Five ways small colleges can respond to MOOCs

The chorus of people proclaiming that MOOCs will destroy traditional higher education is long and getting louder.  MSN Money wonders if they portend "The End of Higher Education as We Know It." The excellent education analyst Kevin Carey suggests that they present both a solution to access and cost challenges of higher education.  And venture capitalists, world-renowned universities, and star faculty members are lending their wealth, fame, and wisdom to the creation of businesses that create, market, and manage MOOCs.

If MOOCs achieve their wildest dreams--huge enrollments of students taking courses for free that grant college credit, then  institutions that charge large tuitions will be hurt.  But MOOCs are far from those dreams.  While a few courses have massive enrollments, a tiny proportion of students complete them.  The quality of the course content is uncertain, and the pedagogical assumptions behind them are flawed, at least if what we think we know about the power of active learning is true. MOOCs offer individual courses, not well thought-through curricula that lead to higher-level learning outcomes. And MOOCs don't have a business model that works for the simple reason that free things don't earn the money required to create them.  In this, MOOCs are not unlike shareware and social networks--both things that consumers can use for free but which seek to earn income.

It is here--at the intersection of MOOCs' prominence and their weakness, that small colleges who wish to engage with MOOCs (as opposed to ignoring them or demeaning their popularity) can act.  So the question is how small colleges can respond to MOOCs in a way that takes advantage of their prominence and the expertise of small colleges.  Here are a few thoughts:

• Provide academic support to students who enroll in MOOCs. Any traditional institution that lost more than 90 percent of the students in a class before it ended would shut down.  And so small colleges have figured out how to ensure that students stay enrolled, not just for a single course but through to graduation.  They do so by providing academic support--discussions, tutoring, advising, and evaluation to track student learning.  MOOC students who are serious about learning would be anxious to have this sort of support.
• Provide feedback, evaluation, and improvements for MOOCs. One of the dangers of using famous faculty to teach MOOCs is that famous faculty get their fame from excellence in research, not (usually) in provoking student learning.  MOOC providers (and other edtech entrepreneurs) have not tended to study student learning or to design their work based on measurable outcomes. In other words, online providers of education haven't given attention to quality control.  Colleges and universities have spent the better part of the past twenty years building courses to achieve certain educational outcomes.  That expertise is sorely needed in the world of MOOCs.
• Use MOOCs to fill gaps in their own curricula. Students at small colleges experience curricular gaps in three ways: the school does not offer a particular course because it lack faculty expertise in that area, courses are offered rarely so students who need to take a course can't get it, or students develop curiosity in an area where there is no course.  MOOCs could fill those gaps more easily and less expensively than hiring an adjunct, assigning overload to a faculty member, or hiring a new faculty line.  So if a student wants a course in, say, East African history, let her take a MOOC. more broadly, MOOCs could be a way to round out the curriculum for intensely focused schools.  If you run a music conservatory, for example, use MOOCs to fill out general education.
• Use MOOCs for remediation. A large proportion of college students need remediation which institutions supply by offering lots of sections of college algebra, for example.  The quality of these courses vary among instructors (often adjuncts), and the cost to the institution (faculty lines, classroom space, etc.) and to students (uncertain quality, the need to repeat, slowing the path to graduation) make remediation a big issue.  But if an institution selected a MOOC in, say, remedial English (or built a curriculum in math through the Khan Academy's YouTube lessons) consistency of content would improve, students could progress at their own speed, and the cost to the institution would go down. 
• Use MOOCs to assure the quality of prior knowledge. Colleges already accept massive amounts of transfer credit.  The quality of some of it is very good.  But other sources--concurrent enrollment, for example--provide prior learning of uncertain quality.  Add to this fact that ever more students will come to traditional colleges with credit from for-profit universities, corporate training, and military service.  Many schools deny students credit for that experience.  but a school which wanted to welcome students who had learned in those settings might ask prospective students to work through a MOOC for free, and use their success in the MOOC as a  rationale for granting credit for prior learning.  MOOCs thus become a real tool for access to higher education, not a tool for avoiding the wisdom built into enrolling full-time in a college.

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.

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.

The right questions about cutting tuition

Mount Holyoke announced recently that it would not raise tuition for the 2012-2013 academic year. The announcement drew the typical coverage--some meandering thoughts about college cost and boilerplate assurances from the institution itself that it is dedicated to responding to rising college costs and making its brand of education accessible to a broader public.

That is all well and good, but if we are going to take the cost of college seriously, then the institutions who freeze or cut tuition and the people who write about them need to get much more serious about explaining the contexts and purposes of their decisions (as do the people who raise tuition, but that is for another post).

At the very least, any reporter covering the announcement of a tuition freeze or cut should ask the following:

• Is the reduction in tuition costs accompanied by reductions in institutional aid?
• Is it accompanied by changes in enrollment goals, or put another way, are you making up the difference by enrolling more students?
• How do you expect the reduction of tuition to effect the school's revenue in the coming year?
• Are you reducing expenditures in the coming year?  If so, which ones?  What are you doing with faculty and staff salaries?
• Do you really believe that a reduction in tuition makes your school accessible to students who would not otherwise be able to afford it?  What evidence do you have?
• What steps are you taking to ensure that the quality of the education you provide improves?
• Why cut tuition instead of doing other things to reduce costs to students--i.e. speeding up time to graduation, reducing room and board costs, enrolling more transfer students from community colleges, increasing funding for students to work on campus?

Absent answers to these questions, I can't help but think that a tuition freeze or cut is more about publicity than improving access, reducing cost, and ensuring an excellent education to all students.

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.

Can differential pricing help reduce the cost of higher education?

From time to time colleges and universities play with a form of differential tuition pricing publicly.  Some schools  charge more for credits above a certain number to encourage students to graduate rather than hanging on and taking more and more classes.  Others charge higher tuition for certain majors--business being the most common.  And many, including Westminster, charge different rates for different graduate programs based on the willingness and ability to pay of students interested in those programs.  (So, for example, students in the MBA pay a higher tuition rate than those in the Masters of Teaching program.)

Colleges also employ differential pricing in quieter ways--providing different amounts of scholarships and institutional aid to students in order to shape the class and meet revenue targets.  And, by raising tuition each year while holding scholarship amounts steady, many schools run a differential pricing model that assumes that the longer a student is enrolled, the more that student is willing to pay to go to school.

That may be the case, but poor retention rates after the first year, and long times to graduation suggest that this model of differential pricing hurts many students.  And because schools rely on it in order to meet revenue goals (that is, their budgets are built around the assumption that the gap between tuition and aid will increase as students move through the institution, thus increasing revenue), it is a significant impediment to reducing the cost of higher education.

So what if instead of raising tuition for students each year of their enrolled period, tuition declined as a student moved through the institution?  The first year would be the most costly, but each year thereafter, tuition would decline by, say, 5% for students in that cohort.  As a result, seniors would be paying 15% less for tuition than they did as freshmen.

There are several potential benefits to this model.

• First, it allows individual institutions to reduce costs to students in a way that is predictable and fair. 
• Second, it rewards students for staying in school, and encourages experimentation in learning throughout the curriculum, rather than supporting the sort of curricular narrowing that usually takes place. 
• Third, it supports retention through the entire four-year experiment,thus providing stronger revenue.
• Fourth, it aligns revenue with expenses.  (Here I am assuming that the freshman year, with its focus on advising, counseling, mentoring, learning communities, retention, the co-curriculum, etc. costs the student more per credit hour than do upper division years.  I expect this is the case in all disciplines except the sciences where the costs of labs increases through a student's experiences.) 
• Fifth, it calls new students and their families to really engage in the first year, with the understanding that success in the first year will make the later years less expensive.
• Sixth, it changes the onus of timely graduation from the student (who often has to fight through the system to complete in four years), to the institution, who will now have an incentive to ensure that curricula make it possible for students to have significant learning while moving speedily to graduation.
• Seventh, done right, it can help colleges simultaneously earn enough revenue and reduce the costs to students of attending college.

Who moves first on cost, access, and quality in higher education?

It is widely agreed that in coming years higher education needs to reduce costs, increase access, and improve the quality of learning. Setting aside the enormous matter of how to do all of these things, I am wondering today who will move ahead on them.

In a few instances, individual institutions have taken steps on one of the pieces of the cost/access/quality knot.  MIT and Yale have made course content freely available online, though doing so has not increased access to MIT and Yale degrees or reduced the cost to degree seekers.  A few schools have, in the past decade, frozen or cut tuition, but often for a single year, and to no spillover effect on other campuses.  (The recent Seton Hall decision to cut tuition for top scholars seems to be little more than a naked play for a handful of better students, thus continuing the American tradition of making education affordable to those who can best afford it.)

Even if an institution was to successfully move on all three pieces of the problem, it isn't clear that its success would extend broadly enough to actually make a difference for more than its own students.  So where are the networks of schools who could make headway on the problem?

First, a word about where they aren't.  I don't imagine state systems successfully cutting costs to students while simultaneously increasing access and improving learning.  State systems face more and more budget cuts, making tuition increases, not cuts, the rule of the day.  And even if they were to get up steam on cost cuts, state systems are too diverse to move together.  It is hard to imagine how, for example, how Snow College and the University of Utah could make common cause on this matter. Nor is it likely that the big higher education associations are going to lead.  Their memberships are too large and their purposes too much to defend the status quo to really shake things up.

Who can move first then?  My money is on regional or affinity networks of colleges and universities, and the organizations that support them.  Ambitious leaders of accrediting agencies can make headway on the quality of learning, since they are obliged to certify it.  Associations like the Appalachian College Association are in a position to unite regional political and educational leaders around the dual challenges of cost and access.  And collections of like-minded schools like the New American Colleges and Universities (since they are dispersed across the US and rarely compete directly for students), ought to pioneer and test new approaches to cost, quality, and access.

If I'm right, then the emergence of effective smaller organizations of colleges and universities will be a sign that American higher education is getting its bearings, and is capable of responding to the big issues before it.  Keep your eyes open.

Enrollment management, cost, and quality--the questions

For a brief time the national conversation on higher education was attentive to the relationship between cost and quality, with open learning advocates and technology fans predicting a future where education might be both more affordable and better.

More recently, though, the two matters--cost and quality--have become separated.  The smaller stream, focused on quality, has been concerned with findings like those in Academically Adrift which point to the lack of learning taking place in higher ed.  The broader stream has focused on the cost of higher education, especially in relation to an economic decline which puts into question the dollar value of a college degree.

There has been little attention to enrollment management in the discussions.  This is a shame, since regardless of the direction of the stream, enrollment managers are the ones most likely to have a sense of what preoccupies prospective students and the most likely to have to explain new approaches to education to those students.

So here are several questions about the relationship between cost, quality, and enrollment management, all of which I've been wondering about over my past couple of months in enrollment management::

1. What is the current relationship between cost and quality at your institution?  What should it be? On most campuses discussions about cost take place in budget meetings while discussions about quality reside in faculty meetings, so the two rarely meet.  When they do, enrollment managers often are not at the table.  For this reason campuses are not always clear about where they stand on this issue, and unclear about which direction to move.  That direction needs to be set both by practical considerations (the "is" question) but also by strategic ones that can only be uncovered by asking the "should" question.
2. Who does attend your institution?  Who should attend? Most campus stakeholders have some idea about who should attend their institution, and those views have a great deal to do with where the stakeholder stands on the cost and quality issues.  But those views are rarely informed by an understanding of who does attend the institution and why.  Often, enrollment managers are the ones with the information that makes a conversation about the demographics of the student body possible.
3. What does your school mean by quality? What role do students play in that definition? One of the reasons that the conversation about cost has outpaced the conversation about quality is because the meaning of quality is so unsure, especially at institutions where inputs--the wealth and academic performance of entering students, the wealth and prestige of the institution--are not the key measures of quality.  Here, enrollment managers seem to be behind the game, largely using input measures as the key indicators of quality. But if quality is about student growth, or about learning outcomes, then an input approach to the entering class gets in the way of advancing an institution's work on lowering cost while improving quality.
4. Does your school have a coherent philosophy regarding merit- and need-based aid? Over time more and more institutional funds have gone into merit-based aid (academic scholarships) and less into need-based aid. If this shift aligns with an institution's strategy about cost and quality, then it makes sense.  But if not (which I expect is the case on many campuses) then not only does enrollment management fail to support the institution's direction, but it cuts against it.  If, for example, your school is more costly than its peers, and your students are struggling to afford it, and campus stakeholders believe the institution should be accessible to a diverse student body, then a merit-focus cuts against strategy and culture.
5. Does your school have a defensible balance between standard aid practices and special sources of aid?  Most schools have published aid grids--if you have XX ACT score and X.XX GPA you get a scholarship of $XXXXX.  But they also award aid to students for other things--athletics, science achievement, coming from abroad, etc.  Many of these special sources of aid advance strategic initiatives, others support new programs, or meet the interests of donors, or seek to open new student markets.  It would be naive to think these special sources should go away.  So the question is whether the number, size, and frequency of these special sources of aid undermines the main financial aid strategy.
6. Does enrollment management have a meaningful place in the campus strategic plan? Many strategic plans include enrollment management in an operational role--the plan says to do things X, Y, and Z, and enrollment management will get us enough students to provide revenue to do them. But especially if an institution is serious about making headway on cost and quality, enrollment management has to be an active part of the plan--not just meeting enrollment goals but providing insights into who is likely to attend, why they attend, and who the plan is most likely to serve well.

Cost, quality, and freedom, or, can you crowdsource an education?

In Cognitive Surplus Clay Shirky argues that the invention of movable type had three impacts on intellectual culture: it reduced the cost of publication, increased people's freedom to publish, and initially, lowered the quality of the things that were published.  Over time, though, the increase in freedom brought about an increase in creativity, innovation, and learning.  The sum total of the quality of published things has never returned to the glory days of publishing--there is much more dreck for sale today than when monks carefully illuminated manuscripts.  But we are substantially better off as a culture, and people who want to publish are better off as well.

For educators concerned about the cost and quality of education, there is much to learn in Shirky's brief account. Two things come immediately to mind.  The first is that colleges and universities cannot make meaningful progress on cost and quality without asking serious questions about freedom--Who will shape the curriculum? Under which rules? Who will decide what is good?

The second is that the key voices in this discussion need to be the potential producers of learning. By this I do not mean that students ought to choose.  Nor do I mean that faculty or administrators ought to be the source of innovation in learning.  Instead I mean that regardless of role, people who see themselves as creators of learning should be the ones who create it.

Shirky makes this point too, as he notes that technology makes it possible for people who were once only consumers to become collaborators.  Online this means bloggers and coders and social entrepreneurs and all the other people who band together to jointly solve problems or have fun.  In education I suspect this means crowdsourcers--people who can call together experts in many fields--both content and delivery--to create custom educations.  You might imagine a day when colleges and universities collaborate with their students to pull together courses and learning experiences from around the world, leading to an education that is cost-effective, high-quality, and, in the political sense, free.

The Priceline model for choosing a college

I met today with a group of enrollment managers at the NACU conference at North Central College. One told the story of a father who came to the financial aid office on his campus and said "I have $xx,xxx dollars to spend on higher education for my son each year.  Make me a deal." This scenario was quickly called "the priceline model" of higher education.

This story is enlightening for what it tells us about debt, decision-making, and the place of higher education in the economy.  The people in the room agreed that this scenario would become more common in the near future, in part because of the cost of private higher education, in part because of the New Frugality, and in part because higher ed is no different from the rest of the economy where consumers are seeking more customized, personalized pricing and experiences.

How would a priceline model influence higher education?  It would do three things, I think.  First, it would shake the prestige nonsense out of higher education selection.  If a consumer of higher ed were to select parameters (location, field of study, NSSE scores, etc.) and then offer a price, students would end up in one of the thousands of good institutions in the US, but almost certainly not in the ones that use price as a proxy for prestige.

Second, it would encourage innovation on the margins of higher education.  New higher ed providers might "compile" an educational experience for students, putting together a set of classes from disparate institutions, united by advising, or an internship, or something else. The result would be a college degree that met the consumer"s demands by building an institution from scratch. Or providers might go in seriously for differential pricing (a history degree would be cheaper than a business degree, for example) or disaggregated pricing, so that instead of paying tuition for classes, you pay instead for a certain amount of faculty time for each class, or you select having a mentor in one class but not for another.

Third, institutions would lose the relationships that often bring students to campus and keep them once they arrive.  Instead, the decision to choose a college would be made almost entirely on cost.

Would this make for a better learning education for students?  Would it improve or diminish the quality of colleges and universities?

How do we get there from here?

Yet another article, this time in The Atlantic, about the higher education on the verge of a major reconfiguration.  The outline is the same as usual--higher ed costs too much, is accessible to too few, and produces too little learning.  And technology is the answer.  The examples are the typical ones as well--MIT's open course initiative and the Khan Academy.

I agree with the author that higher ed needs to be reworked, and that the framing of the issue--how can we get better learning at lower cost in ways that respond to the needs and desires of students and society?--is the right one.

But that is the easy part.  It is simple to diagnose the disease, much harder to fix it.  Here is why: "free' alternatives like OpenCourse Ware or Khan Academy aren't free--they are either subsidized or make no money. For-profit options are expensive too--they charge students a premium for convenience.  Private non-profit institutions have budgets based on expensive tuition (though the level of tuition discounting means that budgets are not nearly as high as one would think).  Any move to offer a less expensive education runs up against the fact that the institution runs on a small margin at very high tuition.  And inexpensive public institutions are  subsidized, at capacity, and too poor to devote resources to vastly improving student learning. In short, most colleges and universities, public and private, are resource poor.  They don't have money to experiment, nor do they have R&D operations.

So how do we get to high quality, low cost education from where we are now, in the real world?  Are there incentives that exist for the leadership and faculty of private institutions that will encourage them to cut costs and maintain quality?  What are those incentives?  Are there different incentives for low-cost providers who are operating at capacity?

My view (which will be no surprise to readers of this blog) is that existing institutions will not be the leaders here.  It will be new colleges and universities who will figure out the cost/quality formula first. (Take a look at this proposal for a new university in England.  High quality, but high cost also.)  Reformers need to work to lower the barriers for new entrants.  They key barrier?  Access to federal financial aid. The students who will desire low-cost education are those with little money to invest in their educations.  But start-up colleges and universities lack the accreditation that gives them and their students access to financial aid.  No financial aid, no students, no new institutions.

In Praise of Business Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Academically Adrift: Doing assessment at small colleges

Academically Adrift has reignited the debate about the amount of value that attending college adds to a student's learning.  Its conclusions--that many students do not learn much during college, and that that fact is due to the low requirements for the amount of student work are both sad and unsurprising.

The book's reliance on data from the CLA has received much less comment than its conclusions.  This is due, in part, to the fact that over time the CLA has become a non-controversial assessment tool.  But it is due also to the fact that few people outside higher ed know how the CLA works on a particular campus.  For our campus, though, the CLA, regardless of what is says about our students' performance (and the news is sometime quite good), is always of questionable value.

The CLA purports to measure the "value-add" of a college by giving students a real-world critical thinking and writing challenge, and then measuring how students perform on that test in comparison to how the CLA (using a sophisticated algorithm) predicts they should have done.  If senior students perform better than predicted (both by the performance of freshmen and by their own aptitude scores), that improved performance is the "value-add."  Schools receive a report from CLA that breaks down student performance by field of study, and that compares the college's value-add to that of other institutions.  Institutions are free to do with the data what they want.  In my experience what they most want to do is see how they stack up against their peer and aspirant institutions on the "value-add" measure.

Westminster has used the CLA for six years. Each year's report is met by the same reactions.  First, whether our value-add is high or low, we always wonder what that measure is due to.  Because the CLA reports data only at major and campus level, and because it is a cross-sectional study, it is never possible to be sure what causes student performance gains or losses.  Is there a particular class that made our philosophy students a year ago stand out so much?  Is there a particular gap in the liberal education curriculum that lead our students to perform poorly on the "make an argument" portion of the test? Did some change in advising or curriculum have an effect?  Do we just happen to have an outstanding bunch of freshmen whose scores make our senior's performance look bad? How would we know?

Second, and most importantly, our results are always compromised by small sample size.One year we were able to get the entire graduating class of philosophy majors to take the test.  They performed very well.  But there were six of them, so the statistical significance of the findings is in question.  Some years we are only able to get 14 nursing majors to take the test, and so we have a huge standard deviation.  Every year there are outliers who either make our scores look great or make them look awful.

The message here isn't that the CLA is a bad tool, or that Academically Adrift's conclusions are dubious.  It is, instead, that small colleges and universities are poorly served by assessment tools that sample, aggregate data, and make comparisons at the campus level.  The numbers in our sample groups will always be too small to be trustworthy, and the unit of measure (the entire college experience) too large to do something about.

Instead of these sort of abstract measures, small colleges and universities need to become much more serious about tracking and influencing individual student performance over time.  There is no reason why a campus could not administer a measure of student learning each year to each student and track that particular student's performance. Then, if a student performs poorly on critical thinking, the student's advisor could recommend a particular course, or a particular shift in study habits, to respond.

The assessment mantra of small colleges should be something like this: Disaggregate, don't aggregate.  Do longitudinal studies, not cross-sectional ones.  And most importantly, assess the learning of students as real living human beings, not as part of an abstraction of how the entire institution is doing.

Such steps will make it harder for small colleges to play in the rating/ranking game that measures like CLA and NSSE allow.  But it will allow small colleges and universities to be able to link assessment and learning in the lives of individual students--the thing we say we do right now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can schools make money on learning?

Ask educators what their schools produce and they will answer "learning."  After all, any school worth its salt advances a set of learning outcomes, teachers teach to help students learn, tests try to gauge learning, and students say they learn.  But no school I know of makes money on learning.

I find this odd.  Nearly every viable business makes money on what it produces.  Stock brokers make money by buying and selling stocks.  Psychotherapists earn money by providing therapy. Fruit growers sell fruit.  But schools make money by enrolling students.

This is the case whether a school is taxpayer-supported or not. Public schools receive tax funds based on how many students enroll. Private colleges (like Westminster, for example) receive tuition funds based on how many students enroll for how many credit hours.  Both get additional money from grants and donations, but these sources of funding are not directly related to learning either.

You may respond that I am being obtuse--that a school cannot survive economically if it does not produce learning.  There is some truth to this.  After all, a student will stay to graduation only if she perceives that she is  learning, and if enough students fail to learn a school may fail.  But even in cases where failure is possible--under NCLB for example--many parents keep their children enrolled in schools that fail to produce learning (measure by standardized tests, I know--hardly a good measure but still...)  And even among colleges that disappear, death does not come because of an absence of learning but instead because of an absence of enrollment.

Why does this matter?  First, because if learning does not elicit income, then the economic incentives for the school are wrong.  (Interestingly, this is the case even for the most market-focused schools--for-profit colleges, for example, or those places where vouchers are available.)  One need only look at colleges who have increased enrollment through high discount rates to see that enrollment-focused income can impede learning.

Second, paying for enrollment sends the wrong incentives to students as well.  It indicates that the best unit of measure is full-time enrollment, since they get the most academic credit for their dollars.  But full-time enrollment may be the worst thing for learning, especially if it puts students at financial risk.

Third, it limits innovation.  If more learning led to more income, then the incentive for schools would be to try create more learning better and faster.

Fourth, it blunts reform.  Consider the four main reform efforts in American schooling, K-16--active learning, access to education, focus on choice, and focus on cost.  Each carries in mind a model of education where income to schools is based on enrollment. The active learning folks, for example, imagine that students will learn more but that they will stay in school for the same amount of time.  Cost-focused people call for quicker time to graduation or the reduction of frills without considering the effect on the viability of schools, etc. etc. And so whatever their reform ideologies, their efforts exist in the context of traditional schooling.

One has to look outside traditional schools altogether to find examples where learning is the source of income.    But there are examples.  Consider music lessons, where as a student gets better at the instrument (or put another way, learns more) the student pays more for learning--choosing a more skilled teacher, for example, and attending lessons more frequently.

Or consider dance and martial arts academies.  They often offer free lessons for the first month.  Students who learn that they hate dance or karate drop out early on.  But those who like it sign on for more.  Learning gets linked with success and pleasure, and before long, the student is part of a performance team and parents are paying a substantial amount of money for lessons, uniforms, and travel.  At some point the student becomes so good that he is invited to teach as well, starting usually with the beginners.

I do not mean to suggest that schools ought to restructure their sources of income so that they earn nothing if students don't learn.  But it would be interesting to see the effect of lower costs for introductory classes, or full tuition payment only coming after students demonstrate their learning, or a collaboration between reformers who are working to change the incentives in the system so that learning, not enrollment, is the heart of what any good school does.

The fortune at the bottom of the higher education pyramid

Daniel Griswold, Director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, spoke at Westminster last week about his new book, Mad About Trade.  The talk was part of our Weldon J. Taylor Executive Lecture Series, and it was pitched perfectly for the audience--a mixture of students, faculty, and community members interested in global issues and connected to the Utah Council for Citizen Diplomacy, our partner in the lecture series.

Most of Griswold's talk focused on the benefits of global trade, but he made a passing comment that has had me thinking ever since.  He noted that while the cost of many things produced in a global system has declined rapidly (think TVs, computers, etc.), the cost of things impervious to global trade has risen rapidly. And of course the two industries that make this case are health care and higher education.

The general recipe for driving down the cost of things in global trade is the reduction of trade barriers.  And there are certainly barriers to trade in higher education, most particularly the quotas and visa system that make it difficult for international students to study in the US (and vice versa) because they cannot get access to higher ed here.

But it is my sense that the main barrier is the unwillingness of American higher education to look at the right markets.  Where American colleges and universities do make international partnerships, they tend to target the upper third of the pyramid--those people who have already become part of the global middle class and can therefore afford something like a full-ticket American education.

You can see this approach both in the partnerships that US universities make globally--the NYU campus in Abu Dhabi, for example; or Yale's foray into creating a liberal arts college in Singapore--and in the international students that US campuses recruit.

In doing this American higher ed overlooks the huge changes in the developing world.  There are dozens, but four that stand out are these:

• the pace of urbanization is picking up in the developing world, and with it the amassing of millions of people in close proximity to each other,
• the cities of the developing world are showing signs of increased vitality and creativity, most particularly in those sections settled by squatters,
• squatter cities have shown themselves to be tremendous economic engines--that is there are fortunes at the bottom of the pyramid-- and to be much greener than older cities, small towns, or suburbs--that is, a sustainable future depends on the ability of humans to live successfully in cities (see Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Discipline: An Eco-pragmatist Manifesto for a clear account of the vitality of squatter cities),
• and one engine of economic improvement and social well-being are schools in those cities, organized and paid for by parents.

 Last year I highlighted James Tooley's The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey into how the World's Poor are Educating Themselves. Tooley's story is that of the emergence of educationally and economically successful primary schools in the developing world.  American higher education ought to be asking itself if it can play a role both in advancing those successful primary schools and in helping to develop low-cost colleges and universities for the same people.

Such schools would both help colleges and universities live out their commitment to helping people and their communities build better lives, and help colleges and universities figure out how to do their work less expensively, while maintaining the quality that we are justly renowned for.

How do students learn the language of prestige?

I have another daughter who is beginning to look at colleges.  She will be a senior next year, has taken the ACT, and is looking to applying for college in a few months.

As with her older sister, a big part of her thinking has been tied up with the prestige of the schools to which she will apply.  Both her mother and I attended BYU as undergraduates.  My wife's MBA is from BYU also; my PhD is from the University of Delaware.  Good schools both, but neither at the top of anyone's list of the most prestigious schools in America.  Neither of us have focused on prestige in talking with our kids about college.  In fact, I have argued again and again that fit is more important than reputation, and that learning has a lot more to do with student and faculty engagement than with the size of a school's endowment.  Nor have my kids learned to seek prestige from their high school counselors or peers.  They attend a public high school which encourages its graduates to go to college.  Only about half do, and of those last year, only two left the state for college.

This situation--that both of my college-age daughters have been highly concerned about prestige without any direct discussion of it--intrigues me for three reasons.  First, I wonder where strong students come to link their futures with the prestige of the institutions they will attend.  After all, short of a few very famous universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton) discussion of prestigious schools isn't part of the broader American culture.  Surely universities with famous football teams (Penn State, Florida, Oklahoma, USC) are better known than excellent liberal arts colleges (Middlebury, Williams, Grinnell), even among the well-educated.

Second, I wonder how prestige has come to be a stand-in for quality, and how that stand-in role is perpetuated among young people.  That prestige stands for quality is, of course, a commonplace, and the basis for most of the many college rankings.  But top students ought to be the least likely to be fooled by the argument that a huge endowment means great learning, or that world-class research faculty mean that freshman composition will be a life-changing experience.

Third, youth culture is undergoing a huge shift in the ways that reputation works.  Nearly every aspect of culture--music, movies, clothing, food--bears a reputational ranking with it now, and young people are happy to rate everything, including college teachers once they enroll.  Somehow, though, student views of institutions of higher education are currently impervious to the reputation revolution going on elsewhere.

So what is it that makes prestige endure?  I suppose there are several answers.  Parent perceptions might be one, since nearly every parent gets some vicarious educational experience through their childrens' schooling.

If I had to bet, based on my daughter's experiences, I would say that prestige is a proxy for opportunity, and that it is the expectation of access to educational opportunities that most shapes a student's views of prestige.  This is an interesting variant of the prestige = quality equation.  Opportunity is sometimes linked to quality, but it is more powerfully linked to access--to travel, to friends, to relationships with faculty, to employment prospects.

What does the research on prestige suggest?  Are there schools that have successfully used reputational rankings to raise their visibility and desirability?  What else does prestige mean to students? 

Checklists and transparency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Education checklists?

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

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

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

Would retention go up 35%?

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

Would learning improve 35%?

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