What kind of business is enrollment management?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you innovate and focus at the same time?

You can't bump into an education sage or a political pundit without hearing that the United States needs to be more innovative.  Steve Jobs was hailed as a heroic innovator at his death, Arne Duncan is calling for innovation in fixing college costs, Colorado's Governor John Hickenlooper has created an innovation initiative, and President Obama has argued that America must innovate its way out of our economic doldrums.

Institutions of higher education are particularly susceptible to the innovation argument, because they are under fire for being irrelevant, because they are the major location for research in the American economy, and because they have an overwhelming desire to distinguish themselves from each other.  But there are at least four major concerns with pushing innovation as a major value in education.

1. Confusion--though colleges and universities talk about innovation--renewing an older thing to make it better and more meaningful--they often are hoping for invention--the creation of something almost entirely new.  The conflation of innovation and invention means that small innovations often lack the appeal and funding they would need to get established, while big sparkly new things get the go-ahead on the basis of their inventiveness.
2. Integration--as my colleague Ian Symmonds has pointed out, without integration, innovations will lose their luster, remain isolated,and eventually wither rather than change the institution.  But unless institutions are purposeful about integration, it doesn't happen. 
3. Leadership--Often innovation is associated with a leader (think Steve Jobs again) rather than an institution or a set of processes.  But as with other large institutions, higher education leaders come and go.  If innovations are tied to them, or sparked largely in their offices, the spirit of innovation may leave with them, or take on their own idiosyncrasies.
4. Focus--At the same time that schools are being called on to innovate, quieter voices are calling on them to focus.  There is logic in this call, since without focus, many schools on limited budgets will fail to allocate resources wisely or pursue risky new activities to their detriment.  And in a crowded market, institutions that lack focus will get lost. Unfortunately, higher ed loves the lack of focus (we even have a name for it--the university).  But as Jim Collins argues in How the Mighty Fall, lack of focus is one of the major sins that lead healthy organizations to collapse.

Can organizations innovate and focus at the same time?  Of course they can, but to do so, they have to have a particular sort of innovation discipline.  The sources of innovation--those institutions, ideas, passions, practices that the institution will apply to a new context--have to be focused as well.

Here is what I mean.  Innovation is essentially taking something old and reworking it to be something new.  If an institution goes to the same few sources as birthplaces of its innovations, it can count on the innovations having at least some focus at the end.  So if a religious university wants to innovate it should comb the memories, writings, speeches, and histories of its religious tradition, looking for some idea that is analogous to the current situation.  If a teaching college wants to innovate and focus it needs to go back to the same well again and again--the same philosophers of education, say, or the same peer institutions, or the same sort of pedagogy.

Here Apple and Steve Jobs are instructive.  They have few products, all with the same look, feel, and appeal.  They have been innovative to be sure, but their focus is even more impressive.  Few colleges and universities have that same sort of limited product line and common design.  Instead they work incessantly on creating a brand--a logo, a color scheme, a tagline--to somehow make it seem like their sprawling programs and new initiatives feel like they come from the same place.  Most brands cannot live up to that task.

Pop-up colleges

For at least the past seven years, retailers and restaurants have been attracted to the pop-up store model. Pop-up, or flash shops allow shop owners to try out new merchandise, new locations, or new designs.  And since they are cheap to create and temporary by nature, they allow for experimentation in a way that a traditional store would not.

In the meantime, most colleges and universities continue to offer academic programs in much the same way they have in the past.  This is not, by definition, a bad thing.  But the difficulty of radically overhauling an academic program, getting rid of one that no longer has a market, or starting a new one in rapid response to student demand puts colleges and universities consistently behind demand for new programs.  In the past this misalignment was not tremendously damaging for higher education because there were no external competitors.  But with the availability of free instruction and cutting-edge content on the internet, colleges and universities face the prospect of losing out on the intellectual leadership in new fields.

So why not create a pop-up college--a school composed of teams of faculty who create new academic programs, recruit students, run two or three cohorts through the program with the plan to close it down after, say, five cohorts, and then take a year off to develop a new program and another to recruit new cohorts into it.

The financial model would require that the school save enough money over the life of a cohort to survive two years without income from the particular faculty team.  The academic model would require faculty to be generalists and learning facilitators, not primarily disciplinary specialists.  The programs would have to be deliverable in generic spaces, not spaces that require a particular design. Accreditation would be tough. But the downsides from these criteria would be offset by the possibility for innovation, deep learning, and meaningful collaboration among faculty.

I am not suggesting that all (or even many) colleges and universities ought to pursue pop-up education.  But I  expect that faculty who get it right could create a new school that delivered high quality learning at reasonable cost and innovated in design, delivery, and administration of the school.

Reflections as America's dullest higher education blog reaches 5000 page views

Learning at Westminster has reached a milestone of sorts--5000 page views.  Of course for the big league blogs 5000 page views come before breakfast.  For me it has taken since July 2009.

This is no surprise--I've mostly used this blog as a place to reflect on trends in education, make connections between my work and the non-education stuff I'm reading, and try to figure out what my future (and the future of higher education) looks like.  Over two years I've posted nearly 200 mini-essays, and written over 100,000 words.  Here is what I have learned:

1. Learning is in danger. Most of the major forces shaping higher education--technology, the cost debate, questions about access, funding danger, and the political climate--are focused on delivering information more efficiently, more effectively, or in a more relevant way.  And the force that has the closest link to learning--assessment--is in danger of becoming so rigidly focused on measuring a pre-determined set of outcomes that it overlooks both the importance of growth and the possibility that important things will happen to learners that cannot be predicted.

Fortunately, while learning seems to be slipping out of education, there are more and more ways to learn outside of school.  Blogs, mash-ups, the growth in social networks, the re-emergence of home-based manufacturing, the ease with which you can record your own music are all things that support learning and do it in a much more open, student-directed, verifiable way than what happens in schools.  What is happening in religion may be what is happening in schooling as well.  More and more people are spiritual seekers, fewer are going to church, so churches are in decline.  More and more people are learners; is the future of schools like the recent past of churches?

2. Schooling needs a metaphor that works.  A great deal of talk about education is built around explicit or implicit metaphors--schools are like newspapers, or factories, or businesses or price bubbles.  I'm not sure that any of them fit.  But without a way of thinking of ourselves that inspires some confidence and gives some direction, schools will be swallowed by their metaphors.

3. There is lots of room for innovation.  Technology isn't the savior, but it does make it possible to start or re-shape schools so that they focus on what the school does best.  I expect that the next major trend in higher education and high schools will be specialized schools where students complete general education online and the classroom focused learning is all about the school's specialty--the humanities or music or entrepreneurship or whatever.  Schools like that can be cheap, fast, and excellent.  And they can be started by subject-matter experts.  I'm not necessarily sanguine about this future, since I care deeply about the civic role of schools and about general education.  But I would love to start a school focused on innovation and creativity (which I think are two of the four  key civic virtues, along with contemplation and humility)

4. The barriers to entry for higher education are falling.  There are really only two that matter any more--the certification of learning (that is, proving that the learning that takes place in some new schooling venture is real), and the matter of accreditation.  These barriers are two aspects of the same characteristic of higher education--social prestige.  That is, the diploma and accreditation bear weight because they have social standing.  It is assumed that a diploma from the University of (insert your preferred state or private institution here) is better than a diploma from Bob's Start-Up University; and that regional accreditation guarantees that fact.  I am not suggesting that that is not the case.  I am saying, though, that if I were a registrar or an accreditor I would be pushing for my peers to do more to show evidence that those things are true, because I predict that the social status on which diplomas and accreditation rest will crumble in the coming years.

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?

Struggling students are like...

If you have been around higher ed for long you have been through the debate about whether we should think about students as customers.  The debate (like most on-going topics) usually provides more heat than light.

But I've been thinking about that metaphor as I have spent time in the past few months working with students who have gotten cross-wise with the college (be it because of academic dishonesty, grade disputes, or any of the myriad other ways that students and campuses have a falling out).

In these instances, the student as customer metaphor just doesn't work.  It doesn't imply the sort of commitment on the part of either the student or the campus that makes it possible for the parties to work out their difficulties.  Other typical metaphors aren't any better.  Thinking of students as learners runs aground because most of the disputes are about the failure of students (or their teachers) to achieve learning.  For this reason, thinking about students solely as learners ends up in a determination that one party or the other has failed--hardly the sort of outcome that leads to a solution (as opposed to a resolution) of the problem.

So I have turned increasingly to thinking about students as employees. (Perhaps it is a sign that working with the Gore School of Business has influenced my orientation to education.  (Not a bad thing at all, in my view.))  On the surface this is a stupid metaphor, since students pay us to go to college, not the other way around.  But the student as employee metaphor is an old way to think about education--it is the apprenticeship model of education for an apprentice-less age.  And given that at most institutions, student tuition doesn't cover the full costs of educating the student, it isn't far fetched to consider that the institution (or the state's) investment in the student's learning enables us to think that students work for the college and its funders as much as we work for them.

Thinking about a struggling student as an employee forces us to consider what we can do to both raise the quality of his/her work and to fix our own problems.  (At least at businesses with a quality employee development program this is exactly how they think about their relationship with employees.)  It implies a long-term commitment  (interestingly, the median time to graduation and the median time at a certain employer is about the same).  And thinking about them as employees requires us to consider where they fit best in an organization, moving them around until we get the best use of their talents and they make the biggest contribution, and ensuring that opportunities for growth are available to all of them.

All of these things--raising the quality of the student's work and the institution's work, making a long-term commitment to their well-being, and finding the right place for them--happen to be hallmarks of good student development practice as well.  So perhaps by borrowing a metaphor from the business world we can strengthen the practices of colleges and universities that are already aligned with getting the best out of a student by giving that student our best in return.

The geography of extra work

This has been a season for thinking about extra work in higher education.  We are hiring adjuncts for fall--many of them in the Bill and Vieve Gore School of Business are executives who also teach a course or two.  At the college, nearly every adjunct also has another job (or two, or three).  New projects that pop up have to be taken on by existing employees--it is too late to do searches for fall (hence my second job as Interim Dean).  Faculty are finding projects to supplement their incomes--consulting, facilitating meetings, joining new initiatives, etc.

Though these types of extra work are disparate, they share two characteristics.  First, they all use pay as an incentive to encourage people to take on work that is not in their main job description.  A small point to be sure, but one that is increasingly common in higher education, where a little bit of pay is the central form of encouragement to try new things.

Second, when people talk about this type of work, they always use a geographical metaphor.  They are doing work "on top of" their regular assignments.  Or they are doing the additional work "on the side." Or they are picking up work "here and there."

What does this connection between geography and work mean?  It seems to indicate that whatever our jobs, we conceive of them in space--the assignments in a geographical relationship to each other (as opposed, I guess, to temporal relationships or relationships based on priority.)  It also means that this extra work is just that--extra, not part of the core of what we do.

I am particularly intrigued by the use of the phrase "on the side."  It has had negative connotations. Consider, for example, the way we say that an unfaithful spouse has a lover "on the side" or the connotation that side-work is secondary. But the phrase is getting some rehabilitation in the call for faculty to move from being "Sage[s] on the stage" to "guide[s] on the side." In that use of the phrase, being on the side is a good thing, something that allows others (students) to take responsibility for their work.

I wonder if there is possibility in that use for all of us who take on work "on the side."  It is worth asking whether there is anything in the view of work encapsulated in "guide on the side' that suggests how we can do extra work.  Perhaps as work moves more to the side the person responsible must be more facilitative than directive.  Or perhaps where several people are working on side projects, we would be wise to follow the model of collaborative work on the internet, where, to use Clay Shirky's phrase, we contribute from our cognitive surplus to projects of which no one is in charge.  Or it could simply suggest that the more work we do on the side, the less centered our work is, for good or ill.

Black Swans and Blue Grasshoppers

By now the term “Black Swan” is part of common parlance, gaining a toehold in American English with the financial crisis and subsequent publication of Nassim Taleb's book of that title. A black swan is an event that no one predicted, but after its occurrence seems to have been inevitable. Tagging something as a black swan seems to serve two purposes: to indicate how complex the recent past has been, and to embark on an effort to turn that complexity into something understandable by explaining how the black swan appeared. So Black swan-ing is everywhere it seems—in the effort to explain the meltdown of the derivative markets and block its re-occurrance, in the explanation of the Gulf Oil spill and our response, in any event where someone in power vows “never again.”

Blue grasshopper events are less noted in the culture at large. I’m taking the term from Lewis Richmond’s book, Work as a Spiritual Practice. In its first chapter he tells the story of a blue grasshopper that arrived in the middle of a sesshin, and proceeded to slowly make its way across the zendo. It eventually encountered a statue of the Buddha, climbed its body, alighting on the head of the Enlightened One. The grasshopper seemed to change things, to portend something, though the change and the meaning were complex, unsettled, and thus worthy of repeated reflection.

I’ve been wondering about the roles of Black Swans and Blue Grasshoppers in learning. Black Swans change curricula. Business schools across the world are scrambling to respond to the lessons of the financial crisis—beefing up ethics programs, improving the quantitative skills of students, retraining executives in hard-to-grasp corners of the economy. Colleges and universities will ramp up immediately to respond to the Gulf Crisis. The unexpected success of Sputnik spurred the growth of engineering in the 1960s, a decade before the Cold War did the same for mathematics, physics, and language instruction.

But while Black Swans change curriculum they preserve the fundamental mindset of higher education. They suggest that all big things are understandable and need to be understood—in other words they seek to make inevitability become predictability.

It seems like Blue Grasshoppers—the unexpected, fraught, small, meaningful stories that make the world seem strange—ought to have a similar place in learning. If you talk to anyone about how they came to their current point in life they will almost always point to a Blue Grasshopper event. One day something happened that made life to that point strange. And since they have been pursuing the meaning, for them, in that strangeness.

But the impulse to make sense of Black Swans seems to overwhelm Blue Grasshoppers. They get explained away as coincidences, or spirituality, and therefore recede into the private parts of people’s lives. And so schools go ahead overlooking this key part of human life and with it the richness that comes out of musing on the strangeness of being alive.

Nodes, metaphors, and learning

Thanks for the comments on my last post about the discussions at Grinnell organized around nodes. LionofZion raised some strong concerns about the value of discussions like these: in part because they seem to be trendy ways of talking about old things, and in part because of the loose use of language--that is, that just because people use the same words for something doesn't mean they are communicating. And thanks to Paula Smith from Grinnell for commenting. I appreciate it.

A quick response on the node idea, and then something a bit longer about metaphor in higher ed. I am sympathetic to LoZ's views on the loose use of language, which is often a sign of intellectual sloppiness. (My favorite George Orwell essay, "Politics and the English Language" is a bracing statement of exactly this view.) But I think that the word "node" is exact evidence of the value of conversations based on similarity, if not agreement.

It is true that a node in the brain, and a node on the internet, and a node in a city are very different things. But it is also the case that exchanges between partisans of these types of nodes has given us some much larger insights about learning and organization. In each instance, it is repetition of use that strengthens the node, not the quality of the node itself. So it matters less how good the stimulus is (beyond a point, of course) and more about how the new input connects to older pathways be they roads, websites, or axons. In a system organized by nodes, control is decentralized. This is good news, potentially, because it means that weakness in one area can be compensated for by strengthening another. And it means that would-be controllers, have they good or ill intentions, are less likely to assert dominance for the long run. Taken together, then, a node-view of the world provides suggestions on how to bring about change and about how influence (as opposed to power) is organized. This is a very old view of the world, one that dates to the period of the vedas in India. But contemporary society seemed to have forgotten it until the node conversation got re-started.

Of course a node, or the topics that Grinnell used as nodes, are metaphors. And thinking about the comments to the post, coupled with a debate on campus about the proper role of administrators, and my reading of a great new book, has gotten me thinking about what metaphors do in higher ed.

(The book, for whatever it is worth, is Paul Knitter's Without Buddha I Could Not be a Christian. In it Knitter notes how religious language is essentially metaphorical, and then plays out how certain Christian metaphors have been mis-understood, either by reading them literally or by ignoring the implications of certain interpretations. For Knitter, Buddhism's emphasis on practice and its distaste for dogma can help Christians make meaning out of their lives and thus revive their religious language.)

Since Knitter's book is on my mind, let me use an example to describe the roles of metaphors. Take "God is love." What does a metaphor like that do? Here are several things:

1. It puts words onto experience that is hard to communicate otherwise. God is love is a way of saying that I felt something that feels like love and comes from my experience with the transcendent.

2. It allows people to see new characteristics of old things. The loving Christian God is quite a contrast from the God of the Old Testament--he metaphor makes that contrast clearer.

3. It re-groups things together that once weren't. If God is love, what do we do with the other manifestations of love--friendship, lust, companionship, etc. The metaphor asks us to consider how those things are linked to God.

4. In the re-grouping it implies a set of values that might otherwise get overlooked.

5. Metaphors have histories. Overlooking the history means overlooking some of the meaning.

In all of these ways, metaphor is an opening to conversation, not a closing. Of course, by being an opening it is also an invitation to public confusion and public debate. Metaphors always stand part way between description and dissembling.

Educators ought to be as alive to metaphors as theologians. Take some of our most basic language in higher ed. What do you call the regular gathering of students in a room? Is it a class or a course? Choose one and your focus is on geography or location. Choose the other and it is on movement or process. Or do students have majors, fields of study, or disciplines? One suggests hierarchy (major over minor), another location again, and another behavior.

The list of metaphors could go on and on. (Are you a professor? A teacher? An instructor? A coach? A facilitator?) But the Inside Higher Ed piece on Grinnell's nodes has made me think that we would be well-served to examine some of our old metaphors as well as searching for new ones. Perhaps they would serve us better if we thought publicly about what they do.

I would be particularly interested in exploring what the titles of faculty, staff, students, and administrators imply about how campuses get along and do they work they do. We could stand to revisit them.

Nodes

This piece in Inside Higher Ed argues that there are intellectual nodes that are fruitful sites for discussion across the disciplines, and that those nodes might also be a location for learning (or at least teaching). Grinnell College has been having discussions about what the right nodes are, and how they might influence learning there. I read this just after participating in a workshop about community building, one of the points of which was that cities and brains also function best when they have healthy, well-connected nodes. (See Steven Johnson's Emergence for a great discussion.)

Lots to consider about nodes. Here are some of my questions:

1. Does Grinnell have the right nodes? If you asked students what the intellectual nodes of their learning are, what would they say?

2. How are discussions like the nodes discussion more/less fruitful than those that are directly about curriculum and programming?

3. What are the other key types of nodes for learning? What are they physical nodes? Who are the people that act like nodes? Do they deserve the same sort of care and attention that intellectual nodes do?

4. In an age focused on connection, what about this point, made by philosopher Alain de Botton, that we may need fewer nodes (at least if online connections can be considered nodes) and more fasting--limiting our intake of ideas in order to improve our thinking and our lives?

Is there anything worth reading about education?

I am traveling for work again today--this time to Seattle for an accreditation meeting. I get a lot of good reading time when I travel. Thinking about this trip made me realize that it has been a long time since I read anything recent and good about education, or at least anything recent and good that was longer than a magazine article or a blog post.

This is not to say that there is nothing worth reading that has implications for education. I am in the middle of Dixit and Nalebuff's, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life (purchased, incidentally, in the Seattle Airport bookstore). The Art of Strategy has a lot to suggest about education--both about how simple decision trees can help teachers and students predict the results of their activities, as well as about how the prisoner's dilemma might help colleges think more clearly about the cost of a higher education. Similarly, lots of reasonably popular trade books--Nudge, The Wisdom of Crowds, The Tipping Point, Emergence--are filled with ideas that have clear applications to learning, to the organization of schools, to educational policy, and even to the philosophy of education.

And there are several older education books that provide bracing viewpoints on education. Paul Goodman's Compulsory Miseducation ought to be read by anyone thinking about the purpose of college, or whether higher education is for everyone. (College administrators ought read it whenever they get a little confidence about the educational value of administration.) Ivan Illich's De-Schooling Society is rooted in a deep respect for tradition, but that respect allows Illich to predict forms of social organization (online social networks, for example) that others have only made sense of in retrospect. Neil Postman's The End of Education anticipates today's debates about the competing values of liberal and professional education, and suggests responses that today's administrators and teachers should use. (Not to mention Dewey--important but unreadable, Addams, Locke, etc.)

So the question is this: Why there is so little contemporary book-length writing about education that is worth reading? And why is this the case particularly when education has become an ever more significant part of public discourse? Here are some answers:

1. I have a narrow field of vision. Maybe there is a lot of good writing about education, but I have just missed it. This is certainly likely, but if it is the case, what would you suggest that I should read?

2. The long stuff is unnecessary. Maybe book-length writing is passe, and so what really matters is the short stuff. If so, what are the short pieces of writing about education that have really changed the way you think, teach, or learn?

3. Writing is unnecessary. What really matters is (a) data, and (b) action. So what we should be looking for is results, not ideas. If so, where are the results? Where are the data? Or where are the websites, cognitive maps, etc. that have replaced writing about education?

4. Education is no longer really important--it is only symbolically important. True, perhaps. But if so, why? Shouldn't there be at least one good book explaining why all the attention to education doesn't really mean anything? Is there one?

5. There is no market. Teachers don't make much money, and who else would read this stuff? If so, what explains the glut of spirituality books on the market? Do you get rich from religion? From writing political memoirs? Fiction?

6. There are no ideas worth paying attention to in education. Maybe, but it seems to me that the big challenges in the world--sustainability, the economy, social organization, liberty and responsibility, the purpose of life--are about learning in one way or another. And lots of the thinkers in those areas are asking education to take a more active role. So how can educators do the same, and ask business leaders, politicians, bureaucrats, and families to pay a bit of attention to what we know about how people learn.

I'll know this has happened when I get to the bookstore in the Seattle airport, and instead of choosing a business book, or a novel, or something about Buddhism, I have a selection of books about learning that I want to read.

metaphors for disaster--eating the seed corn

Earlier this week University of Utah President Michael Young appeared before a legislative committee considering additional cuts to the higher education budget. Young told committee members that an additional 4% cut to state funding for the U (and the rest of the Utah system) would be akin to "eating our seed corn." "Twenty years from now," he asked, "do we want to have terrific prisons and terrible universities?"

Setting aside the fact that Utah's prisons are about as dismal as prisons in every other state (and that the Department of Corrections faces budget cuts as well), and that systems of higher ed in other states are facing fiscal problems larger than those in Utah, it is worth wondering what Young could have meant when he said that budget cuts would be like "eating the seed corn."

The most literal reading would be that by cutting budgets now, the university will starve in seasons to come. Read more liberally, a short-term solution, like cutting budgets, would push today's problem into the future. The question is whether by either of these readings, Young accurately describes the potential impact of this year's budget cuts.

The answer has to be no, for two reasons. From one perspective, Utah ate the seed corn long ago (or never had any at all). By many measures, the state of Utah already faces an education crisis. Most campuses are full to capacity, first- to second-year retention rates are between 43% (at UVU) to 83% (at the University of Utah) for four-year institutions (these data are from before the economic downturn), and a large portion of high school graduates never go to college at all. While a 4% cut may make things marginally worse, from an access to education perspective, things are already bad.

At the same time, a view from the outside suggests that a budget cut doesn't necessarily doom an institution for the long-term. City, county, and state governments have already sustained such cuts, but we don't hear anyone suggesting that Salt Lake City faces a long, bleak future because of those cuts. Businesses regularly face decreases in income and respond.

So this comes around to a more fundamental question--are institutions of higher education unlike other institutions, in that they cannot adapt to vagaries in funding? If so, why? And, more importantly, is greater funding necessary in order not just to maintain the status quo, but to actually reach those thousands of students who don't have access to higher ed in Utah?

Checklists and transparency

In an excellent comment on my first checklist post, Bryce Bunting wrote:

On another note, I could see educators voicing arguments similar to those of physicians with regard to why they don't need checklists (e.g. "teaching is an art," "I don't want to be restricted by a checklist," etc.).

Shortly after reading Bryce's comment I got a copy of an article on health care reform from my boss. (Thanks, Cid.) The piece, Making Health Care Better profiles Intermountain Health Care's efforts to improve health care and cut costs (go, Utah!)

IHC uses checklists (or protocols like them) but the improvement of health care system-wide comes not just from the checklists but from using and sharing data from them. IHC's computer system recommends certain treatments to doctors and nurses (the preferred treatments are developed by a team of doctors, nurses, and administrators from IHC). They are free to use those treatments or choose others. Those choices and the outcomes go back into the system. So, over time, IHC has developed a set of preferred practices, based on research and outcomes, and the evidence from those practices is visible.

Contrast this with what happens in education. Teachers prepare for class, using a combination of the things they have done in the past, innovations they prefer, ideas from colleagues, etc. My sense is that most teachers (and nearly all professors) spend a substantial amount of time in preparation, as well we should.

Then they hold class. There, they likely do most of the things they planned to do, leaving some out because of time constraints or because the class goes in a different direction. At some point students are supposed to show evidence that they learned. The professors evaluate them. Class ends. Students get final grades and go on to the next course.

The major difference between excellent health care and excellent college classes, then, isn't the preparation. It probably isn't the presence or absences of checklists either (though they cannot hurt, it seems). Instead it is transparency.

The transparency problem has two components. First, with the exception of student teachers and faculty undergoing review, no other qualified teacher ever sees what happens in a classroom. Second, no one ever sees the outcomes of what happens in a particular class. As a result, systemic improvement generally depends on training rather than results.

Why is the classroom so opaque? Tradition has something to do with it--universities still carry with them a model of master-disciple born in the middle ages, and that model suggests that the key relationship is between teacher and student, not between student and educational system. Academic freedom, at least as we have come to see it, influences as well.

But I think the main obstacles are not cultural, but systemic. After all, faculty favor collaboration with colleagues on nearly every other task (committees, research, writing, etc.) and most good teachers turn to colleagues for guidance all the time. The "fear" of having someone else watch and comment on your work is probably not too deep, particularly if that someone is a fellow faculty member.

But the system makes it impossible in three ways: first, almost no system of education believes in standard practices (a "meta-checklist" if you will). Teaching chemistry differs from teaching history; teaching first-year students isn't like teaching grad students. But why is this? Those few institutions with a campus-wide commitment to particular teaching approaches seem to have positive effects. Second, we schedule faculty work so nearly all professors are teaching simultaneously. Why don't colleagues visit your classes? Because they are in their own. Third, we don't know what outcomes would look like. What would be the result of a well-taught class in history? How would it differ from a similar course in, say, music?

I don't have good solutions to these transparency problems. But I can think of a simple first step. As part of campus faculty development efforts and accounted for in faculty workload, mandate (or incentivize) faculty members to enroll in one class taught by a colleague each year. A few benefits would be almost immediate. First, faculty development would be campus-wide rather than focused on the willing few. Second, faculty would learn from each other. Third, they would see the experience of students first-hand. And fourth, colleagues would be in a position to talk with each other about the best ways to do our common work.

Education checklists?

This morning NPR interviewed the surgeon Atul Gawande about his new book The Checklist Manifesto. In it he argues that surgeons do much better work when their surgeries are guided by checklists. As the surgery goes along, surgeons, nurses, and techs make sure they have covered all best practices by completing a checklist. Gawande reports that surgical errors declined by 35% when surgeons used a checklist. The checklists are based on those used by pilots and developed by Boeing.

I have often advised my students to create checklists, though more as a time management practice than as something that would make their performance better. But the Gawande interview left me wondering if colleges ought to use checklists much more frequently.

Take, for example, advising, mentoring, and other student support activities. Campuses recommend them for all students, but often the best students (or at least the most compliant) are those who take advantage, while at risk students don't. Do schools use mandatory checklists to ensure that all students take advantage of high impact experiences? (George Kuh and the NSSE people found that students of color and first-generation students are less likely than other students to participate in high impact activities like learning communities that are proven to improve student engagement.)

Would retention go up 35%?

Or consider faculty members. What if they went into every class with a checklist of best practices. Write outline on the board...Take roll...Elicit questions about previous class meeting...Uncover pre-existing understanding among students...Switch pedagogies every 15 minutes...Give students assignments to be completed in class...Check for understanding...

Would learning improve 35%?

If not, why? Is a failure to learn not the result of mistakes and overlooked opportunities? Are some students not retained because they simply "fall through the cracks"? Is education more complicated than surgery?

Learning about cost and quality from health care and agriculture

Atul Gawande has a great piece in the 14 December 09 New Yorker. "Testing, Testing" contains hints at two ideas that would help higher ed move ahead on the cost/quality issue.

First, he reminds us that for health care reform to succeed government has to mandate that nearly every American get health insurance. Or, put another way--the best way to ensure access to health care is to require that people get access to health care. Mandated access is important because it is only by expanding the market that the pool of the insured is large enough to make insurance a viable business.

Access to higher education is the sometimes forgotten key to cost and quality in higher ed as well. Millions of new potential university students aren't attending college. And millions more who have dipped their toes into higher ed are no longer pursuing it. Why? Cost is a big factor, along with cultural challenges, and the indifference of much of HE to their plight. So, if we want movement on cost, perhaps we need to move on requiring access. (I know the objections--not every job requires higher ed, many, many people can't afford it, it extends the power of the state well-beyond its current already-impressive reach, etc.)

And who knows--millions more adults, required to get higher education, might be a powerful force for reform of higher education. (Right now students and potential students have a very limited role in pushing reform--they act largely by choosing another campus, dropping our, or never joining up.)

Gawande then explains why access should be a requirement, but there should be no standardized approach to insurance and treatment. To make this point he turns to another mandatory practice--eating. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries food was expensive and access was limited. Farming was outdated, soils depleted, public health poor, life expectancy relatively low, farm work brutal.

Government did not mandate a particular approach to growing food, though. Instead it catalyzed changes through extension agents. One particularly influential agent, Seaman Knapp, traveled to Terrell Texas to try to get farmers to try out some new techniques. Not every farmer adopted them at first. Instead, community leaders (most of them farmers) encouraged one farmer, Walter Porter, to try the new techniques. Terrell's leaders provided support for Porter. In some ways they helped reduce his exposure to risk (of embarrassment, failure, financial ruin) while he experimented. When his changes made a difference, most of the farmers in the area adopted them. Food costs began to decline, access to food improved, as did quality and public health. Based on this success the US government created an army of extension agents, dedicated to doing what Walter Porter did.

Now the history of agriculture since then hasn't been all good. Small farms have died, natural growing techniques have disappeared, agribusiness rules the day.

But in that story there is an important suggestion for higher ed. Experiments on cost are risky when gone alone. But a consortium of schools can help spread risk. The consortium agrees that a particular approach looks promising. One school agrees to try it out. The other schools indemnify the experimental school. If things go poorly the consortium helps fix the problem ( by providing money, support etc.) But if they go well the consortium shares in the benefit and they all adopt the changes. The consortium comes to look something like a mutual aid society--a group of people or organizations committed to the well-being of their members by sharing risk and success.

Today there are plenty of consortia of colleges and university. But few of them collaborate in this way. Instead they gather for meetings, swap stories, produce papers, but when the chips are down members of the consortium are on their own. Perhaps it is time to look to the past when these cooperative organizations were the basis of our social safety net and civic innovation. Couldn't hurt.

or if the historical allusion doesn't work, consider a modern one--venture capital. Imagine 20 college presidents, each serious about cost/quality. They each pitch in $100K to a fund. They fund experiments, and get equity in the results. Something works, all benefit, something fails, no one faces a total crisis.

when do you reinvent the wheel?

I've written a few times about analogies and metaphors of education. One of the most common these days is "don't reinvent the wheel." This is the sort of advice that sounds wise on first listen, but becomes almost meaningless the more you think about it.

Its meaninglessness is wrapped up in what it implies--that somehow a teacher can import something--the "wheel"--into a class and that doing so will save time and money. This is a key assumption behind the open content movement. But I've wracked my brain, and cannot think of any "wheel" that reduced my time commitment because it was so easily applied to the course.

Instead, in my experience importing something into my teaching means one of two things:

1. I simply shift the time and location of the effort from one place to another. So, for example, when I have incorporated a new textbook into a class, it shifts where I spend my time, moving it earlier in the sequence. Or, I re-allocate resources away from one thing (say, preparing class presentations) to another (becoming familiar with the textbook).

2. I take that thing--a textbook, a pedagogy, some technology, an approach to mentoring--and over the course of the semester my experience with students requires that I re-create the thing itself. I drop chapters that don't work, change topics, spend more time on working with students and less on course content, whatever. By the end of the semester, the "wheel" and the course look substantially different.

Now, I know it is possible to do neither. My dissertation advisor, for example, used the same lecture notes for his intro to US History course in 1995 as he did in 1969. But I expect that most good teachers re-invent the wheel every time they enter the classroom. Perhaps it is because they are guided by another phrase--"you can never step into the same river twice."

Is this a good thing?

Build to think

Over at Musings from an Amateur, Bryce Bunting wonders why students love to learn but don't like school. He tells the story of coming to like writing not from taking writing classes but from blogging. His explanation of why he learns this way? What Prof. of New Media Clay Shirkey refers to as the "architecture of participation."

Shirley suggests that old media had only one model--comsumption. Experts produced, the public consumed. New media, on the other hand is built around a three-part model: consumption, production, and sharing. In Shirkey's view production and sharing are ever more important, because people are willing now to spend a bit of their "cognitive surplus" on exactly those things. We don't only watch (consume) TV. We also make it.

The analogies to education are pretty clear here. The old model of education was consumption based--experts produced knowledge, students consumed it. When they had consumed it well enough, they demonstrated it by producing something of their own.

I hope we are moving towards a "new media" model of education, where consuption, producing, and sharing all take up major proportions of student and faculty time. (After all, one of the main complaints of faculty is that they don't get time to consume (i.e. read, do research, take a sabbatical) because they are always producing stuff.)

But how to do it? Tim Brown suggests that "design thinking" can make it possible. His ideas are far bigger than I can describe here, but one phrase in his talk stood out to me--that designers shouldn't "think about what to build" they should "build in order to think." (This turn reminds me of William Carlos Williams' line "no ideas but in things.")

If education is based on the idea that we build to think, it has several implications:

1. No need to start with giving the background--start with doing. Write a paper to discover what you know and don't know; learn to play an instrument by playing it.
2. Do the same thing several times in order to get better.
3. Build trust, because when it isn't possible to know the outcome in advance, the project depends on trust (or community) not a promise of success down the road.
4. Trust grows when work focuses on real human need.
5. The realm of real human need is huge. Working on needs isn't, then, just about hunger and poverty. Instead it is about being honest in public about one's own weakness and showing patience with those of others.
6. Work in public, revise in public, fail in public.

Efficiency, Cost, and Small Educational Organizations

Outside of education, small organizations get a lot of praise for being efficient with their resources--they adapt well, move quickly, and because in small businesses everyone needs to know a bit about everything, they innovate as well. They do only a few things, but they do them well. Let's call this the responsive model of efficiency.

As businesses get larger they trade many of these efficiencies for economies of scale, which at the production and systems levels mean some cost savings. You can make widgets cheaper (or sell them more cheaply) if you produce (or sell) millions of them. Software is cheaper per employee if you get an enterprise-wide solution. Managers are cheaper if they manage more employees, etc. Interestingly, this often means better quality in the products, since standardized processes lead to standardized outcomes.

In education, it is largely the economies of scale version of efficiency that wins out. Put dozens of schools in a district and administrative costs per employee go down. Put dozens of students in the classroom and the cost of instruction, per student, drops. (Interestingly, though, quality doesn't improve. It would be interesting to know if in big systems, though, quality became more standardized.) We'll call this the scale model of efficiency.

Small schools (especially colleges), on the other hand, pride themselves on their willingness to avoid economies of scale. They are proud of their small classes. They have majors with only a handful of students in them. They offer tiny versions of all of the programs you would find at bigger schools. And their costs are high, as they make the case that small programs mean big quality. In public schools you see this tendency most clearly in charter schools who eschew system efficiency for the ability to do what they think best for their students.

It seems like higher education ought to be more thoughtful about efficiency. Rather than accept the responsive or scale model of efficiency, they ought to blend them. Here is the mix I think would lead to low cost and high quality learning:
1. Narrow curriculum (responsive)--small colleges ought to take advantage of their intellectual connections and offer a narrow, focused curriculum rather than offer every major under the sun. Doing so saves money and it allows for meaningful connections to develop between faculty and across the band of disciplines. It also permits the sort of intellectual innovation that happens in focused small businesses.
2. Universal pedagogy (scale)--If colleges think that their model of education really works, they ought to employ it across the board. Students should come to expect that every class will include a group project, or that service-learning happens in every year, or that faculty focus on asking questions. A universal pedagogy allows for improvement across the board. It also allows the campus to specialize, and by so doing, distinguish itself from the big, "we do it all" schools. Finally, it permits savings--no need for a projector in the ceiling of every room if PowerPoint presentations don't exist on your campus.
3. Standardized Core Content/Large Lectures (scale)--These days content is essentially a commodity. Campuses ought to take advantage of that fact, and treat it as such, either by ensuring that every section of physics, for example, includes the same content, or by delivering core content to very large groups of students. It saves money and ensures reliability across the organization.
4. Small activities (responsive)--while content is a commodity, meaning-making is a specialty. As such, students ought to have access to a wide range of meaning-making experiences so that the best meaning for them (be it about physics or about themselves as humans) emerges from their small activities. Note that I say small, not individualized. Small groups allow students to have the same opportunities for collaboration and innovation that their faculty do.

I don't mean to suggest that efficiency is the sole window onto cost and quality, but it may be a useful one, especially if schools can get past the idea that economies of scale is the only way to low cost, or that ignoring them is the only route to quality.

Expectations Gaps in HS and College

Civic Enterprises has just released a report on the dropout problem in high school. One of the key findings of On the Front Lines of Schools is that while many teachers and principals doubt that all students can take college-prep courses and graduate HS, 2/3 of dropouts say that they would have stuck with school if there had been higher expectations for their performance. Front Lines' authors call this the "expectation gap."

I wonder what that gap might mean for thinking and practice in higher ed. When students aren't retained or fail to graduate college, we rarely attribute it to low expectations. More commonly we imagine that college drop outs are caused by too-high expectations at the college (or financial and other personal challenges).

Would colleges retain more students if expectations (and support) were higher?

Learning from other high cost enterprises

Atul Gawande's piece, "The Cost Conundrum" in the New Yorker is startling. He describes McAllen Texas, one of the poorest, least healthy, and costliest (at least for health care) places in America. The cost isn't due to its distance from major cities, or its unique health challenges, but instead to four other things:

1. McAllen physicians seem to be particularly entrepreneurial, seeking many ways to make money--through owning buildings, clinics, and stores instead of simply maintaining a practice.
2. McAllen health care professionals are also particularly non-communicative, meaning that they are unaware of the high costs of health care in their town, unaware of what other physicians are doing, and unaware of the health benefits (or lack thereof) of particular medical actions.
3. As a result of (1) and (2) above, McAllen physicians recommend far more tests and procedures than their counterparts elsewhere.
4. As a result of (3), health care costs are unusually high in McAllen.

Physicians in healthier, less expensive places avoid (1) and (2) above, and therefore avoid (3) and (4). Instead they have created ways to share information about cost and treatment, and devote more time to patients as individuals, rather than patients.

The article got me thinking about cost in higher education. Education is one of the only other fields where costs have risen with a pace and force comparable to those in health care. And education, at least in many areas, follows the practices of McAllen physicians. We are entrepreneurial, non-communicative and non-cooperative (especially with colleagues from other institutions), and therefore our goal becomes to recruit and place students in programs (treatments) rather than meeting them where they are. (In addition, their funding streams are coming to look more similar every day, with the federal government paying out large portions of the cost of health care and education.)

Higher education lacks one thing that health care has--a clear measure of health. One of the things that physicians in low-cost high quality towns are certain about is how to help people manage their health. Educators lack this. We don't agree on what educational sickness looks like (is it the absence of a degree? a job? certain facts? certain habits of the mind?), and we don't agree on what educational health looks like.

In the absence of clear measures, can we learn from the story of McAllen? Can we focus on students as individuals with particular needs and desires? Can we shape education to meet those specific needs? Can we cooperate on outcomes and treatments so that we increase educational health and reduce its costs? And can we help students, parents, faculty, donors, legislators, and regulators think this through?