The unwise pleasures of administrative work

Forgive me for writing about something both personal and mundane.

My family and I took last week--spring break at Westminster--and went to Southern California.  It isn't a particularly opportune time to travel if you work in enrollment management (though truth be told, more opportune than lots of other times of the year).  And since I also play a large role in Westminster's current strategic planning process, and since I'm holding down the fort as the Interim Director of the Office of Communications for another week or so, I decided that I ought to work a couple of hours each morning.  Which I did, along with checking my email every ten minutes or so, and also working at night after everyone went to sleep.

The trip was pleasant but not relaxing, in part because of where we spent several days (Disneyland--don't ask why), but largely because of my inability to disconnect from work, and thus to agreeing to be superficially on the trip and superficially at work.

I told myself on Sunday that the habits I have developed are unwise.  They have left me a bit frazzled, and a lot uncertain about the grounds upon which I stand and from which my motivation stems.  I've been reading Ruth Haley Barton's Sacred Rhythms (ironically including in the wee hours of the morning on vacation and on the flight back), and have been struck by its deft description of my own spiritual disconnectedness and by its recommendations for establishing a "rule of life" --a set of practices that are slower, quieter, and more aligned with what I think I desire deep inside myself.  And I'm committed to taking up lectio divina as a way of paying deep attention to something small ( a few verses of scripture, a poem), and trying to remind myself that a key reason I got into higher education was to focus--to develop a discipline, a profession.

I drove to work this morning, my first day back, with that desire for something deeper on my mind.  I got to my office, and then spent an entire day in frantic activity--bouncing from meeting to meeting, answering phone calls, writing emails, and producing documents. My day touched, among other topics, accreditation; 2+2 exchange agreements; the number of FAFSAs filed by admitted students from outside of Utah; the design of webpages for graduate programs; the intersection of strategic planning and liberal education; graduate education; the strategic direction of the Utah Campus Compact; our commencement program; the transition for the next Director of Communications; our tuition and fees schedule; the college's SWOT analysis; the Utah higher education legislative agenda; the impact of sequestration on federal financial aid; three personnel questions; aligning recruitment, financial aid, retention, and long-term financial sustainability; and recruitment for graduate programs.

That said, today had its pleasures.  This is the largely unspoken truth about administrative work--it has its psychological pleasures.  It doesn't offer just busy-ness, but the opportunity for flow, for making Blink decisions, for moving many things one step further ahead.  The pleasure is part of the reason that administrators thrive in meetings--because meetings are brief periods of focus, in which decisions get made that allow the rest of the rush of the day to take on meaning. It is what makes it possible for them to keep working when the work doesn't carry the intrinsic rewards of working in an area of one's passion. Administration is a "feat of strength"--a demonstration that in the face of overwhelming demands, one can avoid succumbing to any of them (at least during working hours--the feeling at night and first thing in the morning is something else entirely...)  It is a feat of connection--a way of remaining a contributing part of a community whose core purpose you serve but do not participate in.

I've got no deep insights (as befits my role as an administrator) into solving this problem, if it is indeed soluble. But a few thoughts: any effort to make administrative work meaningful in the way that lectio divina, or disciplinary work, or deep commitment to a single task, well-performed are meaningful,  has to grapple with the fact that administrative work is not just all of the things that open it to mockery, but that it is also attractive, pleasurable, and rewarding in ways that other forms of higher education work are not.  Even more, the effort at meaning has to face up to the fact that for all of the grousing about the burgeoning administrative corps in higher ed, administrators do work that is central to the success of colleges and universities. The true challenge, then, is not about time allocation, or better run meetings, or clearer procedures for governance, or any of the other proposed solutions to the administrative problem.  At least in my mind, the challenge is to find ways that the pleasures of administration--which are in many ways unwise--can become wise.

If you know how to do that, let me know.  I check my email constantly...

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.

Thinking about academic innovation in a context of declining demand for education

Over the past decade, colleges and universities have become adept at offering new or revised academic programs to respond to changes in the marketplace for students.  So, if the number of transfer students in your area is in decline, seek more freshmen.  If your MBA program is dropping off, then add a program in health sciences.  If demand for traditional undergraduate programs slackens, then add new pricing schemes or new modes of delivery.

This remains a smart approach to adjusting to the sort we have had over the last decade where demand for education continued to increase but was distributed differently than in the past.

Three recent studies suggest, though, that overall demand for higher education has flattened or is in decline. The Council of Graduate Schools reports that overall enrollment in graduate programs fell in 2011 for the second consecutive year.  NAICU, passing along federal data, notes that overall enrollment in undergraduate programs declined last year.  And WICHE's new study of high school graduation suggests that the number of students graduating high school will decline for the next couple of years before flattening out.

This is not to say that there will be no mid-level changes in demand.  To the contrary, WICHE is clear on changes in the ethnicity of new college-goers, and it seems likely that more students will continue to be willing to take online courses.  But whereas in the past realignments of student interest took place in a context of overall growth in enrollment, these changes will take place in a period of flat or declining enrollment.

What does this shift mean?  A couple of thoughts:

• Campuses cannot count on a rising tide of enrollment to protect them from misguided guesses about where new demand would lie, as they could in past years.
• Because there is not a naturally increasing enrollment, new programs or approaches will need to pay for themselves almost immediately, or be replaced.
• Without a safety net, campuses (especially small ones) will need to get better at certain types of new programs or enrollment initiatives.  That is, they will need to become specialists in innovation rather than generalists.
• Schools will need to get better at thinking about geography, academic preparation, and diversity as the  variables in their academic innovations, rather than putting new academic programs at the foreground and worrying about the make-up of the students interested in them later.
• It will be harder for institutions to start or sustain loss-leader programs, that is, programs that do not bring in revenue but which garner some attention for the institution.  (In this context, one has to wonder how long even large universities will be able to maintain their MOOCs without meaningful enrollment, student success, and revenue associated with them.)

What kind of business is enrollment management?

Until recently, one of the most consistent complaints about American higher education was that it had become too much like a business. (Ironically, now the louder complaint, coming from a different source to be sure, is that colleges and universities are not enough like a business, spending time as they do on things besides job training.)

The debate about whether higher education should or should not be like a business obscures a smaller but important question--what sort of business discipline should the components of a college be like?

While someone who knows more about the business office and fundraising operations of a college could write something brilliant about whether those offices should be more about accounting, finance, or entrepreneurship, I would like to touch on a question in my area: What kind of business is enrollment management?

This question matters because over the past twenty years, enrollment management has become a marketing discipline.  By this I mean that its key foci (pricing, branding, messaging, advertising) fall within marketing as a discipline, and that the obsessions of marketing (novelty, agility, cleverness, persuasion, differentiation, growth) have become the core obsessions of enrollment management.

Those obsessions seem to work best in a growth market, one where many additional consumers are looking to buy a product and are making decisions about the purchase based on marketing questions (How much will it cost me? How will it make me feel?  Is the product glamorous or prestigious? Do its ads and sales pitches speak to me?).  In this landscape, enrollment management teams can improve and expand marketing and thereby expect ever better results.

It may be that we don't live in that landscape any more.  Students are increasingly skeptical of traditional marketing tactics, and parents are dubious about the prices being charged for education.  Schools with a powerful brand can still rely on that brand, but the down economy and skepticism about the value of regular higher ed suggest that marketing tactics may not enroll students the way they used to.

So if enrollment management is becoming less like marketing, is there a business discipline whose insights are more helpful?

I would put my money on supply chain management as the disciplinary future of enrollment management. (Thanks to Dr. Brian Levin-Stankevich for making an off-handed remark that sparked my thinking on this.)

Supply chain management argues that it is not marketing, but instead creating value through the entire supply chain that leads to a product's success.  Further, it argues that relationships and customer service are more powerful than messaging and advertising in ensuring satisfaction.

In a supply chain model of enrollment management, admissions offices would think of establishing supply chains of students rather than increasing the number of prospects.  These supply chains--in schools, churches, non-profits, employers, would be in relationship with the college, and would be tasked with selecting the best supply of students for the particular college.  They would be fully empowered to make that decision--given control over a scholarship budget and admissions decisions.  Their work would be evaluated on outcomes--if students succeed in college, the suppliers would continue to get rewards.  If not, then the college would seek out new suppliers.

In turn colleges and universities would go out of their way to build, strengthen, and satisfy their suppliers, since there are many competitors for the supply chains.

Describing access to college in this language sounds, well, business-like.  But looked at another way it is an effort to solidify relationships that ought to be strong, but instead are weak in American society.  Would high school counselors know their students better if they were actually responsible for getting them into college?  Would high school and college curricula align better if there were real incentives to the high school to have its graduates succeed at particular colleges? Would freshmen be more likely to be retained if they attended a college where many of their older classmates attended? Would communities be healthier, and colleges more focused, if their supply of students depended on maintaining good relations with other institutions?

The answer to all of these questions is yes.  And if we could respond to all of them positively, we could be sure, too, that both students and society would be benefiting from the power of a meaningful college 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.

Mission, demographics, and the problems with enrollment management

Students who go to college in the future will be different from the freshmen who have traditionally enrolled in private colleges and universities.  In order to attract and enroll those students, private colleges and universities will need to better differentiate themselves from each other, and from public institutions of higher education.  But as an enrollment manager, I cannot be confident that I have the tools I need to enroll those students.  Here is why:

With the exception of very prestigious institutions, colleges and universities seek students by buying their names from testing and other college preparation services.  We then snail mail, email, call, text, and visit with those students to try to get them to enroll.  But our ability to buy names is limited by the sort of data that testing services gather.  And right now, they mostly gather demographic data and data on academic performance.

These data are important--they help us target students by geography, socio-economic status, and test score.  But they don't help us see who will really engage with our campus, learn successfully in our classrooms, flourish at our school in ways that they wouldn't flourish elsewhere.  In other words, because those data don't tell us anything about how a prospective student will match with the mission and the pedagogy of the institution, they don't help us link our institutional mission with its central task--educating students to succeed in college and beyond.

Now it is true that mission-matching takes place later in the recruiting process (sometimes), and it is true that many high school students do not care much about the mission of the schools they are looking at.  But it is also true that if schools don't do better at attracting students who really fit the institutions they are selecting, we will fail to do our duty to those students, their families, and the communities that support them. And we will fail to take advantage of the characteristics that make our institutions unique.

Having said this I confess that I don't have any idea how to align student search with mission.  But the organization who does it, who helps colleges and universities think about prospective students as more than an amalgam of educational and demographic data, will have done real good for students and for American higher education.

What auto loans can teach us about student loans

If you were a recent high school graduate, worked hard, got decent grades, and wanted to borrow $20,000, you could spend it on one of two things: a new car or a college education.  One of those choices is a much better investment than the other.  But while it is almost universally understood that a college education is more valuable than a new car, it is also the case that the means of getting that education--a student loan--is widely feared while the means of getting the car--an auto loan--carries no such stigma.

There are big cultural reasons why this is the case: the contradictory fears that a college education is essential for success in life and inadequate to ensure that success, for example, or the nonsensical political debates about  student loan interest rates.

But I am more interested in the practical reasons that auto loans are accepted and student loans feared, because colleges and universities can do something about those practical considerations.  Here are five characteristics of auto lending that might be suggestive for student lenders. The characteristics share one factor that ought to be on the mind of people working to fix student loans: auto loans give people power to act in ways they see fit.  Student loans, at key points in the college process, make it more difficult, not less, to act.

1. Markets in interest rates matter--I can borrow money to buy a new car at 2.94% from my local credit union.  Occasionally, manufacturers offer 0% interest.  If I had horrible credit, but was willing to follow a strict repayment plan I could still get a loan, albeit at a much higher interest rate.  In short, there is a market for auto loans dedicated to making it possible for all sorts of people to buy all sorts of cars.  There is no meaningful market for student loans--regardless of your background, career goals, or ability to pay, you pay rates set by a single lender, the federal government, and take out loans in amounts dictated by the federal government. (And because there is no real market for loans, the few private lenders in the business can set their rates even higher than the federal rates.) Markets, when they work correctly, empower people to make informed decisions.  The process of getting a student loan is disempowering--all the key factors are out of the buyer's hands--the rate, the amount borrowed, the source of the loan, its term of repayment.
2. The size of the loan and the desirability of the purchase coincide--A new car is most desirable when it is new, and so its worth aligns with the amount owed.  As the car ages and its value declines, so does the principal.  As with cars, a college education is most desirable when it is new, before the hard work, the disappointment, and the frustration of choosing a major, writing a thesis, and facing up to the hard factors of life weigh in.  But unlike an auto loan, a student loan's principal is highest when the thing purchased--a college education--is at its end--the moment when satisfaction is often the lowest.
3. It is the monthly payment that matters--When you take out an auto loan, the focus of the discussion is on the monthly payment.  This focus, of course, obscures the total cost of the loan.  But it also helps people budget, since they know that each month for the coming five years they have to pay that amount.  In student loans, the monthly payment is a moving target until after graduation.  That fact makes budgeting difficult and forces soon-to-be-graduates to make decisions about their futures in a context of uncertainty.
4. There is a secondary market for the loan and for the purchase--If you borrow to buy a car, and then decide that the car isn't for you, you can sell it. Selling the car allows you to either invest in another car or pay off your loan early.  Or, if you keep the car, other people can use it--brothers, sisters, friends.  But there are no secondary markets for college educations or student loans.  The loan you take out is yours.  You cannot share its amount with a family member.  Nor can a friend take classes paid for by your loan. So the social benefit of a student loan and a college education are blunted by the way the loan is constructed.
5. An auto loan buys a car; a student loan does not buy an education--You buy a car because you need a car.  The thing purchased is directly tied to the money borrowed.  But a student loan really buys time in the classroom, not learning or an education. There are no guarantees; you cannot return the education if it isn't working, or get it repaired under warranty. For this reason, if time in college does not lead to learning, the price of the loan seems out of alignment with the value of the thing purchased.

It is my sense, then, that if the government is going to reform student lending, or if student activists are going to take up the issue, that they look to the auto business, where loans align with desires, serve social purposes, come with clear information, and provide freedom to act.

Can Democracy Upset the Structures of Higher Education?

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.

Where enrollment management and the curriculum meet

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.

Being the parent of a transfer student

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.

Is enrollment management a skill or a discipline?

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.

Can the curriculum lead to retention and graduation?

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.

Academically Adrift: Doing assessment at small colleges

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.

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.

Dialogue and civility

Yet another in what is becoming a series of posts about civility.  Earlier this week KSL, one of the state's major news outlets (and an outlet owned by the LDS Church) shut down the comments section of its website.  The reason? "We recognize that our comment boards do not meet our own standards or the expectation of many of our users," (according to a statement posted on the KSL.com website and cited in this article).

As a Mormon I can say that I am not surprised at this step--after all, my church is not just uncomfortable with open discussion of major religious issues in church, but deeply committed to politeness, favoring it over open-ness or honesty. And as an occasional reader of public fora on news sites I can say that I have almost never read a comment that added to the discussion of the topic.

Still, there is much to be concerned about in this step.  At least some supporters of democracy argue that communities need public spaces, or third places, where they can talk, discuss, debate, and disagree about major issues prior to making a decision or taking political action on an issue. (My favorite book on this topic is Christopher Lasch's The Revolt of the Elites--a must-read, and a reminder of how much we lost when he died 15 years ago.) 

The big point in the work of third place theorists is that democracy needs an infrastructure that is related to but separate from the decision-making apparatus.  In the past that infrastructure has been physical--pubs, churches, parks, social clubs, etc.)  Today a good chunk of that infrastructure is online.

So when KSL.com shuts down is public fora it is doing two things--first striking a blow for civility by reducing the overall amount of bile that spills out online.  But second it is undermining a piece of the infrastructure that makes democracy possible--hardly a good things for a news outlet (or a church) to do.

It is worth noting in conclusion that colleges and universities could do a lot more than they do in this area.  Many institutions of higher education have almost no real public space, or third places.  Instead they give over all their space either to private uses (offices), or directed uses (classrooms).  What is more, the opportunities for open discussion are severely limited.  Most faculty meetings, for example, are devoted to two things--passing along information in a passive manner, and making decisions on proposals.  We would be well-served to have more open fora to lay the groundwork for better decisions and, therefore, more civilized outcomes to our work.

Are we good at discussing but bad at deciding?

Two things about professors seem to be universally believed--that we are good at leading discussions in the classroom and bad at making decisions in the faculty meeting.  I do not know why this is--one would think that people whose professions use discussion to lead to learning would excel at using discussion to lead to decisions. And I am not sure that the beliefs are true--good institutions make lots of good decisions, and bad discussions take place everywhere.  But it is worth considering why discussion and decision are so segregated in our thinking about higher education.

Why is this  the case?  Perhaps it is because professors are, before they are faculty, people. As people they share assumptions and practices about decision-making (and -makers) with the general public, a group characterized by ever-stronger ties with like-minded people and ever more hostile relations with people who disagree.  If this is the case, then the classroom is the location of like-mindedness and meetings the location (at least potentially) for confrontations with those who disagree.  And so discussion is comfortable because it takes place in an atmosphere of consensus, while decisions are difficult because disagreement is the central context.

Or it could be that classroom discussions and university decision-making come from entirely different traditions, so that while they are neighbors on campus they are culturally and intellectually strangers.  There is certainly some truth to this theory. Faculty governance emerged after a long period of conflict with administrators in the late-19th and early-20th centuries,  (for an excellent history of this period read George Marsden's The Soul of the American University) and when it did it adopted a set of practices codified in two earlier periods of conflict--the years of the early republic (when American parliamentary procedure first emerged) and the years of the civil war and reconstruction, when Robert's Rules of Order came to rule public meetings.  The history of learning through discussion is much older, dating to at least to Socrates in the Western tradition, and seems to have flourished independently of institutions of higher learning.

Or perhaps it is the case that there are discussion people and decision people in higher education.  This is certainly the case in the self-image of some faculty.  It is not at all uncommon for a faculty member, in explaining her/his disengagement from contentious governance issues, to say "I'm here because I love to teach,"  or "it is the students who really matter to me,"  implying that while governance is important, it is peripheral to the real work--learning--of the institution.  And it is also the case that administrators, department chairs, and presidents of the faculty senate will sometimes wonder out loud why their colleagues won't join the hard work of joint decision-making, favoring instead the safe harbor of the classroom.

Or maybe there is a distinction in beliefs about what is at stake in classroom discussions and decision-making meetings.  The classroom carries high potential (a person's life may be transformed forever) but low stakes at any one gathering (after all, one dull discussion of Walden does not guarantee that students will forever lead lives of quiet desperation).  Conversely, decision gatherings are often low potential (insert here your favorite story about months spent debating campus policy on the use of chalk to advertise events on campus sidewalks), but high stakes--once a decision is made, the die is set.

Whatever the explanation, higher education needs to focus here, both because the work of most campuses is diminished by poor discussions and poor decision-making; and because the same malady afflicts our public lives.  If you believe in democracy, or politics, or the possibility of people making decisions that shape their lives, then you have to hope that people learn to discuss difficult issues, and then make decent determinations about those issues.  And if you believe that learning can take place in the space between the ideas held by individuals, then you have to hope that we figure out how to take fuller advantage of discussion's reputation.