Confessions of a Community College Dean

Transience

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:29:43 GMT

I had a good conversation this week with someone who works at one of our major feeder high schools. It's in a low-income district, and since it's close by, we get tremendous numbers of its graduates.

We were talking about college preparation, and the various options and obstacles. In reference to a program that seems like it should work, but somehow doesn't, she mentioned that so many students move during the course of a year that it's not unusual for a majority of a class to turn over during the year. When students bounce from town to town -- it sounds like most of the moves are relatively local -- it's hard for any single program to gain serious traction, no matter how well-run it might be.

That seemed hard to accept, so I asked around on campus for the last few days to see if others had heard or seen the same thing. They had. Apparently, one of the features of our local low-income community is extremely high transience.

In a way, that helped me understand some things I'd noticed recently on campus. Last year we started putting chairs in unused parts of hallways for students to use; they've been full almost without interruption, since literally before they were unwrapped. The library is standing-room-only. The outdoor benches are often full, even on cold days, and even without smokers. Although the college was built for commuter students, some students are starting to use it as a home away from home. If the regular home is precarious, that makes sense.

The stereotype of urban poverty is of an entrenched underclass that gets stuck in place. This seems to be the exact opposite; these students may be a lot of things, but 'entrenched' isn't one of them. They move a lot.

From the high school's perspective, constant churn in the student body makes meaningful educational interventions incredibly hard to sustain, since all that turnover defeats the sustained focus you need to make real progress. (In the era of mandatory statewide tests, this has direct consequences for the schools.) It's hard to form bonds with teachers or counselors when you switch schools twice a year.

From the students' perspective, of course, it's a disaster. I imagine that it's driven by delicate family situations and shaky economics, each of which brings issues of its own. And moving, in itself, is a major hassle.

I don't really have an easy solution for this. We don't have the money, land, or political will to build dorms. And even if we did, they wouldn't help the K-12 students. But I'm starting to appreciate the new chairs a little more.

An Open Letter to the Department of Education

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:29:20 GMT

Dear Dept of Ed,

Thanks for the wonderful grant support you've offered recently to community colleges. With enrollments up and state support down, it couldn't have come at a better time.

That said, though, I wonder if a simple procedural change could save untold reporting and staff costs, and allow us to focus more resources on direct service delivery. I'm referring to “time and effort reports.”

As anyone who has worked on grant-supported projects can attest, time and effort reports are detailed accounts of how people who receive grant support spend their days. Personnel whose salaries are partly or entirely grant-supported are supposed to spend a proportionate amount of their time on grant-related activities. That means that someone whose salary is half Perkins funded and half college funded is supposed to spend two and a half days per week on grant activity.

While I can appreciate the idea behind time and effort reports – they're a way to prevent 'supplanting' college resources with grant money – they're untenably detailed, and they focus on the wrong thing. They focus on inputs, rather than outputs. They reward “but I tried really hard!,” as opposed to “I got it done.” And the paperwork involved in doing them is non-trivial.

Here's an alternative proposal. Instead of the quasi-Taylorist tracking mechanism of counting fractions of hours, measure and reward outcomes. And instead of worrying about 'supplanting,' worry about getting the job done.

We could make far more efficient use of resources if we didn't have to 'wall off' certain people at certain times, and produce timecards attesting to that. And the argument against 'supplanting' strikes me as misbegotten when the states are slashing our budgets. One could make a pretty compelling argument that the entire point of fiscal stimulus money is to 'supplant' money otherwise lost to the Great Recession. To the extent that we can redirect resources to core functions, rather than walling off everything new into isolated silos, we have a better shot at improving outcomes. And if the outcomes still don't improve, then by all means, do what you have to do.

I hope you read this in the spirit of making a good idea better. Grants are great, but they could be even more productive if they stopped focusing on the wrong stuff.

Sincerely,

If You Give a Prof a Project...

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:46:23 GMT

(hat-tip to Laura Numeroff's If You Give a Moose a Muffin...)

If you give a prof a project,

he'll want a course release to go with it.

If you give him the course release,

he'll want a budget.

Getting the budget will remind him that

other places are doing similar things

and he'll want to go there.

He'll ask you for more travel money.

If you give him more travel money,

he'll come back with guidelines and templates

and rubrics and technology.

He'll play with them all.

They'll remind him of nifty ideas he heard

at a conference you paid for.

He'll want to try them.

And chances are,

if you let him try them,

he'll want another course release to do it.

Gravity

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:44:28 GMT

If I had plenty of ambition and no conscience at all, this would be my plan to get my cc through the crisis and emerge with greater resources and cachet on the other side:

Upscale.

Although academics as a breed love to be idealistic, I'm increasingly convinced that economic class exerts a certain gravitational pull that can only be resisted with great and ever-mounting effort. Every institutional incentive we have is to go upscale.

If we dealt with the pincer movement of lower state aid and higher enrollments by imposing admissions standards -- say, by refusing to do remediation anymore -- the economics (and prestige) of the operation would take off. Blocking developmental students would, all by itself, result in a wealthier student body. We would have much higher retention, graduation, and transfer rates. We would have much less call for special services for students with severe learning disabilities. Our financial aid spending would drop dramatically, as would our spending on tutoring. We'd run proportionally more sophomore-level classes, to the understandable delight of the faculty. As our graduation and transfer rates went up, our standing as a college of first choice would go with it. And we could both impress our politicians and insulate ourselves from them, just like the University of Michigan has.

I've seen some public four-year colleges follow this strategy, and it almost always works. They decide at some point to become more exclusive, and a few years later, they're suddenly 'hot.' For whatever reason, they don't experience this move as a violation of their mission. If anything, they take pride in their newfound exclusivity.

(The marketing of something like that can get weird. "Your tax dollars at work, excluding the likes of you!" Tone is everything.)

Although I haven't seen cc's do this at the institutional level, many of them do it at the program level. Nursing programs often have competitive admissions, for example, and they have notably higher retention and graduation rates to show for it. One of the weird paradoxes of pass rates is that the more academically rigorous the class, the higher the pass rate. Developmental math classes have terrible fail rates, but calculus classes don't. Since most of us would probably agree that calculus is 'harder' than arithmetic, the difficulty of the material isn't the critical variable. In this case, the weaker students don't get to calculus in the first place.

Much of the angst cc's experience on a daily basis comes from the effort to fight gravity. Colleges were originally built for the second sons of the aristocracy, and the closer you get to that, the better it all works. Moving to open admissions in a society with increasing class polarization leads to some extremes for which the system wasn't built. As the K-12 systems from which many of our students come continue to founder, we spend more on tutoring and support services to try to make up the difference. Students who need those services notice that we're good at them, so they seek us out. Our graduation rates suffer, and we get flogged for it in the press and the political discourse. Meanwhile, the public four-year college down the street jacks up its standards and all is well.

(I still don't understand why there isn't a viable upscale proprietary college. Founders College tried that, but insisted on grafting an Ayn Randian political agenda to a model that otherwise could have worked. There's a HUGE market gap here. Any venture capitalists who'd like to take a flyer are invited to email me...)

If our politics and/or economics matched our mission, many of the issues that drive me to distraction would fade away. Until then, we're fighting gravity ever harder, and always with less.

Scenes with The Girl

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:46:37 GMT

"I wish you could see my thinks, but they're stuck in my brain and I can't get them out." -- The Girl

---------

At parents' lunch at TG's school, a little boy from her class came up and hugged TG.

TW: Does he do that a lot?

TG: Yeah.

TW: Do you like it when he does that?

TG: Yeah.

TW: Do you ever hug him back?

(pause)

(shy smile)

TG: Sometimes.
-------------
TG had a brush with sexism this week, but handled it well. She and TB went trick-or-treating together, TB as a mummy and TG as a veterinarian. (Some people thought TB was TG's patient. I thought TB's outfit made him look like a giant tampon, but decided not to mention it.) TG's costume combined green scrubs with a white lab coat with a nametag (Dr. TG) and a surgical mask that she wore loose around her neck.

They made quite the pair, and many of the adults at the doors couldn't help but comment on their costumes. A frequent exchange:

TB and TG: Trick-or-treat!

Adult at door: Ooh! A mummy and a nurse!

TG: I'm a doctor!

Adult: Oh, sorry, honey.

TG: I'm a vet-er-in-ar-i-an.

Adult: (smile)

Naturally, once we got home, this became a teachable moment.

TW: You know, women can be doctors, too.

TG: I know.

TB: Yeah, I know.

DD: And men can be nurses.

TB: They can?

DD: Yup.

TG: And I'm a vet-er-in-ar-i-an!

DD: That's right.

She's only five, but TG is already more composed and self-possessed than many adults I know. Sometimes.

Thoughts on Community

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 01:06:23 GMT

I've opined before that academic deans, and community colleges, need more glamorous portrayals in the media. Dean Wormer from Animal House had one great line ("fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son"), but he was generally held up for ridicule. Larry Miller's "dean" character in the Nutty Professor movies got sodomized by a giant hamster. (Make 'faculty senate' joke here.) And community colleges have been almost completely invisible.

So, along comes Community. It even has a youngish dean!

Hmm.

On the plus side, the show is funny and humane. The students are pretty realistically diverse, if skewing a bit older than you'd usually see in daytime classes. (I'd also add a Latino character or two.) Senor Chang is a great character (though he doesn't help with the Latino factor), and I like seeing the juxtaposition of Joel McHale's "young Chevy Chase" to Chevy Chase's "old Chevy Chase." The status-bickering between John Oliver's character and Senor Chang at the academic dishonesty hearing was uncomfortably close to true, and funnier for it.

(Readers who want to imagine a slice of administrative life are invited to imagine trying to manage Senor Chang once he has tenure. Welcome to my world.)

Still, the show so far strikes me mostly as a missed opportunity.

First, there's the annoying tv habit of making colleges into high schools. I've never seen a community college with 'morning announcements,' or a dean's office with a microphone prominently displayed on the front desk. That's high school. For that matter, I've never seen a community college with a football team, though I'm told a few exist.

The dean character seems to be a dean of students, as near as I can tell. I enjoyed his flubbed 'welcome' speech on the first episode, but since then, he's been played for slapstick. His invocations of the Ivy League, and of diversity, could have been far more clever -- and biting -- than they are. (Okay, I'll admit laughing at his explanation of the "Greendale Human Beings" mascot. "If we make the Human Being a white male, what message would that send...?" I've almost had that conversation.)

But the most annoying part has been the study group.

I guess it's theoretically possible to gather a bunch of community college students who don't have outside jobs, but I'd be hard pressed to do it. Their meeting table feels much more like The Breakfast Club -- again, high school -- than any recognizable community college setting.

The writers are missing a chance to flesh out the student characters. Give each one -- except old Chevy Chase, since he's retired -- an outside job. Now you can juxtapose the demands of the job, of the classes, and of the logistics of daily life. Have one kid work at Arby's. His coworker is a burned-out hippie. They're running the meat slicer. The hippie speaks. "I don't know, man" (slings beef) "what does economics have to do with life?" (slings beef). They could vary the settings whenever they need more jokes, and still stay true to the premise. So far, they haven't, but it wouldn't be that hard. At least one student in the group should have kids. Show one taking the bus to class, and dealing with the various indignities of that. Having them just appear at the table every week is lazy writing.

Still, it's early yet, and the show seems to have a sense of humor about itself. If it can just drop the high school trappings and roll with the promise of the premise, it could really be something. And nobody will have to get sodomized by a giant hamster.

In Praise of Collaborative Answers

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 01:04:26 GMT

Sherman Dorn has a nice response to yesterday's post, in which he basically argues that established unions are generally better off when administrators are competent than when they aren't. (Nascent unions can benefit from having a cartoonish villain to provoke their formation, but that only holds in the early stages.) I think he's right, both for the reasons he gives and for another one.

He lists several, including the daily wear-and-tear of living with a siege mentality, the real damage that idiotic decisions can do before they get reversed, and the cost (in time and money) of litigation and/or open conflict. (These arguments also apply to union leadership, for all the same reasons.) I'll add another: the wild card of third party solutions.

In many cases, discussions that don't get resolved internally get referred first to mediation, which isn't binding, and then (if that doesn't work) to arbitration, which is. While arbitration can settle a given question, it's usually a little like using a shotgun to kill a mosquito: it works, but there goes the living room window.

When The Administration and The Union discuss an issue, they both (usually) have at least some sense of what's involved in it. Much of that won't have to be spelled out, since it's common knowledge. But when a third party comes in from the outside, empowered to settle the question, the ever-present danger is that the settlement will inadvertently go far beyond the issue at hand. And if it does, both sides will be stuck with it.

That usually happens with the arbitrator invokes some sort of principle or general rule behind the decision. In a large and complex system with layers of history, statements tend to have ripples of meaning far beyond the intention (or even knowledge) of the speaker. That's why it's so maddeningly hard to pin down a single interpretation of a contract. Implementing a contract involves far more than simply reading it and trying to follow it; if it were that easy, we'd all be much better off. It also involves "past practices," past grievances, past settlements, and different interpretations of words like "reasonable" or "customary" or "terms and conditions." I've had people flip out when I've used the word "program" when I should have said "initiative." ("That's an initiative, you jerk! Since when did that become a program? Has it been vetted through the program review process?" Honestly, life is too short, but I've actually had this conversation.) And heaven help the poor soul who refers to "student affairs" instead of "student services," or vice versa.

Language is a minefield for people who live with it every single day. Bring in an outsider whose knowledge is pretty much limited to single presentations by opponents, and I'd be surprised if she didn't set off a few landmines without even knowing it.

I read once that part of the reason that most criminal cases are plea bargained is that juries are just too hard to predict. Now imagine if jury verdicts carried the force of precedent.

Smart administrators who are lucky enough to have smart union leadership will seize the opportunity to work things out between them whenever possible, even if it sometimes means swallowing a little more than they think they should have to. A bad agreement can be revisited, but a bad arbitration settlement is forever.

Power 101

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 01:42:40 GMT

Several alert readers sent me this story about Southwestern College, a cc near San Diego. According to the IHE account, the college has banned several faculty, including the past and current presidents of the union, from campus. Their indirect support of a student protest appears to be the reason. (The President is apparently on an extended vacation, which doesn't help.)

I won't go off on the evil of banning critics from campus, since I take that as given. And I won't do the usual administrators-are-the-source-of-all-evil rant, either, because it's neither true nor helpful.

Instead, I'll offer a critique as a college administrator. Simply put, Southwestern's administration is looking amateurish. This is not how it's done.

Anyone who has held an authority position during a budget downturn has faced criticism. Some is probably fair, some is clearly not, and much is highly emotional. People who don't deal with budgets for a living often don't understand the constraints within them, erroneously thinking that money from column A can simply be shifted to column B at will. Worse, rather than taking the time to learn the rules, they immediately leap to the moral high ground and start passing judgments, loudly and publicly, based on misinformation. Being on the receiving end of that can be wearing, and you'd have to be pretty impressive -- or pretty out-of-touch -- for it not to affect you. Some of your less-balanced critics will even make it personal.

This is where leaders need to step up.

Depending on your estimate of the situation, and the direction you want to go, you have several options.

You could enlist the aid of the union (and/or the students) in making a common pitch for more resources. Admittedly, California may not be in a position to respond, but that approach has been known to work in other settings.

Or, you could call the union's bluff on the moral high ground, invite its leaders to the table, explain the very real constraints, and ask them what they would do. Admittedly, some of them will get squirrelly at this point, but the smarter ones will see a chance to actually achieve something and jump on it.

Or, you could divide-and-conquer, finding some sort of fault line within the union itself and hitting it with surgical precision. This takes skill and some creativity, but it can be devastatingly effective.

Or, you could take the crisis as an opportunity for a thorough reinvention of the college as a whole. This combines 'divide and conquer' with 'fiscal realism' and 'good PR.' Done well, this can lead to the college coming out stronger -- at least in relative terms -- than before.

Or, you could take the "cut off the head" approach, purge your senior staff, and refill your top admin positions with the union leadership. That way, you deprive the union of its strongest leaders in a way that they can't grieve. ("How dare you promote proven leaders?" won't get them far in court.) You also get the satisfaction of watching the firebrands who used to know everything discover constraints.

Or, you could simply ignore the criticism and go about your business as best you can. It's not ideal, but it's not the worst approach, either. If questioned, just affirm your belief in freedom of expression and go back to what you were doing.

Or, you could do your best imitation of Dr. Evil, go out on limbs that will be sawed off quickly in court, and make yourself look like an idiot in public. That seems to be the strategy here.

From high office, pettiness is amplified. That can be frustrating, since leaders have all the same human failings as everybody else, but less license to indulge them. That's the price of leadership. There's a real and generally unacknowledged unfairness to that, but there it is. If the best response to generally fair criticism you can come up with is to kick the critics off campus, you're probably in over your head. (I say 'generally fair' to distinguish this from, say, slander. Slander is not protected by academic freedom, and those who commit it are fair game.) Worse, playing the heavy in such an obvious way simply galvanizes the other side. One of the easiest ways to get a disparate group to cohere is to unite against a common enemy. Making yourself that enemy simply plays into their hands. It's an amateur's mistake.

I expect that the bans will be overturned posthaste, and I wouldn't be surprised to see this President's tenure end quickly. In a situation as bad as California's, you can't afford ineptitude at the highest levels. This is not how it's done.

Ask the Administrator: Should I Remain Pure?

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:52:41 GMT

A new correspondent writes:

I've just started my first quarter as a part-time English instructor at a community college near Big City, and I was lucky enough to get a full load. Next quarter, however, that probably won't be the case, as enrollment at our school goes down in the winter and spring. I've applied to a few other community colleges in the area, but I haven't heard back from anyone. At any rate, I was wondering if I should apply to Big City University as well, since I've taught at Private College (where I got my MA, and where I taught for a bit after grad school). But would teaching at a university work against me if I want to continue part-time at CCs and eventually apply for full-time jobs at CCs?

First, congratulations on your first teaching gig! I hope it treats you well.

And I'm heartened to hear that you consider a full-time cc gig a worthwhile goal. I happen to think it is -- okay, I'm biased, but still -- and the students deserve professors who actually want to be there, rather than professors who are 'settling' for it. You've picked a tough year to hit the market, but you know that.

All of that said, your question really goes to purity. If you teach at different kinds of places, does that somehow compromise your candidacy at a cc?

In my observation, the short answer is no. The longer answer is no, as long as you have some cc experience.

Since cc faculty jobs are really about teaching -- and teaching the students we actually have -- candidates who have experience with students akin to those at the cc have an advantage. But that experience doesn't have to be exclusive. If you've taught at both Tony Private U and Local CC, you've gained experience with different sorts of students. I'd be concerned if your only experience were at Tony Private U, but that doesn't look to be the case here.

In fact, there's a pretty good argument to be made for gaining exposure to different campuses, and even to different sectors of higher ed. You'll be better prepared to tell students what to expect when they transfer, for example. You'll also have a better sense of which quirks are local and which are just endemic to the academy. (Hint: there's more commonality across institutions than many academics suspect.) You'll pick up more contacts, which can't hurt, and you'll be less at the mercy of a single hiring manager. If you're mixing public and private institutions, you're better able to smooth out the fluctuations in enrollment at each. (For example, in my area the non-exclusive private colleges are hurting for enrollment right now, and the publics are bursting at the seams. That's pretty common during recessions.) Yes, there are limits to all of these, and you need to factor in extra transportation time and money. But I certainly wouldn't turn down a good private U gig out of fear of some sort of impurity on your c.v.

Good luck!

Wise and worldly readers -- what do you think? Have you seen private college experience held against someone at a cc?

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

Kids Today...

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:41:56 GMT

These three articles are all about the same thing: kids today...

Tim Burke's piece details the issues of self-presentation among Swarthmore students. The piece about Morehouse College details measures taken to change the self-presentation of students at Morehouse College, a historically black all-male campus. And the piece about professionalism details the failings of self-presentation that employers perceive in their (few) Gen Y hires.

Although each piece is context-specific, if you read them next to each other, you'll quickly be struck by how little context matters.

I've never been a huge fan of Golden Age arguments. One of the consolations of aging is that I've been around long enough to remember some of the Golden Ages to which people sometimes refer, and they didn't seem that way at the time. That's because they weren't.

Anyone who remembers carbon paper in typewriters can tell you that talk of a Golden Age is hooey. Remember the Ford Maverick? The Brady Bunch Variety Hour? Roach clips as jewelry? Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft? Remember the homophobia? It's not gone now, heaven knows, but it used to be so much purer. Remember the smoking? That was some fine lung cancer back then. And wow, was the racism ever more impressive back then. My Dad, who grew up in Memphis in the 40's and 50's, lived long enough to vote for a black President. You can call that a lot of things, but cultural decline isn't one of them.

Okay, I'll stop.

Unfortunately, the gratuitous nostalgia gets in the way of what could be a very valuable discussion.

While the ritualistic hand-wringing of elders beholding youth is about as useful as cursing the sun for rising, there's still some truth to the claim that styles of self-presentation that can work for students won't work for employees. Professional jobs have certain expectations and codes of conduct that nobody is born knowing, but that new employees can pay severe prices for not knowing. And it makes some sense to expect students to learn some of those expectations in college.

At Proprietary U, we attended to that in a mandatory career development class. Students were coached on what to wear to an interview, how to conduct themselves, and the like. Despite the name, the class was mostly confined to 'getting a job,' as opposed to 'doing a job,' but at least it was something.

In the cc world, though, we haven't done a lot of that.

Part of that is based on a sense of what counts as 'academic' and what doesn't. Part of it is based on the reality that most of our students who will go on to professional jobs will first transfer to four-year colleges, and the immediate task at hand is giving them what they need to succeed there. Part of it is based on the very real heterogeneity (or 'diversity,' if you prefer) of 'real world' work environments. A cultural style that works well in a sales position might not work well at all in a medical position, for example. ("What can I do to get you in our vasectomy clinic today?" Gee, look at the time...) Part of it is based on a sense that attempting to overpower students' sense of identity upfront will shut down any meaningful attempt at learning. And part of it is based, honestly, on unthinking tradition. You know, stuff that dates back to the Golden Age.

(True story from my student days at Snooty Liberal Arts College: my then-girlfriend reacted with shock and horror when she learned that another student was also an English major. When I asked her why she reacted so strongly, she replied -- correctly -- "but he's so...inarticulate!" The major didn't require any sort of speech courses.)

Back in the day, of course, Snooty Liberal Arts Colleges and their ilk didn't really need to socialize students into the ways of the upper classes, since nearly all the students sprang from them. But that doesn't help from the perspective of an open-admissions public college today.

It's not entirely clear just what would be involved in grooming students for future employment. Public speaking courses are well and good, but speeches on the job are exceedingly rare. I'd guess that most people would benefit more from lessons in "how to conduct yourself in group meetings," or "how to keep your cool while being attacked." You'd think that academic seminars would prepare students for that, but they really don't; the cultural norms of academia are too different. (I sometimes reflect that some of the cultural pathologies of higher ed come from hiring employees based on their success at being students. The skills don't always translate.) Some basics are always welcome: expect students to show up on time and ready to work, model preparedness for them, and reward performance rather than effort. But beyond that, the questions get much more complex than is generally acknowledged.

Strip away the narrative of cultural decline, and there's still real work to be done. I'm just not sure how to do it.

Netbooks for All?

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 01:42:28 GMT

A regular correspondent wrote to mention that his cc is considering mandating laptops for all students.

We've given that some vague thought on my campus, too, focusing mostly on netbooks. The idea has its advantages.

- With good wifi on campus, students could do work just about anywhere, not just in dedicated labs.

- Netbooks now are much cheaper than laptops used to be, and if they're required, they could (I think) be covered by financial aid. Some even have full-size keyboards.

- We could spend less on dedicated labs, and take fewer general-purpose classrooms out of circulation for them. This is not to be underestimated.

- Lower-income students would have a more even playing field with their more affluent peers.

All of that said, though, we haven't pulled the trigger. The reasons?

- Part-time students, non-matriculated students, etc. Only about half of our students are full-time. Does it make sense to require someone taking just one course to buy a netbook that costs more than the class? If not, then some students in a class will have the mandatory netbooks and some won't. From an instructional standpoint, that reduces the 'level playing field' effect.

- Managing expectations. Netbooks are built for net access. Even if we could get the campus wifi system to the level it should be (cough), students will only have access off-campus if they can afford it. A typical usb broadband modem runs about sixty bucks a month, which is quite a chunk of change for a student working at minimum wage. I also wouldn't be surprised if students decided that college-issued netbooks were up to the college to maintain and troubleshoot. Our IT department is struggling now, without the added burden of liability for thousands of free-floating netbooks.

- What about students who already have laptops or netbooks? It would be silly to require them to buy new ones, but financial aid gets tricky when some students need computers and some don't.

- Special programs and special needs -- macs for graphic design, say. Candidly, though, this objection strikes me as the weakest, since we could still have some specialized labs.

- This would be yet another cost item added to students' bills. Given how much some of our students struggle economically, adding a three-hundred-dollar 'nice to have' item to the 'mandatory' list should not be taken lightly.

Wise and worldly readers -- what do you think? Would it make sense to push campus computing (where possible) from fixed labs to student-owned netbooks? Are there good arguments for or against that I've overlooked?

Where Enrollment is Down

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:03:44 GMT

The headlines about the enrollment booms at community colleges are accurate, as far as they go. But I realized yesterday that they leave out part of the story.

Locally, our credit-bearing programs are bursting at the seams. The library is literally standing-room-only at peak hours; veteran staff tell me they've never seen that before. English as a Second Language is through the roof.

But our non-credit courses are dramatically down. The profit-making classes -- pottery, French for travel, that sort of thing -- are cratering. Contract training for local employers is also down. The only increases are in the money-losing pro bono area of adult basic education. (ABE is sort of a pre-remedial track. Think 'basic literacy,' as opposed to 'developmental writing.')

Over the years, we've used the profit-making courses to pay for the pro bono stuff. But with the Great Recession making itself felt ever more strongly, the folks who used to take classes like 'wine appreciation' are finding them relatively easy to skip. And companies that are struggling to stay afloat find it easier to eliminate training than to do other cuts.

Annoyingly enough, we don't even get the minor compensating benefit of easier parking for everyone else, since the non-credit courses typically run during off-peak hours and/or offsite.

A decline in revenues from personal enrichment classes isn't a huge crisis, since they were never a huge part of the budget. But every little bit helps (or hurts), and the difference with the credit programs is striking. The personal enrichment courses have historically been our connection to the 'affluent adult' market, which is small but politically important. Meanwhile, the student body on the for-credit side gets progressively younger and more non-white. I'd like to think that won't matter politically, but history isn't encouraging on that front.

So yes, our enrollments are up, but it's a bit more complicated than that.

The Hard Part of Transparency

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 01:41:56 GMT

My college, like so many others, has tried to deal with the Great Recession by having a series of public meetings about what's most important to us. The idea has been to give stakeholders from around campus -- including students -- input before decisions are made, so the decisions can be made with a clearer sense of what we all think matters. No secret decisions, no hidden agendas, no "why weren't we consulted?" objections. And some of the conversations have been wonderfully productive, with a surprising degree of consensus around a couple of major issues.
But now the process is hitting a wall.

When you ask people "what's crucial for student success?," you can get some wonderful responses. When you ask "what could we do better?," you get some great ideas, some of which could only come from people on the front lines. So far, so good.

But when you get to "and what would we be willing to reduce to pay for it?," the silence is overwhelming.

I get some of the reasons for that. I don't want to start a needless fight by saying that somebody else's job isn't important. I don't know what some people actually do in the course of the day, and presuming to pass judgment without that knowledge would be rude at best. Throw someone under the bus, and you'd better hope the bus does its job; if it doesn't, now you have a righteously pissed-off coworker for many years to come. And it's easy to envision a meeting quickly degenerating into a shouting match, with all that that entails.

But in a very real way, this is where transparency and inclusiveness are the most important. If we get these decisions wrong, the pain will be felt for years to come. This is where we need the most help.

One professor I spoke with suggested moving from a 'public brainstorming' model to something closer to an 'either/or.' He basically suggested that The Administration come up with two or three options -- call them plans A, B, and C -- and asking for the sense of the college as to which made the most sense. That way, you get around both the 'first mover' problem and the 'otherworldly proposal' problem. Instead of asking people whose self-image is based in excellence at critical thought to venture something, you're asking them to compare things, which is a much more comfortable position for them. It plays more to their strengths.

I'm intrigued by the idea, but experience tells me that their first move will be to look for some unspecified plan D. (Something similar happens anytime you present statistics: the first move is always to question the methodology behind the data.) Someone will invoke 'false dilemma,' someone else will propose forming a committee, and you're right back where you started.

This is one of those message-in-a-bottle posts in which I hope someone has a better answer than anything I've seen or surmised. So, wise and worldly readers, I seek your counsel. Is there a productive way to engage the campus community in a discussion of what to cut?

How Not to Balance a CC Budget

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 01:10:16 GMT

Out-of-state students!

According to this article, several state university systems are now considering making deliberate moves to increase the proportion of out-of-state students, specifically to capture the tuition premium. The idea is to replace lost state subsidy support.

I won't address the logic at the university level. But at the cc level, this would be political suicide.

In most states, out-of-state students pay higher tuition at public colleges and universities than in-state students do. This holds true all the way from the flagship university to the community colleges. (In states where community colleges are based in counties, out-of-county students usually pay a rate in between in-county and out-of-state.) The idea is that the taxes they've paid by living in that state have subsidized the cost of education there, so in-state tuition is a form of payback. Out-of-state students haven't subsidized that state's colleges, so they pay more.

The idea isn't perfect, of course. One could easily make a case that to the extent that Federal money is involved, my taxes support higher education in every state. But it's certainly true that my state and local taxes go to my state and local systems in a way that they don't go to the systems of a neighboring state. And to the extent that public institutions are reliant on the goodwill of their taxpayers -- which is to say, for their very survival -- there's something to be said for keeping the locals happy.

The out-of-state premium is supposed to be enough to make out-of-state students at least a break-even proposition. But in practice, many systems treat them as cash cows. They don't have the legislature's ear like in-state students do, and the fact that they're there anyway indicates a certain level of desire. They can even add a certain kind of diversity to a student body, at least in theory, even if in practice they tend to be upper-middle-class or just plain rich.

(The exception to that is undocumented students who are treated as out-of-state. But that's an entirely different issue. There, the students in question are effectively local, often having graduated from a local high school; they're undocumented because they came over as kids. In that case, the issue isn't interstate poaching; it's federal immigration policy, which is much more complicated.)

In discussions I've had with state legislators, the issues that prick up their ears are the number of students who live in their district, the number of employees who live in their district, and the relationships we have with employers in their district. Out-of-state students don't count. And I don't want to have the conversation in which I try to explain why our scarce marketing dollars are being spent out-of-state.

Even leaving the politics aside, there's a basic irrationality to the entire idea. If we simply traded a third of our student body with a counterpart school across the state line, what, exactly, would we have achieved? As near as I can tell, we'd simply shift more of the cost of instruction onto students, thereby effectively licensing our home state to make even more cuts. If the students keep paying, why not? And it's not like those students vote here anyway.

No. It's not what cc's are for, and the long-term cost would dwarf any short-term gains. I get the 'premium tuition' argument -- this week, more than ever -- but some premiums just aren't worth it.

Sabbaticals and Layoffs

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:52:16 GMT

Should a college doing layoffs simultaneously fund sabbaticals?

First, some context. My college doesn't have a publication requirement for faculty. Most faculty here don't publish with any frequency, and nobody has ever been fired here for lack of publishing. It's a teaching-centered institution, and the promotion and tenure requirements reflect that. So denying someone a sabbatical might put a dent in his overall plans, but it won't put a dent in his tenure or promotion application. In a research university, or a college that styles itself as research-driven, the context for the question is markedly different. I'm talking about a community college.

We have a process for deciding on sabbaticals, and a set of published criteria. Without giving too much away, I can share that the point of sabbaticals is supposed to be to develop or focus on something that will be of benefit to the college over time. They aren't intended for personal renewal, and they aren't entitlements or compensation. (The faculty union contract acknowledges this.) They're basically purpose-driven course release taken all the way out. They're paid, which distinguishes them from leaves of absence.* They're discretionary expenses meant to reassign a professor to something that is supposed benefit the college as a whole. (Since the proposals come from the affected faculty, of course, that rule has been applied with varying degrees of stringency over the years.) The effective cost to the college is the cost of the adjuncts to teach the courses the sabbatical recipient would otherwise have taught. Although the college has a history of awarding a few sabbaticals per year, the number has fluctuated over time, and there has not been a past practice of everybody getting one every x years.

That said, of course, sabbaticals are interpreted differently by different people.

Some professors see sabbaticals as inhering in the role of 'professor,' or as moral (if not technical) entitlements. Others see them as irreplaceable elements of their long-term professional development, arguing (reasonably) that maintaining currency with changes in their fields, or technology, sometimes requires stepping off the teaching treadmill. And there's a perfectly valid objection that in the current climate, anything taken completely off the table is unlikely to reappear for a long time, if ever.

That said, though, there's something fundamentally difficult about explaining why some people are being paid for a full release from their regular job while others are losing their jobs entirely. I can just imagine the headline in the local paper – staffer x loses job while professor y gets full salary without even showing up on campus for months. Ouch. As a public institution, we ignore public opinion at our considerable peril.

The timing cycles don't match up well, either. We have to make decisions for next Fall's sabbaticals, if any, by mid-winter. But we won't know the full extent of state cuts until next summer.

Wise and worldly readers, what do you think? Is it reasonable to juxtapose the two categories, or would it be fair to do both at the same time?

* We also have a category of reduced-load-for-reduced-pay arrangements that can be offered by mutual agreement. Since those involve unpaid intervals, they can be used for personal purposes. I consider those a variation on unpaid leaves, even though some people call them sabbaticals.

Seeing Like a Student

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 01:38:19 GMT

This in IHE contains a lot, and is well worth pondering. It has several posts' worth of material, actually, but for today, I'll just focus on this:

To better promote success, it appears that not only do particular student support services need to be in place — including in-depth orientations, proactive advising, early warning systems, and well-organized tutoring and other academic supports — but those services must be well coordinated among themselves and with academic programs. Seamless integration of programs and services from the student’s perspective and collaboration among faculty, staff, and administration are what seem to contribute most to student success. (emphasis added)

It sounds obvious, but it's incredibly hard to implement.

Like most large organizations, colleges are organized into silos. Each silo has its own function and its own imperatives. Although that sounds obviously perverse, it actually makes sense; each area has its own specialization, and the idea is that the gains from a division of labor will accrue to everyone involved. The physics department doesn't package financial aid, and the facilities department doesn't grade papers. That's not because those functions are unimportant; it's because they're complicated. Specializing allows for considerable expertise in each area, without expecting anyone to be superhuman. (Of course, with recent budget cuts forcing job consolidations, that's becoming less true in some areas. But the basic idea hasn't changed.)

But the students don't experience silos. They get everything as a big, messy whole.

I remember noticing that in my first semester teaching at PU. A number of students, including some relatively good ones, asked if I'd mind if they left class twenty minutes early every day to catch the bus. They explained that the next bus wouldn't come for two more hours. (I later found out they were telling the truth.) I objected, of course, and even took some offense at the question. But from their perspective, there was something to it; they were looking at total time on campus, rather than time in class, and they judged the cost of twenty more minutes of class to be out of line. In that case, the local bus schedule was drawn up without an eye to our class schedule, and it put all of us in a series of no-win situations.

In administration, of course, silos are the bane of my existence. It's one thing to meet enrollment demand by running more class sections at non-traditional times; it's quite another to get the financial aid office, counseling, tutoring, and the other areas to stay open in support of those times. This is especially true when the number of sections at a non-traditional time is relatively low. The marginal cost of adding a section balloons if you suddenly have to add staff hours in the various support roles, but if you don't, some students will be left marooned.

Even if you have the money, though, it isn't that easy. In a unionized environment, "terms and conditions" of employment can only be changed through bargaining. That means that anything that materially affects somebody's work environment -- reporting lines, hours, etc. -- can't just be changed because it's a good idea. The speed bump undoubtedly prevents some lousy ideas, but it prevents some helpful ones, too. And don't underestimate the resistance of an employee who has maximized her corner-cutting in her current role. Those folks will trot out every argument under the sun to protect their sinecures, and will usually go on offense when they don't have a good defense. All of that internal energy then gets diverted from actually helping students.

In a for-profit setting, there's a relatively straightforward rationale for organizing the enterprise around the student's perspective. Dollars follow students, so if students don't get what they want, the dollars walk out the door with them. But in a nonprofit setting, where the mission is diffuse and the funding complex, that kind of clarity is harder to maintain. That's especially true when students come and go, but employees stay for decades.

Still, if we don't take the students' perspectives seriously, others will. And there's something to be said for remembering why we're here.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen ways for efforts to 'see like a student' actually succeed at your campus? I'd love to steal an idea or two...

Local Economic Indicators

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 01:42:06 GMT

The Planet Money podcast from NPR has a running feature called "Today's Economic Indicator" (or something like that). It's a number plucked from wherever that's meant to be suggestive of something larger.

I've heard a number of good ones locally of late. My local economic indicators for Fall of 2009:

--usual utilization rate of work-study money on campus: 75-80%

--amount by which our work-study allocation increased this year: 50%

--this year's utilization rate for work-study money on campus: 100%

On the bright side, we're able to fill every work-study position on campus, including some long-neglected ones. (Every computer lab is staffed!) We've also vastly increased our work-study allocation for off-campus community service. On the down side, that's because we no longer compete with off-campus jobs. There aren't any. For most of our students, we're the only game in town.

--this Fall's total enrollment gain relative to last Fall: approx. 15%

--this Fall's tuition increase relative to last Fall: approx. 6%

--this Fall's increase in financial aid money relative to last Fall: slightly over 30%

The proportions tell a story.

--number of quarterly cuts we took in our public funding last year: 4

--number of quarterly cuts we've taken so far this year: 1 and counting

When you plan on a yearly cycle, and you sell a two-year degree if everything goes right, this cycle is devastating.

--proportion of our budget covered by state/local funding three years ago: half

--proportion projected by this July: one-third

Luckily, our students are wealthy, employed, and easily able to afford the difference. Oh, wait...

Imposter Syndrome

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 01:34:30 GMT

Lesboprof has a thought-provoking post up about imposter syndrome. It's that nagging feeling that you get in an authority role that you don't really know what you're doing, and that you're this close to being exposed as a fraud.

I remember having that the first few times I taught. But I sort of expected that, and there was a year of T.A.'ing to help me get used to the idea.

The surprise for me was how much more intense the syndrome was once I moved into administration.

Although a title like "Dean" carries with it certain symbolic baggage, the daily reality of the job is basically middle management. The two roles don't go together in any obvious way, and sometimes they conflict. I was fine with the management part, mostly, but found the symbolic stuff harder to negotiate.

Being a department chair, at least in my experience, was almost entirely about administrivia. You run a few meetings, but otherwise you basically take care of the details nobody else wants to. That made the transition to a role with considerable symbolic expectations that much harder, since there wasn't really a break-in period.

At the next level up the hierarchy, though, you're suddenly a part of The Administration. This means, among other things, that many people will abruptly start treating you as the enemy, and you will be held personally responsible for things your predecessors may (or may not) have done ten years ago. If you're feeling a little unsettled in the role anyway, finding yourself suddenly cast into the role of apologist for all manner of past sins, real or imagined, can be disconcerting.

It can be even harder to find your balance when you basically disagree with some of the directives coming from above. At that point, you have to walk a very careful line, both representing the decision and maintaining your own sense of integrity in the process. I'm increasingly convinced that candidates for administrative positions should look very, very closely at their reporting lines before deciding whether to take a job. If you aren't basically in tune with those above you, you're in hell.

The tragedy of the ceremonial baggage is that it sometimes attracts people for the wrong reasons. If you're going after the job because you crave deference or authority, I feel terrible for anyone who works with or for you. The best bosses I've had, without exception, have been the ones who know it's not about them. It's hard enough to sell a questionable decision when it's based on a sincere, if mistaken, sense of what's best for the college. It's much, much worse to try to sell one that's basically about someone's ego. If you're directly reporting to a narcissist, your sense of imposter-hood is basically correct. At that point, your job isn't what you thought it was. Your job is basically to be an extension of somebody else. At that point, the uncanny 'apologist' role is almost accurate; you might as well be a stand-in for someone else. Imposter-hood goes all the way down.

The most effective way I've found to balance the reality of a chain of command with the need for personal integrity is a strong sense of jurisdiction. If you have footprints on your forehead from people stepping over you to get to your boss to overturn whatever you say, you might as well quit. But if you have a relatively clearly defined area of jurisdiction, with an appropriate level of backing from above, then it's much easier to be both effective and sane. That requires a boss who's willing to delegate and mean it, but it's the only way I've seen to really 'own' the role. Without that, imposter syndrome is really another name for self-awareness.

Cracks

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 04:51:38 GMT

Apparently, it's compare-and-contrast week on the blog.

These two stories from IHE, posted on the same day, are worth reading next to each other. They're both about for-profit higher ed, though they take very different angles on it. The first one notes that a quarter of all the Pell grants in America go to students in for-profit institutions. That's a significant increase over even just a few years ago, and it's revealing of the for-profits' student demographics. The second story notes that where community colleges are relatively well-funded, the appeal to students of for-profit alternatives declines.

To which I say, well, yeah.

As regular readers know, I used to work at a for-profit college. Having moved from that into the community college world, I can attest that both institutions made a point of serving populations that have traditionally been underserved. Both include some civic-minded people who believe their work makes a difference in the world, and both have flaws. I also recall a significant number of students moving back-and-forth between the local community colleges and the for-profit, often taking their gen ed courses at the cc and transferring the credits in to save tuition money. (For whatever reason, I don't ever recall reading a story about that, but it was pretty commonplace on the ground.)

With the public side of higher education taking ritual beatings in the various states, I'm not at all surprised to hear that students are flocking to for-profits. For-profits thrive in the cracks of the nonprofit system. As the system cracks up, the for-profits gain more room to move.

In my days at Proprietary U, the college liked to make a distinction between the 'tax paying' sector -- of which it was a part -- and the 'tax consuming' sector, with which it competed. The labels were always a bit overdrawn; as the Pell grant story correctly notes, if Federal student financial aid went away, so would the for-profit college. (From this side, I'd note, too, that direct support for public higher ed is a steadily declining percentage of our budgets.) I also couldn't help but notice how many of PU's faculty, myself included, came from various graduate programs at the state's public flagship university. Since public higher ed is remarkably good at producing new Ph.D.'s, and remarkably bad at providing jobs for them, the for-profits have a steady stream of applicants for faculty positions. In my darker moments, I recalled reading something about sowing the seeds of one's own destruction.

It was once possible to sneer at the entire concept of for-profit higher education. As recently as the early 00's, I attended the national conference of my academic discipline and saw the disdain on people's faces when they saw my institution on my nametag. But there's a fundamental reason that the for-profits are growing, and will continue to:

Someone has to grow.

The non-elite private colleges are economically unsustainable. Public higher ed is creaking. The elites, by definition, can only ever get so big. But the demand for higher education continues to grow, as the realistic alternatives for a decent living without a degree continue to shrink. (The gender breakdown of the Great Recession should finally put to rest the tiresome Charles Murray-esque glorification of manly male blue collar trades. Those jobs took the worst hits by far over the last year.)

Unlike every other sector of higher ed, the for-profits have a revenue model that allows for -- encourages, actually -- growth. My cc loses money on every student. PU made money on every student. Which do you suppose was more capable of growth?

One of the grand poobahs from Home Office once visited PU and gave a talk in which he referred to PU's "secret weapon: private investment capital." Although that was several years ago, the line stuck with me.

In my preferred world, of course, the public sector would have access to that capital through progressive taxation and the redirection of resources away from voluntary wars. But that doesn't seem to be the direction of things. And public higher ed is too busy plugging holes in the dike to think seriously about structural change.

If you don't like the concept of for-profit higher ed, support generous and sustained funding for the public kind. If you're really serious, condition that funding on basic structural change. Without both of those, traditional higher ed faces the fate of a declining aristocracy losing power to a grubby-but-aggressive rising merchant class. Snobbery doesn't pay the bills. At this point, the cracks reach all the way down to the foundation.

Speaking on Behalf of...

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 03:09:44 GMT

A little while back I was involved in a meeting at which a relatively contentious issue was debated. One person prefaced her statement with something along the lines of “the such-and-such committee has discussed this, and passed a motion saying x. I'm just here to convey that.” I took issue with x, and gave my reasons. She took umbrage at my answer, and responded that “well, I'm just conveying the message, and I think that ought to be respected.”

I don't know what “respect” means in that sentence.

It could mean “obeyed,” but that conveys a serious lack of respect for the larger group. It could mean “held immune from criticism,” but that actually means either “obeyed” or “ignored.” I guess it could mean “considered,” but how you consider something without evaluating it is honestly beyond me.

(If I were an abrasive jerk, I suppose it could refer to demeanor. I'll just ask the reader to trust that my demeanor was civil.)

Moments like these are why I get impatient with the advocate/constituent model of meetings or decisionmaking. (For those keeping score at home, I'm siding with 'trustee' representation over 'delegate' representation.) Someone who feels bound to represent the Final Word of a given group has no real ability to compromise or to engage others in meaningful discussion about it; the Word is the Word, end of story.

But the real work of decisionmaking isn't just smashing people into each other and seeing who wins. It's about finding solutions that allow for the best considerations behind the various positions to find expression, even if not in the form originally imagined. It's about discerning the difference between 'spirit' and 'letter,' and being willing to sacrifice the latter for the former. But you can only do that if you're able to move beyond “I've said what I've said and that's what I've said.” You can only do that if you own your words enough to change them.

When confronted with “I've said what the group had to say, and that's that,” I feel like the meeting has been hijacked. Now it's not about whether x or y or some variation is the best idea; it's about the relative standing of the group that issued the dictat. Instead of solving problems, we're dealing with internal politics and wounded egos. At best, it's distracting. At worst, it leads to decisions made for all the wrong reasons.

I've seen a variation on this theme in customer service situations way too many times. A policy is enacted for a particular reason. The front-line people don't know the reason; they're just directed to enforce the policy. So a policy gets forced onto a situation where it makes no sense. The front-line people don't 'own' the policy in any meaningful way, so they don't feel entitled to make judgment calls, no matter how obvious they might seem.

Wise and worldly readers -- have you found a graceful way around this?