In Praise of Business Education

These are, we are told, dark days for business education.  The economic downturn has been laid at the feet of business schools too caught up in teaching theory to inculcate ethics.  Employers complain that business schools fail to provide them with students who can complete the most basic tasks--writing clearly, speaking well, working with others.  And most recently, business schools are bearing the brunt of the criticism growing out of Academically Adrift, which suggests that standards are low, teaching is poor, students are unmotivated, and that business fields have become the major of last resort for students hoping to slip through college without troubling themselves to learn.

As a historian serving for this year as the Dean of the Bill and Vieve Gore School of Business at Westminster College, I have three responses to these complaints:

 First, at least during my entire education career, business schools have been magnets for these sorts of complaints.  My fellow history majors looked down their noses at business school students who just wanted to get through and get paid.  Later, when I became a faculty member, my colleagues and I looked with jealousy at the big salaries paid to business school faculty and graduates.  And we complained in the halls about the business students in our general education classes who could not find a passion for important things like the social history of British colonies in the Americas.

Second, many of the supposed faults of business schools--large classes, lecture-oriented teaching, disengaged students, shrinking amounts of homework--were not pioneered by business schools.  Instead they are the creation of colleges and universities enamored of what John Tagg calls "the instruction paradigm"--an approach to education that focuses entirely on educational efficiency, or in other words, getting as many students as possible into and out of classes.  Sir Ken Robinson's recent speech (made into a video that has gone viral) is only the latest demonstration of the soul-killing futility of such a model of schooling.

Third, these criticisms of business schools miss both the innovations in business education that are now leading change in higher education, and the new generation of business students who are transforming the goals and curricula of business schools across the United States.

Let me start with business students.  While there are certainly students who have selected business because it is an "easy" major (in the same way that students fall into other "easy" majors--sociology, english, history--pick your favorite) the business students I have met at Westminster tend to be ambitious, focused, and intent on improving the world they find themselves in.  Fifteen years ago when I started leading civic engagement efforts on college campuses, I was most likely to attract students from the social sciences.  Today, those students come from business.  They have discovered the transformational power of social entrepreneurship, they understand the way that the world is a complex system, and they believe that business fields are the ones best prepared to empower them (and their fellow-citizens) to respond to the economic, environmental, and educational crises before us. 

Nor are all business students upper-middle class white kids intent on maintaining their status through high-paying jobs.  Business is a field that attracts non-traditional students, first-generation college attenders, students of color, and others who are looking for a way to craft better lives for themselves.

In business schools that are paying attention to changes in education and the business world, those students are met with curricula and pedagogy that are as good or better than that found anywhere else in the university.  Here is what I mean:

Outcomes--Many academic programs are designed around classes and then, almost as an afterthought, they add desired outcomes.  Many business programs are designed with the outcomes in mind, and then the learning experiences are built to lead students to those outcomes.  In the Gore School, our MBA was built after long conversations with alumni and local business leaders led us to agree on a set of outcomes.  Then the courses were built to add up to those outcomes.  The result is a curriculum that reinforces itself, where every class adds to student understanding of a range of topics, not just a single subject. When we have learned about gaps in student performance, as with writing a few years ago, we have adjusted the curriculum to respond.

More radically, in recent years we have created two project-based programs, where rather than taking courses, students work through a series of projects.  Those projects lead them to the outcomes.  The programs are competency-based.  That is, students graduate when they can demonstrate competency in all of the program areas.  No competency, no graduation.  The result is programs where students can demonstrate their business acumen, not just demonstrate that they have taken courses on business topics.

Pedagogy--While many business (and non-business) schools use traditional lectures as their teaching method, more and more of them, including Westminster, focus on teaching that leads to learning.  By this I mean that our courses require students to get a hands-on learning experience.  They work through cases, do live consulting projects, build businesses, serve internships, and solve real-world problems.  They can do this because their faculty are both academically qualified and experienced in the business world.  Our students may not be able to rattle off complex formulae or theories at the drop of a hat.  But all of them graduate with real experience in the business world.

Relationships--While it is not the case that small class sizes guarantee excellent learning, at Westminster we have been able to use small class sizes to build strong relationships among students and between students and faculty.  The result is a learning environment where no student can hide, and where no student is ignored.  This is good educational practice, to be sure.  But it is also good business practice.  In a work world where more and more jobs require people to work in teams, to respond to complex problems, and to innovate rather than replicate what has been done in the past, an education focused on ensuring both support and accountability is essential.

I do not mean to suggest that Westminster, or any business school, has "solved" the problem of business education.  Nor do I mean to suggest that all of the critiques of business schools and business students are wrong.  But I do think that the sort of education that good business schools provide their students is the sort of education that all students need.  The proof, perhaps, is in the results.  Last year, accountants with a Westminster undergraduate business degree passed the CPA exam at higher rates than students from any other school in Utah.  Westminster's D.A. Davidson investment team consistently is one of the top five in the US at making gains in the stock market.  And for the past two years, Gore School of Business seniors have significantly outperformed expectations on the CLA--the very assessment tool which has sparked the furor about business education in Academically Adrift.

These are small things all.  And the number of students participating in each is too small to generalize about all Gore School of Business students as a whole.  But at the very least they suggest that not all business education is broken.  In fact, it may be very good indeed.

Why are liberal arts colleges expensive when the liberal arts aren't?

NITLE just held a conference on the uses of technology in the liberal arts.  One key theme of the conference was that liberal arts colleges are headed for disaster because their business model is broken.  Inside Higher Ed's summary of this conference theme is full of the language of crisis.  NITLE's hope, of course, is that technology can help reduce the cost of education at these schools, and therefore save them. (Because, presumably, without liberal arts colleges people would cease to learn the liberal arts.  A questionable assumption, but the theme for another post.)

But what the article seems not to ask is this: Why are liberal arts colleges expensive when the liberal arts aren't?  After all, the lowest labor costs are to be found in liberal arts disciplines: a historian is cheaper than a finance professor; an english prof earns less than a PhD in nursing.  The liberal arts require no costly infrastructure (except for the sciences, but the goals of science in higher ed are so far from the liberal arts that they hardly belong in the same institution).  Because of the sort of practices that lead to learning in the liberal arts--discussion, writing, service-learning, group projects, etc.--it is conceivable that classes in the liberal arts could have larger enrollments than those in professional disciplines and achieve the same learning value. And because of the focus on human development in the liberal arts traditions, student support infrastructure could be less costly.

So the short answer to the question is this: Liberal arts colleges are costly because they aren't really liberal arts colleges. That is, over the years, liberal arts colleges have adopted the budgets, infrastructures, faculty roles, aspirations, and curricular specialization of comprehensive or research universities.

These things are almost impossible to put off once a school adopts them.  And so the alarms sounded at NITLE and in many other venues are likely to be true. There will be liberal arts colleges that die because students can't afford them.  But there is irony here, because once liberal arts colleges die, their place in the market could easily be filled--by liberal arts colleges.

The perils of prestige

This article, in the Washington Monthly's outstanding College Guide, tells the story of George Washington University's rise from an affordable private university in a dreary DC neighborhood to one of the most expensive universities in the United States.

GW's story is one that gets played out in smaller degree on campuses across the US.  In order to attract more students, colleges and universities build new buildings, form new teams, hire more faculty, and mimic the goals and cultures of the richest, most prestigious campuses in the US.  The result is, on the one hand, rising prestige, and on the other, rising costs.

There are all sorts of reasons to wonder about the wisdom of a prestige-focused path to institutional success.  Most of them are obvious--there isn't a bottomless pool of families able to afford such schooling, and moves towards prestige don't necessarily lead to better learning are two of the most compelling.

But a third is equally important--in nearly every instance, colleges and universities on the prestige track give up focus and mission for prominence.  (The story about GW is full of such losses of focus.)  This need not be the case, of course.  A campus could seek prominence by offloading all programs that are unlikely to attract attention, or by getting rid of all departments that are unlikely to become nationally prominent. 

That schools do not seek prominence through focus teaches us a couple of things about American higher education.  First, the pursuit of prestige is really a form of hedging bets, of trying out lots of things in the hope that some will be successful.  Second, while apologists for higher ed in the US like to point out the "diversity" of institution types, there is really only one that matters for prestige--the research university.  You can have big ones or small ones, but if you want a prestigious campus you need new buildings, a wide range of programs, faculty who publish a lot, and outcomes that are as much about prominence in and connection to the world of wealth as they are about learning.

That world of wealth and prominence is in key ways a zero-sum game--only so many people get to play. And so the prestige path is likely to be a winner for a few campuses and a loser for lots more.  But without alternative models of success in higher ed, colleges and university leaders anxious to improve the lot of their schools will struggle to propose something other than the things that George Washington University has done so well.

on-campus work and retention

This year, as every year, our campus is looking at retention.  Our institutional retention rate has crept up over the past several years; it was 79% last year, our best number ever.  As we break down the data, there are two factors that predict retention more than any others--level of previous academic performance, and working on-campus.

Previous academic performance is no surprise, since it tracks with what we know about success in college--if you have done well in school in the past (which is often a factor of high socio-economic status and family culture) you are likely to do well in the future, and likely to say in school.

But on-campus work is different.  It doesn't depend on high SES.  (In fact, getting a job on campus often depends on having a lower-than-average SES). It is a factor that the school itself can control.  Compared with the expense of other retention efforts, it may be relatively cheap.  And work can, in fact, have a meaningful impact on learning.  (Westminster has begun requiring all on-campus jobs to specify how the job helps students achieve the college's learning goals.)

Students who work on campus at Westminster as freshmen are 6 to 10 percent more likely to be retained than students as a whole.  On-campus work isn't a panacea.  Schools in the Work Colleges Consortium (where all students work) have retention rates that range from 36% to 82%.  But a campus interested in investing in retention would be wise to put its money in student jobs.

Why are there no reality shows about education?

It struck me part-way through watching my third consecutive episode of Swamp People that while there are reality shows about alligator hunters, junk buyers, truck drivers, coupon cutters, and pawn shop owners (actually two shows here) there are no reality shows about education.

If you are among the many that believe reality shows are a sign of the impending cultural apocalypse, or if you believe education is too serious of a topic to be serialized on the History Channel, then this news must cheer you.

 But if you are a fan of reality TV, or if you like the way reality shows take overlooked parts of society, show the nuttiness of the people who inhabit it, and then demonstrate how that nuttiness is in fact part of a lifestyle that has meaning and dignity, then the fact that you can't spend a season tracking the progress of Ms. Johnson's 8th grade  pre-algebra class, or sitting in on the weekly meeting of Dean's Council must make you wonder.

I don't have some Great Theory of Culture that explains this fact.  And there is a lot of media attention to education, both in a fictionalized (Glee, High School Musical) and documentary (Waiting for Superman) format, not to mention the endless discussions about fixing education that emerge any time a legislature sits or an executive stops trying to solve the worlds problems long enough to focus on our own.

But the absence of reality shows about something like education, where every day teachers face the equivalent of surprisingly dangerous alligators and discover a human analogue of the $10,000 guitar hidden behind a pile of junk, must have some explanation.  I would love to see yours.

Here is mine.  Both reality show producers and education leaders believe that education is too important to show on television.  For reality show producers the question goes like this: Why would we produce a show that might turn out to have an unhappy ending?  For education leaders it is the same question, asked a different way: Why would we trivialize something as serious as the crisis of education by putting it on TV?

Behind both of these questions is an assumption that education is broken, and only major, systemic overhauls can do something positive.  No one wants to relax to that on TV.

But we know that many parents are  satisfied about their kids' education, even when that kid is enrolled in a "failing" school  (it is the equivalent to the case that while most Americans distrust congress, most like their own representative).  And we know that educational success is tied to a bunch of context-specific things--home life, access to books, the enthusiasm of the teacher--that don't give themselves easily to system-wide fixes.

It is exactly those context-specific things that make reality shows interesting.  So if we see several education reality shows emerging on TV in the years to come, it will be a sign that education leaders and media producers have come to better understand education as something like hunting alligators--hard, interesting work done by people who aspire simply to decent lives and the chance to do what they love with people they like.  That would be a good sign.

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

Over the past couple of years I have blogged several times about what it would take to start a college or university today:

Here and here I posted about the notion of "Charter Universities"--where states would adopt the model used for charter schools to encourage innovators to provide higher education as well.

Here I mused about whether an "emergent" model of change could lead to the creation of a college.

This essay noted some of the "mysteries' in education--things we don't currently do well--and proposed ways to arrange a school that made money by responding to them.  And this one wondered how you could monetize learning as opposed to classes.  These posts have mused about ways to make use of open learning resources.  And this one suggested that private universities ought to start junior colleges.

Having said all this, there are essentially 3 big barriers to starting a college or university today.  The first is the cost associated with building a campus.  Even schools like the  University of Phoenix that rent their buildings have significant space costs.  And the cost of building a new campus, especially one that includes science, would be enormous.  The second is accreditation.  Without accreditation, students cannot get federal financial aid, and without accreditation, diplomas have almost no meaning.  But getting accredited means many years of work, years during which whatever students you can gather have to take it on trust that their expenditures will produce something that has meaning.

People who have responded to these two issues have often done it by focusing on supporting learning online.  The most famous example today is Khan Academy--a learning center than began on YouTube and now boasts thousands of videos on discrete topics in math, science, and other areas.  Khan Academy has hundreds of thousands of fans, and just got an infusion of money and support from Bill Gates.

But these free online learning models have not resolved the accreditation problem, and in fact aren't really interested in becoming colleges or universities.  And they often run on a non-profit model, where they rely for funding on donations.

All of which makes the recent re-launch of Learnable.com more interesting.  Learnable is the first site I've seen that allows producers of learning content to get paid by the users of that content.

 Looked at one way, Learnable is like Etsy.com, a site that allows craftspeople to sell their wares.  Looked at another way, though, it is a combination learning management system and back office for a college or university.  With Learnable, then, a group of people who want to start an actual college or university have access to the resources to run the school, manage the courses, and handle much of the financial end of the business.  I wouldn't be surprised to see new, small colleges and universities pop up on Learnable, either as a supplement to regular face-to-face courses, or as the platform for their entire institutions.

Do incentives for organizations work better than incentives for individuals?

In the past week the Department of Education has clamped down on one sort of incentive for enrolling students in college and increased support for another.  Taken together, the two moves make we wonder whether incentives are better at the individual or organizational level.

In this "Dear Colleague" letter, the Department of Ed ruled that it is improper for colleges and universities to provide financial incentives to employees for recruiting and enrolling students.  Among the activities that cannot be incentivized are:
Targeted information dissemination to individuals; Solicitations to individuals; Contacting potential enrollment applicants; aiding students in filling out enrollment application information (p.8)

These rules, and others related to financial aid in the same document are a response to a scandal that blew up a couple years ago in which ethical lapses in providing financial aid grew out of cozy relationships between financial aid officers and private lenders.

Four days after offering this guidance, Ed announced a competition for nearly 200 million dollars in grants to encourage colleges and universities to enroll, retain, and graduate more students from college.  The NYTimes article announcing the grant was called, "Incentives Offered to Raise College Graduation Rates."

In noting the almost-simultaneous banning and encouraging of incentives I am not trying to make a point about inconsistency in the Department of Education.  Instead I am wondering about the proper location of incentives.

Some recent work by Dan Pink and separately by Barry Schwartz argues that incentives are relatively ineffective at getting individuals to behave well over an extended period of time.  At the same time, donors are offering ever larger prizes to organizations that can solve problems, be it creating a privately funded space ship or raising high school graduation rates.

One wonders, then, about what incentives do for organizations that they do not do for individuals.  Are organizations more likely to behave ethically with incentive money than individuals?  Do incentives to organizations lead to sustainable changes in behavior when they do not for individuals?  (Here the evidence would seem to say no, at least as indicated by the number of good educational innovations that disappear as soon as outside funding disappears.)  Is the impact of incentive money weakened in organizations since it is distributed broadly, while it is focused in individuals?  And finally, can donors and funders expect that incentives will bring about the sort of changes they hope to see?