Learning from low-cost private universities

Most people believe that private higher education is too expensive.  Their suggestions for reducing costs fall into two categories:

• cut unnecessary administrators and luxuries, and/or
• add very low-cost online courses.

These answers, though,are speculative.  No private institution has significantly reduced the cost to students through these methods.  In fact, it is from the most expensive and prestigious institutions that low-cost online courses are flowing.  Those schools seem unlikely to reduce tuition in the near future.

These speculative recommendations ignore the fact that there are many low-cost private non-profit institutions of higher education in the United States. The Department of Education's College Affordability and Transparency Center generates lists of the private institutions with the lowest tuition and the lowest net costs.  What do these schools share?

1.  Most have never had expensive administrators or luxurious campuses. 
2.  Few offer online courses.
3.  They have a clear curricular focus--usually religious--and generally offer a limited set of degrees.
4. They often are subsidized by religious bodies or in the case of Berea College, a massive endowment.
5. They are resolutely local (note, for example, the large number of low-cost private institutions in Puerto Rico).  Or put another way, few have national or global aspirations.
6. Instead, their aspirations are to serve a single population, or a particular sponsoring body.
7. Many are very small.
8. They tend to have very low retention and graduation rates.
9. Many are newly created.

A healthy discussion about the cost of private higher education would take these schools into consideration.  Their track records are not spotless--many teeter on the brink of collapse, others serve their students poorly by charging them so little.  

But four characteristics of theses schools are intriguing--curricular focus, local commitments, and recent origins.  All four flow against the trend towards offering more degrees, seeking global opportunities, and banking on the prestige that flows from venerability.  But education reformers who value private, non-profit higher education might bear these characteristics of real schools in mind as they try to craft the successful institutions of the future.

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.

Should a college presidency be a 24/7 job?

Westminster just completed a search, and hired Dr. Brian Levin-Stankevich as its 17th president.  The four finalists varied widely in their backgrounds, their passions, and their visions for the college.  But they shared one thing--they all said or intimated that being a college president is a “24/7” job.

Now if 24/7 job is simply shorthand for saying “being a college president takes a lot of time and I understand that” then there is no need to wonder about it.  But my sense from this search, and from discussions with other presidents and academic leaders, is that the statement means something more.  It means that the president has almost no life outside of the life of the college--that he or she is essentially owned by the school.

The ownership of the President (and other academic leaders) by the institution may not be a bad thing.  But it should at least cause the school to ask some questions about its leadership style and assumptions about the role of the college in society.  Here are a few key ones:

• Have the assumptions and structures of leadership kept up with the literature on leadership?  The 24/7 leader grows out of two widely held but dubious models of leadership.  The first, dating from the early 1900s, suggests that the corporation should provide all shape to the lives of its employees--housing, food, work, recreation, etc.  The second, dating from the 1980s, assumes that the CEO has to be the face of the corporation, and lead through charisma.  Both models have been challenged outside of academe, but remain within.
• Does the President have a clearly defined role? Show up at any late-night or weekend event on campus and you will find not one but several leaders--the President, the Provost, the VP for Advancement, the Dean of Students--plus assorted faculty and staff.  If they are there because they are interested, wonderful.  If they are there out of obligation, then one must ask why?  What is it about the presence of many leaders that makes an event more successful?  Or is their presence evidence that leaders haven’t determined what their strengths, responsibilities, and roles are? Must the President attend nearly every event on campus?
• Is the President’s calendar planned or reactive? I know from experience that an open week on Monday morning gets filled past capacity by Tuesday lunch.  While it is true that stuff happens that must be responded to, it is also true that the President, more than most other people on campus, has limited control over her/his calendar. And much of the time on that calendar is filled with “dignitary work”--shaking hands, greeting visitors, meeting with donors, attending lunches and dinners.  Again, this is essential work, but much of it could be done by others, with greater long-term payoff for the college and for other leaders, whose experience grows and whose own special skills come into play.
• Is the campus too busy?  Westminster, like many colleges and universities, offers several events, lectures, plays, and sporting events each night.  In addition to those things, the leadership has other events to participate in that aren’t open to the campus.  But these events, like formal academic programs, need a mission and purpose check.  Are the events we host matched with the institution’s mission?  And if so, do they advance that mission?  Busyness often masks uncertainty about the mission and appeal of an institution.  If you aren’t sure where you stand in the market, or what your students need and desire, then you try to have a bit of everything for everyone.
• How serious is your campus about reflection and renewal? We know from the literature on learning and on contemplation that growth and well-being emerge from regular acts of contemplation, reflection, and renewal.  If the president is owned by the institution, and moments of reflection and renewal are haphazard (15 minutes here and there, a last-minute weekend escape) then it is evidence that the campus is not as serious about reflection and renewal as it ought to be.  (Please note that I do not consider planning and other sorts of “retreats” to be reflective or renewing.  They are business, and serve more to summarize work that is already going on and spur more work than they are to provide a space for reflection.Once upon a time most presidents (and other senior leaders) taught a class on campus--today most don’t.  But preparing to teach is education’s native contemplative practice. If it is absent, then it may be that contemplation is gone as well.
• Is the college the most important thing in the world? The answer has to be no. No job ought to be more important than family, than citizenship, than god, than happiness. So if a job, even one as important and useful as college president, owns a person, then it is a sign that the job needs to be rethought, if only to bring it into alignment with what humans know about the relative importance of things.

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.

When cost, quality, and access are in conflict

People who worry about the cost of higher education often argue that high cost reduces access to higher education.  That is undoubtedly true.

But it is also true that low cost limits access.  Here is how: When a good school offers a very low tuition, demand for enrollment in that school increases.  In this case, schools could do one of two things: increase enrollment or become more selective. Because schools have a limited ability to increase capacity (both because of physical plant and because low cost is almost always a result of finite subsidies from outside sources), they almost always become more selective.  And by becoming more selective, students who need access to higher education are often unable to enroll in those top-quality low-cost schools.

US News and World Reports' recent list of the 10 Least Expensive Private Colleges makes this point in spades. The top four schools in this list (which is an idiosyncratic list--it is missing Cooper Union, for example) are good schools and inexpensive.  But they are hardly accessible.

Berea College is inexpensive because its endowment--almost 800 million dollars--subsidizes a huge portion of its budget.  The BYUs that follow--Idaho, Hawaii, and Provo--get subsidies from another source.  When I was a faculty member at BYU Provo about a decade ago, the rumor was that 80% of the budget came from LDS Church funds--mostly the tithing dollars of members. I don't know if that number is correct, but it is certainly the case that BYU is inexpensive because the church pays most of the costs of attending there.

These schools limit access in two ways. First on  mission.  Berea is dedicated to serving low-income students from Appalacia, the BYUs to serving Mormons. Second, on academic preparation.  Here BYU Provo is the strongest example.  Its entering freshman class routinely has an average HS GPA of 3.75 and an ACT composite score of 28.

(BYU-Idaho has worked hard to increase capacity to be able to serve Mormons who cannot get into BYU-Provo.  It has adopted a year-round calendar, and has recently begun aggressively moving into online education. (Take a look at The Innovative University for the full glowing story. Here are my views on the book.)  In doing so it hopes to draw on volunteer faculty--retired Mormons with PhDs who will teach online for almost nothing.  Hardly a business model for the nation.)

The stories of these schools share a simple message--reducing cost doesn't necessarily help with access at all. It may, in fact, make it harder for good students to go to good schools.

Ten theses on improving quality, reducing cost, and increasing revenue

The challenge facing small private colleges like Westminster is to improve the quality of learning while maintaining or lowering costs to students and increasing revenue to the college.  To date some colleges have been successful with one of these goals, but often at the cost of the others.  There are many reasons for this failure, but two stand out.  

The first is the assumption that quality is measured almost entirely by inputs--the academic preparation of incoming students, the variety of services offered to students, the amenities provided on campus, the pay of faculty, the reputation of the institution, etc.  Many campuses pursue improved inputs as part of a strategy to heighten the prestige of a campus and thereby drive students to it.  But all of these quality measures add expenses to campus, which are either absorbed in the budget or passed on to some students through higher prices.  

The second is that campuses rarely coordinate the activities that bear on these questions. By this I mean that decisions about tuition and aid are set in one way, decisions about the curriculum, policy, and student services are set another way, and decisions about expenditures in a third. The separation of decision making means that choices, such as those on enrollment, which influence the ability of the campus to provide a quality education, are made apart from those decisions on curriculum, policy, and expenditures which make it possible to assemble a class.

So the question is whether a campus can work simultaneously on cost, quality, and revenue; and if so, under which conditions this sort of work is possible.  I believe the three can be linked.  Here are ten characteristics, which if they existed on a campus, would make simultaneous work on cost, quality, and revenue possible:

1. The most important quality measures are outcomes measured by learning--of students, staff, faculty, and other campus constituencies--and by student perceptions of value.  Those value perceptions are almost always a function of how much a student paid to attend in relationship to how much the student learned.
2. The most important cost measure, then, is not price (particularly not sticker price) but instead the cumulative amount that a student and his/her family pay for education. Communication with students before, during, and at the end of their educations should emphasize this point.  And influencing this measure should be the key focus for campus stakeholders working on cost issues. 
3. The most important quality measure is time to graduation, since it sits at the intersection of cost,quality, and revenue.  In theory, excellent quality education and strong student learning should reduce the cost to students because they are more likely to graduate on time having learned enough to succeed in a future that they desire.  And excellent quality and improved graduation rates increase revenue by heightening demand and expanding the capacity of the institution to handle that demand.
4. There are curriculum policies  that cumulatively improve quality, reduce cost, and heighten revenue.  Among them are smoothing transfer enrollment, regularly updating the content of the core curriculum (rather than creating new courses to respond to changes in the field), reducing the number of electives, increasing the number of core credits in a major, increasing opportunities for special topics courses and internships. 
5. Curriculum reform should focus on implementing these changes across campus, so that the shape of majors (number of credit hours, proportion of coursework and independent work, capstone experiences, internships) is as similar as possible across the institution. Otherwise, while students in some fields will move more effectively through their educations, others will not.  And without similarity across campus, it is impossible to reward faculty fairly for their investments in this process.
6. Greater similarity in the shape of the curriculum leads to greater efficiency.  But it also improves quality by increasing the consistency of faculty interactions with students and preparing students to learn successfully in the college’s particular learning environment.
7. Improving quality, reducing cost, and increasing revenue can be accomplished while maintaining many sorts of diversity.  But it is unlikely to be successful at institutions that enroll students from a very wide range of economic backgrounds and levels of academic preparation. Diversity in academic background creates a wildly fragmented curriculum where highly skilled students (via honors and other special academic programs), and less skilled students (via remedial and introductory level courses) have special pathways to graduation which lessen the efficiency of the curriculum and the effectiveness of common approaches to learning.  And wide diversity in economic background means that certain students subsidize the tuition of others, thus lessening the likelihood that all students will perceive the quality of their education similarly. As with the curriculum, then, financial aid should trend towards similarity across campus, with the range of financial aid awards narrowing.
8. Recruiting should shift towards enrolling students who will be successful with the college’s particular approach to learning, rather than recruiting a wide range of students of whom only a portion is likely to be successful.  Note that this does not assume that a college must only recruit academically strong students or only wealthy students (both of which are hallmarks of an input-focused approach to institutional success).  Instead, it imagines that schools can position their missions, curricula, and financial aid to align with a demographic that is most likely to be successful in that setting.
9. Campuses must distinguish themselves as a whole from their competitors (so that, say, Westminster as a whole becomes more and more different from its competitors) by creating greater similarity within the campus (so that, say, there is greater uniformity of experience regardless of a student’s major). Doing so allows the development of campus-wide expertise in a particular sector of higher education instead of developing pockets of expertise in many sectors of higher education.
10. The effort to improve quality, reduce cost, and increase revenue requires a coordinated approach that spreads over several years.  Often, institutions seeking to make headway on these issues start with rewriting their missions.  But the approach above  favors making headway on key infrastructural matters--curriculum shape, financial aid and recruitment philosophy, common approaches to teaching and learning, time to graduation--as a precursor for creating a mission that has support from stakeholders and systems.

The future(s) of religious higher education

I have an ongoing interest in the intersection between religion and higher education for many reasons that readers of this blog might have noted--I'm religious myself (or perhaps religiously confused might be more accurate), I'm convinced that some spiritual practices have great potential for secular higher education, and I'm beginning to suspect that faith-based institutions do a much better job on institutional vision and the development of students than their secular counterparts do.

To these reasons let me add one more:  that current and historic practices in the creation of churches might provide some insights into ways to respond to challenges facing higher education.

Carol Howard Merritt's post "Ten Church Models for a New Generation" neatly summarizes emerging practices among people wanting Christian churches to flourish.  There are five themes that run through them.

• First, the church, like higher education, has moved away from the needs of its congregants, either by succumbing to the temptations of largeness and prominence or by remaining complacent while the world changes around it.  
• Second, that successful innovations are coming in small settings, where the trappings of religion--big buildings, formal worship services--are less important than building a sense of common purpose among those who are participating.  
• Third, that these new forms of congregations have, in many instances, developed new funding models as well, where the congregation is funded by proceeds from a coffee shop, say, or where the pastor is an entrepreneur.
• Fourth, these newly successful congregations emerge from the efforts of a few people who plant a new congregation and nurture it while it grows into something sustainable.
• Fifth, while in some new versions technology plays a central role, in most technology is secondary to the broader mission of the organization.

In this list one can see suggestions for institutions of higher education.  Particularly intriguing to me is the possibility of college-planting, where institutions of higher education select a couple of people to open what is essentially a store-front version of the home institution, dedicated to the particular needs of the people  who live nearby.  In a higher education landscape where even small colleges have hundreds of students, and where campuses are nearly always set off from their surroundings, store-front schools would be a place both to reach new participants, to innovate in education, and to build the sorts of relationships between learners and teachers that result in powerful learning.

Given that the trends that Merritt summarizes are emerging from the church, it may be that church-affiliated institutions are the first to move in the direction of small, emergent colleges.  But no school should overlook the potential of emergent churches to suggest ways to reach new communities of learners, explore new models of revenue, and reinvigorate the human relationships (and the understanding of those relationships) that were once at the core of what it meant to be an educated person.

Can learning outcomes be Good?

Having learning outcomes is better than not having them, and if they are measurable and agreed upon, a set of learning outcomes significantly improves a student's learning.  By this I mean simply that a course or a curriculum designed to help students towards certain ends--the ability to think critically, or communicate well--is better than one that aims simply for an increase in knowledge, or understanding of content.

But I sometimes hear the value of learning outcomes put more starkly--that they make it possible to create an education that focuses on what a student can do, not what a student knows.  Here I have two concerns.  The first is obvious.  Education is about both what a student knows and what a student can do.  Learning is not content-neutral; communicating well in one discipline does not mean that a person can communicate well in all disciplines, in the same way that being smart about philosophy does not guarantee that you are also smart about biology. This objection is largely, I think, about the rhetoric of the learning outcomes movement, not about its actual approach to education.

My second concern is this: that learning outcomes may make an education more practical, more demonstrable, and better.  But they may not make it Good. Education, at least in its traditional sense, is not only about what a student knows, or does.  It is ultimately about what a student becomes.  And if a school is interested in its students becoming something--engaged citizens, moral human beings, disciples of a god, whatever--then learning outcomes aren't enough.  The school needs a mission, and a culture, that talk about the ultimate value of education, about what is Good, not simply what is good.

In the absence of that, learning outcomes become techniques or skills.  They are useful things to be sure.  But highly skilled people without a sense of what is Good have done a lot of damage in this world.  And college campuses, for all their rhetoric about making a better world, developing leadership, and transforming learning, are no better than the communities that surround them.  In some ways, they are worse.

Institutions with vision

Over the past couple of months I've written several times about problems with the vision of  American higher education.  Here I noted that strategic planning seems to drive institutions to look more like each other rather than helping them distinguish themselves, here that the thirst for prestige gets in the way of a serious focus on learning, here that too often campuses try to differentiate themselves on superficial grounds, and here that colleges and universities are not well-situated to respond to the big challenges facing the world today.

On this last point I should note the growing number of colleges that have realigned themselves to respond to climate change and the challenges of sustainability.  The College of the Atlantic has been hard at this work for quite a while, as have, in less visible ways, schools like Sterling College, Unity College, and Northland College. All of these schools are doing great work.  All of them are also quite small, but all of them have a powerful vision that helps shape the curriculum, learning, and environment of the schools.

I am deeply interested in the resurgence of religious mission in higher education (see, for example, Naomi Riley's God on the Quad, George Marsden's The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship , and Budde and Wright's Conflicting Allegiances) and with it the possibility that colleges and universities will return to serious education about the big issues in human existence.  If this effort interests you, take a look at the vision statement for Houston Baptist University.  HBU right now is a small but serious college about the size of Westminster.  But in their vision statement they aim for nothing less that creating a world-class protestant university, one where all the efforts of the institution serve bigger ends--helping students lead meaningful lives, merging the best of secular and religious learning, and setting the example for other religious universities to follow.

Think what you will about HBU, or about their mission.  But the ambition of the school, not for prestige for its own sake but to remake American higher education and American culture, is a big thing.  Something all schools should think about as they seek to create authentic visions that stretch them beyond prestige, financial sustainability, and the latest trends in higher education.

The Washington Monthly College Guide Gets it Wrong, a Little, Twice

The best back-to-school college guide and rankings, hands-down, are at the Washington Monthly.  The rankings actually measure important things--like graduates' contribution to society--rather than wealth, prestige, and the test scores of incoming students.  And the accompanying articles are both well-informed and well-written.  (For example, this month's "The end of college admissions as we know it" should make anyone who cares about college access hopeful, even while it makes traditional admissions shops shiver...)

This month's college, guide, though, includes two articles that deserve a response.  The first, "Administrators ate my tuition" makes the argument that the on-going rise in college costs is due to bloat in the ranks of administrators, and that a solution to the problem might be, as the article's byline puts it, "Want to get college costs in line? Start by cutting the overgrown management ranks."  Three points in response:

• The growth in the ranks of administrators is due to changes in faculty roles, driven by faculty and by external stakeholders.  Faculty don't take on the day-to-day work of managing colleges and universities as much now as they used to because faculty have pushed, successfully over time, to teach and research more, and to do less administrative work.  At the same time, external bodies, including the federal government, have heightened requests for data and compliance to such an extent that without a cadre of researchers, report-writers, etc. colleges would be unable to respond to those demands.
• All administrators are not managers.  The author, Benjamin Ginsberg, seems to believe that there is little difference between an Associate Dean and an Associate Director of Student Life.  He is wrong.  At Westminster, over the past 5 years the number of full-time faculty has grown more than the number of new administrators.  And among the new administrators, only a couple actually spend their time managing.  Most spend their time programming--running environmental initiatives, leading trips to the mountains, helping students face psychological difficulties, ensuring that international students get their visas, etc.  The need for these tasks, at least at Westminster, comes from faculty, parents, and students requesting these services. And these tasks all lead to learning, something Ginsberg fails to acknowledge. At an institution like ours that has to compete to stay alive, if our key stakeholders request something, we are happy to oblige.
• If a college wants to change its faculty/administrator ratio, the first step is not to cut administrators.  It is to focus its mission.  Until a school does that, it will be impossible to carry out the work that faculty, students, parents, and regulators have demanded.  The solution, then, is to figure out how not to be all things to all people.

The second, "The College for-profits should fear" is a positive article about Western Governors University.  I like WGU.  Its focus on student outcomes, and its innovative division of the work of learning among faculty and mentors (more administrators!) both saves money and can lead to better learning.  And it has blazed a trail into online learning that others ought to pay attention to.

But WGU shares two things with for-profits that don't get enough attention.  First, though tuition is low, the cost-per-credential (that is, the amount of tuition paid per degree granted) is very high. According to a recent Salt Lake Tribune article, it is around $80,000.  The article attributes it to a "statistical anomaly" but it also suggests that WGU serves many students well, but not many of them earn degrees.  This point alone is not damning--after all, the students who enroll in WGU are like the students who enroll in most-on-line programs.  They work long hours, are trying to switch jobs, and often take time off from school to solve family problems, change jobs, move, or manage life.  One of WGU's strengths, in fact, is that its students can do that.  But if an institution's goal is to get students a degree and on to life, then WGU has a ways to go.

Second, WGU, like its for-profit counterparts, has recently become a marketing juggernaut. All along I-15, the main north-south freeway in Utah, there are WGU billboards with photos of powerful Utah business and civic leaders--Harris Simmons, Board Chair of Zion's Bank, Mike Leavitt, former Utah Governor--touting WGU.  The Washington Monthly article suggests that WGU is unlike for-profits in that it doesn't spend as much of its resources on marketing as does, say, the University of Phoenix.  It appears that might be changing.

What makes us think that education can solve global problems?

On his blog, Ian Symmonds muses about how higher education is responding to global problems. The list of issues, drawn from Jean Francois Rischard's book High Noon is heartbreaking and incomplete. The assumption behind Ian's question--that colleges and universities ought to prepare students to fix the problems of the world--is both commonplace and reasonable.  And almost no one argues that education ought not take on these problems.

But what makes us think that they can be tackled by colleges and universities?  In asking this I do not mean to suggest that higher education is ineffectual.  I am simply wondering two things: Are colleges and universities the sort of organizations that solve problems?; and Can these problems be solved?  I think the answer to both these questions is no.

Here is what I mean; colleges and universities excel at helping students resolve certain sorts of problems--narrow problems in disciplines, problems that respond to experimentation, and personal problems.  None of the problems listed in Symmonds post are these types of problems.  Instead they are all wide-spread, multi-causal problems without simple solutions.

This is not to say that colleges and universities ought to do nothing.  Instead, they ought to focus on three things: (1) helping students to resolve their own problems, (2) framing the problem so that it can be worked on in smaller, more local pieces; and (3) trying out local solutions to certain components of the problem at hand.

So, for example, it is unlikely that colleges and universities will solve poverty.  It is too widespread, too intransigent, and too complex to "solve."  But colleges and universities can help resolve poverty in their own neighborhoods.  And they can help their students avoid poverty.

To do these things, though, higher education will have to be more focused and less given to grandiose rhetoric.  While we may live in a global village (or some other version of the "flat earth" world) but our ability to influence society is decidedly narrow.  There is nothing wrong with this fact, as long as we acknowledge it.  Unfortunately, few colleges and fewer universities do.

How innovative is "The Innovative University"?

Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring's new book, The Innovative University is garnering significant attention right now, as one would expect from a book penned by Christensen and a book that is organized around a comparison of BYU-Idaho and Harvard University.  (Full disclosure--Westminster College is mentioned in several sidebars; I was part of the Westminster group who made suggestions about those sidebars.)  Christensen and Eyring's recent Chronicle of Higher Education op-ed, "How to Save the Traditional University, from the Inside Out" has elicited 62 written comments as of 31 July, and several webinars devoted to the book and its argument are pending.

Their argument--that in order to innovate and succeed, colleges and universities need to do more with technology, reduce costs to students, and focus themselves in order to provide to students what they desire while giving society what it needs, is unexceptional.  In fact, it happens all the time, as colleges and universities make decisions about starting new programs, discontinuing old ones, and recruiting students who will succeed on their campuses. (And, it should be noted, it is small, focused institutions that, if they don't find a market, are more likely to die.) I would suggest that the authors' central trope, that Harvard's DNA has been grafted into nearly all of American higher ed causing a sort of arms race that prices students out of the market and fails to deliver good learning, is a bit of a stretch.  It may be the case that Research I universities, and top-tier (and top-tier wannabe) liberal arts colleges have adopted  Harvard-like mission and faculty roles, but the vast majority of public and private universities have not.

But setting this aside, the real question is this--How innovative is "The Innovative University"? At least in their op-ed piece, Christensen and Eyring look towards a future where more specialized institutions (ones that have focused their offerings and their student profile) produce knowledge that meets the needs of their learners, using technology in discovery, dissemination, and learning. (For a great example of this sort of school, plus one that really innovates in its focus on learning, take a look at Roseman University of Health Sciences.)  But presumably, students would still take classes, work towards degrees, and engage with the institution over a brief but focused period of time.  That is, college education would still look largely the same to students once they matriculate. The main difference would be in the options available to students, and the role of cost and specialization in helping students choose those options.

Such an approach, for all of its virtues, fails to respond to some of the major issues facing education in the US.  It does not, for example, do anything to ensure that college-going students are prepared to go to college.  It does little to reach the millions of adults who need more education but cannot enroll in college to get it.  It doesn't put the interests and passions of students at the center of the learning experience.  It assumes that much knowledge exists largely in universities. And it maintains (or perhaps exacerbates) the assumption that learning and knowledge exist in disciplinary boxes, rather than being integrated with each other.

One might imagine an entirely different model of education--call it the Education Maintenance Organization (EMO).  An EMO would look like an HMO.  Its job would be to provide regular check-ups on the learning and academic growth of young people and adults.  EMOs would be made up of generalists--educators who could diagnose needs and provide guidance on behavior.  They would develop relationships with their clients. They could prescribe--a focused set of sessions on math for the 10-year old, learning experiences that would develop competency in history for the college-age student, job re-training for adults wanting to shift careers-- and they could provide treatment.  Costs would be paid like health insurance--on an on-going basis throughout the lifetime of their members.  The goal would be well-being--ongoing learning that serves the needs of individuals, and y so doing, of the broader community as well.

For some an EMO would sit on top of a traditional education--filling gaps, helping parents raise student achievement, providing focus during the summer, helping relate learning to student's passions.  For others it might replace some aspects of formal education.  But EMOs, whatever their role, would look little like colleges and universities.

I am not suggesting that colleges and universities should disappear.  In fact, I think that the reason so few of them are disappearing is that, by and large, they do meet the needs and desires of their students.  But if it is innovation we are looking for--not just in content but in structure, role, and location in society, it will take more than focus to get us there.

The perils of prestige

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

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

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

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

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

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

What about work?

(For the next while I am trying a new approach to this blog.  Each Monday I will post on a particular theme for the week.  Any posts that follow during the week will expand on the theme; the following Monday I'll write about a new theme.  Trying to put a bit of organization to my writing here, in hopes that it eventually adds up to something in addition to discrete mini-essays on learning...This week's theme is Work.)

With all of the attention higher education gives to getting graduates employed, it is astonishing how little interest we have in work. By this I mean simply that it is rare for an institution to help its students consider what work is, how it shapes human beings, and how it gives meaning to life.  I cannot think of any college (though I am sure there are some) that requires courses about the meaning of work, only a few campuses that consider the learning that comes from employment while in school, and only an handful of business programs that attend to the questions about justice, human fulfillment, and the social good that emerge from the way that employers structure work.

This issue is on my mind for several reasons.  I've spent the past 18 months on a task force working to connect student employment at Westminster to the college's learning goals.  Our hope is that every student who works on campus will have a job that leads to learning, and that that learning will be of value to the student.  My wife's job currently requires 14 hour days and weekend work, with almost no consideration of the toll a workload like that takes on her, us, or the quality of her work.  And I have been asked to take on a major additional assignment at the college, serving as Interim Dean of the Bill and Vieve Gore School of Business, an assignment that raises questions about my ability to complete good quality work while maintaining the balance and clear-sightedness that might make it possible to do that work.

Our inattention to work is not for lack of meaningful content to study.  The meaning of work is a core concern of many major religions (right livelihood in Buddhism; the notion of a holy day of rest in Western religions); assumptions about it undergird Marxism and Capitalism; the topic is more universally experienced by students than anything except sleep.

What is more, the recent economic downturn has pushed the meaning of work to the fore of American culture.  I had lunch last week with two former students, honors graduates of the college, recipients of graduation awards, perhaps the two most civically engaged students I have ever known.  Neither has full-timer permanent work.  One works temporarily for the state doing field biology; the other takes tickets at the local aviary.  Work is a huge issue for them--they both have large amounts of student debt, but they both also want to live decent lives and be part of the human conversation rather than structuring their lives around their jobs.  And on a more abstract level, the problem of work is at the center of some of the most influential books published in the past year--Rework and Shop Class as Soulcraft among them.

I don't have any idea about how to insert (or is it re-insert) the study of work into the curriculum.  But it seems that if faculty, staff, administrators, and students do not take up the questions that come out of work seriously then our institutions are failing our students, and we are failing ourselves.

What could administrators contribute to the intellectual life of a college?

Last Saturday the Alpha Chi Honor Society was kind enough to invite me to give the keynote speech at their induction ceremony at Westminster. My talk focused on lessons from Jane Addams' essay "The Subtle Problems of Charity" for students who wish to make a major contribution to the social good upon graduation.

I enjoyed the chance to speak, in large part because I felt like I was contributing to the intellectual life of the college in a small, but real way. I do teach courses at Westminster (about 1 a semester) but most of my work is administrative, and as such concerned with policies, process, planning, and programs of the college. I believe all of these things are essential if a college is to flourish. Without them, the core activities of the institution--the intellectual life of the college and the community life of the college--wouldn't happen as well or as predictably as they do.

But it is also true that administrators tend not to be in a position to contribute much to the college's intellectual or community life, except by helping to facilitate it. Many of us wish we could do more, and do it more directly. As I suggested in my last post, most administrators were once experts before they took on the experience of administration, and most administrators wish that their expertise, however developed, could contribute more to the academic discussions and culture--the stuff that shapes the college's mind, if you will.

So I've been wondering what administrators could do to contribute more. This is in some ways a simple question--keep administrators teaching, ensure that they develop their academic expertise as well as their administrative experiences, welcome them to the department and faculty meetings, encourage them to sponsor clubs and mentor students, require that they read in their fields.

The more interesting (and complex) question is related: What do administrators, as administrators, know and do that can contribute directly to the college's intellectual life? My colleague Mary Jane Chase, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, once suggested that historians (she is one, so am I) make particularly good administrators because their discipline is committed to outlining the grey areas between the black and white worlds recognized by theory.

There is a lot of truth in this statement, which broadened seems to suggest that administration cultivates certain habits of mind--seeing and being comfortable in working in grey areas, valuing compromise, attending to process, respecting particularity, speaking for pragmatism over dogmatism--that should be represented in the intellectual life of the college.

Are there other intellectual habits of administrators that are valuable to an institution? Dangerous to it?

Means, Ends, Cost, Quality

I've been wondering lately if the effort to reduce costs (while maintaining quality) in higher ed is an end in itself, or a means to something more important. I'm afraid that the cost discussion in higher ed is following the health care discussion, where the end has become passing a health insurance reform bill, not finding ways for Americans to be healthier.

In the same way, it appears that reducing cost has become an end in itself, not a pathway to something else. This is a problem for three reasons:

1. I'm not sure that the call to cut costs motivates the people in a position to do it. Instead it may put them--faculty, staff, and administrators--on edge, worrying about their jobs and pitting them against each other. ("The expensive part of education isn't what I do, it is all that extra stuff (fill in your favorite bugbear) the college does.")

2. When a reform movement becomes an end in itself, it tends to become isolated--it has its own center, or its own organization, but it struggles to spread throughout campus. Here, the cost/quality movement would be wise to learn from all of the other reform efforts--service-learning, assessment, etc. which got stymied on campuses where the goal was simply to "have one" (a service-learning center, an assessment office, learning communities, whatever) rather than to use that tool to stay interesting, alive sorts of places.

3. The notion of something being an "end" assumes a linear path to that end and a hierarchical organization to support it. But paths aren't linear, higher ed isn't hierarchical, and colleges and universities are systems, not pyramids. So thinking about cost/quality as an end makes such efforts butt up against the complex, interdependent way that things are. (On a philosophical level, I don't believe there are really ends anyway. All things are means; ends happen when you stop to look around and take your bearings...)

So if we thought of cost/quality as a means rather than an end, what difference would it make?
A huge one, in my view, because we could then connect the effort to values that are widely held and practices that are already embraced in HE or on a particular campus.

For example, most colleges and universities are inspired by a democratic vision--that access to education is a way of building just, wise, and healthy societies. Reducing the cost of education makes that democratic vision more likely and links it with other democratization efforts--civic engagement, retention, diversity, etc.

Most colleges and universities care that their students become part of a community of learners. Linking cost reduction to community-building is a powerful activity. Let's say that a campus wants to make college more affordable by hiring more students to work on campus. The act of hiring students to work on campus knits them into the campus community, makes them not just consumers of school, but producers of learning and stewards of place.

Most schools want to stay lively, to maintain momentum, to innovate, to encourage creativity among faculty and staff, to share those innovations across the campus. The cost/quality challenge, like retention, or civic engagement, or any of the other recent reforms, calls for innovation and creativity. Linking it there reinforces the campus culture instead of suggesting that the campus culture is an impediment.

All schools are committed to learning. Where innovation advances learning (or makes it more visible) and students understand that, they are more likely to stay, and to love their time in college, both things that make the cost of higher education seem like a value, not a punishment.

All of this is to suggest that while much of the conversation about the future of higher ed assumes radical changes afoot, perhaps the best way to succeed in their face is to preserve tradition--those values and practices that inspire, unite, and advance our core mission--to educate.

Do we provide students a morally serious education?

A couple of thoughts on the eve of Veteran's Day, wrapped around a question on the moral seriousness of education.

My father-in-law, Klem Schneider, grew up poor in rural Idaho. He knew by the time he was 16 that he wanted out of Lewisville. He saved money from working in potato fields to go to college at Utah State University. At first he wanted to be an engineer, then a doctor. He and my mother-in-law, Linda, married while they were in college. Then my wife, Kristine was born. Klem decided that to become a doctor with a small family would cost nearly everything. He enlisted in the Army, which paid for his medical school and then sent him to Vietnam. He spent a year there, doing public health and general practice. He sent line drawings of water buffalo home to his kids.

He was exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam, and as a result got cancer--Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma--for the first time while Kristine was a senior in high school. After two more bouts of cancer and chemo, he died at the age of 61, 7 years ago. I took his oral history while he was in remission. He was a serious man, and he made a morally serious decision about education while still young--that he would get enough education to ensure his family was never poor. If that meant signing on for a tour of duty in Vietnam in order to go to medical school, so be it. He never regretted his military service, not because he was particularly patriotic, but because it got him the education he wanted, needed.

C.S. Lewis fought in the first world war. On the cusp of the second he preached a sermon at Oxford on the topic "Learning in Wartime." This was his question--

As students, you will be expected to make yourselves, or to
start making yourselves, in to what the Middle Ages called
clerks: into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics, or
historians. And at first sight this seems to be an odd thing to
do during a great war. What is the use of beginning a task
which we have so little chance of finishing? Or, even if we
ourselves should happen not to be interrupted by death or
military service, why should we -- indeed how can we --
continue to take an interest in these placid occupations
when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are
in the balance? Is it not like fiddling while Rome burns?

Lewis' answer was to put war into context. He told his listeners,

The war creates no absolutely
new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human
situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has
always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture
has always had to exist under the shadow of something
infinitely more important than itself.

The United States have been involved in big wars for 19 of my 44 years, and in little wars (Panama, Nicaragua, Grenada) for a chunk of the rest. More than half of my academic career has been during wartime. I wonder by what acts of denial I (by which I mean most of formal education) have managed to ignore the aggravation of the permanent human situation caused by these wars.

Last year I had 3 young veterans in my history class. One had recently been deployed in Iraq. They were no better students than the rest of the class. They shared the weekend binges and late semester declines with the rest of their classmates. But on big issues--the role of government, the purpose of authority in society, freedom, justice, race, and war--they spoke with conviction and complexity--that their classmates could not match.

Pointing to the weaknesses of higher education is a common practice today. It costs too much, it isn't accountable, students don't always learn, etc. etc. Let me add one to the list, on the day before Veteran's Day. Many students, most perhaps, don't get a morally serious education. Or to use the language of the previous post, they get very little to help them choose to pay the price of experience. Perhaps this is OK--a degree and a vocation and some personal growth are good things. I wonder if it is enough.

Blog Action Day: Climate Change and Higher Ed

Today is Blog Action Day, a global effort to turn the attention of bloggers (and blog readers) to a single topic. The topic this year: climate change.

Climate change has had two notable impacts on higher education.

First, it has turned campus processes green. AASHE tracks sustainability efforts in higher education; every week the list is longer of schools with LEED-Certified buildings, carbon neutrality pledges, and revised purchasing, sourcing, and food policies. This is a major change, and it is driven in many instances by students.

Second, it has influenced the curriculum. The number of academic programs in sustainability, environmental engineering, green technology, etc. etc. is swelling. Of particular interest is the way in which climate change has revived field work in science (particularly biology), after years in which the trend was ever more towards lab-based practices. Bio-engineering, bio-chemistry, neurobiology will continue to grow no doubt. But it now appears that field and environmental biology will not become a backwater.

These are major changes. But they leave me wondering if deeper change is possible. After all, lots of public issues have led to curriculum and policy change. The Cold War sparked foreign language study and the militarization of academic research; the decline in civic engagement provoked service-learning. But higher ed seems to have absorbed these impacts, and continues along much the same trajectory as before.

So, questions. Could you build an institution around climate change? How big would it be? Would it have a campus? Is there something about the nature of climate and environment that would shape relations between students, faculty, staff, and administrators? Would there be a hierarchical org structure, or a networked structure? Where would the humanities fit in Climate Change U? What would be evidence of its effectiveness? How would students be different leaving than they were coming in?

the value of intangible things

This TED Talk by ad man Rory Sutherland, is laugh-out-loud funny. (Especially good from 13:00 on). But his main point--that in a world of scarce resources, we ought to do more to increase the value of intangible things, and the intangible value of real things, is profound.

Education is currently awash in the practical --trying to demonstrate tangible value, develop real skills, create new things--programs, patents, technologies, etc. All this stuff is important, but as Sutherland points out, it may not make people happier. What is more, if its main message is about consumption (come, buy our new thing, earn more money, etc. etc.) it may be doing harm.

There are things that add intangible value to education though. Ceremonies and diplomas, for example. (If you have ever been to a graduation event of students who had to work hard, the ceremony itself is enormously important. Or visit the home of a first-generation graduate, and see the diploma in a place of pride.) And gifts--of time and books particularly. And perhaps most importantly, perspective. One of the most effective ways to deal with any current problem, personal or societal, is to be able to put it in the context of human trials.

Of course, there are anti-democratic sorts of intangible value as well. Education at Harvard is no better than lots of places for most students. But the brand itself is of huge value, and that value endures through the life of the graduate. So the challenge for educators everywhere is this--how do we increase the intangible value of education, but do it democratically, so that education has an egalitarian impact on society?