Higher education's impoverished talk about work

In my last post I suggested that higher education has failed to keep its talk (and action) about civic engagement up with the experience and needs of students.

We are similarly laggard in the way we talk about and treat work (I've made this point before).  On one level, this should be surprising, since a tremendous amount of public discussions in the past 5 years have been about the ability (or inability) of colleges to help students get better jobs.  But it is exactly that talk, done almost entirely by people who aren't students, that is the cause of our impoverished talk about work.

When you chat with students about work, this is what you hear:

1. Most of them are working, expect to work through college, and will then continue on in jobs, to be accompanied by periodic bursts of education while they are working.
2. Many of them are skeptical about the future of careers.  They aren't confident that their work lives will continue on a path, or that their jobs will build one on another to some sort of pinnacle of employment.
3. Their skepticism about careers frightens and frees them.  On the one hand, they fear that they will never be able to pay off student loans.  On the other hand, this means that they can select jobs that do not tie them down and that allow them to be creative.
4. Their hope, then, is that this work freedom will lead them to personal freedom.
5. Many hope that their freedom will help them to lead good lives, not lives of corruption and malfeasance, nor lives that are dominated by their jobs.

Put briefly, what students want, then, is not the sort of career guidance we give them (how to network, how to write a resume, how to interview, and access to big-name employers).  Parents want that.  What students want is work that has meaning.

Colleges and universities, especially secular ones, spend precious little time on making work meaningful.  Drop into your career center and you won't see workshops on vocation.  Go to an alumni event and you won't talk about right livelihood. Peruse campus jobs and you will see precious little about learning from work.  Look at the general education curriculum and you will see no guidance about how to think about work, in spite of the fact that we spend half of our waking lives doing it. Look at universities that explicitly serve working adults.  Lots of talk about job placement.  Little talk about the meaning of those jobs.

Again, as with civic engagement, it may be that students have moved well beyond us, and that they don't need our help to do this anymore.  But as with civic engagement, we are failing in our missions if we don't take work seriously. Learning from, through, and about work (or its analogue, discipline)  is, after all, the proper job of educational institutions.  If we aren't committed to it, then we aren't committed to our missions.

Mission, demographics, and the problems with enrollment management

Students who go to college in the future will be different from the freshmen who have traditionally enrolled in private colleges and universities.  In order to attract and enroll those students, private colleges and universities will need to better differentiate themselves from each other, and from public institutions of higher education.  But as an enrollment manager, I cannot be confident that I have the tools I need to enroll those students.  Here is why:

With the exception of very prestigious institutions, colleges and universities seek students by buying their names from testing and other college preparation services.  We then snail mail, email, call, text, and visit with those students to try to get them to enroll.  But our ability to buy names is limited by the sort of data that testing services gather.  And right now, they mostly gather demographic data and data on academic performance.

These data are important--they help us target students by geography, socio-economic status, and test score.  But they don't help us see who will really engage with our campus, learn successfully in our classrooms, flourish at our school in ways that they wouldn't flourish elsewhere.  In other words, because those data don't tell us anything about how a prospective student will match with the mission and the pedagogy of the institution, they don't help us link our institutional mission with its central task--educating students to succeed in college and beyond.

Now it is true that mission-matching takes place later in the recruiting process (sometimes), and it is true that many high school students do not care much about the mission of the schools they are looking at.  But it is also true that if schools don't do better at attracting students who really fit the institutions they are selecting, we will fail to do our duty to those students, their families, and the communities that support them. And we will fail to take advantage of the characteristics that make our institutions unique.

Having said this I confess that I don't have any idea how to align student search with mission.  But the organization who does it, who helps colleges and universities think about prospective students as more than an amalgam of educational and demographic data, will have done real good for students and for American higher education.

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.

The temptations of distinctiveness

I've been thinking a lot about institutional distinctiveness lately.  The nonprofits whose boards I chair are both trying to find their niches in complex sectors of the non-profit world (culture and K-12 education); a big chunk of marketing colleges revolves around crafting a distinctive image of the institution; and job ads for college administrators consistently tout the distinctive characteristics of the school. Distinctiveness is everywhere.

I understand the importance of distinctiveness--potential customers, friends, and colleagues can only find you, and you them, if there is something that distinguishes you from the rest of the crowd.  And no organization wants to find itself unable to articulate a vision  (think about this tagline: "We do lots of stuff pretty well"), or a niche ("We do pretty much the same stuff as lots of other organizations.")

But the quest for distinctiveness carries with it three temptations that can be as damaging as the absence of distinctiveness.  Here they are:

1. An "arms race" for new stuff: One of the critiques of American higher ed is that it would cost less if campuses stopped thinking they needed the newest or the most unique stuff. That stuff could be buildings (LEED certification anyone?), or programs, or activities.  The now-ubiquitous climbing wall is the symbol of this sort of problem--once a campus built a climbing wall.  Now no self-respecting campus seeking active students would be without one.  (We have two--one indoors and one out).
2. Imprecise language: The search for distinctiveness leads us to suggest that certain things are evidence of distinctiveness when in fact they are not.  Every school I know of touts its small class sizes.  Small class size is a proxy for lots of things: faculty-student interaction, welcoming environment, and care for individual students.  But when the local Research I, community college, and liberal arts college all tout small class sizes, that distinctiveness marker means almost nothing.
3. A loss of community: students who are attracted to one thing--a program, a professor, a building--are both more likely to be at-risk, and less likely to be engaged than students who engage with many things.  And engaging with many things means that students become part of a community, where they are connected in many places and to many people.  Distinction, in other words, can mean isolation.  And isolation is neither good for the student nor good for the institution.

Can the curriculum lead to retention and graduation?

This article in Campus Technology highlights the efforts of California Lutheran University to retain more of its students.  The university is rightly proud of its efforts, which have increased retention five percent in the past five years.

Their approach should be familiar to anyone who has worked on retention in the past decade--a mix of one-on-one outreach to students, strong support in the co-curriculum, a focus on students at-risk, and a robust data effort to ensure that no one falls through the cracks and to verify assumptions about what works and what doesn't.  I expect that a similar mix, deployed with more or less effectiveness, exists on any campus that has worked to improve retention.  Where there is variation, it comes in implementation and student characteristics, not in approach.

I suspect that this approach, though, has just about reached the limits of its effectiveness.  Here are a few reasons:
1. The focus in higher ed is shifting from retention to graduation.  The Gates Foundation, the federal government, and the various states are now pushing an obvious point--that one major goal of education is to graduate from college.  Most retention efforts, on the other hand, focus on first-to-second year persistence.  And while there have been moves towards sophomore year experiences and other extensions of the retention model, most individual components of retention efforts can succeed without moving the overall graduation rate one bit.

2. Retention efforts fail to engage large portions of the campus community.  By this I mean two things: first, that most students are not the focus of retention .  Upper-division students don't usually get considered.  Nor do students in the broad middle--those who are doing well.  Second, retention work fails to engage most faculty.  Certainly those who teach freshman seminars or learning communities classes play a role.  And so do faculty leaders--deans, honors program directors, freshman advisors, etc.  But unless yours is an unusual campus, the number of faculty for whom retention is another nice program (or something to be offered up for budget cuts in difficult times) is large.

3. Retention efforts do not influence the curriculum as a whole.  Retention work has influenced key segments of the curriculum.  First-year seminars often exist to help retain students.  So do learning communities.  And at the outer edge, some campuses have redesigned their General Education programs to focus, in part, on retention.  But few majors have been redesigned to retain students.  And in fact, the trend towards requiring more hours in the major may work against retention.

So the question--what can be done in the curriculum to both retain more students and get more of them to graduation?

A few thoughts:

1. Hold departments responsible for retaining and graduating declared majors.  Again, if your campus is anything like the norm, department chairs and deans cannot tell you which majors retain declared students.  Nor is there any attention to the data showing what movement from one major to another looks like.

2. Make sure there are enough sections of upper-division classes so that retained students can move through expeditiously.

3. Enrich the portion of the curriculum that sits at the transition from GE to the major.  Too often the first class in the major is also a large service course for the institution.  Or students come to it willy-nilly, some in their first semester in the major, others after exploring upper-division courses

4. Ensure that there is a narrative to the curriculum--a reason that one course follows another, a story that all students and faculty can tell that describes why they are where they are in their course of study, and why the next step makes sense.

I am sure there are many more ways that the curriculum (here I am distinguishing from pedagogy) can lead to retention and graduation.  But whatever they are, certainly institutions must be moving in that direction.  Retention is no longer enough.

Portfolios as a tool to respond to the big questions about private higher education

It is not clear what higher education will look like in a decade.  Or, to be more precise, it is clear that higher education will be even harder to describe in 10 years than it is today.  There will be more varieties of schools, more ways to get degrees, more degrees available, more disagreement about higher education's values, and more debate about the value of higher education.  Some well-regarded schools will be shuttered; schools that you've never heard of will surge to prominence.

But while the higher education environment of the future is hard to describe, the questions that will form that environment are clear.  Campuses will distinguish themselves by how they respond to these questions, and by the tools they choose to craft their responses.  By choosing to use portfolios to support, track, and assess student achievement of Westminster's college-wide learning goals, we are selecting certain responses to these questions.  in turn, those responses can help distinguish a Westminster experience from those at other colleges and universities.  A portfolio system, then, is nothing unique.  But the way we use it at Westminster will allow us to bolster our claims of uniqueness while strengthening those portions of the learning experience that we do best.

 Here are the big questions:
Which students will an institution choose to serve? There is a disjunction between the major trends in college-going and the sorts of students that many private colleges and universities hope to recruit.  More and more college students will be first-generation students, or students of color, or from low-income homes, or returning to school after a career.  Many will need remediation, and many will face added difficulties staying in school.  At the same time, most private colleges and universities will compete for two other classes of students--those that can pay a large portion of private school tuitions, and those whose prior educational achievement adds to the prestige of the institution.  These students may be more likely to be retained, but their number is relatively small.

Adopting a portfolio for all undergraduate students allows Westminster to aim for a broad range of students, because the assumption of portfolios is that they help students demonstrate their growth over time. Doing so allows us to shift the conversation away from demographic characteristics and towards the fit between students and the learning environment of the college.

How will those students learn? Prognosticators assume that this is a closed question--that  in the future more learning will take place via technology.  This is undoubtedly true, but hardly meaningful, since educational technology has always tracked with technological innovation in society.  The bigger question is whether students will learn only in one way, and only in the classroom; or whether their learning (or the learning we count) will be various and take place everywhere.

By investing heavily in the learning environment--in undergraduate research, and civic engagement, and environmental programs, and global learning, and student life--Westminster is wagering that learning will be varied and constant.  And by requiring a portfolio for all undergraduate students, the college is arguing that students need to be aware of and responsible for the varieties of their learning.

How will they demonstrate their learning? Colleges and universities have a long list of ways for students to demonstrate their learning--tests, papers, projects, presentations, lab reports, reflections, performances, etc.  Students, at the same time, often say that while they learned a lot in class, the most significant learning in their lives took place outside the classroom.  This is undoubtedly true, and undoubtedly difficult to demonstrate.

A portfolio system attached to the college-wide learning goals makes a bold claim--that learning inside and outside the classroom can, with the right measures in place--be demonstrated in the same way.  Artifacts provide evidence for learning whether they come from a class or a club or an act of civic engagement.  And reflections require students to make connections between the artifact and the learning outcomes, showing how learning outside of class is equivalent to that from within.

What role will faculty and staff play in that learning? While the phrases "sage on the stage" and "guide on the side" refer to two main varieties of in-class faculty behavior, it is the case at Westminster that faculty play a much more complicated role in student learning.  A faculty member, through the entire course of her interaction with a student, is a recruiter, an advisor, a mentor, a teacher, an antagonist, a colleague, and an evaluator.  Increasingly staff members play a similar range of roles.

The temptation in higher education is to specialization--to decoupling these roles in order to be more efficient.  A portfolio system, though, helps to link those roles, since it asks students to make connections across their experiences and asks faculty to facilitate those connections rather than focus entirely on classroom interactions.

How will campuses innovate? Some campuses innovate relatively little.  Others focus largely on finding efficiencies in their systems, but do relatively little innovation in the academic setting.  Still others locate innovation largely in the creation of new academic programs.  And many of the most innovative campuses innovate in silos, so that individual innovations do not add up to something in common.

Portfolios should strengthen the innovation culture at Westminster in two ways.  First, they help students draw together their experiences with innovative programs--so that, for example, they see how participation in the Westminster Scholars program, their concern for environmental sustainability, and their majors go together.  Second, they will help the campus see where innovation needs to take place.  If the quality of work in, say, the "leadership, collaboration, and teamwork" learning goal is relatively small, it signals that the college needs to strengthen its work there.  Or if portfolios show us that learning is particularly robust in "global consciousness, social responsibility, and ethical awareness" then we know that we have an advantage in that area.

How will campuses demonstrate their value to stakeholders? This is perhaps the biggest question for the institution as a whole.  Parents, students, funders, legislators, employers, accreditors, and campus members are all asking whether college is worth the cost.  A portfolio system allows a deep response to this question.  It helps students identify how their college experience as a whole was valuable.  It demonstrates to employers what graduates can do, not just what they know.  It shows legislators, funders, and friends what the results of a Westminster experience are, and it portrays concretely the college's ability to live up to its strategic plan and mission.  In this way, then, portfolios allow a new richness in the way schools sum up their work, for they give us evidence, in a common format and on common themes, of the power of a Westminster experience.

Student Engagement: Does Success Require Faliure?

In the 2009-2010 academic year we agreed that all entering students would have a mentor assigned to them. The mentor would be one of the student's learning community faculty members if the student was in a fall learning community. If not, the mentor would be an administrator. The entire senior administrative staff (including the President and Provost) participated as mentors--each assigned to 3 to 5 students.

The school year is mostly over, and reports are rolling in from the administrative mentors. Almost universally there have been frustrated by the failure of their efforts. Many students never responded to contacts from their mentors. Of those who did, only a few stayed engaged for more than a single meeting.

This result, and a decline in our scores on the NSSE "faculty/student interaction" index even while we are trying to increase it has led to some anguish on campus. These events have gotten me thinking that a campus trying to create a system that encourages all students to be engaged will necessarily have more and more failed interactions between faculty (and staff) and students.

Here is my thinking: engaging students depends on three things: offering a wide range of engagement opportunities, getting all students to participate in at least some of them, and ensuring that of the things individual students engage in, at least one of them turns out to actually engage the student (which in turn depends on a student knowing what they find engaging).

The paradoxical result of these requirements is that a good system of engagement--one that stands a real likelihood of engaging nearly all students--will be home to lots of failed interactions. The Center for Civic Engagement, for example, might host many service opportunities, but each opportunity will only attract a few students, of whom even fewer will stay engaged. We will work feverishly to connect mentors with students--but most of those efforts won't succeed because most students won't find meaningful connections with most mentors. We will let students form dozens of clubs, but only a few will flourish while most will limp along with a handful of participants, offering events that attract only a few students.

So, lots of failure, but the overall result at the level of individual students will be a system that is likely to engage them in one way or another.

There are two (at least) big implications of this fact: 1. anyone involved in engaging students will have to spend a lot of time managing frustrated "engagers"--those people whose efforts are rebuffed by students, and 2. any effort to assess engagement has to look at the system as a whole (is the system likely to offer engagement opportunities that will appeal to nearly all of the students who choose our campus?), and students as individuals (do most students find something--anything--that engages them?). Only after assessment at these levels does it make sense to assess at the program level.