Who opts out of public schooling?

One of the quiet themes in this blog is that K-12 and Higher Ed could learn a lot if they paid attention to each other. This post is about another issue where this is true.

In higher ed, we have known for a long time who doesn't attend public institutions. In general it is the wealthy, the very poor, students without a family history of higher education, very religious students, students whose parents didn't go to public schools, etc.

In K-12, though, the assumption has always been that those who opt out of public schooling are simply the wealthy and those who know the system. This myth comes up every time there is a discussion of vouchers, or of school choice. Public school people say that if choice opens up, the public schools will be left only with low-achieving, troubled, low-income students whose parents don't have the time or the money to select an option.

I'm the board chair of a public charter high school in Salt Lake City--City Academy. I met yesterday with the head of the school to talk about enrollment for fall. Our enrollment is up, and growth is coming not only from wealthy, highly educated families (those who the myth says will opt out). It is coming instead from all areas of the periphery--families whose children were singled out for teasing in public schools, or high-functioning autistic kids, or kids who are culturally on the margins. In short, our school is made up of the same kids whose families later opt out of public colleges.

Why is this? Because K-12 and public higher ed aim for the middle. They recruit decent students who understand the school system. Kids whose families are on the periphery, for whatever reason opt out.

This should be good news for people worried about the future of public schooling. Rather than sink into a mass low-performing students, choice (be it through charter schools or private schools) could leave them with the students they are set up to serve. It is bad news for people who care about kids on the margin, though. There aren't nearly enough targeted non-public K-12 options for them. What we need is a K-12 system that looks more like our system of higher ed--more small options available--but with more attention to the needs of low income families.

It should also encourage us to be careful with how we think about the student body. It is rarely useful to think of a large body of students (those in a school, or a district, for example) as members of a hierarchy arrayed on economic grounds. We would be better off thinking of them as part of a system with a core and a periphery. Public schools serve the core (whatever it may look like--the core in the DC schools is far different than that in the Salt Lake City school district), the question is how can we serve the periphery better?

What is an educational frill?

My daughter leaves for college in a month. Yesterday she got a solicitation from the college, inviting her (meaning us, her parents) to hire the school's laundry service to wash, iron, and fold her clothes. For only $690 a year. This is a frill.

"No frills" education is all the rage these days. Pennsylvania is considering a no-frills college; Southern New Hampshire University has a no-frills branch campus. Arne Duncan recently suggested that students would flock to no-frills versions of higher ed.

These no-frills schools have the same formula--limited curriculum, no extracurricular activities, bare bones facilities, lower tuition. I understand their appeal, both as a parent facing costly college bills for the forseeable future, and as a historian whose classes would usually fit into a no-frills model.

But the more I think about a no-frills approach to education, the more I think that these pioneers have gotten it wrong on educational grounds. The no-frills models they propose are based in the "instructional paradigm" to use John Tagg's phrase. That is, they value efficient content delivery rather than a focus on student learning. So again, the cost may go down, but the quality may not improve at all.

So what would a no-frills college look like that valued student learning? I'm not entirely sure, but here are some ideas:

• extra-curriculars would be at the center of student experiences, since it is in extra-curriculars where students say they learn the most and develop the most. Students wouldn't be able to choose any one of a hundred clubs, teams, etc. but they would be expected to be involved, deeply, in one extracurricular activity. (This report provides some evidence of the retention power of student services, an important point for a no-frills effort.)
• the curriculum would be small, interdisciplinary, and project-based. Students would be required to demonstrate mastery of content and achievement of campus-wide learning goals to graduate. But they could graduate more rapidly than in a traditional or no-frills school because they could move faster, and because single learning experiences (a service-learning project, for example) would matter in many courses, not just one.
• students would work closely with a single mentor, who would be responsible for helping that student reflect on her learning, solve problems related to schooling, and monitor progress toward graduation.
• students would be required to demonstrate their learning publicly, and to the public.

What else?

Change over time

Folks working on reforming higher ed today rarely look to the past, except to deride it as something to escape by means of technology, pedagogy, etc. But there are some interesting implications in the broad history of American higher education for the effort to improve learning, lower cost, and reform institutions, if not the entire system. At the risk of betraying my roots as a historian, here are a few historical trends worth paying attention to:

• Very few institutions have moved from high cost (to students) to low cost (to students). It seems instead that once an institution or sector of higher ed locks into a price model, it stays there. So you don't see private institutions cutting their tuitions hugely. Nor, interestingly, do you see many institutions based on low tuition moving to a higher tuition model (beyond adjustments for the cost of doing business as they see it). (This article, which encourages caution in cost-cutting, is evidence of the difficulty in reducing costs.)
• Some institutions have been able to move from lower quality to higher quality. Elon University, for example, has received a lot of attention for raising its quality over the past 30 years (though truth be told it made that move in part by raising status). Earlier in the history of the US, several state institutions jumped into the highest echelons of higher ed--midwestern state universities, for example. Their move came at a flush moment for higher ed though, and depended in large measure on the ability to spend on the same things that Ivy League schools did.
• Moves out of higher education have tended to be due to financial problems or obsolete missions, not diretly to cost or quality. The main example in this area is the recently secularized independent private schools who, in the 1970s, having severed their ties to denominations, found themselves too small, too poor, and too isolated to stay in business.
• Moves into higher education have tended to be based on structure or approach, (or occasionally on mission), but not on cost or quality. So, for example community colleges emerged to meet demographic changes (though here low cost did matter to the mission) in post-WWII America, the University of Phoenix found a niche in providing education to working adults, and online universities followed in the same area.

Why does this matter? Because it suggests that changes in the cost/quality relationship may not be able to drive institutional change. Systemic change might be easier, but only if the issue can be tied to a broader educational approach which has the power to appeal to an underservd group. So the question should be "what sort of education is desirable and effective for first-generation students (or Hispanics, or any other group)?" not, "who wants to study in an open learning, low cost, high quality institution?"

Is "transparency" the solution?

There is a good exchange at The Quick and the Ed about transparency, information, and the quality of higher education. On one side is the libertarian Neal McCluskey who argues that higher ed would be better off with less government interference and expenditure. Less government would lead to greater freedom, which would lead to greater innovation, McCluskey argues.

On the other are several authors arguing that cost will only go down if consumers have more information, colleges are more transparent, and the federal government sets the standards to which schools must respond.

The debate thus becomes the typical regulation vs. freedom set-to that pops up in American politics all the time.

Sometimes these debates are useful. This time, I think not. Here are the reasons why (based almost entirely on my experience in the past year, working on improving learning and reducing cost, while helping my daughter select a college):
1. in spite of liberal hopes to the contrary, information alone does very little to help people make good decisions. If anything, there is too much information, not too little.

2. parents and students generally have access to the information they use to make decisions about higher ed. A tiny bit of it is related to colleges (tuition, fees, access to financial aid, academic programs), but most of it has to do with the dynamics of the family--can we afford this school? do we have any connections there? do we feel comfortable sending our child to that school? does the school seem like a good fit with our values?

3. that limited information is probably fine, since the variation in student engagement and learning is bigger within a school than between schools. In other words, a student can have a great experience at nearly any school, and a great experience at Salt Lake Community College is often better than a lousy experience at Harvard.

4. there is no evidence that more information about what colleges spend their money on, or about rankings, or about student learning in general, drives parent decision making or cost containment at an institution.

5. responses to cost are driven instead by internal factors--the predilections of the leadership, the influence of the faculty, the value placed on innovation, and the types of information about the future that flow into the institution. So if more info is needed by anyone, it is not the public but instead college presidents, provosts, and faculty who are in a position to make changes with it.

Is the college experience built backwards?

Today's Inside Higher Ed features an article titled "Bucking Conventional Wisdom on College Costs," by Dennis Jones, president of NCHEMS and Jane Wellman from the Delta Project on Higher Education Costs. It is a good piece--attentive to cost savings that come from efficiencies, aware that current educational models ensure ever-increasing costs, but determined to find ways to maintain quality while reducing costs.

The article lists a series of pieces of "conventional wisdom" on cost. Number 5 caught my eye. Jones and Wellman argue that the agreed-upon truth is that:

"Instructional costs rise by the level of the student taught – e.g., lower-division students are cheaper than upper-division students, graduate students are more expensive than undergraduates, and doctoral students who have been advanced to candidacy are the most expensive of all."

They suggest that this is not the case--that once you consider recruitment and other expenses, first-year students might actually cost the institution money. And, of course, there is lost revenue when first-year students quit after their first two semesters in college.

But where it is the case it is because first-year students require relatively little faculty time while upper-division and graduate students require much more. Consider class size--freshman classes are almost universally larger than upper division classes. (Freshmen seminars being the exception that proves the rule.) And junior faculty teach more first-year courses than do their more senior colleagues.

This arrangement--big first-year classes, small upper-division classes--is the classic "lower cost, lower quality" set-up. It is also educationally and developmentally incorrect. First-year students need closer contact with faculty and staff support. As they move through the curriculum, they need to become more independent, and can think and act at higher levels.

The problem suggests a solution. Switch ratios so that upper-division faculty are responsible for more, not fewer, students.

Of course, nothing good will come of this if upper-division faculty try to lecture their way through their courses. But if a campus is committed to students working cooperatively, then interesting things happen. Let's say faculty teaching first-year students are each responsible for 20 students. They form into four groups, and get close supervision, lots of feedback, good guidance on content, and strong mentoring. As students move through the curriculum, they stay in small groups, but their faculty supervise more of the groups. Let's say it is eight groups in the second year, twelve in the third, and sixteen in the fourth.

In this process, two things happen. First, faculty oversee more students, driving down costs to the institution, and potentially to the students. Second, those students are working more independently, judging the quality of content, making their own conclusions, etc--all prerequisites for work (and life) outside the halls of college.

Lest you think this is crazy, consider Aalborg University in Denmark--an institution that does much of what I suggest.

a very short text for the common read

A couple of posts ago I wondered about the actual value of asking entering freshmen to read books before they come to campus, thinking that something much shorter might be much more powerful.

I've had the following quote sitting on my desk for a couple of weeks. It would be an interesting one to wrap a long-term, campus-wide conversation around.

"If the reconciliation of the common good with free persons in their weakness and division is one of the most crucial of all human tasks, we do well to heed the principles of lowliness. The most realistic solutions are not likely to be grand or lofty, but humble and concrete. Looking for them in the wrong place, or in the wrong mode, we are quite likely to miss them altogether. The principle of lowliness...is the most reliable guide in political philosophy."
--Michael Novak, Free Persons and the Common Good (Lanham, MD.: Madison Books, 1989), 73

At a time when we are talking about global crises, global citizenship, and people trying to fix the world, the question of lowliness is a really interesting one, especially in college where the reigning notion is not lowliness or humility, but pride and the desire to fix big things.

Follow-up on private higher ed; the future of CEU

Following up on two recent posts:
1. In this post I wondered if the expansion of low-cost private K-12 education in the developing world could be copied in higher education. Turns out the answer is yes. This story, which refers to this report from UNESCO, describes rapid growth in private higher education around the world. In some countries, more students are enrolled in private than public higher education. The article also points out that the fastest growth has come in schools focused on workforce development, and in schools started by religious sects. In the US, we tends to assume that starting new colleges and universities is almost impossible because of the bricks and mortar costs. It seems as though these costs aren't impediments around the world.

2. Here I suggested that Utah would be smart if it turned its struggling campuses into schools directly focused on innovation, but worried that instead the struggling institutions would be swallowed up by bigger ones. Looks like that will be the case, as the Utah Board of Regents are leaning towards Utah State University wholly owning the College of Eastern Utah. I see no good reason to do this, except for administrative efficiency.

If anything, the state would be better off if Utah State gave over its educational centers in Eastern Utah to CEU. CEU could over time become a regional university, similar in its scope to schools like Weber State, SUU, and UVU who have also made a relatively recent shift from 2-year to 4-year schools. Utah State could in turn tighten its focus on its key research focus (and its extension goals which seem to be conflated with its regional education efforts).

So, Utah misses an opportunity, Eastern Utah loses the chance to get the educational, civic, and economic attention it deserves, and efficiency triumphs over all education.