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.

Is your school more like a newspaper or a pub?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Priceline model for choosing a college

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blogs to love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do we get there from here?

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

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

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

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

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

Public schools are dead, long live public education?

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

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

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

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

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