Does nostalgia for the 1960s drive MOOCs?

I am not, in this post, primarily concerned with whether MOOCs are good things.  Rather, I am interested in an assumption shared by both fans and foes of MOOCs--that they are innovative.  If innovation is understood to mean using the internet to do something that in the past was done without the internet, then MOOCs are innovative.  But in three essential ways MOOCs are nostalgic, not innovative.  They embrace major assumptions about learning and about institutional quality that were held true in the 1960s, but are no longer assumed today.

1. MOOCs recall the dream that huge numbers of students can learn from a single professor. This idea has been part of American higher education since the explosion of college enrollment after World War II.  It gained strength in the 1960s with the creation of public television, and again in the 1980s with the expansion of the television spectrum that allowed the creation of public-access television.  Today thousands of people earn college credit by watching televised lectures in Utah and then taking exams at remote locations.  The same surely happens in other states. (It happens in traditional classrooms as well. My own first opportunity as a college professor--a one-year contract at BYU--was to teach a class with an enrollment of 2700 students, who attended lectures in groups of 900 twice as week and then a discussion section of 30 once a week, led by a TA.  Students took exams in a massive testing center.)   These courses are not educational disasters for every student.  But any student who learns deeply in such a class must be highly motivated, since it is almost impossible to include any of the "high-impact practices" that deepen student understanding and help them connect the classroom to the real world. High-impact practices do not demand tiny classes.  But they do require regular, consistent interaction between faculty and students. And the require the recognition that students are human beings, whose approaches to learning, backgrounds, skills, and character vary widely. Enormous classes of all sorts are nostalgic for an approach to education that could ignore these facts, and instead treat students as an undifferentiated mass. 
2. MOOCs imagine that the "best" professors are those employed by research institutions. Advocates of MOOCs argue that they are merely providing the "best professors" teaching the "best content" in the world. Those professors are uniformly found at research universities, since the major MOOC providers are contracting almost exclusively with Research I institutions.  In so doing, they look back to a time before faculty at Research I institutions lifted research excellence over teaching excellence as the basis of tenure.  It may have been in the 1960s that one could reasonably assume that faculty at  research universities were outstanding teachers.  But that is no longer the case.  Nor is it the case that research excellence guarantees teaching effectiveness. 
3. MOOCs look back to a time when top-tier American research universities set the higher education agenda for the world.  In the 1960s, with a few European exceptions, the best universities in the world were in the United States.  While it is still the case that American universities are at the very top of major global rankings, more and more top universities from outside the US are rising in the rankings. What is more, a series of studies suggest that students who graduate from top-tier universities have not learned more and are not more likely to succeed after graduation than their peers at less prestigious institutions.

MOOCs might be an important part of the future of education.  But if that is to be the case, their advocates and designers need to ensure that their approach to learning becomes as current as their approach to the internet.

Why high schools will be the next major innovators in higher education

Nearly all of the press about innovation in higher ed is focused on technology firms--Coursera, or any of the many other MOOC providers, for example, or new low-cost online institutions like the University of the People.  But if I was looking for the business sector best situated to innovate on cost and quality in higher education, I would look to high schools, not high tech.

Three reasons why:

1. High schools already have means to get their students college credit. Whether it be via AP, IB, Cambridge exams, CLEP, or concurrent enrollment, a large proportion of high schools in the US make it possible for their students to earn low-cost, transferable college credit.  And as those programs expand, the cadre of high school teachers prepared to support college-level learning grows as well.
2. High school teachers, on the whole, have more training and experience in supporting student learning than do college faculty. (This is in fact one of the major lessons of MOOCs--that in very large, impersonal, online college courses, most students fail to complete.)  As the demographics of college-goers change, it will be high schools and their teachers more than universities and their faculties,who  are prepared to ensure their success.
3. High schools, particularly independent high schools, have both market opportunity and the need to innovate here.  Independent, private, and parochial high schools charge tuition to their students. They are also widely perceived to be better schools than public high schools. But while their tuitions are generally lower than college tuition, and their value propositions stronger than public high schools,  they struggle to enroll and retain students.  If independent high schools built out their college-credit opportunities, though, they would both strengthen their value propositions and  reduce the overall cost of education to their students.

All of these points suggest that high schools should expand access to college credit with an eye towards offering their students a complete general education before moving on to college.  Doing so, most reasonably through the creation of a 13th year of pre-college coursework, would strengthen their market position, take advantage of their strengths, and make it possible for their graduates to move more directly to graduation from college. In turn, students would have greater access to less-expensive, rigorous, and well-supported college-level courses, and the credits that go along with them.

Success in the shadow of giants, or, What does a school like Westminster call itself?

With the exception of schools whose fame (like Williams, Pomona, Middlebury, Dartmouth, or Brown) or location (New England and the Midwest) make their purposes automatically comprehensible to prospective students, the first thing that institutions like Westminster must figure out is what to call themselves.

By saying this I mean something more than "schools must have a name."  I mean that schools like Westminster--which receive neither state, nor church, nor investor sponsorship, and which offer neither all fields of study or a severely limited roster of academic programs--are incomprehensible without a clear self-description.

Think about the prospective student growing up in Utah, or Colorado, or Texas, or Alabama, or any other state with a very visible state university system and/or prominent church-sponsored schools. If they are religious, they understand immediately what BYU or Baylor or Gonzaga are about.  And if they are at all attentive to the news or sports, they have been exposed to state universities (particularly flagships and land-grants) since before they even considered college.  Stuart Dorsey, the President of Texas Lutheran University put it this way to me in a conversation; "For a kid growing up in Texas, the first question about higher education they ask themselves is, 'Am I a Longhorn or an Aggie?'" State schools and religious universities enter the recruiting contest with an immense advantage, since they are not only more highly subsidized, but more frequently covered, more visible, larger, more famous, and more likely to be part of the everyday life of young people than are schools like Westminster.  They are giants, not just in enrollment, but in visibility, in reach, and in influence.

In this context, a school like Westminster is not just unknown but unfathomable.  So our first challenge, before we can work with a student on fit and affordability, is to figure out how to describe ourselves.

Our traditional way of doing it--"Institution X is a small, private, liberal arts college" is almost useless, since all of those terms are either weak, confusing,  compromised, or unattached from their historical meanings.  "Small," for example, is claimed by nearly every institution in the US (just look at how they market their average class size for an example).  Further, for students today, small carries as many negative connotations (no bigger than high school, boring) as positive.  "Private" is even worse, since it requires an immediate explanation of the legal  and educational difference between for-profit and not-for-profit institutions, and a quick distancing from the University of Phoenix, ITT Tech, etc.  "Liberal Arts" carries mixed meanings, with some equating it to general education and others to traditional approaches to learning.  And "college" is similarly confusing, since major universities contain colleges, and small institutions call themselves "universities." And none of the words convey any of the things that make such institutions distinctive or innovative.

So how can a place like Westminster describe itself so as to be both accurate and attractive?  Here are a few thoughts:

• Independent. Independence conveys three facts--all important and all desirable.  Independence suggests that the institution is beholden neither to church nor state. It points to the most important component of the traditional meaning of liberal arts, that it is the education necessary for free people.  And those two points open a meaningful conversation about why the cost of an education is higher at Westminster than at a particular state university--because it is self-funding, and because its educational goals include but go beyond employment.
• Interconnected. Interconnection suggests something good both about the curriculum--that its pieces are tied together--and about the life of the community, that set schools like Westminster apart from their competitors.  Large public universities have no such interconnected community--they have at best interest groups--and private or technical institutions have no desire to make their curricula add up to something bigger than the sum of their parts.
• School of higher learning. School is a rich word, one whose etymology suggests place, independent effort, and community.  Those meanings are both more varied and more precise than "college" or "university."  And "higher learning" locates the work of the school at a level of greater complexity and meaning than other school work, and puts the focus on learning, where it belongs, rather than on the scholarly bona fides of faculty or the institution's prominence, size, or image. 

It is true that "Westminster College [or any other such institution] is an independent, interconnected school of higher learning" sounds odd.  But the oddness of such a sentence is a good thing, since it pushes both the speaker and the hearer to recognize the oddness of the institution, its mission, and its location in the higher education landscape.  And that is certainly better than describing the institution using words that lack clarity and accuracy.  If we are going to move out from the shadow of giant institutions, some such language is essential.

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.

Early admit for regular students

Most colleges that offer early admission programs do it to attract top students.  It is a way both to ensure that top students enroll, and to indicate to them that they are, in fact, top students.  In the logic of enrollment management, these purposes, and the early admit process itself, make perfect sense.

But in the logic of student success, the students who need early admission most are not top students, who know how to do school, and who are likely to succeed wherever they enroll.  Instead, the students who need early admission are regular students--those who are at the median or below academically, and who have little experience with higher education.

The reason is this--the later a moderate or weak student is admitted and enrolls, the less the likelihood that they will be successful.  And if admission takes place after registration begins, the likelihood of success drops even more.  In short, students with a marginal academic background need more advising, more access to the right classes, and more time to integrate into college.

(And for those focused on revenue, since marginal students receive smaller merit scholarships, admitting and enrolling them early is a way of ensuring decent revenue.)

So if enrollment management has as its purpose student success in addition to prestige, building a class,  and revenue, then early admit programs ought to target students who will benefit most from it--not the stars, but the regular students.

Sharing the right data on student loans

Public discussion about student indebtedness is composed of three less than useful strands.  The first frets about the overall amount of student indebtedness, which has now topped 1 trillion dollars and surpassed the amount of credit card debt in the US. The second points to extreme cases of student debt, particularly for students in fields where salaries are low or uncertain. And the third tries to respond to the first two by reporting average amounts of student indebtedness.

Mixed together, the three fail to help families make good decisions because they are all true, but taken together provide an incomplete view of student indebtedness--one that is unlikely to apply at all to an individual student.  Let me propose that to help round out the picture of student debt, financial aid offices should provide these two pieces of data for students at their institutions:

• The range of student indebtedness. It should be a simple thing for schools to make a chart showing the range of student indebtedness, rather than just reporting the average amount of debt.  I suspect such a chart will be sobering both for those fretting about the student debt crisis (since a perishingly small proportion of students rack up huge amounts of debt), and for admissions officers at schools, since the median and the mode of indebtedness may in fact be higher than the average.
• Student debt by major. It is almost certainly the case that there are students in low-paying fields (history, for example), who have high student debt.  But the most common location of highly indebted students are graduate students in professional fields--law, business, healthcare.  At the undergraduate level, debt is closely related to time in school, so majors with high indebtedness are likely to be majors where it takes a long time to graduate.  Such data would help families make informed choices about borrowing in anticipation of future earning power.  And it would force institutions to reform the curricula of programs where student debt is higher because graduation is slower.

Why cities need higher education strategies

In the United States, almost all colleges are either state schools--that is, sponsored by a state government with the help of federal funding--or private schools.  Both state schools and private schools have geography problems, in that their masters (state governments and boards of trustees) and their locations (actual physical communities) do not align.

This is an obvious point.  But when coupled with another obvious point--that cities, not states or nations--are becoming the most important political geographic units on the planet, that obvious point needs a response.

The response is this: cities need higher education strategies.  Some cities (New York, and for a while longer San Francisco) sponsor universities.  But few cities have a bona fide plan that says: "Our city needs educated people in these fields to create a good society, and support civic life, and build our economy.  Therefore, we will be active in higher education in these ways..." One that has moved in that direction is Mesa, Arizona, which is inviting private non-profit colleges to set up shop within its boundaries. 

Benjamin Barber will be arguing in his new book that mayors should be much more important political figures than they are.  To that let me add this simple point: one of the most important thing a mayor of any city or town can do if s/he wants to live out the significance of the office, is develop a strategy for 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 most important fact about the future of higher education

Many things will be true about higher education; only some of those things will be important. If your school is concerned about the future of higher education, it must both figure out what makes a fact important (in my book important facts are those that, if acted upon, have the potential to change the whole institution), and which important facts your school wants to focus on.

The most important fact about the future of higher education is this: all students will be transfer students.  By this I mean two things: first, that an increasing proportion of students will approach an institution bringing transcripted credits with them, and second, that even more students will bring expertise with them that they have learned outside traditional institutions, but which must be transferred into their new campus if that campus is to be true to the student's learning and aspirations.

Here are several ways in which the fact that all students will be transfer students will transform higher education:

1. Traditional measures of success for access, retention, and graduation, will become obsolete. If most students bring credit with them, there is no such thing as a "freshman class," retention will not be controllable (since students will move easily among several institutions), and four-year graduation rates will mean very little, since few campuses will provide the entirety of a student's education.
2. The idea of a curriculum will be unstable. Curricula rely on students taking courses in sequence, or at least in an order required by the institution.  But transfer students will not join an institution with the same academic backgrounds, and so therefore won't want (or shouldn't want) to take courses in sequence.  Curricula must look like networks, not lines, and learning must include opportunities to make meaning of learning outside of a standardized sequence of courses.
3. The freshman year will be less important.  For the past two decades colleges and universities have focused on improving the first-year and placing distinctive programs in it.  But given the increasing number of students coming with credit and knowledge of varying sorts, the first year will be much less important than the last year, presumably the only time when most students at an institution will be able to have a common experience.
4. The most important skills for faculty will be aggregation, meaning-making, and certification, not teaching, learning, research, or any other currently popular aspects of pedagogy. It will fall to faculty to work with students to help them aggregate their prior learning from a variety of institutions and sources, make meaning out of it, add to that store of knowledge, and then certify that that knowledge adds up to something that can be carried along.
5. Colleges and universities will specialize more than ever before. If students are transferring knowledge and credits from many sources, only those institutions with identifiable specialties will be able to stand out among standardized options.
6. The most important alliances between institutions will be among unlike, not like, institutions. Currently nearly every alliance--athletic conferences, consortia, lobbying groups, faculty development networks, etc.--are among similar institutions.  Westminster is part of the New American Colleges and Universities, a consortium of institutions of similar size and programming.  The University of Utah has just joined the Pac-12 to be with schools more like it. But in a transfer world, schools will want to ally themselves with a network of differing institutions in order to maximize learning for (and revenue from) students.  We will see more formal alliances between community colleges and liberal arts colleges, research universities and teaching institutions, so that within a network of schools a student can get all the learning s/he desires, and individual campuses can contribute specific things of value to the learning of particular students.

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.

What does growing economic inequality mean for enrollment management?

The Occupy movement has coaxed economic inequality from a quiet, hidden corner of American civic discussion to the center.  By all measures, it is growing in the United States.  And it has sharpened the discussion about access, tuition rates, and the value of higher education.

The big questions about higher education are important ones.  In this post, I want to focus on something narrower, though--the impact of growing economic disparity on enrollment management.  This is a topic about which there has been little discussion, and about which there should be serious concern.  Here is why:

Growing economic inequality means three things:

1.  Children from families at the top of the economic heap will have ever greater educational opportunities because socio-economic status correlates with academic performance.  And in enrollment management, strong academic performance is linked directly to high discount rates, as schools compete for top students.
2. Children from families at the bottom of the economic heap, a growing proportion of American society, will require ever more need-based aid in order to go to college.  And in enrollment management, high need correlates to high discount rates, as schools try to make it possible for those students to attend college.
3. Therefore, enrollment managers will see increasing demand for both merit and need-based aid, and hence growing pressure on the discount rate from both ends of the spectrum.

The key question for enrollment managers, then, is how to face this dual challenge while bringing in enough revenue to meet the institution's need.  I don't know the answer, but I do suspect one thing--that schools who do it successfully will focus on narrowing the economic band from which they recruit students, because they can no longer count on one end subsidizing the other.

Does education come before employment?

That education precedes employment is a belief so widely held and loudly asserted that it must be, in significant ways, wrong.

And wrong it is.  Many young people work while in high school, even more work while in college--some as much as 40 hours a week.  This has also been the case historically--hence the academic calendar that affords students time off for the harvest.

But I am even more interested in ways that key movements for social change have made employment a precondition for education, not the other way around.

 Jane Addams' Hull House, and other social settlements, set themselves up to help factory workers make meaning out of their working lives by creating formal educational opportunities around the work schedules of their neighbors.

The Greyston Mandala, founded by Bernie Glassman, created a bakery to employ homeless people, and then wrapped Buddhist practice and education around that work. (For a great book on Greyston and its meaning-making, see Glassman's Instructions to the Cook.)

The Delancey Street Foundation takes recently released felons, employs them in its businesses, and uses that employment as a source of learning, of dignity, and direction.

And this recent Fast Company article on Homeboy Industries makes the same point--that regular employment is essential to rehabilitating prisoners, who can then take on a formal education, which expands and contextualizes the human changes that come through work.

All of these examples are of organizations that take people on the margins of society, helping them find "menial" jobs, and using that as the basis of rebuilding their lives.

All of which suggests that educators ought to be much more thoughtful about how their work relates to the work of their students, and build academic programs that are informed by the work lives of their students rather than seeing education as a way to escape the drudgery of labor.

Should service make things better?

The notion behind a typical service project or service-learning class is that acts of service, civic engagement, or activism take a flawed reality (homelessness, poverty, hunger, discrimination, etc.) and tries to move it towards an ideal (justice, equity, access, peace, etc.).

But consider these lines, from Shinso Ito, a master in the Shinnyo-en branch of Japanese Buddhism:

By channeling your energy into acts of service, you transform the ideal into the real.

Here, Ito is arguing that the "ideal" is that thing floating in our heads--some notion about how things are, or should be.  But since all is impermanence in Buddhism, that ideal in our heads is really getting in the way of our ability to perceive things as they are.  Service, he suggests, can strip away the falseness, both because it gets us out of the conversations running in our heads (in the way that meditation aims to do) and because it introduces us physically to a reality that does not get experienced otherwise.

So what are civic engagement practitioners to learn from Ito's argument?  To be humble in the face of reality.  To trust that when service leads someone to say they have been changed in ways they cannot describe, they are telling the truth, not being superficial. And to be skeptical of efforts to respond to abstract problems in abstract ways.  "Service" does not help "homelessness." But people can work together in ways that helps them see the world real, and as they remake that world, remake themselves as well.

Why colleges should track credits to graduation, not time to graduation

Let me make four obvious statements:

1. Improving graduation rates is essential for colleges, for society, and for individual students;
2. The current measures--particularly time-to-graduation and 4-year graduation rates--describe things that are, to some significant extent, out of the hands of colleges;
3. Because they are out of the hands of colleges, campus efforts to improve graduation rates get mired in debates about measurement, or frustration at the futility of trying to change something over which we have little control;
4. Such a sense of futility impedes our ability to improve.

So in lieu of time-to-graduation, or 4-year graduation rates, let me propose that colleges measure their effectiveness through credits-to-graduation.  There are a couple of obvious benefits to this measure:

• All schools mandate a minimum number of credit hours to graduation
• Credit hours to graduation describes something over which campuses have significant control
• The measure is comparable across campuses (at least when expressed as a proportion, i.e that students at college Y require 1XX% of their minimum credit hour requirement in order to graduate.)
• The credit hour measure ties directly to the cost for students, since they pay by the credit hour, not by the year.

The right questions about cutting tuition

Mount Holyoke announced recently that it would not raise tuition for the 2012-2013 academic year. The announcement drew the typical coverage--some meandering thoughts about college cost and boilerplate assurances from the institution itself that it is dedicated to responding to rising college costs and making its brand of education accessible to a broader public.

That is all well and good, but if we are going to take the cost of college seriously, then the institutions who freeze or cut tuition and the people who write about them need to get much more serious about explaining the contexts and purposes of their decisions (as do the people who raise tuition, but that is for another post).

At the very least, any reporter covering the announcement of a tuition freeze or cut should ask the following:

• Is the reduction in tuition costs accompanied by reductions in institutional aid?
• Is it accompanied by changes in enrollment goals, or put another way, are you making up the difference by enrolling more students?
• How do you expect the reduction of tuition to effect the school's revenue in the coming year?
• Are you reducing expenditures in the coming year?  If so, which ones?  What are you doing with faculty and staff salaries?
• Do you really believe that a reduction in tuition makes your school accessible to students who would not otherwise be able to afford it?  What evidence do you have?
• What steps are you taking to ensure that the quality of the education you provide improves?
• Why cut tuition instead of doing other things to reduce costs to students--i.e. speeding up time to graduation, reducing room and board costs, enrolling more transfer students from community colleges, increasing funding for students to work on campus?

Absent answers to these questions, I can't help but think that a tuition freeze or cut is more about publicity than improving access, reducing cost, and ensuring an excellent education to all students.

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.

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.

Can higher education be anti-poverty?

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

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

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

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

Can small colleges support a small future?

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

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

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

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

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