There's a thoughtful discussion over at Dr. Crazy's about full-time faculty workload. (The post was a response to Tenured Radical's own discussion here) Within a recognition of the importance of context, Dr. C notes that what looks on paper like a static workload has actually been increasing in insidious ways over the years. (It's all the extra, off-the-books stuff, like advising and assessment, that consumes the extra hours.) In her estimation, some faculty have made themselves martyrs, and others have "half-assed it" in teaching, since there's really no institutional reason not to. Recognizing the limits of the strategy, she has allied herself with some colleagues to look for ways to streamline the extra tasks to allow for a more sustainable workload that doesn't shortchange students.

She notes in passing the different understandings of 'productivity' that underlie the work speedup. More students per class increases the tuition generated per professor, at least in the short run; that's one version of 'productivity.' More students per class decreases the amount of individual attention the professor can really give, which leads to a decline in the quality of feedback; that's another version of 'productivity.' Both versions are internally valid, but they don't necessarily mesh with each other. And that's where the real problem is.

From the standpoint of an individual instructor, the controllable variable (at least to some degree) is the quality of instruction. That's also what you care the most about, what you pride yourself on, and at a really basic level, why you're there.

From the standpoint of trying to make payroll, though, the opposite is true. A thrilled student doesn't pay any more than does a barely-contented student. (There's presumably a minimal level at which attrition becomes an issue, but I'm assuming at least basic competence.) Students pay by the credit, the course, or the year; they don't pay by the breakthrough. The 'extras' that a great class can generate don't show up in the budget. Worse, some students actually prefer classes that don't ask very much of them. (If you doubt the truth of this, spend a day at in-person registration, just listening.) The mutual non-aggression pact between an instructor who doesn't ask very much and students who'd rather not be bothered is one of the open secrets of American higher ed, and it fits short-term institutional needs disturbingly well. There's a reason that Rocks for Jocks and Physics for Poets still exist.

(I'll add here that I agree with Dr. C that in some classes, there's really a minimum size beneath which quality can actually drop. A public speaking class with two students isn't really a public speaking class. I once had a section of six very quiet personalities, and teaching that was painful. A couple of sparkplugs would have enhanced the class tremendously. But this is really a side issue.)

The endemic conflict is that beyond a minimal level, and outside of the elites, there's no economic incentive for the institution to do better than okay in the classroom. Once you understand that, the rest follows. (There's a moral imperative, but that's a different issue.) For a college that's struggling to stay afloat financially, the short-term cost of stuffing a few extra seats into each class is dwarfed by the tangible and immediate tuition gain (or labor saving). You can blame pinheaded administrators for that if you want to, but you'd be missing the point; the math is what the math is. When the college is flush, it's possible to make a choice to have your cake and eat it too; when the college is strapped, though, the contradiction is unavoidable.

And that's the core issue. If you want to be paid for quality instead of quantity, you have to charge by quality rather than quantity. You have to align the incentives.

The elite SLAC's do a version of this by selling exclusivity. If you charge 50k a year for a small residential college, small classes are part of what you sell. There's a market for that, and you'd defeat your own niche if you watered that down too far. But most colleges and universities don't do that.

And it's not entirely clear how to do that. In olden times, I'm told, lecturers went out on public circuits, and the audiences paid them according to how impressed they were. It was lecturing for tips. But I don't see that (or anything terribly close to it) making sense now, if it ever did.

One could argue that philanthropy is a very delayed response to 'extra' quality --- quality above and beyond what the student paid for --- but the length and uncertainty of the delay makes it a difficult sell. I agree that community colleges could and should do a better job courting philanthropic resources, but I'm not convinced that this will tip the balance in most cases, particularly in the short term. One could also argue that 'prestige' is a proxy for quality, but anyone who has t.a.'ed intro classes at prestigious places (or who has taken those intro classes with t.a.'s) can tell you that the connection between prestige and quality is problematic at best. A good adjunct will often do a better job than a full-time professor who's "half-assing" it, and will do it for much less. As long as price isn't connected to quality, these perverse incentives will arise.

Since I haven't cracked this particular nut, I'll crowdsource it. Wise and worldly readers, is there a sustainable way for colleges to charge by quality rather than quantity?

I read Menand's new book on the kindle app on my ipod touch, which means that I don't have page numbers for references. The good folks at Amazon are invited to find a way for those of us who like to cite sources to do that.

I've been a fan of Menand's for a while. The Metaphysical Club is a fantastic (and readable!) bit of intellectual history, especially for its portrait of William James. Menand has the rare ability to boil complexity down to readability without flattening out the nuances in the process, and heaven knows he does his homework. When I heard that he had a book coming out addressing higher ed, I was excited at the prospect.

It wouldn't be entirely fair to call A Marketplace of Ideas disappointing, since the expectations I brought to it aren't its fault. Menand admits at the outset that the questions he addresses are salient mostly at the rarified level of elite graduate institutions; community colleges are mentioned only in passing, and mostly as afterthoughts. Given the perspective from which he writes, the analyses strike me as sane and grounded, but they mostly aren't the questions I would have asked. For example, he devotes a chapter to the battles over defining general education, focusing mostly on Columbia vs. Harvard. Well, okay, but that's not really my world. At my cc, we define general education mostly by transfer requirements. Lively questions around Gen Ed here have mostly to do with developmental needs, outcomes assessment, and how to offer non-standardized experiences (i.e. freshman seminars) when transfer agreements are written around checklists of traditional disciplines. Jacques Barzun has nothing to do with it.

That said, Menand's book offers some useful food for thought, even if it has to be rearranged a bit on the plate.

A few of his basic facts tell a good bit of the story. From 1945 to 1975, the number of undergraduate students in the US went up 500 percent, but the number of graduate students went up 900 percent. Since then, growth of undergrads has slowed dramatically, but graduate students just keep increasing. Menand pointed out that from 1989 to 1996, the number of graduate students in most liberal arts disciplines increased steadily, even as the number of undergrads nationally declined every year. As he correctly put it, by the 90's "the supply curve had completely lost touch with the demand curve in American academic life." That's because the incentives for individual universities are skewed in favor of producing as many ABD's as possible, whether there are full-time jobs out there for them or not. As one would expect from incentives like that, the time-to-completion figures in the liberal arts fields keep getting longer, even as the market utility of the degree continues to drop. In Menand's estimation, the predictable consequence of these conflicting trends is that all but the truest believers are screened out, and those who remain are neurotically attached to the status quo, despite its obvious unsustainability.

Oddly, though, his proposed solution is to make Ph.D.'s much easier (and faster) to achieve. By setting degree completion at a determinate length, like the three years of law school, he hopes to open up the doctorate to people who currently self-select out. The upside would be a greater likelihood of diverse approaches to scholarship. Why an already-flooded market would benefit from an even greater influx, though, is not entirely clear. Given that the liberal arts Ph.D. is largely unrecognized as an asset outside of academia, and given that the supply curve left the demand curve in the dust decades ago, one would expect that increasing the supply would be the last thing you'd want to do. My best guess at an interpretation is that Menand considers groupthink a greater problem than unemployment. I suspect that solving the unemployment problem would also solve most of the groupthink problem. History will decide.

Given Menand's well-deserved prominence, I hoped he would have used the opportunity to address the root causes of the crisis of higher ed. He gestured towards some of them with his discussions of demographics and the anomalous growth rates of the 1960's, but simply didn't address the productivity trap of measuring learning in units of seat time. He also left out most of the competing demands for public dollars, and offered only a glancing gesture at the political climate of the last thirty years. Dispiritingly, he attributed much of the economic problem to more students majoring in business. At the cc level, at least, that's mostly irrelevant; even business majors have to take gen ed classes. The real story is the farming out of the gen eds to adjuncts, which is made possible by the overproduction of ABD's and Ph.D.'s. Supply and demand curves have a funny way of finding equilibria, even if they aren't where we wish they were.

I'll give Menand credit for his usual readability, and for an unusual level of self-awareness. As advertised, his book gives an elite-faculty-eye view of the trajectory of the liberal arts in America. It just could have been so much more.

A longtime reader writes:

I'm hoping you and your readers can offer some input. I'm on the cusp of receiving my PhD in English from an RI school, having been trained by a well-known and distinguished senior scholar in my field. I went on the academic job market last year and got a couple of nibbles from small regional schools, who were reluctant to make any offers to an ABD when they had equally-qualified applicants with PhDs in hand. I didn't lose hope, though, because my advisor has a 100% placement rating. As things unfolded, my husband and I actually accepted short-term faculty posts at an overseas branch of our school. We planned to get out of some debt, experience a new culture, finish up our dissertations, work on getting published, and then return to the job market after a year or two. The time has come for us to return now, if at all possible, and we have both applied to tenure-track jobs at four-year universities, SLACs, and several community colleges.

In a bizarre turn of events, a tenure-track post has opened in the English department at a cc in my home state (40 minutes away from almost all of my family). My children are the only grandchildren on my side of the family, and they would love nothing more than to live near their grandparents. The cost of living is extremely affordable, and I would easily be happy living there. Would I be happy working there? I'm sure I would for a while...Forever? I don't know for sure, but I'm willing to give it my best shot. I am doing my best to take the advice of many who have commented on the plight of recent humanities PhDs and advised them to alter their idea of what kind of work constitutes academic success. I am willing to do this, and my general feeling is that, as long as I get to teach some literature courses (rather than all composition, all the time), I have some job security, and my family can put down some roots, I'd be pretty happy.

My primary concern, however, is that *if* I decided in the future that cc work wasn't something I could be happy doing for the rest of my career, would a university still be willing to hire me? Or, would I be branded with a blazing CC on my chest and laughed at when I applied for a more research-oriented position? Is there an insurmountable stigma attached to cc work? Have you (or your readers) seen a humanities scholar move from the cc-level to a SLAC or regional state school?

Never having hired at a university, I'll have to defer to my wise and worldly readers for feedback on what they've actually seen and done there. Having said that, though, my initial reaction here is similar to my initial reaction to a reader who was trying to find the perfect time to have a baby: you can control only what you can control.

Yes, I've personally seen community college faculty hired away by four-year public colleges, and once by a second-tier public university. One of the most interesting writers of my generation, Jennifer Michael Hecht, taught full-time at Nassau Community College before moving to her perch at the New School, which ain't too shabby. (I don't know her, but I recommend her book The Happiness Myth to everybody within shouting distance.) Last year my college lost a particularly wonderful junior faculty member to a four-year state college, and it has happened several times over the last few years. I'd be surprised to see a direct hop from a cc to an Ivy, but hops from cc's to state colleges happen with some frequency.

In each case, though, the candidate had something unusual. If you go simply as an accomplished teacher with a doctorate, you'll be one of hundreds. If you really want to make the leap, you'd have to do a kind of double duty while at the cc: do the cc job well, and still build a publication record (or something similar) that would make you desirable at the level you want. It can be done, but there are limits to how much most people will publish with a fifteen credit semester load. For all intents and purposes, you'd be doing at least a job and a half, if not two. Not impossible, but not for the faint of heart.

In any event, though, I wouldn't rule out a job that offers the prospect of a sane and happy life for you and your family on the basis of a hypothetical attack of status anxiety five years from now at some hypothetical university. These things are notoriously hard to predict, and living according to other people's status anxiety is a recipe for misery. If the cc job offers the prospect of doing what you love to do, in a location that works well for your personal life, for a living wage with benefits and security, I wouldn't rule it out. I made a similar decision when I took my nifty academic pedigree to Proprietary U, where it was all teaching, all the time. It wasn't what I had envisioned when I signed up for grad school, but it paid the rent, made sense for my personal life, and eventually opened up an unexpected career path. I couldn't have predicted that at the time, but that's sort of the point.

To my mind, the only convincing argument against applying for the cc job would be if you really don't want it. If the thought of teaching developmental writing, or lots of freshman comp, or fifteen credits per semester gives you chills, then don't do it. But if you can imagine enjoying it for a while, I wouldn't look at it as a life sentence. The world is a huge and unpredictable place.

Wise and worldly readers, especially those who have hired at a university or who have made a similar leap -- what counsel would you offer? Is the c.v. stain indelible, or not?

Good luck!

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

Several alert readers sent me links to this article from the New York Times. It's a weirdly chipper "pick up some money in your spare time by adjuncting!" piece, written for (and apparently by) people who aren't terribly conversant in higher ed.

Depending on your angle to the universe, it could be read as refreshing, bizarre, or deeply offensive. (I fall into the 'bizarre' camp, with sympathies for the 'deeply offensive.')

First, credit where it's due: there's nothing actually false in the article. It notes, correctly, that the demand for adjunct faculty is high right now in many areas, and that the pay is generally underwhelming. It notes, correctly, that a graduate degree isn't always a hard and fast requirement, though from reading the piece you'd think it matters a lot less than it actually does. (At my cc, it's usually a deal-breaker outside of a few, very specialized, occupational programs.) It cites professional networking as a major benefit of adjuncting, which is probably true in a few niche areas, but which most composition instructors would find strange.

That said, the reality is sooo much more complex than the article suggests.

Having been a freeway-flier myself, I know it's easy to assume that all adjuncts feel exploited and really want to be full-time, but it isn't true. Many do, many don't. Adjunct gigs can make a certain sense in some situations, all of which exist on my campus:

- The full-timer who picks up an 'extra' course or two, just to supplement salary. I have a surprising number of these on my campus. Some of them are young and paying off student loans; some of them have kids in college; some, I'm told, will do anything not to go home. (I try not to pry.) These people get health insurance and salaries anyway, but the marginal benefit of another course is adjunct pay.

- People with other full-time jobs, whether on campus or off. We have full-time staff who pick up a class at night because they love teaching and/or want to pick up a few extra bucks. We also have a non-trivial number of high school teachers who like to stretch their wings a bit with an evening class. Of course, there are also the classic professionals-in-the-field, the model that adjuncting was built to fit. We actually do have a few of those -- lawyers who like to pick up the occasional business law class, say.

- Trailing spouses. Typically, they aren't trailing anyone who works here, but the two-body problem brought them to this geographical area, and a course or two fits their needs. In some cases, we get some pretty wonderful people this way. Some would probably prefer full-time employment, but some find the part-time schedule a better fit for their lives.

- Grad students trying to gain experience in the classroom. It's one thing to TA a discussion section; it's something else to teach your own class. I'd argue that you hit diminishing returns relatively quickly, in terms of future employability, but some experience is better than none. This is particularly true for folks who want to find a full-time community college position; hiring committees here are much friendlier to candidates who have taught at the cc level.

- Retirees. We have about a dozen retired full-time faculty who like to teach a class or two. (Some of them teach only in the Fall, using the Spring to travel. Looks good to me...) It's a way of staying connected, without being bogged down in the stuff that comes with a full-time gig. These folks are usually wonderful instructors, and we're happy to have them. We also get occasional retired muckety-mucks from the business or legal worlds who like to pick up a class as a way of sharing what they know and love. Again, most of the time, these work out quite well (though this group usually needs more orientation than the others).

None of this is to discount the real frustration of someone who's trying to break in, ekeing out a living in the meantime by cobbling together jobs that were never meant to be cobbled together. But I think it does explain, in part, why it can be so difficult to get adjuncts to organize; their interests aren't always the same. Reforms that might appeal to a freeway flier may be irrelevant to the full-timer teaching an overload, and might be actually distasteful to the retiree or the high school teacher. I've seen each of these, and untold variations.

The common denominator, though, and what really irks me about the piece, is that college teaching isn't something to be done on a lark. It's work. (Historiann did a nice piece on this -- check it out.) Doing it well requires time, focus, and a willingness to do what needs to be done. Even when it pays badly, the students don't expect -- or, to my mind, deserve -- any less. It's not an easy and fun way to pick up a few bucks. (It can be fun, but the fun is a byproduct of job satisfaction.) I've gone on record suggesting that romanticizing the task too much is a bad idea, and I stand by that, but this piece trivializes it. When the professor is in class, she's the professor, regardless of her paycheck. If she doesn't respect her own role, I don't know why the students should.

I don't expect much from the Times' coverage of higher ed, but this is really a bit much. The pay is bad enough; suggesting that anybody off the street could do it just adds insult to injury. No, thanks.

A few years ago I mentioned my bewilderment at why the failure of the push to adopt the metric system in the United States in the 70's hasn't received more scholarly attention. I remember teachers earnestly walking us through the various units -- centimeters, kilograms, celsius degrees, etc. -- to prepare us for the Big Change. Obviously, with a few isolated exceptions, it didn't happen. It caught on in some scientific and medical applications, where it makes the math a lot easier, but never went much beyond that. I suspect there's a great American Studies dissertation waiting to be written on the whole kerfuffle.

Based on early results, I'm wondering if the Green Jobs movement will come to a similar fate.

As with the metric system, there's a certain logic to the idea that green jobs are the wave of the future. Efficiency gains are a form of productivity, and given the age of much of our public and private infrastructure, there's no denying the presence of uncaptured efficiency gains. The past few years have made it clear that energy prices can be annoyingly volatile, and that one way to insulate (no pun intended) oneself against the fluctuations is to consume less. I like the concept a lot, since it promises steady work, reduced consumption of fossil fuels, and reduced reliance on the people who own/produce the fuels. The political appeal of uniting the environmentalists, the national security enthusiasts, and the working class is obvious. And yet...

Like many cc's, mine is running several workforce development programs to train people for green jobs. Most of them involve working on buildings, whether it's doing energy audits, weatherizing, or installing specialized high-efficiency equipment (like water heaters). The instructors are experienced and pragmatic, the students are motivated, the curriculum makes sense, and...

Nobody's hiring.

The graduates of the programs aren't finding jobs. From a 'workforce development' standpoint, we're developing a workforce that can't find work.

I hope that this is mostly a function of the depressed housing market, and that things will pick up when the economy does. But I'm starting to wonder.

My house was built in the 80's. It still has the original water heater, since the original owner was a bit of a fussbudget about maintenance. (He's a contractor, and he's still local -- we've actually had him do a few jobs for us.) I've read a few things about tankless systems, and thought that they sounded pretty good. But when I asked the contractor about them, and he explained the cost and time involved in retrofitting all that would need to be retrofitted before the system could even go in, I dropped the idea. The cost of adjustment would so outstrip the annual savings that I'd never come close. When this heater dies, I'll get a slightly more efficient new one, but I'm not going nuts. It's not worth it. If I were building a new house from scratch, it might make sense, but as an incumbent homeowner, I'll pass.

Multiply that logic by most people, and you get a lot of unemployed technicians. The greatest gains from weatherization would come in the oldest and most poorly maintained houses, but the people who live in those houses generally don't have the cash lying around for large-scale retrofitting. Even if they did, the chances of them getting back their investments over time are minimal; the rate of residential turnover is much faster than the payback time, and a 'green' house in a slum is still in a slum, and will be valued accordingly. (That's not even taking into account the reality that the lowest-income people tend to rent. In a rental, the cost of the improvement would go to the landlord, and the payback would go to the tenant. Not much incentive there for the landlord, as long as tenants don't put much stock in energy efficiency when they look for places to live.)

In other words, I can see a broad societal need for greater efficiency, and I can see a widespread need for good jobs. But I don't see why enough people will demand the service to make the jobs sustainable. Just as I can concede that 1,000 is a rounder number than 5,280, but I don't see the need to convert all the road signs from miles to kilometers. The gain doesn't seem worth the cost of change.

So we're preparing students for the jobs of the future, though they could really use jobs in the present, and it's not entirely clear just when that particular future will come. I can't remember the last time I measured something in centimeters; some futures take longer than others. The students can't wait that long, and there isn't much point in developing a workforce that can't find work.

Wise and worldly readers -- have you seen more success for Green Jobs programs in your area? Is there a way to thread the needle? Can we save Green Jobs from becoming the new metric system?

Too many of the arguments I've read and heard for hiring more full-time faculty rely on moralistic appeals. The idea seems to boil down to a simpleminded equation of "market" with "bad" and "tradition" with "good."

Moralistic arguments don't work because they solve the wrong problem. But there's a perfectly reasonable market-based argument for hiring full-time faculty right now: buy low, sell high. Great people have never been as undervalued as they are now; this is an unprecedented hiring opportunity.

In normal times, good candidates sometimes get passed over for posing excessive 'flight risk.' The idea is that tenure-track lines don't always get renewed when vacated, so you don't want to waste one on someone who will up and leave in a couple of years. (What this says about the idea of 'market as meritocracy' I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.) Search costs are substantial, and the risk of losing the position to the next round of budget cuts is ever-present, so some places will decide strategically to go for the very-good-but-not-best candidate on the theory that he'll stay if he gets the job. After all, if he leaves, the position may just get adjuncted out.

When the market is so completely dead, though, the candidate pool gets even stronger, and flight risk diminishes substantially. After all, if nobody else is hiring, where else is the slumming superstar going to go?

I've seen this on my own campus. We haven't been able to hire much lately, but we have hired for a few scattered positions, and the candidate pools have been off-the-charts amazing. The few new folks we've brought on recently have been absurdly great. I've actually used this as justification to reallocate resources to hiring more faculty, since now we'd have a realistic shot at people who normally would have been gobbled up elsewhere. While the moral argument is constant, the market-opportunity argument is uniquely strong now. If you hire when everyone else does, you're in a war for talent. If you hire when nobody else does, talent is in a war for you. Leaving morality out of it, the time when nobody else is hiring is exactly the time to strike.

Obviously, well-endowed private colleges have an advantage here. If your college is struggling to meet the payroll it already has, then the argument for countercyclical hiring is of no more than theoretical interest. But if there's any wiggle room at all, this is the time to use it.

Come to think of it, if more people figure out this strategy, it won't work as well. Humph. Never mind; as you were, everyone. Move along. Nothing to see here...

A dispirited correspondent writes:

I'm wondering if you have any words of advice for those of us who are interested in paying jobs in the field of educational reform. I need to earn a living, but I'd like to further the cause if I could. I have 20 years experience in the college classroom, and am currently full time and tenured at a community college, but I am more than ready to leave the classroom. It's painful to me to have to constantly "game" statistics on so-called student learning outcomes while dumbing down the curriculum ever more to improve our "retention" and "completion" rates. We are getting ready for our re-accreditation, so we are in "full assessment mode"; I find it harder and harder to cooperate with the fundamental dishonesty of the whole process. I'd like to leave and work for real reform and excellence in education. My Ph.D. is in one of the humanities, not ed leadership, and I don't have a math/statistics background, so perhaps I'm not the ideal candidate. Then again, who is?

My knowledge of this is pretty limited, so I'll ask my wise and worldly readers to chime in and fill out the picture.

I'll start with the obvious: if your local administration is pushing you to dumb down the curriculum in the name of retention, then your local administrators are idiots. The flaws in their strategy are several and basic. If you water down the degree, you'll lose transferability over time. If you water down the classes, it will become harder to maintain order in the classroom, since students will see no reason to take sanctions seriously. If you tell creative workers that their daily work should be entirely in the service of pleasing the customer, you'll actually get more displeased customers, because the quality of the work will suffer when their morale collapses.

Assessment is another matter, but I'll just say that if it's entirely dead weight, they aren't doing it right.

That said, I'll concede that many of my administrative colleagues seem to miss the big picture. (That's one of the reasons I've stayed in administration so long. I've seen the damage lousy admins can do, and I want to prevent it.) It sounds like you want to address the big picture. Getting paid for it is the tricky part.

Obviously, one way to do that is to go into administration yourself. That will take time and patience, though, since the first rung of the ladder involves far more trivia than thought.

Another way is to look at grant-funded programs. Philanthropic agencies usually have some sort of change or reform agenda; the trick is finding an agency with an agenda you find congenial, and that needs the skills you bring. One fairly common model is a grant that funds a partnership between a social service agency and a community college, usually teaching non-credit courses for targeted populations in specific niche occupations. Introducing yourself to the continuing-ed side of your college and expressing interest in working with them can open up opportunities in ways that are hard to anticipate.

Nonprofits and various ngo's often do the kind of work that seems to speak to you, though you'd have to figure out what your unique contribution would be. If it won't be on the financial or technical side, it could be on the fundraising or publicity side. I wouldn't expect to find a full-time, decent-paying job right out of the gate, but if you're willing to take baby steps, you might be able to find a niche.

Of course, there's always writing. That's my personal fave.

I'm reasonably sure that some of my wise and worldly readers have something to offer on this one, so I'll put out an open call. Does anyone know another way to make a living while fighting the good fight?

Good luck!

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

In ninth grade, I had a wonderful, high-energy social studies teacher whose favorite exhortation was "wisdom and knowledge!" He'd usually punctuate it by thwacking his yardstick against a desk while we took notes. At the time, it was an entertaining shtick, and I didn't think much about the distinction between wisdom and knowledge.

With age and experience, though, I'm beginning to appreciate the difference.

Knowledge is cumulative. The more you know, the more you know. Knowledge can be stored, transmitted, shared, hoarded, traded, taught, learned, and even brandished. People who are "quick studies" can accumulate a surprising amount of it in a short time. Both trivia and timeless truths can be knowledge.

Wisdom is different. It's about knowing the relative importance of different things, and knowing what can be downplayed or ignored. It's closer to 'intuition' than to 'knowledge,' in that it's difficult to store, hoard, transmit, etc. It's hard to 'cram' wisdom, and some people just never quite get it. Wisdom can discern the difference between the important and the trivial, or the passing and the permanent. My grandfather dropped out of the ninth grade and worked most of his life as an electrical lineman, but he was wise. He knew what to care about and what not to, and allocated his energies accordingly. I always admired that about him. His house had the worst paint job in the Western world, and his fashion sense could be described as idiosyncratic, but he didn't care; he was focused on family, politics, and baseball, and the rest was trivia. He knew exactly who he was.

We could use some of that wisdom locally, in preparing next year's budget. There's plenty of knowledge flying around: the governor wants to propose figure x, various legislators are thinking figures d through j, and state tax revenue projections fall somewhere between 'ambiguous' and 'pulling numbers out of a hat.' If you want it, there's warrant for projecting any one of dozens of different outcomes, each with different implications for what we can afford.

Wisdom, here, comes in the form of knowing what to ignore. Some numbers are just wishful thinking or political posturing, and others are actually realistic. Discerning what to discount and what to take seriously is far more important than knowing the exact figure with which someone will grandstand.

The relevance now is that any tuition increase has to be approved by the Board of Trustees, and the Board will likely be more or less open to increases depending on what it expects will happen at the state level. If the best case scenario comes to pass, then passing a tuition increase would just seem punitive to the students. If the worse case scenario comes to pass and we don't have a significant tuition increase, heaven help us all. For various reasons, the Board has to make its decision before the state has to make its decision, so the game is "guess the gap." By necessity, that involves weighing unknowns, which means guessing likelihoods.

If we base the proposal we bring to the Board on the latest-and-most-inside knowledge, we take the very real risk of basing a crucial decision on a number that was never meant to be taken literally. (Initial proposals are often understood by those making them to be strategic, whether highball or lowball.) If we go in with too much optimism and get it wrong, we wind up in much worse shape. If we go in too pessimistic and get it wrong, we inflict needless pain on students, and damage our own future credibility. But the answer is probably not to be found entirely in more assiduous information-gathering. In fact, in many ways, the trick is to block out the more outlandish numbers, and to go with as realistic a projection as experience-based intuition can generate.

Wanted: budgetary wisdom. Apply within.

I've mentioned before that one upside to the Great Recession may be that it finally puts to rest the myth that academic hiring is some sort of meritocracy. Putting that myth to rest would be a good thing, to the extent that it can help frustrated applicants get past self-blame and/or false hope, and find paths that make sense over the long term.

This week I saw another upside, this time on the student side.

People who study college completion rates and their variants -- course completion rates, failure rates, etc. -- know that certain factors usually correlate with higher drop/fail rates: low income, starting at the developmental level, race/gender (young men of color being the most at-risk group).

This Fall we had enormous enrollment growth, with the fastest growth occurring in the highest-risk group: young men of color. Our Financial Aid rate climbed at twice the rate of our overall enrollment. The student body become younger, lower income, more male, and more 'minority.' All else being equal, we should have expected higher attrition.

It didn't happen. If anything, our success rates increased marginally.

That may sound wonky and bureaucratic, but on a human level, it's HUGE. More of the students who need us the most are actually getting what they need. We're making actual -- small and insufficient, but actual -- progress.

I don't have a good explanation for it yet. Certainly we've taken a series of measures on campus to get silly bureaucratic obstacles out of the way, and we've hired well, when we've hired. But I suspect that the recession is really at the root of it.

The jobs that sometimes distract students from their studies simply aren't there. The idea that an education isn't really necessary is less convincing than ever. Perversely enough, for many students, we're their only plausible source for health insurance. The opportunity cost for education is as low as it has been in generations, and people are responding to it.

If we can hold onto these gains, I like where they lead. When the economy bounces back, a cohort of young people who ordinarily would have been sidetracked into the economic margins will emerge with skills and credentials their predecessors didn't have. This strikes me as an unalloyed good.

Admittedly, we've been sort of backed into generating this good outcome, but I'll take it.

Wise and worldly readers -- have you seen something similar at your campuses?

A new correspondent writes:

I have a dilemma. I currently writing my thesis for a MS degree (industrial management). My committee has the rough draft to evaluate. Expected graduation was the end of this spring but summer or fall is a becoming more realistic. I intend to go on for a PhD (Business Administration w/ a operations/technology management specialization), and then pursue a academic career (teaching and/or administrative). I am considering pursuing a second masters degree (MBA) with a dual specialization before the PhD. Why a second masters?

To pick up two related additional specializations (computer science/MIS and finance) to expand my skill and teaching set and increased potential for different industry positions. OM areas, both in academia and industry, often use computer science and financial skills and modeling in problem solving/teaching. I realize it may or may not be difficult to land a full time academic job and will likely have to work as an adjunct, primarily online, while maintaining a job in industry until I can make the formal transition into academia. Additionally, I have a liberal arts BA, but have worked in industry for more than a decade and have several professional certifications (ASQ)-primarily in Quality, and am under the impression that the additional specializations/courses would strengthen a lack of a technical undergrad foundation and possibly bring more to the hiring table, primarily for academic teaching.

So you may still be wondering why a second masters over graduate certificates? My next school offers 18 credit hr (6 courses) graduate certificates in the above noted specializations. There is no tuition discount of any sort for the graduate certificates alone, but if the specializations are part of a degree program, then tuition discounts are applicable. I would receive the schools highest per credit hour discount for government employees, since I work as a village trustee part time. Taking 2 graduate certificates alone would cost about the same as and MBA with a dual specialization. Also, to take the graduate certificates, a completed masters degree is required; whereas, I could potentially start the MBA while finishing my MS thesis.

My second concern is about the number of credit hours in a PhD specialization. My next school has a 51 credit hr PhD w/ 18 hrs/6 courses (5 electives + 1 capstone) in a given specialization. I was considering taking 11/12 courses in the specialization for the following reasons: 1. Interesting courses I haven't seen @ other universities. 2. I've learned most schools require 12, 15, 18 or 24 hrs in a given area to teach, with 18 being the magic number. 3. Thought it, very current courses/topics, may bring more to the hiring table for academic positions, besides intrinsic learning value.

So could you offer your advice about the second masters before the PhD. Is it a worthwhile pursuit, meaning that it can achieve what I think it could achieve, over kill an just more student loan debt, or it's not necessary since I intend to pursue the PhD? If you don't think it's a worthwhile pursuit, how else can I build skills/branch out/move into related areas primarily for teaching (and possibly industry positions).

Could you also offer your advice about taking more course in my intended PhD specialization than is required. Is it worth it or not, meaning just finish and get the degree? Was my line of thinking correct as for hiring purposes or is my impression misinformed.

There's a lot here, so I'll just focus on what I take to be the core question.

If you have two master's degrees, or three, or four, you've achieved the Master's level. If you have one doctorate, you've achieved the doctoral level. A second (or higher) master's keeps you at the master's level. It can give you greater breadth, but that's not the same as greater depth. It's also not the same level of credential, especially for administrative positions, which often require a doctorate.

I'm no expert in your field, but I can say that when we hire Business faculty, we look for both the master's (at least) and some industry experience. A second master's wouldn't mean much, unless it gave you competence in an entirely different field. One master's plus industry experience would be better than two master's. Of course, a doctorate plus industry experience would be even better.

Once you have a strong graduate credential, your undergraduate major really doesn't matter. I wouldn't worry about that.

I've seen positions posted that ask for a master's in one area, and at least 18 graduate credits in another. The problem with those is that they're tough to predict. In my observation, they're usually at very small schools that can't afford specialists in every area, so they look for utility infielders. From your description of your fields, it doesn't sound like you'd be targeting very small schools.

In terms of extra coursework before the doctorate, I'm skeptical. If it's for the sheer love of learning, whatever. But doctoral students often bog down at the dissertation stage, getting stuck in ABD limbo for years and years. Adding coursework would take an already-too-long program and make it even longer. Although one could argue that ABD is higher than master's, most of the time, you either have the doctorate or you don't. The worst finished dissertation is better than the best unfinished one. As an old grad school professor of mine liked to say, a dissertation is just a plumber's license; it lets you go fix pipes. You either have the license or you don't. I wouldn't advise doing anything that could get in the way of finishing. Love of learning is well and good, but a Ph.D. is a professional degree first and foremost. Don't do it unless you're serious about finishing; if you're serious about finishing, don't let yourself get distracted with extra coursework.

Certainly if you want to move into administration, you frequently won't be able to go above the department chair level without a doctorate.

One admin's opinion, anyway. As always, your mileage may vary.

\I'd love to hear from those wise and worldly readers who went for two master's degrees, rather than a doctorate. Did it help? Did it help as much as a doctorate would have?

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.