Why Kevin Carey is (mostly) wrong about merit aid

Kevin Carey is one of the smartest and most eloquent education analysts in the United States. He is also mostly wrong about the uses of merit aid.

Carey's recent Chronicle of Higher Education piece, "Too Much "Merit" Aid Requires No Merit," argues that a significant amount of merit aid (institutional scholarships based on academic performance) is given to students whose academic record does not merit it.  In giving such aid to the "stupid sons of the rich" (here Carey is quoting Harvard's turn-of-the-20th century president Charles W. Eliot) higher education both forces taxpayers to subsidize other students more heavily than it otherwise would and debases the meaning of the word "merit."

His article is wrapped around an anecdote about the son of friend.  The parents were intelligent and rich; the son shared his parents wealth but not their academic prowess.  Nonetheless, he was admitted to several decent private colleges, two of whom offered him a merit scholarship--in Carey's telling in order to entice his wealthy family to pay the rest of the $50,000 annual bill. The parents were incredulous, the father telling Carey, "He's never gotten a 'merit' anything before...He's not a very good student."

It is true that there are students at many institutions like the student in this story, who were indifferent academically but still qualified for merit aid. And it is true that giving such scholarships to the children of the wealthy somehow seems, well, wrong.  It is, in my experience, rarely the case that such a scholarship is given to a student only because s/he is from a rich family, though. And it is also true that the alternatives to awarding merit aid in this way are not much better, either for students or for the institution.

Think about the three pricing models that private colleges use to attract students.  In the first, the college prices tuition at what it costs to educate the student and offers almost no scholarships. In the second, the college prices tuition at roughly what the market will bear, but then provides institutional aid (almost entirely in the form of a discount) based on family need.  In the third, the college again chooses a market price, but then provides institutional aid (again, as discount) based on merit.  What happens for students and for the school?

In model one, schooling is largely available to students of middle and upper-middle class families who can afford the $15K+  that it costs to cover the costs of education.  The student body is thus from roughly the same economic strata, but of varying levels of academic preparation. Will the school be able to enroll enough  students to keep the doors open?  Only if its reputation is strong enough, its quality high enough, or its costs low enough to generate demand.  Otherwise, students have no reason to choose the school.

In model two, schooling is largely available  either to wealthy students who aren't academically strong enough to go somewhere else, or to students with significant enough need, met by need-based aid, that the cost of attending becomes affordable. Again, academic preparation varies widely, but so does the economic well-being of families.  And again, the school will struggle to enroll enough students, unless it has very generous donors whose gifts offset discount, or its reputation is so distinctive that it can attract both of its potential main audiences.

In model three, schooling is available to students with a relatively narrow range of academic preparation (those whose grades qualify them for merit under the school's criteria), and with a relatively narrow economic range as well.  The school will attract students who can afford it, who are attracted to its message, and who may be enticed by a reward for their prior academic performance.

None of these models is inherently better than another.  Schools choose them based on a mixture of their position in the marketplace, their mission, and their view of the social ends of education.

In practice, no school uses one of these pure models.  Most use a mix of models 2 and 3, supplemented by federal or state aid.  In the case of Westminster College, for example, applicants with an ACT score above 21 and a high school GPA above 3.0 earn merit scholarships. Scholarship amounts and ranges are posted publicly. Very few students below that range come to Westminster.  But at each merit scholarship level, students are also evaluated for need-based aid, some from the college, and some in the form of federal loans and Pell grants.  It is the case, therefore, that attending Westminster is actually less expensive for a student with financial need than for a student with a comparable academic background from a more prosperous family.  It is also less expensive for a student with a strong academic background, regardless of his/her economic situation, than it is for a student with a weaker academic record but the same economic profile.

These results--that the cost of school is less for needier families than richer ones, less for strong students than weak ones, and  least for needy, bright students--are defensible on social and educational grounds. But for a school that accepts these results, there are several implications. For enrollment managers, the biggest challenge is balancing the number of prosperous and less-prosperous students, and the number of academically strong and less strong students, so that the institution earns enough revenue to stay open and meet its goals of maintaining access to a quality education.

I have written critically of this practice, known as financial aid leveraging, because it makes price opaque to students and because it may not be well-founded in human psychology. It can cause academic problems as well, since the range of academic preparation can (though needn't necessarily) vary widely at leveraged schools. (That can also be the case at schools that hardly leverage at all). Further, students who are among the weakest academically at any institution are less likely to be retained.  But so are students who are needier, so leveraging is no guarantee of college success.  And for someone like Carey who is looking at higher ed as a whole, the practice raises questions about the quality of the system, since because different schools attract different pools of potential applicants, a student with a 1000 on the SAT may get merit aid at one college, but nothing at another.

Kevin Carey decries financial aid leveraging also when he criticizes institutions for giving merit aid to "the stupid sons of the rich." But Carey is wrong about schools' motivation for giving merit aid to wealthy underachievers. Schools don't do it because they want to enroll more stupid sons of the rich.  We do it to enroll more bright daughters of the poor.  That goal may be worth a few thousand dollars of merit aid to a "stupid son", even for a kid whose parents don't think he deserves it.

Why the liberal arts are the future of graduate education

 Whether the concern is access, or price, or quality, or innovation, the overwhelming focus of public discussion of higher education in the United States is undergraduate education, and the overwhelming tone is one of despair.

At exactly the same time, though, critiques of graduate education suggest that it is undergraduate education, and particularly the liberal arts, that hold out promise for the future of higher education.  Here is what I mean.

In the United States, the curricula of most graduate programs reside entirely within the sponsoring department.  So, with the exception of a course here or there, if you determine to get a master's degree in, say, history, you will take only courses in history and its close cognates.  The history department will manage your registration, advise you, teach you everything it thinks you should know, and evaluate you.

Curricular trends in graduate study point ever more strongly towards this model of departmental domination.  One of the things undermining the strength of MBA programs, for example, is the emergence of master's programs in accounting, finance, real estate, human resources, etc.  This is an expensive model, one that relies on large cadres of specialized faculty, working closely with very small numbers of highly specialized students to achieve specialized learning outcomes.

The irony, of course, is that while the curricula become more independent and costly, criticism of graduate education suggests that the strong technical skills of graduates (finance graduates excel at financial modeling, for example) is undermined by the inability of graduates to communicate well, teach effectively, solve problems, and behave ethically.  In the undergraduate curriculum students develop these skills in the liberal arts.

That this is the case points to a different model for graduate study--one that improves student skills and   maintains their disciplinary excellence.  The model is to create a graduate-level liberal arts curriculum, where students from all graduate disciplines work through a program that drives them to develop competency in communication, teaching, problem-solving, and moral behavior.  Such a model integrates some portion of the graduate curriculum, so that students in several disciplines share courses.  And it allows the disciplines to focus more directly on their areas of specialty.

There are plenty of reasons to wonder about a graduate level liberal education could succeed.  Accreditors would need to change their expectations about faculty qualification and curricular content. Potential students would need to revise their views about what graduate school is about.  And liberal arts faculty would need to figure out what graduate-level training outside their disciplines would look like.  But the benefits to institutions (more efficiency, more integration, more alignment of the work done at the undergraduate and graduate levels, the opportunity to offer more graduate degrees that offer differentiated degrees but a common mission) and to students (better learning, more success at work, clearer path towards the degree) suggest that such changes are worth considering.

Success in the shadow of giants, or, What does a school like Westminster call itself?

With the exception of schools whose fame (like Williams, Pomona, Middlebury, Dartmouth, or Brown) or location (New England and the Midwest) make their purposes automatically comprehensible to prospective students, the first thing that institutions like Westminster must figure out is what to call themselves.

By saying this I mean something more than "schools must have a name."  I mean that schools like Westminster--which receive neither state, nor church, nor investor sponsorship, and which offer neither all fields of study or a severely limited roster of academic programs--are incomprehensible without a clear self-description.

Think about the prospective student growing up in Utah, or Colorado, or Texas, or Alabama, or any other state with a very visible state university system and/or prominent church-sponsored schools. If they are religious, they understand immediately what BYU or Baylor or Gonzaga are about.  And if they are at all attentive to the news or sports, they have been exposed to state universities (particularly flagships and land-grants) since before they even considered college.  Stuart Dorsey, the President of Texas Lutheran University put it this way to me in a conversation; "For a kid growing up in Texas, the first question about higher education they ask themselves is, 'Am I a Longhorn or an Aggie?'" State schools and religious universities enter the recruiting contest with an immense advantage, since they are not only more highly subsidized, but more frequently covered, more visible, larger, more famous, and more likely to be part of the everyday life of young people than are schools like Westminster.  They are giants, not just in enrollment, but in visibility, in reach, and in influence.

In this context, a school like Westminster is not just unknown but unfathomable.  So our first challenge, before we can work with a student on fit and affordability, is to figure out how to describe ourselves.

Our traditional way of doing it--"Institution X is a small, private, liberal arts college" is almost useless, since all of those terms are either weak, confusing,  compromised, or unattached from their historical meanings.  "Small," for example, is claimed by nearly every institution in the US (just look at how they market their average class size for an example).  Further, for students today, small carries as many negative connotations (no bigger than high school, boring) as positive.  "Private" is even worse, since it requires an immediate explanation of the legal  and educational difference between for-profit and not-for-profit institutions, and a quick distancing from the University of Phoenix, ITT Tech, etc.  "Liberal Arts" carries mixed meanings, with some equating it to general education and others to traditional approaches to learning.  And "college" is similarly confusing, since major universities contain colleges, and small institutions call themselves "universities." And none of the words convey any of the things that make such institutions distinctive or innovative.

So how can a place like Westminster describe itself so as to be both accurate and attractive?  Here are a few thoughts:

• Independent. Independence conveys three facts--all important and all desirable.  Independence suggests that the institution is beholden neither to church nor state. It points to the most important component of the traditional meaning of liberal arts, that it is the education necessary for free people.  And those two points open a meaningful conversation about why the cost of an education is higher at Westminster than at a particular state university--because it is self-funding, and because its educational goals include but go beyond employment.
• Interconnected. Interconnection suggests something good both about the curriculum--that its pieces are tied together--and about the life of the community, that set schools like Westminster apart from their competitors.  Large public universities have no such interconnected community--they have at best interest groups--and private or technical institutions have no desire to make their curricula add up to something bigger than the sum of their parts.
• School of higher learning. School is a rich word, one whose etymology suggests place, independent effort, and community.  Those meanings are both more varied and more precise than "college" or "university."  And "higher learning" locates the work of the school at a level of greater complexity and meaning than other school work, and puts the focus on learning, where it belongs, rather than on the scholarly bona fides of faculty or the institution's prominence, size, or image. 

It is true that "Westminster College [or any other such institution] is an independent, interconnected school of higher learning" sounds odd.  But the oddness of such a sentence is a good thing, since it pushes both the speaker and the hearer to recognize the oddness of the institution, its mission, and its location in the higher education landscape.  And that is certainly better than describing the institution using words that lack clarity and accuracy.  If we are going to move out from the shadow of giant institutions, some such language is essential.

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.

On administration, vocation, and going over to the dark side

At least since 1977, it has been possible for faculty members to "go over to the dark side."  This phrase is always directed (in jest or in anger) toward former faculty members who have become administrators.  As such, it betrays a great deal about some faculty--that they see administrators as impediments to faculty governance, or as a sign of administrative bloat, or as highly compensated power-seekers, or simply as representatives of the meetings, task forces, committees, reports, studies, regulations, rules, and procedures that are the most visible manifestation of administrative work.

There is undoubtedly some truth (and falsity) in each of these characterizations.  But they miss what is a bigger temptation in administration--that upon going over to the dark side, one will gradually replace belief in something bigger than the institution with loyalty to the institution and the techniques that make it work.

I describe this as a temptation, because it is technique far more than power or regulation that provides pleasure and reward to administrators.  It is the ability to solve problems, to work out conflicts, to find funding, to enroll students, to entice donors, to serve the institution and make its infrastructure stronger that brings satisfaction.  And after a time, a good administrator develops an entire repertoire of tactics that get this stuff done.

Let me be clear--getting this stuff done is good work, and institutions without a good dark side are likely to be short-lived.  But let me be clear also that becoming a technocrat can erode one's sense of vocation, of filling a higher purpose in work.

Vocation erodes for three reasons.  (1) Administrative work is generally non-reflective, and as such one can go very far down a path without thinking about the path's meaning. (Note that I am not saying the path itself is bad, simply that it is unexamined.) (2) Administrative work is busy, and as such it creates an energy, a motivation, that emerges largely from activity, rather than from purpose.  (3) Administrative work lacks a way to act out a sense of vocation, and educational institutions rarely reward vocation in administrators.

Let me say a bit more about point number 3.  Earlier this summer, while taking my first week-long vacation since I became an administrator ten years ago (see points number 1 and 2 above), I read Chris Anderson's Teaching as Believing.  It is an incredible book and wise both about how learning takes place and how the professor's vocation aligns with that learning, even in a secular setting.  Anderson is a Catholic deacon and an English professor at a state university, and his effort to give meaning to academic freedom by bringing his sense of vocation into the classroom was inspiring.

I was hard-pressed, though, to imagine what a book with the same spirit as Anderson's, but written about administration, (call it Administration as Believing) might say.  It is certainly the case that many administrators act ethically because of a set of religious or philosophical commitments to what is right.  And it is true that religious institutions often bring the religion's faith commitments to bear on administrative practices.  But it is also the case that administration rarely feeds one's sense of vocation, which instead gets built outside of work, or through relationships that exist at work, but outside of the real work of the organization.

By saying all of this I mean simply to say that institutions and administrators would be better off if going over to the dark side did not mean slowly losing the sense that one's work was about both earthly things (solving problems, launching initiatives, etc., etc.) and things that have meaning outside and beyond the institution that sponsors it.  Faculty members and students are encouraged to seek that level of vocation.  Administrators ought to as well.

Third phase civic engagement and the mission of American higher education

Let me argue that we have entered a third phase of campus civic engagement, one which most campuses are unprepared to face.

Though nearly every type of college or university in the US was born with a civic mission, by the late 1950s, many had abandoned that mission for narrower, more private ones.

Phase one civic engagement emerged with the campus-based rebellions of the late 60s and early 70s.  It grew out of a critique of the higher education of the 1950s. That critique argued that colleges and universities were irrelevant unless they escaped the thrall of the powerful and reactionary. Instead, they should be sources for the creation of a just, egalitarian society. Though phase one grew out of student rebellion, its main supporters were faculty, who through the 70s and 80s built the intellectual apparatus that supports civic engagement--fields of research dedicated to understanding and overturning oppression and pedagogy that favors active or experiential learning.

Phase two adopted the pedagogy and theory of phase one, and adapted it to the civic landscape of the late 80s and 90s.  Its thrust was institutional, and its goal was to build an infrastructure--centers, journals, conferences, and organizations--to embed service-learning and civic engagement into the life of the college.  If phase one had been built on faculty members' desires to bring about radical change in politics, phase two grew out of staff and administrator desires to change students, who in the narrative of phase two civic engagement tended to be traditional full-time students who were disengaged from civic life and from learning.  Service-learning thus became a tool to get students engage in learning by engaging in the community.  Community leaders, who might have blanched at the theoretical radicalism of phase one, found phase two to be wonderful--a source of volunteers, project-doers, supporters of non-profits, and future interns, employees, and citizens.

Most campuses continue to practice a blend of phase one and phase two civic engagement.  Faculty continue to push civic engagement as a tool for political change, staff and administrators continue to see civic engagement as a tool for learning through community-building, and the apparatus that supports these efforts continues.

But while campuses have settled in, students have changed radically.  The proportion of traditional college students--full-time 18-24 year olds living on or near campus and away from their families--is in decline.  So, too, is support for traditional approaches to higher education--approaches which seem to cost too much and lead to too few graduates.  In their place is emerging a new civic context which colleges and universities ought to attend.  Among the characteristics of the new civic context that matter for higher ed are the following:

• Student demographics have changed radically.  There are more students of color, more low-income students, more first-generation students, more returning students--in short, more "non-traditional" students than ever before.
• These students are not disengaged from "the community" to use the language of phase two civic engagement.  Instead, they have never left the community.  Many live at home, and work, and have families, and maintain powerful civic and community commitments.
• These students do not have the time or habits of using phase two's infrastructures.  They are often on campus long after the Center for Civic Engagement has closed, or they are rushing from class to work, without time to stop at the service project.  In fact, group work, partnership building, and the rest of the pedagogical apparatus of active learning is a headache for them because they do not own their time. Learning takes place online as much as in the classroom, and reflection is a natural habit, one supported by facebook, instagram, tumblr, and twitter.
• These students are impatient with the radical politics of phase one, and with the traditional civic engagement efforts of phase two.  The distinctions between school, work, community, and family life don't work for them, since those things do not fall into neat silos in their day-to-day lives.
• Instead, today's students are pragmatic.  They will join coalitions with anyone.  They are all leaders comfortable in leaderless efforts.  They favor social entrepreneurship over traditional non-profit work, and boycotts, protests, petitions, marches, and occupations over voting and political parties.

If I am at all right about the third phase, then colleges and universities have some important questions to ask themselves.  Our tendency will be to jump to the practical ones--How should we use twitter in civic engagement?  Should we keep the Center for Civic Engagement open later?  How can we engage this new demographic of students?

But the more important question is not practical, and it does not have to do with students, but with institutional mission.  If students are richly engaged in communities and only sporadically engaged in college life, and if this trend will continue into the future, how can colleges and universities make use of those changes to fulfill their own civic missions?

Why legibility is better than transparency

In the political sphere, transparency is a hallmark on democracy.  But in education, transparency, or making all possible information available to all possible users, confuses as often as it helps. For students legibility, or making it  possible for them to read where they are and where they go next, is more valuable than transparency.

Consider these hallmarks of educational transparency--the campus map, the course catalog, and the tuition and fees list.  Colleges and universities place maps showing all buildings on their websites and at key points on campus.  But students, parents, and visitors are constantly lost.  Why? Because the map provides too much information.  No one really needs to know where all buildings on campus are located.  Instead, they need to know how to get from where they are to where they are going, something that maps do only with difficulty.

Similarly, the course catalog aims to encapsulate all information about a campus' curriculum and graduation requirements.  But students consistently make poor choices, misunderstand policy, and emerge from the catalog more confused than less.

And tuition and fees lists aim to make students and their families aware of all potential costs of attending an institution.  But those tables are generally ignored, in lieu of parents asking a straight-up question--"How much will it cost to attend your school."  To that question we have few good answers, since costs of attendance are variable and odd, given the way that schools rarely charge round figures for anything.

Forbes journalist Patrick Spenner gets it right in his recent blog post, "Forget Engagement, Consumers Want Simplicity." There, he argues that marketers who aim to engage potential customers in too many ways--social media, frequent campaigns, personal contacts--instead trip them up.  I find this increasingly true in student recruitment, where improved marketing tools allow us to contact prospective students dozens of times over the three years prior to enrolling as freshmen.  Some students love the attention, but most ignore much of the interaction, or worse, disconnect early in the process.  (Enrollment managers talk increasingly of stealth applicants--students who apply to the college without us knowing about them.  But the truth is that there are few stealth applicants.  There are instead students who were in the recruiting pool at the outset, but disconnected until they ultimately applied.  They are "simplicity seekers" not stealth applicants.)

The best example I've seen recently of legibility (or in Spenner's terms "simplicity") is at Utah Valley University.  At UVU, all major educational buildings are linked, so that you can walk indoors from one building to any other.  UVU has made huge improvements in helping students and visitors get around--not by posting more campus maps, but by simply posting signs hanging from the ceiling at any juncture between buildings.  Those signs include simple information--the name of the next buildings down any possible path, and an arrow showing which hallway to follow.  The boundaries between buildings are simply marked by the purpose of the building ("business' or "liberal arts" for example) being spelled out in the carpet.

Anyone can get around UVU's campus, then, if they simply know three things--that all buildings are connected, that you can find your way by reading signs, and the name of your final destination.

Not all campuses are designed the way UVU's is.  But you can take their principles of legibility and apply them elsewhere by building educational systems with three questions in mind:

1. What is the campus' approach to the educational experience?
2. Where are the critical junctures where signs need to be placed?
3. What is the student's end goal?

It is disappointing but not surprising that few campuses have simple and clear answers to these key questions.  Each school has all sorts of approaches to education--some majors are lockstep, others aren't, some require a thesis, others don't, some place students in internships, others don't.  We have too many critical junctures--between semesters, and years, and when changing majors, and all sorts of application deadlines.  And we aren't very good at knowing what a student wants to major in, let alone his/her overarching educational goals.  Given our complexity, we resort to putting all possible information out there, and hoping that students can find their ways or build a relationship with a wise mentor who will guide them through.  Or in other words, we default to transparency because our educational systems are illegible.

The end of financial aid leveraging?

Nearly every institution of higher education in the US leverages financial aid.  That is, we all give different amounts of aid to different students to encourage them to attend our institutions. The practical impact for students is that classrooms, like airplanes, hold customers who are paying radically different amounts for the same seat. The result for campuses, at least in theory, is that the institution realizes as much revenue as possible while still filling its class with qualified students.

There is solid research in behavioral economics, and plenty of lived experience to suggest that financial aid leveraging has worked in the past.  But my sense is that it may not work well into the future.  Here is why.

Our ability to leverage financial aid depends on a set of beliefs among students and their parents:

1.  a general assumption that higher education is a good value and a specific belief that the particular institution where a student will enroll is worth the cost,
2.  a willingness to pay money (or to borrow money) to make up the difference between aid and cost of attendance, 
3. a willingness to overlook the fact that each student pays a different amount for the same education, a difference based largely on the student's prior academic performance (and slightly on their actual need).

The institution has to have a different set of beliefs:

1. that students will come even if pricing is unclear,
2. that the particular model of financial aid leveraging is both financially and morally defensible,
3. that the model of leveraging maintains or improves the overall quality of students at the campus,
4. that the class of interested students will be academically and financially varied enough so that students who pay a lot are numerous enough to subsidize those who pay little.

It is fair to say that every one of the assumptions above is under question right now.  One need only consider the move of major research universities into online learning, the uproar about student loans, the explosion of parent appeals of financial aid packages, the outrageous financial aid packages given to  top academic students (who, of course, usually come from families with greater means to pay for higher education), and the changing demographics of new college-going students--to recognize that the landscape that once supported leveraging is radically changed.

Schools have two options to respond--they can stay the course, hoping that while the national mood undermines the assumptions behind financial aid leveraging their own markets will be willing to go along. Or they can move, as a first step, towards clarity in pricing while they figure out exactly what their education is worth to the families who want to buy it.  

Option two demands something more than  changing tuition, particularly for small institutions. It demands that we re-calibrate where we stand in the market and who are the students who are most likely to succeed at the college.  Gone are the days when small colleges could get by on a pitch about small class sizes and an academic program that looks a lot like that offered at big universities.

What auto loans can teach us about student loans

If you were a recent high school graduate, worked hard, got decent grades, and wanted to borrow $20,000, you could spend it on one of two things: a new car or a college education.  One of those choices is a much better investment than the other.  But while it is almost universally understood that a college education is more valuable than a new car, it is also the case that the means of getting that education--a student loan--is widely feared while the means of getting the car--an auto loan--carries no such stigma.

There are big cultural reasons why this is the case: the contradictory fears that a college education is essential for success in life and inadequate to ensure that success, for example, or the nonsensical political debates about  student loan interest rates.

But I am more interested in the practical reasons that auto loans are accepted and student loans feared, because colleges and universities can do something about those practical considerations.  Here are five characteristics of auto lending that might be suggestive for student lenders. The characteristics share one factor that ought to be on the mind of people working to fix student loans: auto loans give people power to act in ways they see fit.  Student loans, at key points in the college process, make it more difficult, not less, to act.

1. Markets in interest rates matter--I can borrow money to buy a new car at 2.94% from my local credit union.  Occasionally, manufacturers offer 0% interest.  If I had horrible credit, but was willing to follow a strict repayment plan I could still get a loan, albeit at a much higher interest rate.  In short, there is a market for auto loans dedicated to making it possible for all sorts of people to buy all sorts of cars.  There is no meaningful market for student loans--regardless of your background, career goals, or ability to pay, you pay rates set by a single lender, the federal government, and take out loans in amounts dictated by the federal government. (And because there is no real market for loans, the few private lenders in the business can set their rates even higher than the federal rates.) Markets, when they work correctly, empower people to make informed decisions.  The process of getting a student loan is disempowering--all the key factors are out of the buyer's hands--the rate, the amount borrowed, the source of the loan, its term of repayment.
2. The size of the loan and the desirability of the purchase coincide--A new car is most desirable when it is new, and so its worth aligns with the amount owed.  As the car ages and its value declines, so does the principal.  As with cars, a college education is most desirable when it is new, before the hard work, the disappointment, and the frustration of choosing a major, writing a thesis, and facing up to the hard factors of life weigh in.  But unlike an auto loan, a student loan's principal is highest when the thing purchased--a college education--is at its end--the moment when satisfaction is often the lowest.
3. It is the monthly payment that matters--When you take out an auto loan, the focus of the discussion is on the monthly payment.  This focus, of course, obscures the total cost of the loan.  But it also helps people budget, since they know that each month for the coming five years they have to pay that amount.  In student loans, the monthly payment is a moving target until after graduation.  That fact makes budgeting difficult and forces soon-to-be-graduates to make decisions about their futures in a context of uncertainty.
4. There is a secondary market for the loan and for the purchase--If you borrow to buy a car, and then decide that the car isn't for you, you can sell it. Selling the car allows you to either invest in another car or pay off your loan early.  Or, if you keep the car, other people can use it--brothers, sisters, friends.  But there are no secondary markets for college educations or student loans.  The loan you take out is yours.  You cannot share its amount with a family member.  Nor can a friend take classes paid for by your loan. So the social benefit of a student loan and a college education are blunted by the way the loan is constructed.
5. An auto loan buys a car; a student loan does not buy an education--You buy a car because you need a car.  The thing purchased is directly tied to the money borrowed.  But a student loan really buys time in the classroom, not learning or an education. There are no guarantees; you cannot return the education if it isn't working, or get it repaired under warranty. For this reason, if time in college does not lead to learning, the price of the loan seems out of alignment with the value of the thing purchased.

It is my sense, then, that if the government is going to reform student lending, or if student activists are going to take up the issue, that they look to the auto business, where loans align with desires, serve social purposes, come with clear information, and provide freedom to act.

Does education come before employment?

That education precedes employment is a belief so widely held and loudly asserted that it must be, in significant ways, wrong.

And wrong it is.  Many young people work while in high school, even more work while in college--some as much as 40 hours a week.  This has also been the case historically--hence the academic calendar that affords students time off for the harvest.

But I am even more interested in ways that key movements for social change have made employment a precondition for education, not the other way around.

 Jane Addams' Hull House, and other social settlements, set themselves up to help factory workers make meaning out of their working lives by creating formal educational opportunities around the work schedules of their neighbors.

The Greyston Mandala, founded by Bernie Glassman, created a bakery to employ homeless people, and then wrapped Buddhist practice and education around that work. (For a great book on Greyston and its meaning-making, see Glassman's Instructions to the Cook.)

The Delancey Street Foundation takes recently released felons, employs them in its businesses, and uses that employment as a source of learning, of dignity, and direction.

And this recent Fast Company article on Homeboy Industries makes the same point--that regular employment is essential to rehabilitating prisoners, who can then take on a formal education, which expands and contextualizes the human changes that come through work.

All of these examples are of organizations that take people on the margins of society, helping them find "menial" jobs, and using that as the basis of rebuilding their lives.

All of which suggests that educators ought to be much more thoughtful about how their work relates to the work of their students, and build academic programs that are informed by the work lives of their students rather than seeing education as a way to escape the drudgery of labor.

Should service make things better?

The notion behind a typical service project or service-learning class is that acts of service, civic engagement, or activism take a flawed reality (homelessness, poverty, hunger, discrimination, etc.) and tries to move it towards an ideal (justice, equity, access, peace, etc.).

But consider these lines, from Shinso Ito, a master in the Shinnyo-en branch of Japanese Buddhism:

By channeling your energy into acts of service, you transform the ideal into the real.

Here, Ito is arguing that the "ideal" is that thing floating in our heads--some notion about how things are, or should be.  But since all is impermanence in Buddhism, that ideal in our heads is really getting in the way of our ability to perceive things as they are.  Service, he suggests, can strip away the falseness, both because it gets us out of the conversations running in our heads (in the way that meditation aims to do) and because it introduces us physically to a reality that does not get experienced otherwise.

So what are civic engagement practitioners to learn from Ito's argument?  To be humble in the face of reality.  To trust that when service leads someone to say they have been changed in ways they cannot describe, they are telling the truth, not being superficial. And to be skeptical of efforts to respond to abstract problems in abstract ways.  "Service" does not help "homelessness." But people can work together in ways that helps them see the world real, and as they remake that world, remake themselves as well.

Why colleges should track credits to graduation, not time to graduation

Let me make four obvious statements:

1. Improving graduation rates is essential for colleges, for society, and for individual students;
2. The current measures--particularly time-to-graduation and 4-year graduation rates--describe things that are, to some significant extent, out of the hands of colleges;
3. Because they are out of the hands of colleges, campus efforts to improve graduation rates get mired in debates about measurement, or frustration at the futility of trying to change something over which we have little control;
4. Such a sense of futility impedes our ability to improve.

So in lieu of time-to-graduation, or 4-year graduation rates, let me propose that colleges measure their effectiveness through credits-to-graduation.  There are a couple of obvious benefits to this measure:

• All schools mandate a minimum number of credit hours to graduation
• Credit hours to graduation describes something over which campuses have significant control
• The measure is comparable across campuses (at least when expressed as a proportion, i.e that students at college Y require 1XX% of their minimum credit hour requirement in order to graduate.)
• The credit hour measure ties directly to the cost for students, since they pay by the credit hour, not by the year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can Democracy Upset the Structures of Higher Education?

I am just back from AACU's annual conference in Washington DC. I had high hopes for it, since its core focus was to be about the civic mission of higher education--something I've been passionate about for a long time.

The conference was disappointing--the talk of civic mission hasn't changed much since the 1980s when service-learning exploded in American higher education, and the examples of best practices were tame in comparison with the challenges--cost, access, mission drift, outmoded approaches to leadership, public skepticism about the value of a college degree--that face higher education.

(There were two bright spots: Eboo Patel's call for interfaith dialogue as an act of civic learning, and a few sessions on the intersection of creativity, entrepreneurship, and the arts.)

I've been reflecting on the causes of my dissatisfaction, and I think they come from a single concern.  Higher education will have to change radically to respond to the challenges I listed above.  The question is what will drive the change?  To be too simple about it, there are three potential impulses for change.

•  Some campuses will change piecemeal, program by program, in response to seemingly discrete forces in the market.  Nursing programs, for example, will offer more Doctor of Nursing Practice degrees because there is a shortage of nursing faculty, because accrediting agencies demand it, and because healthcare providers need to find cheaper ways to provide care.
• Other campuses will change wholesale in response to powerful outside forces--governments, big organizations, and corporations. We can already see the impact of this source of change in state higher education budgets, legislator critiques of "degrees to nowhere", and the impressive rise of for-profit institutions.  In some ways AACU's efforts to shape change fall here, as it tries to link its effort with the White House and other powerful national/global organizations.
• Still others will harness the power of democracy as the source of change, in the same way that democracy is changing governments, organizations, and the social sector.

Of the three sources of change, the third is both the most inspiring, most in keeping with the tradition of higher education in the US, and the rarest.  And here is where my dissatisfaction lies.  For while civic engagement has changed courses, created centers, and influenced mission statements, almost no campuses have become radically different because of it. There have been no significant changes in tuition because an institution got together with its constituents and planned a new way to fund the institution.  Campuses haven't found ways to provide more access because real people have demanded it.  New majors aren't the result of crowdsourcing, assessment isn't based on public ratings, etc.

The thing that makes democracy powerful is not that it gets things right.  Democracy is powerful because it holds out hope that the people who are effected by decisions, systems, and structures, have the experience to identify problems, the wisdom to respond to those problems, and the humility to know that there is no solution to big problems, only an on-going commitment to trying to make things better. So we will know if we have found a way to a democratic future for higher education when we see more instances of programs, structures, curricula, systems, and whole institutions changing as a result of sustained engagement between the campus and its communities.  And until then, conferences like AACU's will continue to disappoint.

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.

Who needs to be oriented?

This week all four of my children start at new schools.  One begins junior high, another high school.  One is a freshman in college, and the other a new transfer student.

Of those four, only the freshman in college has an extensive orientation--four days of small group meetings, info sessions, activities, meals, friend building, instruction in rules, assessments, meals, and a convocation with speeches and a gantlet of faculty in academic robes.  Parents are part of two days of these events, where they are wined, dined, and oriented themselves to how to be the parent of a freshman.

On the other hand, the transfer student gets half a day, the junior high schooler gets one day where her grade is the only one in the school, and the high schooler gets a two hour assembly punctuated by pizza.

Why is this?  Is there some reason to believe that the transition to college is a more significant step than the rest?  Is there something about being 18 that needs more transitional guidance than being 20 or 15 or 13?

As a dad, knowing my own kids, their needs, concerns, strengths, and fears, and as an administrator, knowing the goals of orientation, I would certainly assign orientation differently, and according to the actual kids, not their generic transition from one stage to another in life.  I think my high schooler needs a slower, longer transition.  The transfer student could use a period of guided reflection on how to move ahead at a new, different college.  The freshman told me herself that the longer the orientation the more anxious she feels, so I would skip her orientation until after a week of classes.  And my youngest, most gregarious daughter would get a couple of parent-teacher conferences one-on-one before launching into her new social life.

Asked more simply I wonder this: if we oriented students according to themselves, not to their grade or school, how would orientation be different?  Would it be more effective?

The role of consultants and vendors in enrollment management

One of the major differences between enrollment management and other parts of colleges is that enrollment management relies heavily on consultants and vendors to do its work. We develop prospects with help from one vendor, analyze data with another, use a third to develop our publications, and employ several others for smaller parts of our work.  Consultants help shape our strategy, test our messages, and improve our workflow.  And a great enrollment management consultant, Ian Symmonds, is my guide and mentor as I learn my way into this work.

None of this should be surprising.  Enrollment management is a results-driven business that relies heavily on data to make decisions. And it is a business that has changed rapidly in the last 20 years.  That change has made space in the market for businesses with specific expertise. And if those businesses can demonstrate return on investment, then it makes sense to contract with them, rather than expanding the college's fixed costs by hiring full-time employees to do that work.

One surprising thing about the field, though, is that consultants and vendors are also the source of most of the research about recruiting, admitting, funding, and enrolling students.  Compare data about enrollment management with data about the next step in the student's experience--the freshman year--to see the distinction.  Data about the views of freshmen comes out of the higher education research institute at UCLA.  The epicenter of ideas about  curriculum and retention in the first year is the first-year experience project at the University of South Carolina. And learning about the first-year emerges from peer-reviewed journals and academic conferences.

By contrast, summaries of research in enrollment management are more frequently compiled by vendors, as in the case of this report put out by Noel-Levitz.  The best-known experts in the field are consultants, be it Symmonds or George Dehne. And the list-servs, best practices, and conferences are sponsored by companies who sell products and services to colleges and universities.

There are several reasons that this is the case. Enrollment management as currently practiced is new--perhaps only 20 years old.  Therefore graduate programs that produce researchers in other fields haven't grown up yet in enrollment management.  The rapid change in the field makes it possible for individuals or small consultancies to gather and distribute meaningful data.  The competitiveness of the field, with dozens of colleges battling for top students makes practitioners less willing to share information among themselves.  And the nature of enrollment management--as practice more than discipline or skill--means that campus-based professionals aren't situated in a position to make the sort of generalizations that are the basis of academic research elsewhere in higher ed.

One wonders what this means for the future of enrollment management.  Will it eventually become an academic discipline with its own literature, faculty, etc.?  Or will it leave the university entirely, and become an outsourced service in the way that food service, bookstores, and security are now?

Restoring the value of Directed Studies

A small but consistent part of my job as Dean is approving Directed Studies courses. In nearly every instance, the course is a solution to a problem in the system--a student can't graduate without taking a course that isn't offered during a particular semester, or the two courses a student needs to graduate are offered at the same time, or a student needs to re-take a course offered only by a professor with whom s/he has had a falling out. No one likes Directed Studies courses in these situations--neither the students who have to fit in an additional course in an already hectic term nor the faculty who get no compensation for offering the course.  (Not to mention that learning often stumbles in these courses because they emerge at the last minute and are built around a syllabus that assumes classroom interaction, not one-to-one discussions.)

The "solve a problem" approach to Directed Studies is fine in individual cases, but done too frequently it hides near-misses in the system.  As Catherine Tinsley et al point out in "How to avoid catastrophe" in the April 2011 Harvard Business Review, leaders are tempted to count near-misses as successes rather than as signs of potentially catastrophic break-downs. 

While Directed Studies courses don't signal the same sort of impending disaster as, say, problems at BP's Deepwater Horizon well, they do signal that the curriculum may have too many different classes in it, or that student advising fails to ensure that students move rationally through their majors, or that student demand outpaces capacity in key areas.

Now all of these problems are big and expensive and therefore perhaps better to treat with Directed Studies courses than with thorough-going changes.  But if colleges built Directed Studies into their curricula, they could actually improve student learning, deepen faculty satisfaction, customize learning to the interests of students, and support innovation.

Suppose, for example, that a college radically reduces the number of electives in a particular major.  Instead of requiring students to choose elective classes (where demand is unpredictable), the department instead requires that students take Directed Studies courses on topics of mutual interest from three faculty in the department.  In turn, faculty teaching load would include Directed Studies--perhaps 18 hours of classroom and the equivalent of 6 hours of Directed Studies (or perhaps 12 to 12 if a campus really wanted to support customization and innovation).  Finally, the demand and supply for courses would be managed on an electronic exchange--faculty posting the topics they would most like to teach about; students posting the topics they would most like to learn about--a sort of curricular dating service.

In this scenario Directed Studies courses are a benefit to the system, not the sort of melancholy task that occupies the time of Deans trying to do right by students in a system that isn't working quite right.