The most important fact about the future of higher education

Many things will be true about higher education; only some of those things will be important. If your school is concerned about the future of higher education, it must both figure out what makes a fact important (in my book important facts are those that, if acted upon, have the potential to change the whole institution), and which important facts your school wants to focus on.

The most important fact about the future of higher education is this: all students will be transfer students.  By this I mean two things: first, that an increasing proportion of students will approach an institution bringing transcripted credits with them, and second, that even more students will bring expertise with them that they have learned outside traditional institutions, but which must be transferred into their new campus if that campus is to be true to the student's learning and aspirations.

Here are several ways in which the fact that all students will be transfer students will transform higher education:

1. Traditional measures of success for access, retention, and graduation, will become obsolete. If most students bring credit with them, there is no such thing as a "freshman class," retention will not be controllable (since students will move easily among several institutions), and four-year graduation rates will mean very little, since few campuses will provide the entirety of a student's education.
2. The idea of a curriculum will be unstable. Curricula rely on students taking courses in sequence, or at least in an order required by the institution.  But transfer students will not join an institution with the same academic backgrounds, and so therefore won't want (or shouldn't want) to take courses in sequence.  Curricula must look like networks, not lines, and learning must include opportunities to make meaning of learning outside of a standardized sequence of courses.
3. The freshman year will be less important.  For the past two decades colleges and universities have focused on improving the first-year and placing distinctive programs in it.  But given the increasing number of students coming with credit and knowledge of varying sorts, the first year will be much less important than the last year, presumably the only time when most students at an institution will be able to have a common experience.
4. The most important skills for faculty will be aggregation, meaning-making, and certification, not teaching, learning, research, or any other currently popular aspects of pedagogy. It will fall to faculty to work with students to help them aggregate their prior learning from a variety of institutions and sources, make meaning out of it, add to that store of knowledge, and then certify that that knowledge adds up to something that can be carried along.
5. Colleges and universities will specialize more than ever before. If students are transferring knowledge and credits from many sources, only those institutions with identifiable specialties will be able to stand out among standardized options.
6. The most important alliances between institutions will be among unlike, not like, institutions. Currently nearly every alliance--athletic conferences, consortia, lobbying groups, faculty development networks, etc.--are among similar institutions.  Westminster is part of the New American Colleges and Universities, a consortium of institutions of similar size and programming.  The University of Utah has just joined the Pac-12 to be with schools more like it. But in a transfer world, schools will want to ally themselves with a network of differing institutions in order to maximize learning for (and revenue from) students.  We will see more formal alliances between community colleges and liberal arts colleges, research universities and teaching institutions, so that within a network of schools a student can get all the learning s/he desires, and individual campuses can contribute specific things of value to the learning of particular students.

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.

What does growing economic inequality mean for enrollment management?

The Occupy movement has coaxed economic inequality from a quiet, hidden corner of American civic discussion to the center.  By all measures, it is growing in the United States.  And it has sharpened the discussion about access, tuition rates, and the value of higher education.

The big questions about higher education are important ones.  In this post, I want to focus on something narrower, though--the impact of growing economic disparity on enrollment management.  This is a topic about which there has been little discussion, and about which there should be serious concern.  Here is why:

Growing economic inequality means three things:

1.  Children from families at the top of the economic heap will have ever greater educational opportunities because socio-economic status correlates with academic performance.  And in enrollment management, strong academic performance is linked directly to high discount rates, as schools compete for top students.
2. Children from families at the bottom of the economic heap, a growing proportion of American society, will require ever more need-based aid in order to go to college.  And in enrollment management, high need correlates to high discount rates, as schools try to make it possible for those students to attend college.
3. Therefore, enrollment managers will see increasing demand for both merit and need-based aid, and hence growing pressure on the discount rate from both ends of the spectrum.

The key question for enrollment managers, then, is how to face this dual challenge while bringing in enough revenue to meet the institution's need.  I don't know the answer, but I do suspect one thing--that schools who do it successfully will focus on narrowing the economic band from which they recruit students, because they can no longer count on one end subsidizing the other.

Does education come before employment?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where are the entrepreneurs for community colleges?

It is basic economics that when demand outpaces supply, prices rise.  The rise in prices signals to entrepreneurs that profits are available, and so they enter the market.  So this report detailing the shortage of space at community colleges, on the heels of stories about the collapse of state systems of higher education, the precipitous decline in enrollment growth at for-profits, and the rise everywhere in tuition rates, ought to signal to entrepreneurs that the time is ripe to provide a top-quality education to prospective community college students.

I've argued before that private liberal arts colleges could move successfully into this space.  They already have accreditation, and excellence in the sorts of general education courses that community college students need.   K-12 systems could move into that space as well, since they, more than anyone else, know what 18-year olds who have struggled in high school need in order to move ahead.  And tech entrepreneurs could build online community colleges, drawing on the best content out there and bundling it with the sort of support that community college students need to succeed.

It is a shame that while the prestigious colleges and universities roll out campuses around the globe chasing international dollars, or combine to offer their courses ( but not their degrees) online for free, there is little attention to reaching students in the US who could benefit from the sort of education that community colleges offer--important, basic courses built for students who want to learn but who are not well-served by 4-year institutions.

That challenge is one that ought to set entrepreneurs and educators with a passion for the opportunity that education provides, hard to work.  It is not every day when one can do well by doing good.  But this is that time.

Should service make things better?

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

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

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

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

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

Introversion, active learning, and the need for deep reflection

Susan Cain's new book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking,  argues that the current fascination with group-work and charismatic leadership is both a historical phenomenon and one that ought to be viewed with some suspicion.

This is particularly the case for educators, who, if they take Cain's work seriously, now must balance the benefit of active learning (which often draws on group work and values outgoing-ness) with the knowledge that such forms of learning have a politics to them--one that values extroversion over introversion.

It would be a mistake to think that old modes of learning--the lecture, the multiple-choice exam, etc.--were better for introverts than is active learning.  But it would also be a mistake to think that active learning, as is typically done, works for introverts.

Instead, teachers and learners alike ought to be paying much more attention to deepening the reflective and contemplative component of learning, for introverts and extroverts alike.  Reflection as is currently practiced in higher education is hardly reflective at all.  Writing an essay after service-learning that explains what you learned is no more reflective than writing a book review.  And that act hardly sustains the contemplative practices that lead both to learning and to a deeper sense of how one fits in the world.

For reflection to be meaningful, it must be regular, habitual, and tied to a philosophy of living well in the world.  These things were once a part of some types of colleges and universities.  Today they rarely are part of the core of the educational experience.  Some students experience such things, it is true.  But most students do not.

So Cain's book ought to remind us that reflection is more than an assignment at the end of a class. It is a way of being in the world, one that is good for one's health, and better for the health of our societies.