of your final destination.

Not all campuses are designed the way UVU's is.  But you can take their principles of legibility and apply them elsewhere by building educational systems with three questions in mind:

1. What is the campus' approach to the educational experience?
2. Where are the critical junctures where signs need to be placed?
3. What is the student's end goal?

It is disappointing but not surprising that few campuses have simple and clear answers to these key questions.  Each school has all sorts of approaches to education--some majors are lockstep, others aren't, some require a thesis, others don't, some place students in internships, others don't.  We have too many critical junctures--between semesters, and years, and when changing majors, and all sorts of application deadlines.  And we aren't very good at knowing what a student wants to major in, let alone his/her overarching educational goals.  Given our complexity, we resort to putting all possible information out there, and hoping that students can find their ways or build a relationship with a wise mentor who will guide them through.  Or in other words, we default to transparency because our educational systems are illegible.

Why tuition-driven colleges are the future of higher education

To listen to the pundits, including such luminaries as Stanford President John Hennessy and Khan Academy founder Salman Khan, tuition-driven institutions of higher education are dying. In fact, in a recent Wall Street Journal interview, Hennessy said, "if you look at the vast majority of colleges in the U.S., there are way too many that are [dependent on tuition to fund their budgets]. That is not sustainable."

Let me respond.  Baloney.  In fact, it is increasingly likely that the only institutions of higher education that will survive in the future are tuition-driven, that is, schools where students pay roughly what it costs to educate them in order to get an education.  Tuition-driven schools have a pricing problem--by-and-large we have not found the equilibrium price between what a student wants to pay and what it costs to educate them.  Hennessy and Khan are correct that the use of technology might help us find that price. So might many other things, including greater specialization, clearer curricula, more straight-forward pricing, better loan options, competency-based education, and about a thousand other innovations already rolling out in higher education.

But schools like Stanford, and Khan Academy,  and your local public institution have much more than a pricing problem.  They have a business model problem.  Here is what I mean.  All three of those institutions have built business models that rely on massive and unpredictable sources of revenue to stay open.

Start with the clearest example--state institutions.  For several generations, the subsidy that states provided to state institutions, plus a moderate amount of tuition money, kept the doors of state institutions open.  But the amount of subsidy, at least in comparison to the cost of education, is in sharp decline. And it is tremendously unlikely that that subsidy will return in my lifetime.  So state schools are hunting for a new business model.  What are they turning to?  Tuition.

Consider Stanford and other highly selective research institutions, private and public.  These schools will likely survive long into the future.  But it is unlikely that they will survive as schools dedicated to educating students.  Already, in fact, the chance of enrolling at Stanford as an undergraduate is perishingly small, not because Stanford is incapable of educating more students, but because education isn't its business model.  Instead, its future depends on donations from alumni and wealthy fans, effective management of its endowment, and the ability to capture research contracts from the federal government and corporations.  That is, Stanford is a foundation, an investment firm, and an R&D contractor.  There are almost no existing schools who, not being in the Stanford  category already, are likely to be able to follow that business model in the future.

Finally, think about Khan Academy.  Its mission is to provide a "free world-class education to anyone anywhere."  Except, of course, that the education is not free.  Students simply do not pay for it.  Instead, the cost is borne by investors, and donors, and advertisers who hope that running ads on YouTube sites associated with Khan Academy will drive traffic to their businesses.  It may be that Khan Academy can survive and prosper with a business model reliant almost entirely on subsidies.  But I doubt that the future of higher education lies with such a model.

(Please note that I am not arguing that the waning of state subsidies for education is necessarily a good thing.  It indicates a weakening of our sense of common purpose, of the notion that I am better off when my neighbor is well and wise, and of the idea that communities in the United States protect their futures by educating their young. That weakening is sad indeed.)

Which returns us, again, to tuition as a model of educational funding.  There is a certain logic to paying tuition, since it aligns exactly with what we do elsewhere.  Buying a snowcone involves exchanging money for a product.  So does buying a shirt.  When purchases are very expensive (as with cars, health care, and houses), industries arise to help buyers manage costs and avoid shocks.  Variety of quality and services emerge so there is a continuum of options available to purchasers. And subsidies arise on the margins of the industry to help those who need the thing obtain it at a reasonable cost.

So I can imagine a future with a much greater range of prices (as opposed to quite inexpensive state institutions and quite expensive private institutions) and services in higher education.  And I can imagine a future where there are some state subsidies for some students.  But the thing I am most certain for is that more and more people will pay for their own educations.

The end of financial aid leveraging?

Nearly every institution of higher education in the US leverages financial aid.  That is, we all give different amounts of aid to different students to encourage them to attend our institutions. The practical impact for students is that classrooms, like airplanes, hold customers who are paying radically different amounts for the same seat. The result for campuses, at least in theory, is that the institution realizes as much revenue as possible while still filling its class with qualified students.

There is solid research in behavioral economics, and plenty of lived experience to suggest that financial aid leveraging has worked in the past.  But my sense is that it may not work well into the future.  Here is why.

Our ability to leverage financial aid depends on a set of beliefs among students and their parents:

1.  a general assumption that higher education is a good value and a specific belief that the particular institution where a student will enroll is worth the cost,
2.  a willingness to pay money (or to borrow money) to make up the difference between aid and cost of attendance, 
3. a willingness to overlook the fact that each student pays a different amount for the same education, a difference based largely on the student's prior academic performance (and slightly on their actual need).

The institution has to have a different set of beliefs:

1. that students will come even if pricing is unclear,
2. that the particular model of financial aid leveraging is both financially and morally defensible,
3. that the model of leveraging maintains or improves the overall quality of students at the campus,
4. that the class of interested students will be academically and financially varied enough so that students who pay a lot are numerous enough to subsidize those who pay little.

It is fair to say that every one of the assumptions above is under question right now.  One need only consider the move of major research universities into online learning, the uproar about student loans, the explosion of parent appeals of financial aid packages, the outrageous financial aid packages given to  top academic students (who, of course, usually come from families with greater means to pay for higher education), and the changing demographics of new college-going students--to recognize that the landscape that once supported leveraging is radically changed.

Schools have two options to respond--they can stay the course, hoping that while the national mood undermines the assumptions behind financial aid leveraging their own markets will be willing to go along. Or they can move, as a first step, towards clarity in pricing while they figure out exactly what their education is worth to the families who want to buy it.  

Option two demands something more than  changing tuition, particularly for small institutions. It demands that we re-calibrate where we stand in the market and who are the students who are most likely to succeed at the college.  Gone are the days when small colleges could get by on a pitch about small class sizes and an academic program that looks a lot like that offered at big universities.

Why Larry Summers is wrong about the future of education

 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.

Why cities are the future for liberal arts education

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

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:

1. 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.
2. 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. 
3. 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.
4. 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. 
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.

How innovative is "The Innovative University"?

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.

Public schools are dead, long live public education?

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.

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

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.

Is there any hope for public higher education?

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

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.

Emergent education, or, Can friends start a college?

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?

Seeking the Vice Presidency of the United States in 2012

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?

Who opts out of public schooling?

One of the quiet themes in this blog is that K-12 and Higher Ed could learn a lot if they paid attention to each other. This post is about another issue where this is true.

In higher ed, we have known for a long time who doesn't attend public institutions. In general it is the wealthy, the very poor, students without a family history of higher education, very religious students, students whose parents didn't go to public schools, etc.

In K-12, though, the assumption has always been that those who opt out of public schooling are simply the wealthy and those who know the system. This myth comes up every time there is a discussion of vouchers, or of school choice. Public school people say that if choice opens up, the public schools will be left only with low-achieving, troubled, low-income students whose parents don't have the time or the money to select an option.

I'm the board chair of a public charter high school in Salt Lake City--City Academy. I met yesterday with the head of the school to talk about enrollment for fall. Our enrollment is up, and growth is coming not only from wealthy, highly educated families (those who the myth says will opt out). It is coming instead from all areas of the periphery--families whose children were singled out for teasing in public schools, or high-functioning autistic kids, or kids who are culturally on the margins. In short, our school is made up of the same kids whose families later opt out of public colleges.

Why is this? Because K-12 and public higher ed aim for the middle. They recruit decent students who understand the school system. Kids whose families are on the periphery, for whatever reason opt out.

This should be good news for people worried about the future of public schooling. Rather than sink into a mass low-performing students, choice (be it through charter schools or private schools) could leave them with the students they are set up to serve. It is bad news for people who care about kids on the margin, though. There aren't nearly enough targeted non-public K-12 options for them. What we need is a K-12 system that looks more like our system of higher ed--more small options available--but with more attention to the needs of low income families.

It should also encourage us to be careful with how we think about the student body. It is rarely useful to think of a large body of students (those in a school, or a district, for example) as members of a hierarchy arrayed on economic grounds. We would be better off thinking of them as part of a system with a core and a periphery. Public schools serve the core (whatever it may look like--the core in the DC schools is far different than that in the Salt Lake City school district), the question is how can we serve the periphery better?