Spray water on the fire, not the smoke

Carey is right. Focusing on the tone and not the specifics is a mistake. The counterproductive tone should be mentioned, of course, but the focus of resistance should be the commission’s ridiculous and damaging proposals that laud promotion of for-profits as cost saving measures, advocate tearing down accreditation, and so forth.

Steve Foerster, Director of Instructional Technology at Free Curricula Center, at 8:50 am EDT on June 28, 2006

Why Release a Draft?

It is hard not to react to this document. It seems mean spirited (and you are welcome to disagree with me), partisan, and frankly incomplete. It’s a draft, and unless it was published for the sake of professional commentary and revision, they did not do justice to their cause to release it! But the trends of this document are predictable and consistent with other policies of Bush Administration appointees. It seems to blame faculty salaries (we lazy professors who work five hours a week according the Horowitz) and not administration bloat, title inflation, and building sprees for the inflation of tuition. It seems to anticipate a program to continue to push for the types of assessment (I’m just waiting for them to add such catchy phrases such as “culture of evidence") that has swallowed up teachers’ time and local budgets in high schools. And of course, as this is the Bush Administration, I suspect that one goal would be to advocate the privatization of as much of the Higher Education system as possible(with plenty of federal fund to make them competitive!). Part of this is just conservative politics as usual. One bright spot in this document is the recognition of the problems of connecting the K-12 systems with those of colleges and universities. I have come to the conclusion that state universities in particular need to start thinking in terms of K-16. This has been advocated in a few states (Maine is one of them which has started down this rocky road). The benefits to students would be immense. More AP courses could result in a better prepared college student (if they are taught correctly and if students have the necessary skills going into a rigorous class environment). But as I stated, this is only a draft. I suspect the finished product would be less inflamatory and more collaborative. That is, if they can finish it at all.

John F. DeFelice, Associate Professor of History at University of Maine at Presque Isle, at 9:00 am EDT on June 28, 2006

Advanced Placement

One small question: If the quality of high school education is poor, why does everyone call for more advanced placement classes? If students were to master the high school curriculum with high standards, they would be well-prepared for college.

Now I’ll answer my own question: Advanced placement courses is what happened to the old high school curriculum. There are two tracks in high schools. The standards in regular high school classes have declined and are now are largely the domain of nonserious students. For the good students, there is now the track of honors classes and advanced placement. The quality of these is no better than a standard high school course should be. Average, but serious, students can easily acquire 5-10 advanced placement courses in high school. But they do not get the same quality course as they would in college.

Just my opinion, with my daughter now in high school.

Bob at State U., at 11:35 am EDT on June 28, 2006

National Commission

For more than two decades I have been the Chief Financial Officer at institutions of higher education. The work of the National Commission is right on! The argument for status quo is no longer being listened to by governors, legislators, or the public. Now, all stakeholders should manage the change rather than obstruct the change. Public Education did not do that and now they have No Child Left Behind to force the change.

John H, Professor at Texas A&M-Commerce, at 2:05 pm EDT on June 28, 2006

Real Patriotism

Real patriots expect a report like this to be scientific, not a political position statement. I also hold them to a high standard of logic — their conclusions should make sense in relationship to their presented data. I can handle a scathing report if it were delivered in those terms, but then I am not “a leader of higher education” being just a lowly advisor and instructor. If, on the other hand, I were in the position to evaluate the report as stands, it would be covered in red marks demanding that logic be used instead of dogma. I haven’t had time to give a complete account, but I would also summarize the report’s real goals and objectives that apparently differ from the stated goals and objectives.

Without hearing from the students themselves, it’s difficult to tell why plagarism and sloppy workmanship occur. Did they procrastinate? Did they not care about the project? Were they simply belligerent? The worst cases, however, cite other plagarized or weak sources expecting those to suffice as persuasive documentation. Never mind that they were too lazy to come up with new or original ideas.

For those that think I am defending higher ed, don’t you think a better report would allow for no weaseling out? A cheap political position statement, however, greatly benefits politicians with just that sort of foolishness since its proponents can later whine about how their recommendations were not taken seriously, allowing them to blame the problems on “those uncooperative other people” in their bid for reelection. It is just this sort of insincerity that I take issue with — that Republicans and Democrats alike place their political loyalties above the good of the country in SAYING they wish to improve education while blatantly sabotaging such efforts. Whether this is because of ineptitude, misplaced loyalty, greed, selfishness, or a genuine hatred of our country does not matter to me. All I know and care about is that this sort of behavior is destructive, which is why I oppose it.

The worst part for a person like Mr. Ward is that, because the majority of the group is described as political rather than scientific or practical, he gets his name slapped on the group as well, assuming his frustrations with the report and its process are sincere... I would hate to be in his position and really caring about this being an honest project. I expect he is in for some bitter disappointment.

Advisor Ian, Advisor, at 3:00 pm EDT on June 28, 2006

Comments on the draft

I think it was a good idea to make the report public in draft form and I think it is very good of insidehighered.com to make it possible for people to respond to it. It is an impossible task for a dozen or so people to come up with a document that critiques the state of higher education in America and comes up with solution and fits it into 27 pages.

Higher education in America is a tremedously varied set of institutions that have evolved over several hundred years to meet a wildly diverse set of constituencies and purposes. There is no way that a report could speak to the purposes of thousands of distinct institutions, each of which serves their own multitude of purposes and constituents.

That having been said, the report does focus on three serious problems.

1. The lack of accessibility to the most marginal parts of our society.

2. The growth of tuition at rates that greatly accede the rate of inflation.

3. The lack of academic accountability.

The report discusses these problems and proposes some responses.

The lack of access to education for people from the poorest economic communities precludes any realistic hope of competing in an increasingly technological society. Their response is the need for higher academic standards in the grade schools and high schools and for a greater coordination with colleges and universities to make them aware of what they need to succeed.

It is hard to argue with this but it doesn’t in any realistic way deal with either why these problems exist or suggest how they could be overcome.

What is left unsaid is that there is very little that colleges and universities can do about these problems. There is a question of affordability but this was dealt with in issue 2.

There is definitely a problem with skyrocketing tuition, particularly at state universities and colleges that used to be very cheap and therefore accessible to almost everyone. But the report makes no attempt to explain why the cost of tuition has gone up so much faster than the cost of living. One obvious factor, the horrendous growth in benefits cost is not even mentioned though it is a growing cancer on the budgeting process.

There is a suggestion that decreasing faculty productivity is a factor as more and more time is devoted to research and away from teaching. If this is so, the report has not supplied any evidence to sustain this point. At the top research universities much faculty time is devoted to research and teaching loads are low. But outside support of research in the form of federal grants and corporate support more than make up for the reduced teaching load. Furthermore, research is an important and integral part of the contribution of higher education and reducing support for it does not constitute an obvious benefit to society.

Other institutions that constitute the majority of higher education require considerably more teaching. And while tuition has gone up at almost twice the rate of inflation, they produce no evidence that faculty salaries have come even close to that kind of increase. In fact, as compared to salary increases for high school teachers, university professors increases are often smaller. One of the suggestions for meeting the increased cost of tuition is to encourage more saving for college among low and middle income parents. This proposal is contradicted by their own suggestion of making financial aid increasingly based on need. Since assets are a big determinant of need, there is a strong disincentive to save. Why should people give up expensive vacations and a lavish life-style if the reward is their children become ineligible for need based scholarships. There are many schools where a substantial portion of the seven and eight percent yearly increases in tuition went to increase the aid packages for scholarship recipients. Since many students who do not receive financial aid come from families with modest means, they are working longer hours and incurring ever larger debt to finance those who do.

Affordability is certainly a problem but I don’t think the report has addressed it adequately.

The reports’ worry about inadequate academic accountability hits on a very real problem. Particular mention is made of the problem of grade inflation which needs to be addressed.

But the problem of assessment cannot be addressed by a series of one size fits all national exams. The report suggests using “value added” yardsticks to measure the success of various universities in improving skills. This sounds good but makes no sense.

A college requires about 32 semester classes or 48 quarter classes. These are spread out over a wide variety of schools, programs and majors. How do you cull out a single measure to judge the skill level of an individual student.

LSATs, MCATs and the GREs attempt to measure some kind of aptitute but they are in spirit similar to the ACT or SAT given to high school students and do not measure what has been gained from four years of college.

But more important, the point of most college courses is not to improve GRE scores but to teach the content of individual courses. A literature course is designed to give students a greater capacity to understand, analyze and enjoy novels, poems and short stories. History courses tell us something about the past and hopefully provide some insight into how and why things happened. Math courses teach us something about mathematical reasoning. A similar thing could be said about the whole variety of courses that are offerred at the university. It is difficult enough to design an entrance and exit exam in a single course to assess what has been learned let alone a set of two or three to make such an assessment accross an entire university curriculum.

What I find problematic about the report is what I find endemic in univerity planning documents. They consist of a bunch of nice sounding statements but show no understanding of how the goals might ever be accomplished and no idea of the connection to what is actually going on in the classroom.

To fix the problems of standards talked about in this report, you have to deal with problems of motivation, both of students and faculty. Intellectual growth requires considerable effort. It often means accepting that the teacher knows best about what he or she is teaching and if you work hard, by the end of the course you can look back and realize that you have accomplished something. For the teacher, accomplishing something often involves demanding more work from the students than they want to do. There is a certain amount of conflict inherent in telling students that their work is unacceptable and they will have to go back and do better.

My observation over almost forty years of college teaching is that something fundamental in the student teacher relationship has been losing ground, particularly in the last couple of decades. The social contract between student and teacher, that the teacher has the obligation to make sure that the student learns the material and the student has the obligation to make the effort to do so, has been eroded.

Along with the plush new dorms, student unions and fitness centers, the exorbitant tuition has over the years bought the students the right to not have to work so hard to get a good grade.

A number of commenters have mentioned athletic programs as a source of extravagance. Ironically, in my experience, the athletic programs are the one place where the teacher student contract is preserved. The rules of the game are so obvious and the success or failure is so easily measured that there is an understanding that the job of the coach is to teach the student to perform to the best of his or her ability. At my university, DePaul, even in the classroom, athletes on average make more of their ability than the typical student. In spite of the excessive demands on their time, their participation in competitive sports teaches them the value of practice and perseverance and that is the lesson for life that school is trying to teach.

In my opinion, if you want to improve the quality of higher education, you need to fix the teacher-student relationship.

Jonathan Cohen, at 8:25 pm EDT on June 28, 2006

credentialing rather than educating

I think the fundamental shift Jonathan Cohen describes is in students seeking credentials without necessarily seeking an education or any learning experiences that don’t directly apply. School is just a hoop to jump. The need for a college degree to get on decently in life might be a driving force whereas there used to be decent jobs for those with less of an education. The BA is the new high school diploma.

Still, I’m struck by the notion of a crisis in higher edu. If there’s a crisis, it’s the lack of education funding at all levels, starving the patient until declaring him or her beyond repair, not in that we can’t measure the immeasurable. How does one measure an understanding and/or enjoyment of literature, history or philosophy anyway? By how many names and dates a student can throw down in an exam? How does that enrich anyone’s life or interactions with others?

It’s the phony assessments we end up developing in the name of outcomes, so-called measurables that lump learning in with widget making. I wish we could keep the neo-liberal business model out of education, but when students become customers, when students who don’t/can’t learn are “non-traditional” learners whose needs must be catered to as would any other customer’s needs, we’ve bought the neo-liberal ideology hook, line and sinker.

bradley bleck, instructor at Spokane Falls CC, at 5:50 am EDT on June 29, 2006

Commission report

Being one politically predisposed to dismiss the report and accept the initial responses to the tone as accurate, I was surprised that I was able to agree with much of the report—yes, there were places where the tone was too much, but not as many as I expected; plus, the logic, as has been pointed out, is questionable in many places (but only questionable, not broken); plus, the solutions proposed are problematic, perhaps excessively so. Still, I was able to agree that teaching and learning have been undervalued (I taught at numerous colleges and universities before gaining tenure at a cc)—the comment that only 10% of professors take into account research on learning styles, etc., when planning classes seems about accurate. Yes, the report fails to link the rising costs with decreased state funding (accompanied always with “permission” to raise tuition accordingly) and increased health-care costs. But overall, the report seems fairly accurate given the range of issues and institutions it has to cover, as pained as I am to say it. Whether we ought to (continue to) resist the business model is another question, but that may be moot, since that horse may be out of the barn.

Currently, I’m beginning a process of redesigning our curriculum for our composition sequence (3 courses our transfer students must take) and many of the problems this report identifies I can similarly identify at a micro-level, in my own program—varied quality of teaching and preparedness, little information on student learning, little agreement and understanding among faculty on goals and methods.

On the other hand, we are trying to fix many of the problems the report identifies: we are working with K-12 to make transfer more seamless; we are working to identify standards of readiness. In short, we’re already moving in the directions this report identifies—in fact, there’s nothing in this report, as far as directions and goals go, that I or anyone would disagree with. The solutions are going to be hard, but we’ve already begun.

I expect my comments here to be attacked by someone, and that’s fine, but as I say, I was predisposed to be resistant to this report but find it overall okay—costs are too high, assessment is poor (if even possible), teaching is under-valued, students come under-prepared. Yep. Plus, as someone said here, faculty salaries have not kept up with. . . well, anything around here. Best to all.

Jeffrey Klausman, Professor of English at Whatcom Community College (WA), at 3:55 pm EDT on July 6, 2006