Confessions of a Community College Dean

I get a little twitchy whenever I read about “undermatching” as a problem. Broadly, “undermatching” is the claim that high-achieving students from low-income backgrounds often attend colleges that are “beneath” them academically, and that therefore they miss certain kinds of opportunities. If only the elites were more thoughtful about reaching the masses, the argument goes, they’d do a better job of creating a pure meritocracy, and the talented tenth (or twentieth, depending on taste) wouldn’t be shackled to institutions built for the unwashed masses.

The obstacles aren’t trivial, but I drew hope from seeing Education Secretary Arne Duncan tweet approvingly a link to a story about Maryland K-12 schools adopting later start times.

A few years ago, some colleges in my neck of the woods flirted with the idea of partnering with more expensive for-profits to provide “express lanes” for students to get around long waiting lists for high demand programs, especially in nursing. The idea was that the colleges didn’t have the resources to build the needed capacity, so they would partner with institutions that did. Now, and on the other ocean, California is considering requiring public colleges and universities to accept MOOCs for credit when taken by students on waiting lists for regular classes.

You know how the hook of a song can get stuck in your head, or how you sorta, kinda recognize an actor in something and you can’t stop trying to remember where you’ve seen him before? (Actual conversation at home: “Hey, it’s that guy from...uh...” “Oh, yeah! That one with the girl from the show?” “Yeah, that’s it...”) Some questions have that same effect on me. Once I’ve either heard or asked them, I can’t let them go. This is one of those. Why don’t men return to college?

This year’s drinking game at the League would be to drink whenever someone uses the word “data.” You’d be out cold before lunch. It’s all data, all the time. Or pretty much all the time. We’ll have to crunch the numbers first.

Greetings from Dallas, where the theme of the first day of the League for Innovation conference seemed to be “how to deal with actual human behavior.”

Bruce Leslie, the Chancellor of Alamo Colleges, has a provocative piece on the Huffington Post in which he foretells the end of community colleges. While it’s easy to argue with this particular or that one, the point that resonates is that we need to move beyond the “mini-university” model.

Kevin Carey’s latest, a long piece on financial aid as an enabler of fiscal irresponsibility in elite higher education, is well worth the read. But for everything in it, I’ve been stewing on a single paragraph for the last few days.