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.

Getting college rankings right

This recent Inside Higher Ed essay, like many before it, calls for colleges and universities to reject US News and World Report (USNWR) college rankings. What it does not acknowledge is that the presence of these rankings, and their disappearance, serve the same three types of institutions: highly prestigious institutions who look great in the rankings, state research I institutions who are the schools of choice because of their prominence, size, athletics, and alumni bases, and open access institutions whose students select them without regard for rankings.

The rest of us don't have the luxury of abandoning the rankings because they allow us to communicate things about our campuses which are otherwise hidden to prospective students and their families.  So while some schools can ignore or cater to rankings as it pleases them, we need to figure out how to get college rankings right.

Three suggestions on moving beyond quixotic campaigns against USNWR:

1. Provide the data that parents want in a clear, comparable fashion.  When I talk to parents at recruiting events they always ask about these things: retention rates, graduation rates, the percentage of students who go on to graduate school, the medical school acceptance rate, and the average student loan debt upon graduation.  These points of data should be at the fingertips of all admissions staffers at every institution, and the organizations that oversee higher education accountability should make them easily accessible on key websites.
2. Be transparent with the important data that colleges usually hide.  Schools create and consume huge amounts of assessment data which is standardized across campuses but rarely shared publicly.  College presidents should have the courage to post their NSSE results, their CLA results, and their accreditation self-studies on their websites.  And NSSE, CLA, and the regional accreditors need to find better ways of using the data the request and gather to encourage campuses to publicly show evidence of improvement over time. (I've made this point before at greater length here).
3. Focus on outcomes. While USNWR rankings are regularly criticized for being input focused, and some of the other major rankings--Princeton Review, for example--are criticized for ranking students on things that hardly matter for learning, there are rankings that pay attention to the outcomes of college educations.  The best in my view are the rankings in the Washington Monthly annual college guide.  There the inputs drop away and what is left is evidence of a school's ability to increase the likelihood of graduation, and its influence on the public minded-ness of its graduates.  If I were a college president, I would want the institution I served to do everything it could to climb in those rankings, because they represent the sorts of things that students, parents, and civil society ought to care about in higher education.

Community-organizing as a conservative act

This BBC article tells the story of one community organizer working to re-establish healthy communities in the UK. The key commitment of her work--not to do something for members of the community that they can do for themselves--comes straight from Saul Alinsky, the radical bugaboo of the GOP primary season.  (FWIW, two great books on Alinsky-style community organizing: Upon this Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church, and Dry Bones Rattling, both of which are essential reading for understanding how communities can rebuild their institutions and themselves.)

The irony, of course, is that in the UK this community organizing effort is sponsored by the Conservative government, as part of its Big Society effort--a movement to create civic infrastructure to do work that the state cannot, will not, or should not do.

American Conservatives have forgotten that community restoration is a key conservative activity, one that preserves traditions of liberty and self-help while knitting individuals together into  fellow-citizens.  Now it may be the case that the Big Society already exists in the US, so Conservatives can go ahead and dismantle the state without worry for the well-being of communities and the preservation of tradition.  But I doubt it.

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 "community," not curriculum, be higher ed's best response to poverty?

It is a given among the policy classes that higher education is essential for economic improvement because people with college degrees earn more money than those without.  This view, while true as far as it goes, turns discussion of the value of higher education in two directions--cost and curriculum. So if a degree can be completed inexpensively, and in a field where there are employment opportunities, higher ed will have done its job by preparing students for economic well-being.

Ross Douthat's recent review of Charles Murray's Coming Apart makes a point that higher education leaders ought to consider in light of our increasing obligation to be engines of economic well-being.  Douthat writes that:

"Even acknowledging all the challenges (globalization, the decline of manufacturing, mass low-skilled immigration) that have beset blue collar America over the last thirty years, it is still the case that if you marry the mother or father of your children, take work when you can find it and take pride in what you do, attend church and participate as much as possible in the life of your community, and strive to conduct yourself with honesty and integrity, you are very likely to not only escape material poverty, but more importantly to find happiness in life."

Traditionally, colleges and universities have concerned themselves with some of the behaviors that Douthat cites above. But that attention has diminished over time, particularly as it has to do with making long-term commitments, finding fulfillment in work, attending church, and foregrounding values like honesty and integrity.  That higher ed should care about these things ought to be obvious from our roots in helping students to become something.  And it should be assumed in higher education's commitment to civic engagement.  But if we needed any additional impulse to favor these behaviors, let it be that they also contribute to economic well-being.  And inasmuch as the programs that attend to these concerns reside in the co-curriculum, then it is the co-curriculum--the site of community-building on most campuses--that deserves as much attention as the curriculum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can Democracy Upset the Structures of Higher Education?

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.