The Role of Higher Education
by AndrewMc | 10/06/2009 07:00:00 AM
It's traditional to assume that when a recession hits, college enrollment rises at both the undergraduate and graduate level. There is a sense that having a college education allows one to accomplish more, and to earn more. As what might turn out to be a W-shaped recession drags on, I think we'll see a lot more people questioning whether or not a college education is really worth it. NPR did a piece on this question a few weeks ago, which you can listen to here.

It seems to be the topic du jour. Follow me . . . .




The New York Times also weighed in, asking the following:

The most subversive question about higher education has always been whether the college makes the student or the student makes the college. Sure, Harvard graduates make more money than graduates of just about any other college. And most community-college students will end up making far less than graduates of flagship state universities. But of course these students didn’t enter college with the same preparation and skills. Colleges don’t help to clear up the situation either, because they do so little to measure what students learn between freshman and senior years. So doubt lurks: how much does a college education — the actual teaching and learning that happens on campus — really matter?

and followed with:

Along with all this skepticism, though, economic downturns also create one big countervailing force that pushes people toward college: many of them have nothing better to do.

The article goes on to ask "who's right?"--skeptics who say that a college education doesn't lead to more money, or proponents who say that in the end they will earn more money.

I'm not surprised that this is how media outlets like NPR and the Times have chosen to frame this question. After all, we're in the midst of what is coming to be called "The Great Recession." So, questions of the economy are on everyone's mind. Even without these questions, the Census Bureau reminds us that over the term of the Bush Administration, most economic indicators got worse. Drastically so.

Remember:
On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush's two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country's condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton's two terms, often substantially.

Think about that for a second. "Every major measurement." Not "some." Not "a few." Not "this one over here, but not those." No. "Every major measurement."

What makes this all the more galling is that the economy through which we are suffering is one that is entirely of the Republicans' creation. By the time Bush took office in 2001, that downturn was over. The economy was again on the upswing. By the time Bush left office, the economy had crashed. There's not many other ways to parse the issue. His policies, and those foisted on the nation by his Republican allies, took an improving economy and demolished it.

From the same article (which is worth reading. Twice.):

That leaves Bush with the dubious distinction of becoming the only president in recent history to preside over an income decline through two presidential terms, notes Lawrence Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

So, as we claw our way out of this Recession-not-Depression, folks head back to school. They do so for a wide variety of reasons. Some folks do it as an escape. They take out a loan, float through an MA program, and hope that when they get out the economy has recovered and they're a bit more marketable. Others do it because they always wanted to get that MA in History, and now's the time.

And other folks ask, "is it worth the money?"

Sorry, but this isn't the debate, folks.

And let me say, asking a bunch of economists for the answer is essentially silly. Economists are a Venn-subset of mathematicians whose main occupation is sticking numbers in at one end, excreting them at the other end, and then making wild ass guesses about what the piles of numbers mean for the future.

Education is not about number-crunching. A college education isn't just about earning more money, although that is certainly one incentive. The ideal of a college education is that it helps build a better-educated society on a number of levels. True, it builds a better work force. Even if sie doesn't earn more money, a well-educated laborer is a better laborer--one who can help hir company improve production and efficiency by offering more creative ideas based on a broader set of educational experiences.

More importantly a better educated citizenry is crucial to the workings of a democracy. In order to understand the myriad issues that face this nation, it is crucial that Americans experience as wide a range of viewpoints as possible. Citizens must be trained to take those viewpoints and process them in an analytical fashion. College does that; high school does not.

A century ago, a high school education was more than enough for most. But today's global reality calls for a college education for as many as is possible. Not just for the absolutely unquantifiable economic benefits to the individual, but because of the civic and economic benefits to the national collective.

The New York Times is asking whether or not a college education is creating better-paid workers. The most "subversive" question isn't "whether the college makes the student or the student makes the college." That's a bullshit question dreamed up by martini-sipping reporters looking to sound smart in the first few lines of what they fear will be a boring article.

The most subversive question is "what's the purpose of a university?" [And not, "what's the purpose of a university education?"]

The purpose of a university is to produce students who can think analytically and contribute to the civic body of the nation, in whatever way their talents best allow. It's not about whether or not college creates better-paid citizens. Going to college creates better citizens. That's hard to quantify.

Graduate students and faculty have to do a much better job of communicating the admittedly difficult idea that a college education is about creating a well-rounded individual who is better equipped to participate in civic society. We need to shout that message from the rooftops, in editorials, on blogs, in letters to the editor, and to anyone who will listen. Because as state budgets shrink, higher education is a target.

As the Chron reminds us (paid subscription), down this path lies disaster. While US Higher Ed remains dominant, that leadership is eroding. When it does so the United States loses a lot more than a higher-paid work force. We lose something crucial to the functioning of American democracy.

That's worth more than a few extra dollars an hour.

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It Is Us
by AndrewMc | 9/21/2009 07:00:00 AM
Last week I had the “opportunity” to attend the Kentucky “Governor’s Conference on Postsecondary Education Trusteeship.”

I love the word “opportunity.” It has so many divergent meanings, and as with many words, context is everything. A business opportunity can bring profit, and the phrase “opportunity knocks” is generally seen as positive. But when my department head says “I have an opportunity for you,” I usually turn and run in the other direction. When the dean or the provost says it, I’m not yet sure what to think.




So there I found myself at the Governor’s Conference—a yearly event that lays out the “state of the union” for education. The conference features sessions on a variety of topics. This year’s offerings included something on enrollment, a session on trustee/regent responsibilities, one on the “post-recession” challenges, a session on the upcoming legislative agenda in Kentucky, and a few others.

At the opening talk, the speaker flew through a series of PowerPoint slides, sometimes three or four of them in a matter of a second or two. But I did learn that nationwide, more money is being spent on wealthier students, and less on low-income students in the form of grants, federal aid, and institutional aid. So, the speaker concluded, more money is going to students who don’t need it. In the past year, there’s been about 17% more money for low-income and about 35% more for high-income students. 60% in aid dollars go to students with no financial need.

This should be probed a bit. I suspect that the speaker was casting a pretty wide net with her figures. For example, I suspect she’s counting the increased money that’s going into honors programs, which tend to serve students from middling and upper-class backgrounds.

At the talk on the legislative session we had a chance to ask questions of two of our legislators who are on Kentucky’s Senate Ed. Committee. Both are very nice guys, but I harangued them for calling for greater oversight of universities by Trustees/Boards while at the same time not exercising their own oversight over those boards. For example, I went into the issue of tenure at KCTCS and the astoundingly bad decision made by the Trustees. Where is the oversight when these boards fail?

By far the most startling thing I saw came at a session on higher education in the “post recession.” Friends, this is a sign of the times, and it wasn’t pretty. In fact, I’d call it a downright nightmare.

Essentially this speaker based his talk on three main premises:


  • The current recession requires decisive action: cutbacks, and long term innovations
  • A new generation of emerging analytic capabilities [web 2.0], means more accountability and performance improvement
  • To lift out of recession and more forward, and become more efficient and have better solutions, based on operational efficiency


OK, so far a bit of this makes sense. There’s fat in any university, and the recession certainly requires us to re-think how a university operates, what we need to prioritize, and how we can move forward. And certainly “operational efficiency” is something that any university should strive towards. The number of non-teaching administrators is growing by leaps and bounds.

And by and large he made some sense in the things he said when he discussed how we need to make sure students complete college without having to deal with too many institutional obstacles. But a lot of it made me uneasy, to be honest. The fact that he was hammering the “efficiency theme” got me a bit worried. It clearly was slanted toward the idea that students needed to get in, get out, and get a job. There was very little sense of a broader educational mission, or of any kind of understanding that a university exists for more things than to award degrees to get people jobs.

Whatever. I’d heard these things before.

But then he said that we need to “Improve academic productivity” and my head snapped up. I raised my hand. “Could you possibly explain what you mean by that?” I asked. His initial answer didn’t say anything, so I asked him to again explain how one would measure efficiency among faculty. At that point someone in the back, who I believe was with the speaker, shouted that it was “entirely possible to measure efficiency among faculty, it’s done in factories all the time!” I laughed, turned to the speaker, and asked him to readdress the question. He started to talk about how courses are taught, how many students one has, about hiring more adjuncts, and holding professors accountable for getting students through. I started to get chills.

I realized that I could meet all of his efficiency requirements by teaching a few 500-person sections, assigning crap work, and giving everyone an “A.” And that would be perfectly acceptable under his model.

Then I looked through the brochure for his biography. The speaker was a consultant for several factories (including Black and Decker) and for the University of Phoenix and Capella University. So, essentially his experience has been in trying to help a company produce a product for as little money as possible, all while charging as much as possible for that product. He has no teaching experience.

This is the future, folks. As state funding decreases and universities come to rely on tuition for more of their operating budgets, there will be increased pressure to make certain that students graduate, regardless of the education they receive. The idea of a “liberal arts” education will fall by the wayside as universities seek to maximize their bottom lines by hiring more adjuncts and having them teach larger sections of students.

Keep in mind that when KCTCS decided to abolish tenure for new hires, it started itself down the road towards greater efficiency. And this isn’t just a “Kentucky thing.” Other states are looking into changing the tenure rules as well.

In the meantime, the Board of Regents offered the president of the University of Kentucky a $168,000 “performance bonus.” Lee Todd, who earns $304,000 per year, wisely turned it down, saying that it would be inappropriate in this economic climate, when faculty and staff didn’t get raises this year.

The response? The Board voted to give it to him anyway, with one member saying “"He is CEO of a $2.4 billion entity. I think anything under $1 million is paltry, personally."

Welcome to the future of education.


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Tenure, Job Issues, and Boards of Regents
by AndrewMc | 8/16/2009 07:00:00 AM
I've been chewing on this one for a few weeks, not quite knowing where to begin. I could say "begin at the beginning," which is easy, in theory. If only I knew where the beginning was.

Is it the overall bad economy? Does it relate to trends in higher education that began back in the 1970s? Is it, somehow, Bill Clinton's fault? I'm not sure. What I do know is that over the past few months the Board of Regents for the Kentucky Community and Technical College System has begun to dismantle one of the foundational principles of higher education. And in turn various officials around the state have supported the decisions. And that these decisions are part of a trend.





On March 13, 2008, the Board of Regents for the Kentucky Community and Technical College System voted to abolish tenure for all new faculty hired after July 1, 2009. Despite numerous resolutions condemning the vote from Faculty Senates across the state, despite appeals to the president of the KCTCS system [who was the one who pushed for the policy change], and despite many letters to the governor, it seems that this decision will stand.

In gauging the opposition to this move, one would be hard-pressed to find a greater show of unity among people working in institutions of higher education in any state on most any issue in the past few decades.

From editorials in major newspapers [pdf] in the state, to faculty resolutions, to resolutions from professional organizations, to online petitions, university faculty and even staff worked to get this decision overturned. To no avail.

But they were fighting against more than the KCTCS Board of Regents' decision. Faculty at institutions of higher education suffer a barrage of negative publicity in newspapers about so-called "liberal faculty," the public's general assumption that higher-ed faculty work a few months out of the year and then take the summers off, there is a general devaluation of faculty in general, and a public hostility towards tenure.

In my opinion, the decision by KCTCS reflects a long-term decline in both the valuation of faculty by Boards and administration-types, as well as a short-term change in how Boards are composed. Nowadays many Boards are staffed by political appointees who come from the world of business. These folks see the university as a business, and to them faculty and staff (or "labor") are an obstacle—a problem to overcome in the management of a business.

I recently had the opportunity to attend a couple of meetings of some Boards of Regents. It was not unlike watching sausage get made. The process is ugly, and I think most faculty wouldn't want to see what goes into it.

At one university meeting during the semester the issue of faculty compensation came up. Given the deep budget cuts, faculty at that particular institution will not receive raises in the coming fiscal year. As the president of that university explained, nobody would—the financial situation was too dire, and the state had directed that no state employees would receive a raise.

Except that when the Board published its meeting agenda, it turned out that several administrators and a few well-placed faculty would receive raises in amounts up to $30,000 per year. It also turned out that other state employees would, in fact, receive raises—despite the claims by that university president.

As you might expect, when word of the raises leaked, there was a great deal of outrage. At the Regents' meeting for that university the faculty regent expressed her outrage and noted that the university had already lost three faculty from a single department because of what was seen as a lack of concern for faculty on the part of the administration, as well as because of salary issues. In response one of the Regents pointed out that those faculty were easily replaceable, and that a university needed people who were going to be loyal. There was no dissent.

A few minutes later, when the discussion turned to the administrators' raises, the Regents began praising the work of the administration, and noted that sometimes salary increases were needed in order to retain high-quality people.

At the next meeting of that same board, one of the administrators who received a hefty raise also received a fairly substantial series of bonuses, which elicited the comment from one regent that "this nice little bonus" recognizes the hard work that people do.

Fast forward and change places to the meeting of another board, which I also had the opportunity to attend. Here the Trustees sat through presentation after presentation from different units on that campus. And in fact the presentations on what they had achieved were quite interesting. From sustainable landscaping to dorm retention rates to a series of absolutely fascinating academic initiatives, the faculty and staff of the university were clearly moving in the right direction. Most of the academic presentations were justified by "this isn't going to cost us anything." At the end of each presentation the Trustees either said nothing, or gave a polite "Thank you."

Then came the presentation from the Athletic Director. It was mostly a litany of what will be achieved in the future, and "look at that shiny object over there" moments to distract from the fact that the athletic program is losing money. At one point the faculty representative to the Board of Trustees asked to see a balance sheet for how much had been spent versus how much money was coming in. This was met with indignation and cries of "what an athletics program brings to a university is so intangible."

When the presentation ended the Trustees fell all over themselves praising the athletics director for having such a fine program, for such a great presentation, and for being such a great guy. It bordered on the sycophantic.

I know that this sort of thing isn't confined to a couple of regional schools. It's endemic. Universities have become more top-heavy as non-educational services have increased. Anyone who has read Beer and Circus knows what athletics is doing to higher education.

And yet I can't hep but notice a larger trend wherein universities are simultaneously touting their educational bone fides in terms of the undergraduate "experience," distance education, and continuing education, while at the same time devaluing the faculty who serve as the backbone of that learning experience.

Or are they, in fact, the backbone? The recent decision to eliminate tenure by the KCTCS is a harbinger of things to come. Not a year goes by without the AHA publishing a report on the increased use of adjuncts for teaching. And those adjuncts have it crappier than ever.

The devaluation of our profession is worse than you think. Here's some homework for you. Check to see if your university employs high school teachers to teach college-level courses. And I use the word "employ" pretty loosely here. Many universities have developed programs where high school teachers pay the university to teach for-credit college courses to high school students, and then the teachers receive credit for teaching the class.

That's right, the university is being paid by high school teachers for the privilege of teaching classes. These are usually 100-level classes that fulfill a Gen-Ed requirement of some sort. You are being replaced by high school teachers in the name of economic efficiency, and with a budget crisis and university priorities such as "outreach" and continuing education as an excuse. Can it be much longer before administrators use this as a bargaining tactic with departments and faculty? "You know, you can be replaced by someone who will pay us to teach."

As administrators continue to devalue the work of faculty, our jobs are going to get tougher, and a whole host of attendant problems will manifest themselves. Already faculty have largely lost their voice in university governance, in many cases to students who are seen as customers and who therefore ought to have a voice in university affairs all out of proportion to the experience.

I don't know what the solution is at this point, but I'm all ears. My natural reaction is that faculty ought to unionize, but that apparently doesn't help any more.

What do you think?

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The Bailout We Need
by AndrewMc | 1/11/2009 04:21:00 PM
There have been a few musings of late regarding what kinds of bailout higher education needs—or if indeed higher education needs anything more than a re-ordering of its fiscal priorities. Some have suggested that a massive infusion of cash into American universities would help revitalize the economy by providing an educational infrastructure that would transform American education, and by extension America itself. In early December the Carnegie Corporation took out a two-page advertisement in the New York Times in which 36 university CEOs begged President-elect Obama not to forget higher education when it came time to spread around the bailout largesse. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich wonders why we're bailing out out Wall Street but not public education.

The Wall Street Journal, predictably, has suggested that a little belt-tightening might be just the thing. One blogger at The (Washington D.C.) Examiner reacted to Carnegie’s advertisement by saying “having the federal government borrow money so that pampered professors and university administrators at prestigious institutions like UVA can continue to indulge their surf-and-turf appetites is as ludicrous as it is offensive.”








Set aside, for the moment, the misconception that some may have about what goes into funding higher education. The fact is that many universities overspend, or spend on the wrong things, in an effort to appear modern or to attract more donors. A prime example is college athletics. Big-time college athletics serves no educational purpose that cannot be fulfilled by intramural sports. Study after study—some by the NCAA itself—detail the ways that universities pour millions of dollars into football programs that provide no concrete returns. Yet despite budgets that have increased massively in the past few decades, higher education is chronically underfunded. As Carnegie pointed out, universities and colleges are the places that produce the solutions that will help fix and ultimately strengthen our economy.

Does Higher Ed need a bailout? Well, not in the sense that the Big 3 does. It doesn’t produce a product that nobody wants. Nobody is suggesting that college graduates don’t have the skills to succeed in 21st century America. It also doesn’t need a bailout for the reasons that Wall Street does. Higher Ed produces something of value (an educated citizenry) that always increases in value, and does it well.


No, if American Higher Ed needs a bailout it is because American Higher Ed isn’t capable of delivering its product to enough people. Let me say that in a different way. If Higher Ed needs a bailout, it is because not enough people can afford what it produces. If Higher Ed needs a bailout, it needs a bailout that will help it make its product accessible to more people.


That is, not enough people have what Higher Ed is selling. Fewer than a quarter of all Americans over 21 have college degrees. And it’s not for lack of desire. People want what Higher Ed can provide—better education, better access to jobs. Its just that for a variety of reasons, a large segment of the American population can’t access the product. That’s what any bailout has to address.

Let’s imagine, then, that American higher education was going to get a bailout. What would it look like? What should it look like? Are those two things different?

In terms of what would happen, well, it depends on the model. If it’s a Big 3-style bailout, then there’s a great deal of debate, the faculty and staff (but not the administrators) at higher ed institutions are blamed for the problem, a pot of cash is dangled, a bunch of strings are attached to the money, and institutions gratefully take it and have to account for the ways in which it is spent. If it’s a Wall Street model then there’s very little debate, the students get blamed for the mess, American higher education gets handed a bunch of cash, few or no strings attached, and college presidents are trusted to Do The Right Thing.

But let’s imagine that a bailout really is in the offing. We won’t quibble about how many millions or tens billions it might take. Instead let’s turn our heads to what should happen. For university presidents a “Big-3”-style bailout with the attendant oversight would be a disaster. Far better to have a Wall Street-style “here, take some money and keep being irresponsible” infusion of lucre. I’ll operate on two premises here: The first is that I’ll take the Carnegie advertisement at its word. If the purpose of an educational bailout is, as the authors suggest, to produce educated people who will be the foundation for economic stability, then any bailout must not only be geared specifically toward that end, but must also rework American education in a way that ensures that the production of broadly educated people is the sole purpose. The second is that in order to ensure the first premise, the quality of education must not suffer. That is, the point isn’t to produce more people with college diplomas. The point of any bailout for American universities is to produce more and better-educated people who can make a better future for this country.

Any bailout of American higher education must therefore begin with a bailout of primary and secondary education in this country that has as its goal producing more college-ready kids. Although test scores have improved in recent years, American primary and secondary education is still a mess. Too many kids still graduate unable to read, do anything but the simplest math, and needing intensive remedial education. This is not the fault of teachers, but certainly better-trained teachers will help. Start the bailout by providing funds for every middle- and high school teacher to gain an MA in their field of teaching, and then providing enough money to ensure salary increases at double the cost of living for the next ten years. Following the findings of numerous studies (Krieger 2002, Project STAR, etc) funds would be provided to ensure that every school district has enough money to be able to limit their class sizes to no more than 15 kids, with 12 kids per classroom being the targeted ideal. Those are limits, not averages.

Each classroom would have one MA-level teacher, and one teacher’s aide with a Bachelor’s-level degree in a related field. For those grade levels and subjects that do not require Master’s-level knowledge (kindergarten, for example), teachers could choose to take an MA in any field that might help them in teaching. Each school in every district would have a fully-funded “resource room” that would serve as a place where kids could get remedial services. Teachers who do not want to get an MA would become teacher's aides in another school, and be replaced with MA-level teachers.

Every school would have one textbook for every student for every subject taught, and enough money to fund science labs, physical education, and enough computers with full Internet access so that no child would be without one. Every school district would also have, depending on its needs, enough money to fully fund “adult continuing education centers” where parents who are not able to meet minimum educational levels in reading, writing, and mathematics, could learn these basic skills. Legislation would have to be enacted to ensure, as the Carnegie letter points also argues, that state legislators do not use the federal bailout as an excuse for reducing their own fiscal commitment to primary and secondary education. Continued funding would depend not on test scores, but on improving the college admission rates of students, including admission to two-year, four-year, and trade colleges.

Will this solve the myriad problems with primary and secondary education in the United States? No, certainly not. A whole host of problems exist. But other problems require longer-term solutions and negotiations, and would more properly be solved on the state level. But, it’s a start.

What about the colleges and universities? My model would be closer to a Big-3 bailout than a Wall Street bailout. That is, any two- or four-year college or university wanting access to federal funds would have to submit to an outside audit of all its books, including funds in so-called “foundation” accounts that are traditionally used to pay college presidents, coaches, and others their off-books stipends. No open-accounting, no federal funds. Period. Likewise, states would have to continue to provide funding to higher ed, and would have to develop plans that lay out the ways that state-level funding of higher education would continue to grow in the same ways that it had in the past. Some kind of enforcement mechanism would have to be developed to show that the state weren’t substituting federal funding for their own, and that federal bailout money was “bailout money” and not a new source of continuing money.

Universities would have to develop budgets that justify educational spending, as opposed to athletics funding. Athletics must comprise no more than 1% of the university budget. University presidents would receive a salary equivalent to the average salary of a full Professor, plus whatever comes from foundation accounts. Then, every university desiring federal bailout money would have to develop a plan to prioritize spending federal bailout money along the following lines:

  1. Reducing class size to a ratio of not more than 20 students to each teacher. Not as an average, but as a limit.
  2. Funding scholarships for needs-based students and showing that the expansion in their enrollments is a function of the increased access to education by needs-based students.
  3. Creating a pool of funds to help students complete community-based learning projects that would benefit the community as a whole, while the students were still in school. Projects might include things like public history students funding the creation of museum displays, arts students funding community theater, engineering students coordinating Habitat-for-Humanity projects, etc. etc.
  4. Identifying “21st century skills” and preparing students, in whatever their given field, using those skills.
  5. Increase funding for research projects across the board.


Federal funds could not be used to replace already-existing funds, only to supplement, and could only be used for expenses directly related to education—not for buildings, maintenance, groundskeeping, or any other non-classroom expense. Those other expense are important, true. But if the purpose of a bailout is to create better-educated society then the bailout money ought to be spent on education.

This isn’t a perfect solution, to be sure. But I’d suggest that if higher education wants a bailout that they ought to be prepared to accept greater oversight and responsibility as part of it. And if the purpose of a bailout is to create a better-educated citizenry capable of solving America’s problems, then bringing that education to a much broader array of students must be part of any solution.



You thoughts, additions, modifications, or subtractions?






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