Reality Check

The Next Big Thing: Crisis and Transformation in American Higher Education

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:00:20 GMT

The serial crises that affect higher education in America carry with them an accompanying enthusiasm for big thinking. Big thinking involves the expansion of good ideas into major movements, transformations, inflection points, and other moments of significance. Big ideas serve many purposes. They offer hooks for conferences, papers, and symposia sponsored by associations and foundations, each seeking a position on the leading edge of revolutionary change. For another, big ideas highlight the innovative impact of specific exemplary programs, expanding a good idea within the context of a specific institution into a major next big thing. Underneath all of this lies our natural tendency to identify our lives and our current circumstances with major transformations, giving our struggles significance beyond the momentary angst of coping with whatever bad news arrived yesterday.

Historians and old people recognize that it is difficult to know whether what we experience today will mark an actual major reconfiguration in our world. We have been through multiple change moments in the last 40 years in higher education, many of them presented to those of us living the life of the academy as transformative. While what we do today is not exactly what we did 40 years ago, and while higher education as an industry is in many ways different from what it was in the late 1960s, it is also very much the same.

The four-year paradigm, challenged by many alternative modes of instruction, nonetheless remains the gold standard of “college” experience. The balance between the core curriculum and the major, under constant revision in content over these years, remains the standard paradigm for the college degree. The structure of our industry, with its two-year, four-year, research university institutions, and its public and private not-for-profit sectors remains much the same, although we watch the growth of a parallel industry of for-profit enterprises with interest. The balance among our revenue streams has shifted some, although we still rely on tuition and fees, state and federal subsidies, philanthropic donations, and earned income. We spend our money as we have always spent it, primarily on the people who provide the services our students and other constituents demand, although the exact distribution to direct instruction and other academic support, regulatory, student amenity, technology, sports, and research have changed over time and vary markedly by institutional type and sector.

Of course, many things are different today than they were in the late 1960s. Our students have different worldviews, different technological requirements, and different social modalities. Our parents are more engaged and involved, our society is more concerned about the universal availability of college education, and the faith of consumers in the quality of our product is somewhat reduced. The composition of our faculty has changed to include more contingent instructors and the composition of our students has changed to include more first-generation, minority, and female students. As our industry has become larger and larger, we have spawned more complex educational structures and alternative modes of teaching and validating student achievement.

Yet, the changes we see today, enhanced by transformations in the world economy around us, are much more evolutionary than revolutionary. Looking back on previous crisis moments and the clarion calls for transformation or the dramatic declarations of turning points in our industry, we find some solace for our current sense of catastrophic angst. Change comes to higher education slowly, it comes incrementally, it comes differentially by institutional type and character, it happens fast in some parts of our world and much slower in others, and some of the rapid change we feel turns out to be transitory, a momentary spike in behavior that over time drifts back towards the longer-term norm.

Yes, these terrible economic times are indeed challenging and they will require significant action by institutions to weather the momentary storm. The sense of industry-wide crisis, nonetheless, is perhaps exaggerated. The real damage and transformation of these moments takes place in the micro realm. Moments like these change the lives of individual faculty, staff, and students. Individual careers fall off course, individual student opportunities decline, and individual employees lose their jobs and must find others. Buildings decay, programs stagnate and some die, a few marginal colleges disappear from the list of institutions, and a few institutions, making better choices than others do, improve their performance. When it is over, ten years from now, and we re-read discussions of the big ideas of the 2008-2012 moment, we’ll find traces of them on the surface of this geological industry that is higher education.

What then is the optimal behavior of institutions suffering through the peaks and valleys of these serial crises? Some common sense guidelines may be helpful. The primary imperative surprises none of us: Pay attention to the fundamentals, all of which speak to the competitive performance of institutions within their sector and subsector of the higher education industry.

a. Enroll students.
b. Graduate students.
c. Focus on revenue.
d. Track expenses precisely.
e. Measure faculty, staff, and student performance.
f. Understand the difference between core activity and enhancements.
g. Do the core activities first and do them well.
h. Innovate to improve the fundamentals.
i. Save speculative academic enterprises for the good times.
j. Carefully define the institutional mission.
k. Compete within the mission on quality and productivity against the best.

It is good to attend crisis conferences, seminars, and meetings on the next big thing. We all need to worry about the global transformation of higher education, but it is even more important for each institution to stay closely focused on the performance that produces high quality and high productivity measured against a clear and precise understanding of the marketplace for its mission.

Big, industry-wide ideas are great. They make headlines; they provide the illusion of being involved in transformational times. When the moment passes, the publicity dies down, and the pundits turn to other crises, the college and university winners will be those who paid attention to the fundamentals all along.

Leveraging Crisis for Competitive Advantage

Fri, 08 May 2009 10:32:58 GMT

The unusually large reductions in state appropriations to higher education in many states and the impact of the current record setting economic decline on other sources of university funding has pushed institutional responses into high visibility. We usually interpret America’s never ending economic crisis in higher education as instances of unique phenomena, each one requiring new dramatic response. We react with surprise, alarm, and exceptional rhetoric to the cyclical downturns in public funding or private support. We dramatize the dire consequences that reduced funding will cause. We project an imminent decline in the international standing of American higher education as a result.

Yet, we weather these storms. Our traditional response is to lay off some people, cut back a few programs, delay some maintenance, and pull down our reserves. At the end of the cycle, we may be poorer, but we are not much different. Major research universities in particular are remarkably resilient enterprises. Constructed for the most part in cellular fashion, with each department, college, school, and unit operating almost independently within a national context rather than fully integrated into an institutional construct, the difficulties of one cell have attenuated impacts on others. Research universities generally protect core tenured faculty no matter what the fiscal circumstances, although they may reduce contingent faculty and dismiss staff in less critical areas. Universities have many open positions at any one time, and by delaying replacements, closing peripheral enterprises, and using reserves and other funds to buffer short-term losses, most institutions can find their way through a fiscal crisis without major structural changes to their operations, even when confronted with the dramatic reductions currently anticipated by many institutions.

Often, too, legislators and reform-minded politicians look to financial crises, especially ones as severe as this one, as devices for refashioning public colleges and universities in their own image. They want them smaller, less focused on research, more concerned with delivering job-related degrees to as many students as possible at unrealistically low costs. They imagine they can refashion the educational landscape using economic hardship as a primary tool. This effort generates much rhetoric from all affected parties, everyone seeking to highlight the benefit or damage such reforms might bring, and everyone being right to some degree.

This ritual cycle has its real victims in faculty careers delayed, employee jobs lost, and opportunities for students curtailed. Once the cycle of crises passes, however, the universities, like hardy boats in a storm-tossed sea, right themselves and continue sailing on in the same direction, restoring their damaged equipment as best they can while maintaining their course.

Dramatic realignments and restructuring of higher education only rarely result from the downturns of American economic life, but beneath this cycle of crisis, complaint, response, damage, and repair another less visible but nonetheless significant realignment takes place. The intense competition in American higher education, especially among the top 200 or so American public and private research universities, turns always on the fulcrum of money. Research university competition runs on human talent, whether students, faculty, or staff. The quality and productivity of people determines the winners in this competition. These quality people have the common characteristic of mobility: They can go wherever they believe their talent will find the most support and reward. The money determines which institutions can purchase the largest number of productive high talent people.

The economic cycles of American university life substantially affect the ability of institutions to sustain their competition for the best people: the more severe a financial crisis, the more significant the impact. The consequences of poor institutional response to a crisis tend to erode competitiveness over time rather than generate a dramatic crash. If a university focuses on its competitive context as it adapts to a financial crisis, it will make adjustments that enhance its ability to beat the competition when the crisis recedes. If the institution seeks to minimize internal conflict and maximize stability and continuity, it will almost surely weaken its competitive strength as it emerges from crisis mode.

University competitiveness is a function of how much money the university can spend on quality after it has paid for its sustaining operations. The critical issue in a crisis, especially a severe reduction in revenue, is preserving that margin for competition rather than spending the margin to sustain the status quo. Indeed, a truly competitive institution will reduce its expenses MORE than required; recognizing that as everyone recovers from the financial storm, the institution with money to spend on new people and their programs will have a relatively short period to outbid everyone else for talent, and at lower cost. Institutions that spent their margin sustaining what they had before, and often borrowing into the future to maintain the past, will find the improved economic benefits, when they come, already committed to the deferred costs of the crisis decisions made earlier. By the time they recover and begin to build a margin, they will find themselves behind in the competition for the best people.

This formula is simple and everyone should understand it, but acting on it is quite difficult. Universities are collaborative enterprises, they always seek to minimize conflict and maximize agreement, they have multiple constituencies that fight amongst themselves over declining resources, and they often have leadership concerned with maintaining the collegiality that builds career advancement. In public universities, governing and coordinating boards may be highly political and responsive to the short-term interests of the institution’s many clients and supporters. Legislators may demand quick-fix solutions, and the public may find higher education’s lament only semi persuasive. Private universities, already more coherently managed and with the ability to act in real time with a clear focus on institutional self interest, generally although not always respond better. In the constantly recurring cycle of financial crisis and university response, the benefit of private focused governance gives these universities an edge, especially during severe reductions in state revenue that limit the advantage of public university tax-based subsidies. Over time, and sequential budget crises, that edge helps explain the ability of private research universities to pull ahead of their public competitors in many areas.

Dramatic, revolutionary change does not readjust the competitive hierarchy of American research universities as much as the consistent pursuit of high quality, supported by a financial model that produces a consistent marginal surplus for investment in competitive people. That marginal surplus need not be large, but the university must deliver it consistently and invest it effectively. When that happens, it produces an institution whose competitive quality increases steadily and inexorably over time.

University competition is a game played on the leading edge of institutional behavior, not at the center. The optimal strategy is to move money from the less productive trailing edge to the more productive leading edge. Executed consistently over time, this strategy delivers an ever-increasing leading edge of highly competitive quality that pulls the center of the university’s operations relentlessly forward towards higher standards of performance. The financial crisis cycle provides periodic opportunities to move more money from the trailing edge for investment in the leading edge. Those institutions that take advantage of these crises benefit greatly.

The Mote in Thy Brother’s Eye

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:09:13 GMT

A theme in budget reduction processes in some states is an enthusiasm for cannibalizing some institutions in the hopes of keeping others from suffering the effects of a state revenue reduction. This is of course a highly political issue, not easily resolved by rational discussions because the number and type of public universities and community colleges in a state reflects the accumulation over a long time of decisions by elected political representatives.

In some states, systems of higher education responded to historical circumstances such as the creation of Land Grant universities or court ordered desegregation that drove investment in large research campuses and Historically Black Colleges and Universities. In many states, large community and technical college systems have emerged to provide job related training and college transfer programs. Population growth, political commitments, and economic development considerations, led many states to create four-year-and-beyond higher education systems that include campuses of every type from four-year liberal arts institutions to major public research universities.

The possibly wasteful use of tax dollars to support too many institutions is a popular theme, yet the definition of waste is often relative to the self-interest of the observer. It is a waste to spend money on a community college or a small liberal arts college from the perspective of the research-intensive university because flagship institutions may see their mission as more important to the state than the missions of other institutions. However, from the perspective of the students and communities where these other institutions operate, flagship universities are a wasteful luxury that exist to support major entertainment industries like football and coddle research professors who teach very little and whose discoveries end up nurturing the industries of the Northeast, the West Coast, or boom states of the Southwest.

These charges and counter charges often occur in whispers because the political sensitivity of targeting any particular institution is great. If the HBCU's are untouchable for a host of historical and equity reasons, or if small rural institutions are protected by political influence, then an assault on other institutions elsewhere in the state will not be seen as fair. In addition, the issue of cost is more complicated that it might appear. If the state closes a relatively small institution in a semi-rural area and fires the faculty and staff, we can indeed save money.

This saving is not without another cost. The money saved can make the budget reduction of flagship and other institutions less painful, but the loss of the small semi-rural locations will also ensure that the students who formerly attended these institutions will no longer have an easily accessible college. They may now have to drive two hours a day or more to commute to and from another college. In the effort to keep themselves afloat financially, these students may find it impossible to hold down two jobs, care for a family, and make the commute. This may not concern the institutions that benefit from cannibalizing the budgets of the smaller colleges, for they will have more money and will not have to work as hard to be more efficient, thanks to the loss of services to citizens in other parts of the state.

Whether the smaller institutions are less cost effective than the big research institutions in a state is a complicated and not easily resolved issue. Many flagships have a much higher cost of instruction than do smaller undergraduate-only institutions, and they often have higher tuition and state support per student. At the same time, public research-intensive university are critical elements in any state’s ability to compete for high wage-rate jobs, a good industrial base, and a vibrant economy. No state can afford to export high value jobs and industries to other states (that do have first rank public research universities), and rely solely on low wage rate blue-collar jobs to drive their economies. The real issue is whether the state is paying a reasonable amount to educate each student that attends a public institution and effectively supporting a first rank public research institution. It is not the number of institutions that matters as much as the cost per student educated, since we should measure the purpose of public higher education not by the number of institutions but by success in educating students and driving the public research university performance that enhances the economic competitiveness of the state.

Institutional cannibalism is probably the least attractive of the devices proposed by some as the way public systems should respond to the challenges of declining state revenue. Individual campus advocates who seek to extract efficiencies from other campuses reducing student opportunities elsewhere in their state, rather than look within their own institution for the savings and adjustments required to deal with state revenue loss, do a disservice to everyone. Perhaps they should turn to scripture and answer the question:

"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye,
but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"

The best policy perspective is to pay attention to the cost of delivering a college degree and the required investment in nationally competitive public research university performance. Public higher education institutions at all levels require clear measurements of performance relative to cost, compared to other competitive institutions of their type across the country. Whether we educate physicians or welders, promote science or technology, or create high value jobs, the competitive performance of institutions matters, not the number of institutions in the mix. We should not waste any state money, but neither should we assume that prestige, snobbery, or rhetoric are substitutes for effective, measurable, and cost-effective performance as the guide for investing in the future of all the citizens of the state.

Budget Crises, Academic Change: A Fable

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 19:35:22 GMT

Our fable begins with the recognition that everyone is in favor of change, that magic word for all of higher education. Few things in college and university life capture such universal admiration as the prospect of change. If we become tired of such an ordinary word, we can prefix it with other magical words with high value like transformational and accountable. We know that the good change for universities involves more money to do the things that we want to do. Bad change involves less money. We know we usually do not like change that makes us work harder.

Budget reduction processes offer special opportunities for change. In public universities, these moments of fiscal challenge prompt government representatives, coordinating boards, and other responsible observers to tell us to take advantage of the crisis to restructure the university and achieve better efficiency and accountability. The state may give us a mid-year budget cut and ask for a strategic realignment of our work, as if the university operated on a week by week cycle.

Most of us respond politely, even though we know nothing of the kind is possible. By December, every university has already spent about half of its budget and it has made commitments for much of the rest. If it is to give money back to the state, it must find it by scrounging around in supplies and expenses, canceling travel, postponing purchases of new computers, and perhaps not hiring some adjuncts and increasing class sizes. But strategic realignments? Not a chance.

This time, however, we are told to expect that the mid-year crisis will morph into a major budget reduction for the coming year, so we must engage our strategic thinking to improve the university. This, in a budget reduction mode, should involve getting rid of things we no longer need that cost money and employ people.

Our university president says, "Well, we're going to be efficient and eliminate the program in Sanskrit which has a low enrollment and costs us $300K a year." She immediately learns that there is a major Sanskrit-speaking community in our state (which we had failed to notice) and its lobby in our legislature is very strong. We receive a memo from the state budget office that says: "Please make strategic accountable reductions in the university budget, but leave Sanskrit alone."

She turns next to student social services, for which we pay $3M a year. She says, "Well, between teaching English and sustaining full student social services, we should reduce student social services by half, a $1.5M budget reduction." All hell breaks loose. The student lobby, the social services professionals in the state and their lobby, and various parent groups all point out the outrageously insensitive behavior of an administration that would cut student social services by any amount. The president receives another memo from the state budget office that says, "Please make strategic accountable budget reductions in the university but exempt Sanskrit and Student Social Services."

"OK," she says, "we got it." She then turns to our intercollegiate athletic program, which receives a $5M subsidy from the general budget every year. She tells the athletic department, "We're taking $2.5M from the athletic budget in order to sustain the humanities departments." All hell breaks loose. While the English, comparative literature, and history professors recognize the wisdom of this decision, the sports lobby of alumni, donors, and legislators goes crazy. Blogs fire up, talk radio goes volcanic, and famous former athletes speak out. The president receives an informal but clear message from the chair of the state legislative budget committee, a former football star at the university. The message: "Please make strategic accountable budget reductions, but if sports are on the list we will cut your budget worse than it is now."

"OK," she says, "let's save money by consolidating departments and programs." This is a favorite of budget reduction gurus. Everyone on campus cheers until she identifies the departments and programs. Then, everyone except the people in those programs cheers. The affected faculty and students organize a guerrilla movement on campus to undermine this decision. The faculty in the affected programs call on the university senate for support since the administration, in a misguided effort to be effective and efficient, failed to consult adequately (adequately being about at least a year of study). Someone in the business school calculates that the savings from consolidating programs without firing faculty and staff will be minimal. Indeed, after the new combined program has to reprint all the letterhead stationery and redo the catalog, the analysis shows that consolidation will actually cost the university more than leaving the programs alone. The best faculty in the proposed consolidated programs immediately polish their resumes and threaten to leave (although few actually get offers to leave). Students mobilize, unions mobilize, and soon the university recognizes the folly of its ways and sends the proposal to a university senate study committee, removing this option from the current budget process and effectively killing the idea.

The president, in a fit of desperation, looks outside her campus for better targets and identifies a small public college in the next county that has low enrollment and poor graduation and retention. She recommends a strategic realignment that would absorb the small college's programs into the state university, and achieve major savings. Although the state has frequently claimed that it has more state funded colleges than it can afford, the public regards this aggressive move against a sister campus as ruthless bad form. The mayor and the legislators from that district immediately mobilize to block any such move. Once mobilized, they succeed in getting the legislature to upgrade the state college to a university and authorize three new masters and two new doctoral programs to symbolize the importance of the campus to the economic development of the region.

Finally, the president creates a strategic and accountable realignment for the institution by cutting a little here and a little there, abolishing a program that has no supporters in the legislature and ready-to-retire tenured faculty, and eliminating building maintenance funds to avoid laying off any faculty.
The public relations office describes these moves as creative and visionary change, and the press hails the president as a wise and profound academic leader who has accomplished these fine things in an effective and accountable way without damaging important academic functions of the institution. Although the president knows that the campus' deteriorating physical plant will become a major issue for the future, she also knows that she will be somewhere else when that happens.

And so ends the fable with a budget crisis averted, and a change process achieved.

Performing to Make Money—Making Money to Perform

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 22:17:30 GMT

In the endless Sisyphean task of explaining university finances to many audiences, we often encounter considerable skepticism about our permanent need for more money. No university worth its diplomas will argue that it has enough money to do its job. Not even the richest among us.

Instead, we seek continuously increasing revenue from our states, the federal government, our students, corporate sponsors, and of course our donors. We have a wide range of creative stories we tell about the wonderful things the money brings: more and better students, services, economic development, and significant research. It is all true, as we know, but nonetheless, we can see the skepticism in the eyes of our legislators, some of our donors, many of our students’ parents, and the army of reformers who imagine high quality education should be a free good.

Sometimes we despair, but then again, the job is to preach the gospel of higher education to the unbelievers whether conversion takes place or not. There is a story we can tell, however, that sometimes reaches difficult audiences, especially those made up of business people.

Universities are indeed business enterprises, we can explain. They earn and spend money, they produce and sell a wide array of products, and they compete for student customers and high quality faculty employees. They produce teaching and research, they require students and faculty, and they judge their performance on the quality work both perform. Most people in our audiences will recognize all this as more or less appropriate and right. Then we come to the money.

Universities, we can tell them, are revenue engines with a business model fundamentally different from our corporate colleagues. The business world constructs enterprises to produce and sell products or services with the goal of making money. A successful business earns a profit that it distributes to its owners. The business measures its success by the amount of money (or value) created for its stockholders or owners. This is simple. If the business cannot make the product and sell it for a profit, it stops making that product and makes a different one that it can sell at a profit, because the point of the exercise is the profit not the product.

In the university however, we do something different. We engage in an intense and focused search for money so we can produce teaching and research (with all of its associated benefits). The more money we can generate the more and the better teaching and research we can do. The purpose of the money is to purchase quality teaching and quality research and support a quality university environment. We compete with each other not to make a profit but to acquire quality. We define the successful university by the total amount of quality it can accumulate (demonstrated by its products) within its boundaries.

Quality is rare and expensive because the best students and the best faculty can choose where to go and participate in the creation of quality. To get the best, we have to provide them with an ideal environment for realizing their dreams and aspirations. The people whose work we enable through the environment, the facilities, the support, and the opportunities we create using the revenue acquired from all those difficult sources generate the quality products. The point of the university is the quality product, not the money. For us, the money makes the quality product possible. For the business, the quality product makes the money possible.

The business model produces quality at a cost below what the market will pay for the product. The university model spends its revenue to produce the highest quality its money can buy, and then pursues additional money to buy more quality. We spend in a competition to acquire quality for our institutions where our business counterparts spend in a competition to produce higher profit margins for its owners. In the university, there are no owners; there are only quality producers. We compete to buy the highest quality producers our resources and the efficiency and effectiveness of our institutional systems permit.

In the business world, the one with the most profit taken out of the enterprise wins.

In the university world, the one with the most money invested into the creation of quality products wins.

Our business colleagues are not sure this is rational, but once they see the rules of university competition, they understand better how we play the game.

The Amateur Challenge of College Sports

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 09:15:25 GMT

Nothing is more central to the enterprise of intercollegiate athletics than the commitment to amateurism. Everyone, whether bitter critic of NCAA sports or ardent defender, acknowledges this requirement. College sports depends on the definition and defense of amateurism for its survival, but the tremendous popularity and financial requirements of the college sports enterprise threatens and has threatened this quality since the early 20th century. The core feature of amateurism is the concept of the student-athlete (a compound noun invented to recognize that we could not just have students who played sports but must have regulated students who played a special type of sports). The student-athlete is an individual who, while maintaining a bureaucratically defined status as student also maintains an equally bureaucratically defined condition of amateur sports performer. The line we draw to separate amateur from non-amateur is exceedingly thin and often follows a rather convoluted path that reflects the creativity of those who seek to provide commercial benefit to themselves and to the student-athletes.

Because college sports are hugely popular, everyone wants to buy a piece of the action. The universities and their agency, the NCAA, sells pieces of the action, but in ways that struggle to distinguish between the sports programs and the students who play the sports. In simple terms, we think it OK to sell the program, the team, the game, and the season, but not OK to sell the individual student-athlete in any forum outside the context of the university, NCAA, or conference sponsored context. Our game-day programs feature individual student-athletes without challenging their amateur status, but we consider a student-athlete who sells her own athletic accomplishments to promote an outside commercial as having given up amateur status. The rules that clarify the differences in these circumstances are numbingly complex, but the principle is easy. If we sell student performances as part of the university based and sanctioned package of college sports, it is OK. If the student sells her athletic abilities outside of university based and sanctioned packages, it is not OK.

Our rules create an elegant rococo disputation among those who believe we should pay students to be athletes and those who think we have already over commercialized students who are athletes within the NCAA context. Both positions have merit, but actually, they are beside the point. The point of the exercise is somewhat different.

College sports MUST be conducted with the talent of amateurs who do not receive direct individual payment for their services beyond what is appropriate for school expenses. If they receive more, then they become employees of the university, playing not for the team but for the money. Even if the money is, at the beginning, relatively minor in character, it is the principle that matters. We succeed with intercollegiate sports because we work hard to put only amateur students on the field, we construct restrictions to keep our student-athletes as continuing members of our university, and we rigorously exclude those who step over the line into the professional world or fail to maintain some minimum standard of student status.

This is the product, the amateur, enrolled, student-athlete competing on behalf of the team for the college. Are the Division I and IA basketball and football enterprises all but professional in every other way? They certainly are. Production values, quality of facilities, quality of coaching, quality of support, all of these are at professional levels and beyond, but the key talent, the athletes themselves, are a special breed. They must be very good at their sport, they must follow exceptional structured training regimes, they must follow complex rules and regulations, but they must also remain students and play for only the canonical college career (four years of play).

Throughout the history of intercollegiate sports in America, nothing has caused college sports more trouble than maintaining this construct of the amateur student-athlete. Payments under the table, bribes for recruiting, gambling schemes, secret professional contracts, payments from agents, and an endless litany of other abuses have nibbled at the edges of the amateur student-athlete, each effort captured in some form of NCAA legislation or definition to hold off the contamination of professionalism. Why not, we might ask, just give up this nonsense and let students who are athletes sell their talents outside the university to the highest bidder? We could do it, of course, it would be easy, but in losing control of the student-athlete, the university loses control of the uniform context of the games we play.

We want college athletics to be a seamless web of competition between teams of athletically talented students who compete against each other on a common basis, the legendary level playing field. We want the games to be fair, uniformly conducted, a competition that demonstrates the best college team. We structure our competitions in conferences and tournaments and bowl games and playoffs all to complete an endlessly renewing cycle that creates the illusion and some of the reality of an ideal type of commitment to institution, team, colleagues, and alumni. We take money to create the facilities, the circumstances, and the quality of the enterprise, but we place a barrier around those who make all this possible, the student-athlete, and hold them, for a short time, isolated from direct involvement with professional choices.

The latest flurry around the expansion of fantasy sports to feature individual student names as well as statistics provides an illustrative example of the tremendous pressure to professionalize the college game. Although the CBS version does not appear to buy or sell individual students, it does create a corporate enterprise that exploits an individual student’s athletic performance as it promotes its own profit-making image and activities. The NCAA will find it difficult to resist the use of student names, which exist in the public domain anyway since newspapers, magazines, and news shows on television or the Internet routinely use student names and images to sell the content of their programs that exists to sell the products advertised. The NCAA’s current rules to do not easily accommodate the fantasy football enterprise, and even though student-athletes do not receive a financial benefit directly from the use of their names in this context, the pressure to connect a prize or benefit to the student-athlete whose name is most valuable in the fantasy league will surely be strong.

And so, the cycle of commercial threat to intercollegiate amateurism will take another turn, and the NCAA and its universities will struggle for yet another definitional determination that allows what must be permitted under the law but sustains the essential non-professional nature of its essential amateur student-athletes.

This battle in its many forms has been in process a long time, about a century perhaps, and it will surely continue. We will learn how to accommodate this latest threat, but our line separating the amateur college student and the professional athlete will grow thinner still, and surely acquire another convoluted twist in our rulebook.

Naming Names: Ten Rules

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:30:38 GMT

Periodically, universities and their friends engage in a flurry of conversations about naming things on campus, usually triggered by a high profile naming that some find inappropriate, interesting, or otherwise noteworthy. Most of us have experience in these conversations, having engaged in them time-and-again, in different contexts over the years. We know we will touch on the ten standard naming rules:

1. Only name buildings for dead people,

2. Only use the names of admirable people,

3. Recognize substantial individual contributions,

4. Ensure a gift large enough to justify the recognition by name,

5. Avoid changing the name already on a building,

6. Avoid using corporate names for permanent recognition,

7. Use more relaxed rules for naming exterior spaces,

8. Allow flexibility in naming interior spaces,

9. Avoid naming things for departing administrators, however beloved

10. Be prepared for controversy over naming choices.

Most universities have variations on these ten commandments for naming, but many styles, traditions, and practices modify their implementation. In principle, these things are not very complicated, but in practice, they can provoke discussion and sometimes outrage.

1. We like to name buildings after dead people for several reasons. These individuals will do nothing to embarrass the university in the future. We can be reasonably sure that their accomplishments are truly significant and praiseworthy. Any controversy will be somewhat muted (but not necessarily eliminated) by the reluctance to appear churlish towards a recently deceased individual, although, being deceased is not a guarantee of universal approbation. In any academic setting, there will be those who do not believe an individual so recognized appropriately represents the values of the institution. However, in most cases, we can withstand the controversy.

2. We certainly like to name buildings for admirable people, but the definition of admirable is often quite flexible. We can admire great accomplishment of scientific, humanistic, or artistic character; we can honor exceptional public service; or we can recognize the admirable motives that prompt an individual to contribute a significant sum towards the academic goals of the institution. Some individuals honored in a naming may have academic or public service distinction AND provide an exceptional financial contribution. More and more, of course, our institutions see a financial contribution as the primary motivation for admired behavior, and we anoint fewer and fewer buildings with the names of distinguished but impecunious academics, artists, or public servants.

3. With but few exceptions, universities and colleges, public and private, are in desperate need of funding to support the quality that all of our constituents want. Quality is expensive, tuition and fees are high, public support declines, and so we turn again and again to our financial benefactors for help. In return, we must recognize their essential contributions, and so we name things in their honor, both to recognize the gift and to signal to others that we can be grateful for their help as well.

4. However, while most of us find such recognition appropriate, we often have difficulty setting the right price. How much of a contribution is required for a building recognition? Half the replacement cost of the facility, sixty percent of the cost of a new facility? If our state has a matching program, do we count the state match as part of the gift? And, if the name is for a major unit, a college for example, do we calculate a percentage of the annual budget as the appropriate reference for a naming? These calculations may appear crass, but in fact, they are essential because we must be fair. Whatever is worthy of recognizing one donor must be good for another. If, however, we are a poor college just beginning our fund raising, we may have lower thresholds for naming than if we are a rich college. As a result, we often have lower standards for our first campaign and higher standards for our fourth campaign.

5. Often interesting old buildings already have a name, and frequently the name dates from a period when donations were not relevant to naming choices. When we receive a gift to renovate an old building or otherwise support an important activity in that building, and the donor expresses an interest in renaming the building, we run into our fifth rule. Renaming buildings is always problem. While we make today’s donor happy by doing it, we may well send a signal to future donors that our assertions about the permanence of building names are suspect. If the old name did not acknowledge a gift, the conversation is easier than if the old name recognized a previous gift. Sometimes we finesse this by hyphenating the building name: The Sam George—Susan Peters building. These conversations can sometimes produce volatile responses from alumni with emotional attachments to old buildings, or friends and relatives of the original honoree. Still, we need the gift, and most universities know that if the gift is substantial and the institutional need great, careful consultation and preparation will help smooth over any potential issues, and the next generation of students who will become alumni will have no vested interest in the old name.

5. Corporations often like to see their names in highly visible places, but these names have their own problems. Usually, it is best to put corporate names on things with a finite life span. The Fancy Chemical Laboratory named for a five-year period in exchange for enough money to outfit the lab. Often the corporations find athletic facilities the best naming opportunities because these high visibility nameplates usually sell for a fixed amount per year. When the company disappears or no longer sees value in the venue, or the university has reason to disengage, the end comes without much emotional angst. Public universities often have difficulty naming anything for corporations other than some programs or athletic advertisement opportunities. Private universities have more leeway, but good policy encourages caution in any permanent naming for a corporation that may not last forever, and one never knows when a corporation will be found to have engaged in some behavior that might embarrass the institution.

6. Rules for naming exterior spaces are often much less formal. Courtyards and patios, streets and walkways offer opportunities to recognize living people. We can name a patio, and should the name become a problem, we can change a patio name. We can name a space but with the proviso that the name lasts only as long as the space remains open, which may not be forever.

7. We can also name interior spaces, again with much more flexibility. We can use classrooms, conference rooms, and auditoriums to recognize short term or permanent gifts. We can limit the duration of the naming for the term of the program or for the expected life of the renovation funded by the gift. These interior spaces can also serve to recognize distinguished individuals even without large gifts.

8. There is some difference of opinion about naming things for departing administrators. Often such individuals accumulate constituencies and on the administrator’s retirement, a movement will emerge to name this or that building, space, or program. This can be a difficult conversation. If someone says, “Well, José is a fine fellow, but after all, we paid him good money to do good work, and he did good work, so we should say thanks and move on.” Naming anything significant for a departing administrator can create an entitlement for subsequent administrators. The exiting president is told, “We named the science building for your predecessor, what building do you want?” The wise president will say, “Thanks, but we shouldn’t name anything significant without a donation because the institution is in desperate need of additional funds.” We’d prefer not to be ungracious, saying to the long-serving and well-regarded departing hero, “We love you, but we don’t want to waste a naming opportunity that could recognize a significant gift.”

Whatever we do with a naming, however wise our choices, however clear our rules, we always know that naming things can provoke controversy. Any time we decide to do a naming, we should be prepared for controversy and have our explanations ready. Good rules help, consistency and clarity help even more.

Keeping the Donors and Their Heirs Happy

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:03:43 GMT

The act of matching donor wishes to institutional needs through philanthropic gift agreements is something of an art. Donors usually have specific goals in mind for their gifts, and because colleges and universities have tremendous financial needs, the enthusiasm to consummate a donation can lead both parties to imagine that everyone has the same expectations. Unless the gift document is clear, however, we often find that the meaning of vague language and expectations in the gift agreement drifts over time.

The rate of drift varies, sometimes divergence between expectations and performance occurs rapidly as the first activities financed under the gift begin to take place. In other instances, the divergence may occur many years later when circumstances or changing priorities cause an institution to change direction in ways that the descendants of the donors do not believe appropriate. These instances are often resolved in more or less amicable fashion within the institution, but occasionally some appear in court and gain attention on the national stage.

The challenge of writing precise gift agreements has become increasingly difficult as more and more donors seek unreasonable specificity in the purposes of endowment gifts whose lifetime is presumably forever. Although we may imagine we can predict the future, in most cases what seems central to our academic and institutional concerns today may well be irrelevant tomorrow, and the more narrowly drawn the gift agreement, the less likely it will stand the test of time. An endowment to support the study of romance language and literature will have a much longer useful life than an endowment to support research on the poetry of 16th century Andalucía.

Good gift agreements always include an escape clause that provides a mechanism for the university to ensure that it can meet an endowment’s purpose throughout all time. Moreover, even if an institution and a donor have a full understanding of the gift and its purpose, the donor’s descendants, many generations hence, may have their own goals and purposes, their own interpretations of an ancestor’s intent, which they project onto the gift. They may lay claim to monitor and control the use of a gift made generations ago, and when the original intent is not completely clear, such discussions can become quite contentious and end up in court (the worst place for the resolution of a philanthropic issue).

When constructing an endowment, the donor and the university often glide over an important part of the process. Most endowments pays for only part of full cost of the activities supported. An endowment for the study of Spanish history will support a program in the university that also receives funding from a wide variety of other sources, whether tuition and fees or state appropriations. Those additional resources make the value of the endowment much greater because on the margin of a substantial university investment, an endowment can raise an ordinary program into an exceptional one, an argument often used to motivate gifts.

If the base support from tuition and fees and state appropriations disappears, the endowment income will not be sufficient to sustain the program. This reality can lead clever faculty, department chairs, and deans to work with their donors to leverage additional money from the larger institution to support an endowment gift or to rest a case for continued funding of an obsolete program on the presumed wises of a previous generation’s donor. When the university, or one of its units, can no longer support the larger activity for which the endowment was an enhancement, and reorganizes or otherwise changes the institution’s structure, the issue then becomes whether the university can find an appropriate and related use for that endowment income.

This is when we curse or praise our predecessors. If the gift agreement is clear, anticipates the possibility of a change in purpose over time, and provides for a method to determine an alternative use, then the institution’s need and the donor’s intent can be accommodated reasonably, and we praise our predecessors.

If, however, in the enthusiasm for the gift, the university promised to do something very specific forever, it may find itself in conflict with the donor or the donor’s heirs, in which circumstances we curse our predecessors. Universities and their fund raising organizations suffer intense pressure to capture private gifts and deliver ever-larger campaign totals, and their long-term success rests on educating their donors about the variability of the academic environment and the essential need for gift agreements that capture both the specific intent of the donor and the inevitability of change. While the best solution for the university is an unrestricted gift, most donors want specific programs to benefit from their legacy.

Sometimes, the university’s need to preserve flexibility and the donor’s desire for specificity can be met by designing a process for managing change into the gift agreement. The donor’s gift might well specify an initial focus that is relatively precise -- the study of Miguel Cervantes’ masterwork, Don Quixote -- but recognize that the institution will fulfill the terms of the gift by creating successive five year plans for the use of the endowment proceeds, and that over time, as the field of Hispanic literary studies changes, the endowment may be redirected within the larger field of Spanish and Spanish American literary studies.

We might prefer an agreement that offered the opportunity to address all of the Romance languages; but this mechanism will at least not fix the endowment income on studies of Don Quixote for all time. As another example, an endowment provided generations ago to study the improvement of sailing ships for commercial transport in the Atlantic is of much less value today than an endowment for research on the economics of trade, beginning with a focus on the improvement of sailing ships.

The hard part of this is the conversation with the donor. Donors have many suitors, and in the competition for their gifts, some institutions will promise more than others. To lose a gift because the university would not meet the donor’s specific expectations is a difficult outcome, and few presidents or fund raising professionals want to find themselves in this position. The incentive structure for university gift acquisition is usually short term. The reward goes to the administrators and development professionals who close the gift today, even though the obligations of the university will extend forever. We have campaign totals to meet, the press follows our announcements of fund raising success as if they reflected sports scores, and our associations develop elaborate methodologies to ensure comparable gift accounting standards so we can compete on our annual score.

It takes significant restraint, supported by wise governing boards, to insist on producing good gift agreements with clear, effective, and realistic language that protects both donor and university interests in an endowment that lasts forever. While the conversations that do it right may sometimes be less elegant than anticipated, the institutional benefit will be as long lasting as the endowment itself.

Managing the Elite

Tue, 27 May 2008 20:29:09 GMT

A recent Inside HigherEd (May 27, 2008), and elsewhere in the media, reflects much excitement about the decision by various highly selective institutions to stop requiring the SAT or ACT for admission to their colleges or universities. This is surely an interesting phenomenon, but whether it is good news or not depends on your perspective.

For those who dislike standardized tests because they measure a specific set of skills that correlate highly with income and the better schooling that income provides, the egalitarian presumption prevails and they celebrate the elimination of the test requirement. Eliminating standardized tests is a good thing in this view because it allows elite colleges to admit student who score badly on these tests either because they take tests poorly or because they have suffered various levels of disadvantage in their K-12 schooling that leave them less prepared for such tests.

For those who like standardized tests because they set a national norm for some forms of academic achievement, the decline of standards presumption prevails and they decry the elimination of the test requirement. Eliminating standardized tests is a bad thing in this view because it allows poor secondary schools to produce badly prepared students who cannot score well on these tests without those students necessarily suffering a penalty when they seek collegiate acceptance. They also believe the absence of standardized tests of this kind eliminates one of the few national norms for academic performance that can compensate for the presumed rampant grade inflation of secondary schools.

All of this is good for the ideological debate about elitism in American higher education and the drive to admit more, poor test-taking students to elite institutions. Somehow, we believe, that opening up a few places for those who score badly on such tests will improve equality in America. Probably not. The elimination of these tests from the college admission process may help those less privileged, but it is also a good thing for privileged, low scoring students. Absent such tests, selective institutions have much more freedom to manage admissions to their institutions. They can follow the needs of the institution, whether it is for a higher proportion of minority or first generation or men or women or international students without regard to the relative abilities of the various applicants. If an applicant comes from a very wealthy family but has a poor SAT score and we admit that applicant, we no longer need to explain this deficit to the parents of students from less wealthy circumstances with very good SAT scores. Instead, we say, “Well, our whole file review demonstrated a profile of engagement and involvement that clearly indicates this is a promising student, and in any case we don’t require the SAT.” Similarly, if we want to exclude candidates for admission because we have too many of one kind or another of some defined group, it is much easier to do so when we no longer need reference a national standard for academic aptitude, accomplishment, or performance.

The argument that the test is not a reliable academic indicator is of course a good one, except that elsewhere in the current media we read enthusiastic discussions of national entrance and exit testing to determine whether the students we admit into colleges and universities are learning anything. On one side, we think this sort of standardized testing may be a bad thing for evaluating students for admission but on the other side, we think this sort of standardized testing may be a good thing for evaluating students to know whether they learned anything in college. Furthermore, our colleagues in legislatures and public schools find themselves fully engaged in standardized testing to determine whether the students who graduate from high school know what they are supposed to know. Clearly, we are ambivalent about the purpose and value of testing.

To some extent, the problem also reflects our ambivalence about the notion of elitism. We do not like it in principle (although much of our effort in higher education seeks to increase the number of people who can participate in elite lifestyles). We try to create educational systems that can bypass the normally successful self-perpetuation of elites. In this, we have failed. By definition, education is about creating elites; the only question is how big that elite will be and who has a chance to participate in it. When we believed that the method for achieving the most egalitarian outcome involved a focus on merit, which is a level of performance measured without regard for the economic circumstances of the individual, we rushed to create merit-based selection systems for our elite colleges and universities, and the SAT/ACT gold standard emerged.

Although we should have known better, we soon discovered that while the SAT/ACT did indeed set a standard and did indeed provide a reference point for determining whether we were discriminating based on family heritage and income rather than on a national standard of objective merit, it also provided us with objective evidence that the students who acquired the skills to succeed on the SAT/ACT standard attended high schools and prep-schools mostly located in upper income areas or received support available only to wealthy families. It turned out that merit of the kind objectively measured by the SAT/ACT actually served as a proxy for the merit purchased by the already elite. Some smart non-elite students demonstrated an aptitude for these tests and gained access to the elite colleges, but the correlation between high performance on the SAT/ACT and reasonably prosperous economic circumstances is undeniable.

Our objective measure turned out to help perpetuate the preferential access of reasonably well off people to elite higher education. That did not seem to be an egalitarian result, especially when the distribution of wealth in America often reflected other divisions in society related to ethnicity.

Struggling with this, we turned first to quota-based systems to guarantee a proportion of our stock of elite admissions to groups deemed to be disadvantaged under the merit system driven by the SAT/ACT. If specific ethnic, gender, or economic groups appeared underrepresented for whatever reason, we discounted the SAT/ACT standard for members of these groups to guarantee a particular proportion of spaces that would provide a more egalitarian profile in our elite institutions. This straightforward approach, however, failed legal review, which usually determined that such quotas, when based on race or gender, were not constitutional, or political review in various referenda and legislative actions.

In pursuit of acceptable methods of achieving this desired proportionality, we sought out other techniques. Some states enacted plans that guaranteed, for public universities, admission into the elite public institutions to the top 10% of the graduates of each high school, a device that leveraged the de facto ethnic or income segregation of many American public high schools to achieve an egalitarian objective without specifying ethnicity. We also invented the notion of first-generation admissions, defining a child of parents who had never attended college as more meritorious than a child of parents who had attended. This first-generation notion again offered an opportunity to leverage the economic disadvantage of specific groups to create a preference that, while not defined in terms of ethnicity, permits an improvement in the proportion of desired groups within the admitted student population.

Finally, we have come to the realization that equality of opportunity to attend a prestigious elite college of university requires us to eliminate any specific standards of admission in favor of simply looking at all the applicants as individuals and admitting those we think will create the right profile of undergraduates for our institution. This, in the end of course, is what we used to do before we worried about equality of opportunity. In those days, elite colleges had no nationally referenced standards and admitted or excluded students to create the “right” profile to match the ideal expectations of those colleges’ elite constituencies. While we imagine that the flexibility of admissions will produce a readjustment in favor of disadvantaged groups, it is entirely possible that it will also facilitate readjustment in favor of low achieving but highly advantaged groups.

What does this all mean? It means that universities and colleges respond to the pressures of their time, as do all major social and cultural institutions. It means that if academic practices, such as tests in this case, interfere with the need to meet important social and cultural expectations of our society, we will eliminate or modify those practices. It also means, however, that the elite institutions will remain elite, and they will always find ways to use the tools at their disposal to construct student bodies that reflect the expectations of their elite constituencies. The solution to the dramatic problems of inadequate K-12 preparation of large proportions of our young people for serious college academic performance is not likely to come from manipulation of the entrance protocols to elite colleges and universities.

Financial Aid: Buying Student Talent

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:54:57 GMT

One of the more interesting features of the current enthusiasm for discussing college costs and the elaborate mechanisms to discount tuition and fees for various classes of students at elite institutions is confusion about the process. Some approach this conversation as if it were about dramatic changes in the opportunities for poor but smart high school graduates to attend elite institutions, previously out of reach. Although this may end up as a result for some, the manipulations of the financial aid process are actually about how to buy student talent more competitively.

The process of discounting tuition for desirable students is a well-understood and longstanding practice of most institutions, elite and non-elite. Sometimes the process involves what we call merit aid, used to buy desirable students without regard to their personal or family financial circumstances. In other circumstances we use need-based aid to buy desirable students at prices scaled to match their financial capacity. While the mechanisms differ in terms of how we calculate the price we will pay for a desirable student, the purpose of the exercise is much the same in both circumstances.

To entice the student to enroll, we offer to pay a stipend based on need or merit which the student can apply to the cost of attendance. If we are indifferent about getting a student to enroll, we do not provide any kind of stipend. We also calculate the amount of merit or need-based aid that will prove sufficient to entice desirable students to enroll in our institution rather than in another. We need to engage in this competitive practice because the number of truly desirable students is limited and the demand for their participation in our institutions is strong.

The virtue of need-based financial aid as a mechanism for buying students is that we can calibrate the amount we have to pay to get the student based on a standard methodology for determining need. Then we offer the exact amount of need-based aid that will permit and encourage the student to attend. However, need-based aid only serves to buy talent from a pool of students who have financial need. Another pool of desirable students may not have any financial need, but nonetheless we want to buy their talent for our university. So we use merit aid. We will often find that success in purchasing the attendance of first rank students requires a combination of need-based and merit aid. By manipulating the amount we pay, we can buy just the right combination of student talent for our ideal student body profile.

If we need women, we can use our aid funds to buy more talented women; if we need football players, we can buy those; if we need minority students, we can buy the mix we want; if we need a number of less wealthy students, we can buy just the number desired; or if we need engineering students, we can pay just enough to attract them. For small private elite institutions, this process is a highly specific activity because the number of students each college enrolls each year is quite small. For an elite college of 2000 students, perhaps 600 new students are needed each year. If we want to have 30% of them defined as “needy” and the definitions used can be quite generous, then we need to find 180 students from families with incomes under the definition (maybe 120K annual income) who also have exceptional qualifications and talent, and then using various forms of financial aid buy them for our student body.

Although there are surely noble motives involved in opening access to elite expensive institutions to individuals of great talent who might otherwise not have been able to afford the price of attendance, there is also a clear competitive advantage to doing so. If we have a large endowment made possible by our not-for-profit status and the quality of our institutional offerings and the generosity of our alumni and friends, we may find it effective to spend some portion of the endowment earnings to subsidize the acquisition of highly talented individuals who come from an economic status that is less than substantially well off, if not actually dramatically poor.

The competition among elite institutions for individuals of talent and for the public prestige associated with doing good while doing well requires institutions to emulate and publicize their programs for subsidizing on a need basis the purchase of students. This publicity generates a great deal of discussion, but actually changes the competitive landscape little. A few students who might otherwise not have been able to afford an expensive elite education can now do so without incurring debt. But these students are almost always talented students, and since the definition of “needy” for many elite institutions includes much of the middle class, they are not necessarily from financially challenged circumstances.

In all of these discussions, whether conducted in the rarefied atmosphere of billion-dollar endowed private colleges and universities or among selective public institutions, we must continually remind ourselves that none of this is about the cost of higher education, only about the price to the student. Indeed, as we expand the support for need-based or merit financial aid we do not reduce the cost of higher education, we increase it because the funds used to discount the price paid by desirable students must be added to the basic cost of running the college or university. As a result, the competition to provide more and better aid to some students is yet another example of the increasing cost of competition among selective institutions of higher education in America. It may be good thing, but it isn’t free.

Managing for Improvement: Part II

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:46:37 GMT

If we are focused on improvement, we have to design a strategy for improvement. Although it is possible to have grand ideas and elaborate discussions about the importance of this or that within the university's portfolio of activities, the critical issue is to know what defines competitive achievement and what drives success in this competition.
We will have a big fight about the definitions, but after we have had the fight, and we then say to our colleagues inside and outside the university, "tell me the five universities of our type that you admire most," we will not necessarily pick the same five, but the five each of us picks will have these characteristics: they will have high quality students and they will have high quality research faculty. The quality of their students will be defined by their SAT/ACT scores and their high school grade point averages on admission to the university and the quality of their faculty will be defined by the publication and research records they have achieved in competition against the best in the nation. The institutions may have other characteristics as well: championship sports, elegant facilities, elaborate programs for student engagement, powerful outreach programs, and so on. But the defining characteristics are always competitive students and competitive faculty.
When we want to improve our performance, we have to focus on getting the best students and the best faculty. We have to focus on doing what it takes to enhance the students’ academic and personal experience, not because it's the right thing to do (although it is) but because a very good academic and personal experience is what attracts the best students, and the more best students you get, the more additional best students you can attract. Similarly we have to focus on what it takes to recruit the best faculty, keep the best faculty, and create the support for their research that allows them to be increasingly productive at high levels of competitive quality.
How do we get there? First, we have to have the measurements that focus our attention on the achievement of these things. Second, we have to understand who is responsible for achieving improvement. These two decisions are by far the most important in the process of managing improvement: What we watch, and who is responsible for making what we watch get better.
Universities for many reasons have a great enthusiasm for distributing responsibility widely and thinly. So in the university, everyone is responsible for everything. The faculty think they are responsible for making decisions about the budget, physical plant, parking, student life, fundraising, and in general about everything. They are happy to share this responsibility with many other groups: administrators, students, alumni, political actors, donors, and anyone else with an opinion. We confuse the right to have an opinion with the responsibility for doing something and taking responsibility for the consequences. In universities we tend to give everyone the authority to speak and be heard and be accommodated, but we are not entirely sure who has the responsibility to see that what needs to be done gets done. We are even less clear how we will insist on connecting this authority and responsibility to some form of consequence. (Accountability is the buzz word for this but its meaning is so diluted by the political controversies surrounding the use of accountability in coercive state and national regulations that I avoid it in most cases when talking about real issues.)
The mechanisms that produce improvement involve three things, two of which we've discussed here in many previous posts to our course list. The first is specifying what matters: teaching and research-- students and faculty. The second is deciding how to measure these elements of performance: competitive student quality--competitive faculty research quality. The third is constructing a mechanism for connecting what matters and our measurement of what matters to the budget on an annual basis. When we construct a system that addresses these three elements we will have achieved the core components of the improving university because we will have recognized that Money Matters, Performance Counts, and Time Is the Enemy.
The structure for measuring university performance requires a simple-to-describe but difficult-to-implement system. This system has two components: a mechanism for measuring a unit's improvement relative to its past performance, and a mechanism for measuring a unit's improvement relative to its national competitive marketplace. The first component is easy to do because it only requires us to collect the appropriate measurement of performance using our own data, to which we have easy access. We can do this every year. The second component is more difficult because we have to collect the appropriate measurements of performance using data collected from other institutions, some of which data may be readily available, but most of which is not. In this case we may well have to reference our external market place on a longer cycle, say once every three years or so.
The measurement system also requires us to decide where the authority and responsibility for delivering performance lies. In a university this is almost always the department/program. This is the unit that owns quality control because it owns the content represented by the department or unit. If a chemistry department is going to be good and get better, it is the chemistry department that must know what good means and can ensure that improvement takes place. So the primary responsibility and authority for delivering improvement rests with the department. If the department hires good faculty and motivates them to perform high levels of research and teaching, then the department will improve. If the department hires and tenures ordinary faculty who only perform at acceptable levels, then the department will not improve. While the dean can use the measurement system to see if the department is actually improving, the dean is almost never able to actually improve the department, only the department itself can do this. As a result, the structure for improvement has to focus its measurement system on the department.

However, from the perspective of the institution, the unit responsible for seeing that departments improve is the college or school. The dean is the university official who must operate the system that tracks the performance of the departments to ensure that they are improving. In theory the president/chancellor/provost could run this system directly on behalf of the departments, but in practice this span of control is far too great, and in the university, colleges and schools exist to manage the departments effectively.
Given this structure, what do we measure? Whatever the measures, the university seeks improvement in productivity and quality. One super professor in a department of fifty is not equivalent to 50 highly competitive and productive professors who may not all be at the super professor level. The goal is to do a lot and to do it well. We measure research productivity and quality and we measure teaching productivity and quality. We may find that our metrics for measuring some things are better than for others. So we will surely do better measuring teaching productivity than we will measuring teaching quality, but that does not relieve us of the obligation to produce whatever evidence we have on teaching quality. We will do well measuring both the quality and productivity of research because research is nationally referenced in most cases.

The departments must design the measures of quality and productivity in their respective fields, but the measures they pick must be nationally referenced and approved by the Dean and the Provost to ensure that we create reference points that speak to the national competition. For research we may count publications in high quality journals, peer reviewed grants and contracts, exhibits in nationally significant galleries, performances in nationally significant venues, books published by reputable refereed presses, and so on. These will be different by field, but every department or field in the university will have its nationally established reference points for productivity and quality of research or creative activity.
In addition, we have another element that we always include in these metrics: money. Money matters. Some money is not within a department's ability to manage, but much money is. So for each department we count annual giving, we count grant and contract revenue spent, we count indirect cost collected, and we count other sources (which may be from distance education, executive programs, or sales of goods and services). Similarly, we count credit hours as if they were money. In all universities, credit hours are simply a proxy for the funding that comes from many sources to support teaching and students. Every university pays for credit hours with money derived from the state, tuition and fees, and perhaps other sources such as endowments. Credit hours are also the accounting mechanism we use to describe student work and the work to teach students. Credit hours are another measure of performance, and those units (departments/programs) that teach many students require more support than those departments that teach fewer students, because students generate revenue and require expenses.
Once we have our metrics established, a process that takes a lot of time and conversation and often controversy, we can then track our performance from where we were to where we are and see how much we improved. We can then go outside the university to see how well we can benchmark our internal data against external data related to performance. We may not be able to match everything, but we'll almost always find that we can match much of our data against some relatively small group of significant external reference units.
Identifying these external references to departmental counterparts is a critical process. The department proposes its counterparts to the dean who will approve their suitability and pass this on to the Provost for review to ensure that the reference points for one set of departments in a college match in significance those from other departments and colleges. The counterparts should be no less than three. They should be from institutions that are better than we are and that are major competitors in our field. Our goal is not to show that there are institutions like ours or that there are institutions less effective than ours. The goal is to measure our improvement against the institutions that compete within the top category of institutions like us. We have to get better not only measured against our prior performance but against the improved performance of our competitors. Much discussion is required to settle on these comparators.
Once we have the data, we then have to connect these data to the budget process of the university so we can make the appropriate adjustments to funding that establish the institutional investment that follows successful improvement.

This last element is perhaps the most important one of all in the process of developing a system for institutional improvement. The only way to get consistent, sustained, and relatively rapid improvement is to ensure that the budget follows the improvement criteria. If we fund units and departments that do not improve, because we feel sorry for them, they have powerful political supporters, or they are traditionally protected within the university organization, we will create a set of incentives unrelated to improvement. In all universities, and perhaps elsewhere in society, behavior follows the money. If we fund those units that do well, improve, increase their teaching and research productivity and quality relative to past performance and relative to outside comparisons, then we will see everyone focused on this kind of improvement. If we fund political positions, personal influence, external threats and coercion, or careerism by faculty and administrators, then we will see everyone focused on developing good political networks, excellent personal relationships, external pressure groups, and careerist back scratching among ambitious faculty or staff or administrators. By linking the budget to performance, by systematically, openly, and visibly investing in improvement, and by doing this consistently over some reasonable period of years (usually five to eight), the institution will get better fast, it will learn how to focus, and the system will likely become institutionalized and sustain itself for some time.

This process works, but it is anything except easy.

Managing for Improvement: Part I

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:35:13 GMT

NOTE: This semester we’ve had an active conversation in a graduate course on Managing Universities here at LSU. This blog has suffered as my enthusiasm for arguing about university issues has been diverted to the class discussion list. The participants in this course have provoked some good discussion, and what follows is some of the traffic on my side of a conversation about how universities (and in this context we mean research universities) manage themselves to achieve improvement and enhance competitiveness.

University people maintain a permanent and continuing conversation about change. Change is often the watch word for higher education rhetoric. If we look at the publications that reflect the industry, such places as Change Magazine, Inside HigherEd, or the Chronicle, a large proportion of the discussion is about change. Change is what we university people are led to believe we should want, or that we need to lead. Change is what many commentators see as a crisis, an opportunity, or a challenge. Reading these publications, we might think that universities are incredibly dynamic places in constant flux.
As we know, universities are actually places of great stability where change comes relatively slowly. When large change occurs, it often comes from the outside through large scale enrollment growth from demographic shifts as has occurred in recent times in some parts of the South or West like Florida or Arizona or in an earlier era in California, or as a result of social or governmental action such as took place as a result of the post WWII GI Bill. Yet even these changes are mostly changes of scale and scope rather than rapid changes in the fundamental structure or business model for these institutions.
It helps us understand this stability if we observe the competitive behavior of the universities at the top of the prestige stack. This competition is almost entirely focused on the least change oriented parts of the institutions: the quality of students and faculty, the competitiveness of the instructional and research programs. Our understanding of what makes first rate instructional programs and our metrics for identifying the best research programs have changed little.
In some sense the obsession with "change" is a reflection of the constant need to persuade some of our constituencies that in spite of our great stability and relatively rigid structure, and in spite of our somewhat archaic guild-like organization, we are nonetheless "with it" as we track the major transformations of our society. To be sure, our faculty and students do track the major transformations of society, they study them, they analyze them, and in some instances they cause those transformations by the invention of new knowledge that restructures how we work and live. Yet the university organizations within which we accomplish these things are, in fact, quite stable.
We can have a good philosophical discussion about the reasons for this, but for the purposes of this conversation, which is about MANAGING universities, we take a different perspective. Although we pay attention to the inflated claims of dramatic change that appear in university self-promotion pieces and in the popular magazines that document the enthusiasm for change, the real issue for us is how to manage the university so that it becomes increasingly more competitive with its institutional counterparts. Although it is always more fun to talk about the forces of change, because it makes us feel as if we are in the middle of important transformations, most improvement in university performance occurs by managing effectively, consistently, and even ruthlessly over time.
The first thing to establish in any conversation about managing an enterprise is the goal we want to achieve. If we want to achieve profit, we manage one way; if we want to achieve good for society, we manage another way; if we want to be as large as possible, we manage for that result. If we don't know what we hope to accomplish through management, then we are managing for the sake of doing it, not for the sake of any result.
Most university management is well intentioned and focuses on many things. Universities want to do economic development, community involvement, student development, graduation of undergraduates, production of graduate students, production of research, and an endless list of other things. Universities want to be Green, they want to be inclusive, they want to be responsive to the needs of their state, they want to be successful in sports, they want [fill in the blank with your own enthusiasm]. To achieve all these wants, the university hires managers whose job is to organize and deploy the available resources to produce the goods and services encompassed by the description of the institutional goals (or description of things we want).

Although many people associated with the institution will agree with some of these goals and many other people will agree with others of these goals, and everyone would like all the goals to somehow be achieved, we know that we cannot do everything at the highest level of quality. Even so, to meet all the expectations of their many constituencies, universities often attempt to find a way to do something significant in almost every domain of university activity, although they know they cannot produce top quality everywhere. The richer and more effective the institution, the more activities it can pursue with high quality. The poorer and less effective the institution, the fewer activities it can pursue with high quality. Most universities, whatever their level of wealth and effectiveness, try to participate in as many of the activities that are available to universities and that their constituencies favor as possible. This is why for the most part university profiles look remarkably the same on their web pages. They want to have an entry for everything that every other university has an entry for.
If the purpose of management is to improve the university's competitiveness, however, we have to make some choices among all these things. In every case, universities make choices, but often those choices respond to the ebb and flow of politics, external pressures, internal politics, and targets of opportunity. They change quickly and as a result provide the illusion of change but not necessarily the process of improvement.
We focus on improvement because improvement, as opposed to the common enthusiasm for change, suggests a continuous, focused, and consistent effort to get better on the margin of an operating and stable concern. This is what universities are, operating and stable concerns. Improvement can, if done well, result in substantial change over time, but it is the focus on improvement that works, not the focus on change.

Pricing the Product

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 21:44:35 GMT

In recent weeks we’ve seen flurries of enthusiasm about various interrelated topics, all about money. We hear of the concern about the relationship between the payout rate from college and university endowments and the rise in tuition and fees. We see confusion about the maneuvering of elite institutions to provide non-loan financial aid to desirable student populations with family incomes ranging above $100K. And we read about the increase in potential payments to division I-A student-athletes. It’s always about the money, of course, but in American higher education, we are supremely effective at avoiding intelligible conversations about the two most important issues related to money: What the whole enterprise costs and who pays for it.

Normally, our practice is to pick off an isolated cost, apply it to a particular subset of institutions, and then try to make generalizations about higher education. We look at the tuition and fees of expensive boutique institutions that sell high prestige along with high quality amenities, measure the endowments of the 10% of the institutions that are exceptionally rich, apply arbitrary possible payout percentages to these endowments, and then discuss whether or not we could manipulate these variables to provide more access to these boutique places for poor but worthy students. This is a mostly pointless discussion. If rich institutions choose to spend their wealth in some particular way to enhance their missions, fulfill their sense of social obligation, or improve their market positions relative to other rich institutions, we should watch with interest, but not imagine this is about national educational policy.

The significant issues relate to the problem of the total cost of a college degree on one side and the distribution of that cost to a wide range of paying entities on the other. Most of the argument isn’t actually about the total cost because everyone wants what the money buys: smaller classes, better faculty, new facilities, enhanced support for student life, personalized advising, effective job placement, competitive athletic programs, and so on down a long list. We may disagree on the exact combination of these wants, but the purchasing public has clearly indicated a preference for these things. The real issue is who should pay for what we want.

If we can get an endowment to pay, then we have asked past donors to pay for our current and future benefits, and that’s surely a good thing for those of us who consume those benefits today and tomorrow. If we can persuade state governments to pay, that’s good for those of us who consume, because the money comes from many taxpayers who do not use the benefit. If the federal government pays, that’s even better, because the pool of payers is spread widely, and because the federal government doesn’t have to balance its budget, the cost can be shifted to future taxpayers. If we as parents and students must pay for the benefits, that’s not a desirable outcome. Along the way, each group paying some part of the cost complains about the portion allocated to them.

Each group, rather than looking at the cost and the value of the specific benefits they seek, turn on the institution and complain that all the costs of the institution are rising too fast and argue for a reduction. Few of them argue for a reduction in services, although sometimes one group will propose a reduction in those services provided to another group of institutional constituents. Most of our constituents do not want to worry much about the full cost of the institution’s services or understand how the colleges and universities allocate those costs to the various paying constituencies. They just want to pay less.

Universities perform a wide range of functions, but in many of their operations they do not charge consumers for the full, direct costs of the benefits delivered. Take honors programs, for example. These are very popular, but they are expensive, offering special small classes taught by the best faculty, often in well-equipped classrooms, with special support staff. Yet few would argue that we should charge honors students extra because they receive more expensive services. Instead, we charge all undergraduates the same price, and then we include the cost of the honors programs within the price paid by the non-honors students, and even when we do charge a bit extra for honors, it’s usually a fraction of the true additional cost. When students and parents complain that college is too expensive and class sizes are too large, the institution doesn’t respond by outlining the extra cost to all undergraduates of the honors program.

Similarly, students in chemistry and physics and other lab sciences use more resources than those in English or history, but usually pay only a small fee for the consumable supplies provided, not a premium for the expensive space and equipment the institution provides for their study. Some states, in their funding formulas, recognize this difference and pay more for science than for humanities, but the parents and students do not.

These differences in cost are not restricted to academic variables since student activities of all kinds add substantial cost to higher education institutions, and especially to residential institutions. Some of these costs may be charged directly to the students in the form of fees to cover recreation centers, while others such as social services such as counseling and student activities offices will often end up buried in the general fee bill. Even when there is an explicit fee for a recreation center, however, in most instances all students must pay the fee, even if only some use the facilities everyone pays for. While these mechanisms of burying special program costs into the general campus budget are well developed and common across most institutional types, they nonetheless pose a challenge in explaining the rising cost of college.

If we were willing to replace our current method of pricing our services with a more detailed pricing mechanism, we might find different constituencies of the university with a different interest in supporting various programs. We do this to some extent in big time college athletics (at least in those programs that break even) when we require the revenue generated by the program to match its expenses, driving up ticket, parking, seat priority donations, and other prices to pay for competitive football and basketball programs. We do it in residence halls when we make the residents pay for the cost of the facilities and the programs within them. We do it with parking and food services.

Even so, we resist pricing our academic services differentially. This resistance comes in part from the charmed notion of “college” as four years of self-discovery and preparation leading to the good life. Those four special years should be open for any student to explore any field of knowledge or experience whatever seems appropriate and be supported however it might be necessary until self-discovery occurs or time runs out. Under that notion, we are like an amusement park that charges a flat fee per day to ride all or none of the rides any individual chooses or is able to accomplish within the time allotted; the park charges for the opportunity, not for a specific set of activities. The alternative is the carnival, which charges us individually for every attraction, game, or ride we choose, but only for those we choose.

As the content of higher education becomes increasingly available separately from the context, whether through distance education programs or other delivery systems, the pricing of content and context may also become even more disaggregated within the structure of the traditional college or university campus. We already price MBA programs differentially from MFA programs or MD programs from Vet Med programs, and this postgraduate pricing by specialization may well find its way into undergraduate institutions as a method for dealing with the unrealistic expectations of our paying publics and customers and the opaque nature of our institutional cost analyses.

Finding the Best: The College Football Championship in America

Sun, 09 Dec 2007 22:05:58 GMT

This is the time of endless speculation about which division I-A college football team is the best in America. We have polls, computer rankings, conference championships, and the high profile BCS (Bowl Championship Series) program. Our experts (which include just about everyone who follows college sports) argue with great passion about which scheme is the appropriate method for anointing the “best college football team in America.” This controversy lives and repeats itself because we can never get it right.

The notion of “best” in college football represents an unattainable goal. If football were organized like track or swimming with absolute standardized measurements of performance for everyone, we might be able to measure the best. But football is not organized this way. Football is a regionalized team sport (through the mechanism of conferences), and it is constructed in a format that guarantees the impossibility of defining the best.

No college football team in America can play every other college football team. Some football teams play some other football teams. Moreover, not every football team or athletic conference is equal to every other. Some are very rich (the SEC for example), some have institutions with huge athletic programs (like the Big Ten with Ohio State), and some struggle with financial difficulties or low attendance (like the University at Buffalo). Some are in conferences that have 12 teams divided into east and west divisions, play an extra conference championship game, but no team plays every other team in the conference. The won-loss record of one college football team almost always has a different value from the same won-loss record of another team. If a mediocre team plays other mediocre teams, the won-loss record means something different than if the mediocre team had played very good teams. This illustrates why we have no standardized measure of a football team’s performance.

Absent a clear measurement of football performance, we end up with subjective measures. For many years, we identified the national champion of college football by consulting expert opinions, expressed in various polls, from sports writers, coaches, and others who, in theory, had seen most of the contenders play during the year and who we hoped had a reasonably objective basis for identifying the best. This, however, violated the fundamental premise of sports which is defined by a competition within a strict set of rules that produces an unambiguous winner. People who play and watch sports keep score. If we only care about the beauty of the game, then we do not need to keep score. Not keeping score is inconceivable to most sports enthusiasts, and so everything in sports turns on determining winners and losers.

This context helps explain why the college football season’s end is so fraught with controversy. We can’t figure out how to get a clear, single, winner. Some argue that a tournament would make it work better, but that’s not any clearer because we have to seed a tournament by using a formula based on season performances of teams that did not play each other. The tournament format gives the illusion of effectively determining a winner, but it only creates a second season of football for a group of teams chosen by a complex ranking process that relies on judgment, not direct competition. At the end of a tournament, a team is crowned champion, but the team is only champion of the group invited to the tournament. Given the inconsistency of collegiate football performance, the wide range of resources and capabilities of the various college athletic programs, and the large number of potential participants in a tournament, one can easily imagine a team not included in the tournament that might well have ended up a winner.

The BCS, the mechanism used to identify a football champion, takes a different approach. It recognizes that football is organized into conferences, that the conferences are of differing quality and significance, and that the teams from these conferences will accumulate records in ways complicated and difficult to compare. The BCS identifies the best football teams by combining first, the opinions of two groups of experts (a panel of observers representative of the experienced public and a poll of coaches), and second, rankings based on six different computer models (that offer an illusion of impartiality and fairness) to identify the best football team. These computer models are of course just as arbitrary as the opinions of the human experts, but at least they eliminate the possibility of individual bias against particular teams by substituting systematic bias in favor of certain characteristics of measurable team performance. The resulting rankings produce a playoff between number one and number two in the BCS formula, and then provides a set of secondary playoffs between other ranked teams paired up for their presumed performance quality and television draw. (For a primer on the BCS see http://www.bcsfootball.org/bcsfb/about )

The owners of the BCS, the football conferences and the various bowl organizations, have adjusted the methodology for constructing the ranking to persuade the football-expert public of its validity. However, no ranking system based on subjective or computer analysis can produce a true competition between the best teams for an objectively identified BEST football team in America. We have intentionally constructed a college football system to produce conference champions, not national champions.

Should we worry about all this? No, not at all. While some might yearn for the certainty of knowing which college football team is the best in the country this year, not knowing exactly which team is best has many advantages. The argument over the schemes employed to designate the best two teams to compete for the championship gives us endless conversational opportunity, it gives our alumni and friends something to focus on, it allows newspapers and sports shows to fill their pages and air time with speculation about the relative performances of our teams, and it delivers a discussion that requires no closure because it presents a question that has no answer.

The conference structure of football ensures that we will have many champions, many contenders for the best in the nation, whatever the results of the BCS contests. If our team is very good, but didn’t get into the top game, we can feel confident that, but for the vagaries of a peculiar polling system and ranking calculation, our favorite would have been able to demonstrate its supremacy. If we are among the 64 teams playing in one of the 32 bowl games, we have another chance for a celebration.

This is the genius of the BCS system. It invents an imprecise standard based on subjective measurement (the polls and computer models). It applies this standard of measurement to one of the most rigidly structured games in the nation. It then builds a second season of bowl championships of various degrees of importance around this ranking system and the entrepreneurial enthusiasm of bowl promoters. America’s sports fans, who spend endless hours debating the merits of the imprecise measurement, consume this manufactured championship process and its subsidiary bowl games with ever-growing enthusiasm.

Whatever else we can say about the Bowl Championship Series, it is a one of the most visible demonstrations of America’s unique ability to combine serious academic enterprise with intense competitive spirit, remarkable entrepreneurial ingenuity, and spectacular entertainment value.

[Disclaimer: the author’s institution, LSU, will play in the BCS championship game.]

Deconstructing Faculty Work

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 18:49:19 GMT

Over the past decade much discussion has focused on the growing percentage of college teaching done by contingent faculty. Variously seen as the exploitation of an academic proletariat, the consequence of hostility towards tenure, or a response to difficult economic circumstances, this issue manifests itself in many forms. While we worry about the declining percentage of tenure-track faculty as a symptom of lost significance for the professoriate and struggle with ways of empowering contingent and part-time faculty to participate more fully in academic life, we also need to reflect on the causes for this long-term shift in the employment structure of college faculty.

Many of us who are old imagined that the norm of faculty life revolved around a full-time tenured position in a college or university where we would become permanent and engaged members of an academic community, participating in teaching, research, public service, and governance responding to a holistic conception of faculty responsibilities. We didn’t think much about the relative value of these various functions or the appropriate amount of effort needed to do them. We imagined that sometimes we’d do more teaching or more research or more service, depending on the needs of the institution or our department and our own commitments. We recognized that a job at a state college would entail more teaching than research and a job at a research university would require more research than teaching, but the distinctions remained casually defined and rarely examined in depth.

With successive cycles of financial hard times, the rise of the accountability movement, and the growing intensity of competition for research competent faculty, many of these graceful notions of the faculty job faded. In pursuit of efficiency or at least the effort to demonstrate efficiency, universities began calibrating their investments in different faculty functions. We constructed the artifact of faculty assignment; a quantity set at 100 percent, and then partitioned that assignment into sections assigned to teaching, research, service, and other duties. Although most institutions do not explicitly quantify these assignments, the work recorded in our faculty annual reports make clear that we parcel out our actual effort into categories defined by what we do for teaching, for research, and for service. Our administrative work became defined by the released teaching effort traded for the administrative effort, further subdividing our faculty work. When our colleagues came up for promotion and tenure, we looked at their file and the distribution of their work. If they appeared to spend 100 percent of their time on teaching, we could not insist on a strong research record, and if they appeared to spend 100 percent on research we could not worry much about their teaching. Some colleagues appeared for tenure with a full time commitment to service activities, and neither their teaching nor their research would be relevant.

We designed accountability systems to measure the cost of teaching as an item separate from research so that we could calculate the return on the investment in teaching separately from the return on investment in research. Teaching produced credit hours which produced dollars. Research produced grants, contracts, and publications which produced prestige. These became the measurable quantities for effective optimization and management in our increasingly accountable world.

Recurring hard financial times required us to focus more closely on what we purchased and how much it cost in a short term maximizing mode. Rather than invest in our faculty for a generation we found it necessary to invest in some faculty for much shorter periods. Rather than attack tenure, we simply hired people on non-tenure tracks, sometimes full time, sometimes part time, but with the opportunity to design their work load and measure and pay for their productivity on a retail, piece-work basis. Although we’d always done this before through graduate teaching assistants, the transfer of this temporary status to the regular employment of academic talent became much more significant in our institutions. As we continued to refine the work of academics, we became precise in our ability to price their contributions. Our expertise focused primarily on teaching, and we could determine the spot price of a history course for 100 students with considerable accuracy and buy the faculty talent to provide that course at the market price. Sometimes we bought this talent on a course by course basis (a model adopted by many for-profit educational enterprises and many distance education subsidiaries of major universities). In other circumstances we looked to full-time, non-tenured faculty hired for fixed periods of 5 years or less with an option to renew in the event the demand for their services continued and the quality and productivity of their work remained high.

With somewhat less precision we also developed our skill at deconstructing the research component of faculty work, in many cases by a process of subtraction. We assumed that 100 percent effort would be equivalent to a certain amount of teaching, and then for different levels of research productivity, we would deduct teaching obligations in return for research achievement. Grants and contracts bought faculty released time from teaching to do research. We hired term research faculty to work full time on grant-supported and other activities, giving us the option to terminate them when the money ran out or their productivity declined.

We also priced administrative tasks by releasing teaching obligations in exchange for service as graduate coordinator or department chair or dean.

Once fully engaged in this complex process of deconstructing faculty work into its components to be able to operate more efficiently and effectively in the highly competitive and resource constrained academic world of the late 20th century, we undermined the power of the unified theory of the tenured professor. Rather than symbolizing the lifetime commitment of individual and institution to the academic work of teaching, research, and service and the freedom to pursue these tasks as our conscience dictated, tenure became a job entitlement that created a container of faculty effort, the content of which would be negotiated with institutions to define each faculty member’s responsibilities within the lifetime security of tenure. Further reducing the significance of tenure as identifying anything other than job security, many of our institutions saw fit to include full-time or even part-time contingent faculty within the context of faculty governance with full rights to vote and participate in the academic process.

For the institutions, however, the deconstruction of faculty work offered a great incentive to reduce their commitment to an inflexible work force of tenured faculty and increase their investment in short-term, highly efficient faculty dedicated to specific purposes for specific periods of time and whose productivity and performance could be reliably maintained. The argument about whether it’s better to have part-time or full-time contingent faculty is surely important, but it may obscure the remarkable transformation of much academic commitment from an investment in a person who produces many products over a lifetime to the investment in specific products that ensure the competitive position of the employing institution.

This transformation is still in process, elite private liberal arts colleges feel it the least while mid to lower level public and private institutions feel it the most. Major research universities experience all of this to one degree or another simply because they are large and complex and the deconstructed faculty member is often the most effective individual for a particular purpose. The continuing development of accountability metrics that attempt to measure exactly what each faculty member does in research, or teaching, or service and how those activities produce particular measurable outcomes will accelerate the deconstruction of the faculty. While we will surely never completely lose the role of those tenured full-time faculty who constitute the permanent core of significant academic institutions, the demand for high levels of student access, high productivity demonstrated through measurable output, and low cost will drive more and more institutions to reduce the tenured core to a minimum and increase the deconstructed elements of faculty work to the maximum.

Watch Lists

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 14:48:35 GMT

OK, I’m following the conversation in Washington about putting universities and colleges on a watch list if they increase their tuition by a percentage deemed too high. What a wonderfully nonsensical notion.

The solution to the cost of a college education, we learn, is to publish a list that puts a generic public college with tuition of $3,000 dollars on the bad list because it requires a 10% increase to stay open. That’s an increase of $300. Then we can celebrate the affordability of a very expensive public college with tuition of $6,000 whose tuition increase of 5% or an equivalent of $300 dollars falls below some mindless cutoff point. We’re supposed to think it’s a bad thing worthy of public scorn that the poor public college now has a tuition of $3,300 while it’s a matter of congratulation that the rich public college now has a tuition of $6,300. Who thinks up this nonsense? Whose child pays tuition with a check written in percentage points?

Who is so naïve and clueless that they fail to recognize that the sticker price of tuition and fees at public and private colleges does not reflect the true cost of attendance? Who is so out of touch they don’t understand that the net price to students varies depending on their desirability to the college, their financial circumstances, and other characteristics? Who is so numb that they do not recognize that increases in tuition and fees reflect both decisions about luxury and expensive programs AS WELL AS reductions in state funding?

If Congress wanted to do something useful, they would require a standardized methodology for reporting the net cost of attendance at all colleges and universities, require each college and university to provide a profile of their students by their need-based financial aid status, and require the publication of information on the percent of student financial need met by the college or university.

The price of tuition and fees is one of the poorest indicators of the true cost of college to the consumer, and it fails completely to tell consumers—whether parents, legislators, alumni, or trustees—the amount students with different characteristics will need to pay for their college education. Some places do high-tuition high-aid strategies that charge a lot to people with substantial resources and discount heavily to students with fewer resources. Is this worse that charging a lower flat rate that costs the poor student more than the net to a poor student after financial aid at the high-tuition high-aid institution?

This question is surely worth a policy debate, but the mindless listing of institutions by the percentage rate of increase simply guarantees that the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorly funded higher education.

Perhaps sensible people will eventually intervene in this debate.

Testing What?

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 17:50:23 GMT

Testing enthusiasm continues to grow among friends and critics of higher education. My own enthusiasm for the endless standardized testing schemes proposed tends to be limited. Nonetheless, even as some protest the effects of standardized entrance tests such as the SAT and the ACT, others extol the power of accountability based on standardized exit tests. Leaving aside for the moment, the issue of whether standardized tests serve a useful purpose for sorting students into colleges, the exit testing conversation raises some interesting questions that we should try to answer before signing up for one form of testing or another.

One problem is deciding what we want the test to tell us.

We may want to focus on an institution’s performance in producing students who, in general, meet an average standard of performance. Or, we may want to focus on the student, and certify that each individual graduate meets an individual standard of performance. These different perspectives require a different testing strategy.

The institutional perspective requires us to define a test reminiscent of industrial quality control. We sample the production of our educational process, the students, and test for quality, using statistical quality control to tell us how well our process works. While there are practical issues that may limit the success of this strategy (students selected for the sample may not take the test seriously because it does not have an individual impact and the high variability of student talent and motivation may make the statistical validity of the sampling difficult to demonstrate), the sampling technique gives institutions a way to respond to many of their accountability critics.

The individual perspective requires us to define a test reminiscent of the SAT or ACT that assesses every individual graduate’s level of achievement and certifies the level of competence achieved by each graduate. In large institutions, administering such a testing program will surely be a challenge, but the benefit in establishing a quality metric may well justify the expense.

Both systems will tell us much about the output of the institution, but the utility of either approach depends on the audience. For some, the purpose of the testing is to help parents and prospective students evaluate the expected quality of an institution before enrolling. For others, the purpose of the testing is to guarantee that the graduates can perform at an expected level.

If we want to certify institutions as having the ability to produce a reasonable product out of the student material provided, then the institutional version is useful in picking an institution. We can predict the odds of our student emerging with good skills in much the same way we can predict the chances of an airline arriving on-time. There’s no guarantee that any particular student will emerge fully qualified, but if the institutional average score is good, we can expect that the odds of a good result for our student will be high.

However, an employer may well prefer a certification of the individual student, because the employer needs individuals to perform. If the institution has a good average score, the employer might take a chance that the graduate is good, but if the graduate can pass the appropriate test as an individual, the risk for the employer disappears. This form of testing is what we do when we test students for admission to graduate or professional programs using such tests as the LSAT, the MCAT, or the GRE or require them to take certification exams for nursing or the CPA. Those tests are exit tests from college to determine whether the student, by whatever means, has graduated with the right skills required for either specific employment or particular graduate study. We may want to know that they graduated from a rigorous college, but we are much more secure in our judgment about an individual’s prospects if they can demonstrate directly their own personal capability.

The least useful testing, of course, is indirect measurements where we poll our students and ask them how they feel about their education. The very popular NSSE surveys are a prime example of this kind of test. We know that students who feel good about their education may have had a good learning experience, but absent a test of their actual academic achievement, we really don’t know what they learned as they enjoyed the learning process. Also, asking people whether they think they studied hard or think they had a good interaction with their professor, among other questions of this type, tells us about customer satisfaction, but it doesn’t tell us much of anything about what students learn. This is reminiscent of student evaluation of teaching, a process that has almost nothing to do with learning but much to do with enjoyment and perception. We know what the student learned in class when we give a rigorous test that asks questions about the material. If the student passes the test, we know what the student learned. The relationship between enjoyment or satisfaction and learning is tenuous at best.

Another issue for the testing discussion is the issue of what constitutes a reasonable standard of performance. Much study has gone into the tests that measure baseline reading, writing, mathematical, and reasoning skills. For some institutions, meeting these baseline goals, whether testing institutional performance by sampling or student performance by exit exams, may be a challenge. For highly selective institutions, however, the existence of such minimal standards may prove to be yet another differentiator. Selective institutions might test their applicants against this minimal standard and deny admission to those who do not pass or they might require students to pass the test by the end of the first year. Then, they could introduce subject-specific specialized certifications to give their graduates an additional edge in the job and graduate or professional education markets.

We’re probably locked into some form of exit testing to certify our graduates because our internal processes of evaluation no longer inspire confidence or speak to common standards of performance. Given this inevitability, institutions should think carefully about the competitive advantages of different forms of exit testing, because it is certain that the results of whatever exit exam systems emerge will be used as part of the intense competition among institutions for students and funding.

Taxing the Sports Factory

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 16:32:25 GMT

Since at least the early 20th century, it has been fashionable to attack college athletics as distorting the priorities of American colleges and universities, and there is often much evidence to support the attacks. The difficulty in taking these challenges seriously is that they are often unclear about the context within which college athletics functions and undervalue the significance of the constituencies that support this part of the American collegiate enterprise. The latest issue involves the question of whether the increasing amount of giving to college athletics represents a shift of donor interest from academic enterprise. While it is surely true that athletic giving is increasing it is not necessarily true that it comes at the expense of academic giving, which is also on the rise. To accept this premise, we would need to be sure that those who give to athletics would, in the absence of a tax break or an athletic program, give substantially to academic activities. While evidence on giving patterns is not always entirely conclusive, what we do have appears to indicate that athletic and academic donors are substantially different groups. That is, most of the big donors to athletics do not give much to academics and most of the big donors to academics do not give much to athletics.

This reflects the fact that donors can do what they want with their money. If they want to give it to a political candidate, a church, an international charity, a scholarship fund, and endowed chair, or a college football team, it is their choice and reflects their values. The notion that we, in the university or in the government, can dramatically shift these preferences is charming but not realistic as anyone who has spent time fundraising knows. The donor’s preferences are what matter. They surely like the tax break when it’s relevant and they like matching funds for academic gifts provided by many states, but a matching program for academic gifts does not make an athletic donor decide to give an endowed chair rather than an endow a football scholarship. It might persuade a donor to give an endowed chair to one of their alma maters that has a matching program rather than to another alma mater that does not.

The public benefit of the tax break for college athletics is more complicated than our belief in the value of sports in our universities. If we want to eliminate expensive competitive intercollegiate sports from our colleges and universities, the issue of a tax break won’t make much difference. It will just raise the cost of the enterprise, and since most college sports programs (with the exception of maybe the top ten BCS football schools) run a deficit, the increased cost will fall back on institutional budgets. We can say that money- losing intercollegiate sports programs are a bad thing, but our constituencies (whether at elite private colleges or mega football factories) love their sports.

At the same time, there are many items that big time sports programs do, paid for by their donors, that do not qualify for tax breaks. When donors give money to a sports program, they only get the tax break associated with the gift portion, not the portion that buys a ticket to the game or pays for a meal or provides a team jacket. The rules require that the institution deduct all the products and services that directly benefit the donor, recognizing that these things are commercial transactions, while the gift to the athletic program that sustains its expenses in support of student-athletes and the costs of the non-revenue sports, as well as the losses of football in most institutions, does help the academic enterprise and is deserving of a tax break. These rules may need to be improved, tightened, or otherwise changed to make giving to college sports more expensive to the donors. While this may well affect some donors, the truth is that the people who give in the many-million dollar category (athletic gifts that provoke the most outrage) almost always do not need and cannot use the tax break because they have already used up every imaginable tax dodge available to the rich and super rich. In talking with major donors and extolling the opportunity for a tax break as the result of a gift, many will tell me, “that’s nice, but I can’t use that tax break and I’ll just give the money because I want to help.”

Attempting to fix what’s believed to be wrong with college sports by manipulating tax policies is likely to produce many unintended consequences, harm the smallest and most vulnerable sports programs at colleges and universities, and have almost no impact at all on the mega sports programs that offend many observers. If these mega programs are a bad thing, we should take them on and fix them directly rather than try to sneak in a fix that won’t work via the tax code. Mega college athletics is indeed a remarkable American invention, it reflects the decisions of academic administrators and governing boards at almost all colleges and universities for over a century. It prospers because for the most part we (our faculty, our staff, our alumni, our legislators, our trustees, our students, and our many other constituencies) want it. We could easily change it, IF MOST OF US WANTED TO CHANGE IT. All protestations to the contrary, we, the colleges and universities of America and our friends and supporters, do not want to change it. What we really want is to imitate the best (often the most expensive) programs in America by winning games and championships.

The Academic Success Entitlement

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 15:20:47 GMT

At one time, we imagined that students came to the university to learn, that they had an obligation to engage their courses and faculty, read, write, study, take exams, and demonstrate their achievement. This simple approach placed the responsibility for learning on the students who we assumed recognized that the privilege of attending a college carried with it a commitment to the learning process. We expected the faculty to know their subject, prepare for class, provide support and advice, hold office hours, give fair and effective examinations, mark papers with care, and provide a grade that reflected what the students had learned. This simple formulation has suffered considerable modification over the years.

Today we believe students are entitled to attend college, that they have a right to achieve a standard level of academic accomplishment, and that the institutions have an obligation to ensure that their learning meets this standard by the time they leave. The obligation to guarantee student learning and graduation is sometimes explicitly articulated, but more often appears through measures applied to demonstrate institutional success. Graduation rate, for example, is seen as a measure of institutional effectiveness and anticipates that the institution will guarantee student learning at a level acceptable for graduation and successful entry into the world of work. In this formulation, the students’ responsibilities lie in attendance, but their academic success becomes the responsibility of the institution. When graduation rates are low or students fail to meet some testable standard, we assume that the institution failed, not that the student failed. Indeed, if the student fails, the remedy is to punish the institution and its teachers.

The academic success entitlement that students enjoy reflects a broader belief that institutions need to guarantee results not opportunity. This is a notion borrowed from the manufacturing world where we demand guarantees that the products we buy be free of defects and that all products of a certain type perform their functions in the same predictable and standardized way. This model, while effective for mass produced items constructed out of standard malleable materials where the producer controls the conditions of production, has little to do with high quality education. In a high quality educational context, as we who live here know, the academic enterprise requires the direct and responsible participation of student and teacher. Neither can fail, for if the student is lazy, poorly prepared, or just doesn’t care, the academic result will be poor no matter how expert the teacher. Similarly, if the teacher is incompetent, lazy, or unprepared, the academic result will also be poor no matter how responsible the student. When we place all the responsibility for academic success or failure on the institution and its teachers, exempting the student s, we create an engine capable of predictable mediocre performance.

Our difficulty in restoring the authority of the university and its faculty in the definition of academic accomplishment, and the consequent intrusion of external agencies in the measurement of institutional success, reflects our own ambivalence about measuring and evaluating our own performance. We know quite a bit about learning and how it takes place, but most institutions are reluctant to institute programs that review and assess faculty teaching performance. While the faculty may well be doing a terrific job, updating their courses every year, adopting new teaching techniques that leverage technology and research on student learning, and otherwise performing at a high level, our ability to demonstrate this effectiveness is minimal. Mostly, what we see are outstanding examples, drawn from the work of a number of dedicated faculty with the commitment of teaching resource centers. These wonderful people and their support enterprise capture the enthusiasm of some subset of faculty, but we rarely find comprehensive institution-wide faculty teaching assessments that build confidence in the faculty part of the student-faculty collaboration. To be sure, we have student evaluations of teaching, but as almost everyone knows, these are weak tools for measuring instructional effectiveness although they often identify the outliers (very bad and very good teachers). More elaborate forms of evaluation that employ expert reviewers of faculty teaching performance are rare indeed.

We know that such reviews are expensive and time consuming (although we also know that we do this type of reviewing for research productivity and effectiveness). We know that absent significant rewards for faculty teaching performance, few faculty or institutions want to make the investment or support the controversies that will surround designing an effective process. But we are also very short sighted in this.

The external constituencies that will demand exit testing and various other forms of standardized evaluation of institutional teaching effectiveness will require expensive tests. What they test will often be the wrong things. The consequences of these tests, which will stigmatize some institutions as ineffective and their faculty as poor teachers based on perhaps wrong-headed criteria, will prove expensive for the institutions and their faculty.

Our failure to take full ownership of the issue of teaching and learning effectiveness and evaluation, recognizing both the student and teacher as required partners in producing success, gives influence to meddlesome bureaucrats with often ideological agenda, empowers academic entrepreneurs exploiting our abdication of responsibility by selling us the latest in testing methodologies, and further erodes the authority of the university and its faculty and their ability to determine the definitions of academic quality.

Ranking the rankings

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 11:26:08 GMT

It is rankings time again, as everyone interested in colleges and universities know. This annual celebration gives everyone something. It gives the rich elite colleges a way to demonstrate their presumed superiority and it gives everyone else an opportunity to identify the errors, misconceptions and ideological biases that inform the lists. As often observed, when institutions rise in spurious rankings, they publicize the results; when they fall in the same rankings, they critique the methodology. While the debate is entertaining and often significant in substance, the key issues in rankings sometimes get lost.

Rankings are what they are because the American public likes lists. It knows that they are mostly artifacts of wealth and publicity, it understands that the qualities represented may or may not have anything to do with effectiveness of institutions, and it recognizes that the institutions and the rankings organizations may well manipulate the data and the calculations to match anticipated results. Nonetheless, people like to buy the magazines and reports, they like to see who is where and who may have risen or fallen.

Most institutions, except for those ranked No. 1, find fault with the whole process, and while some college leaders have tried to opt out of a competition that is flawed in almost every way, their public wants to see them listed in the top 10, 20, 50, or whatever category matters. Best dressed, most talented, best small college, most popular movie, No. 1 football team, all these designations feed Americans insecurity about their own ability to make a judgment. So they make some choice -- my college, my football team, my favorite movie -- and then seek validation in a pseudo-scientific ranking system.

We can surely complain, try to help the organizations that produce these things do them better, and point out the failings in the different rankings, but since the public wants them, likes them, buys them, and argues about them; clearly the organizations that produce them are delivering a popular item. That the results distort the educational purposes of many institutions, that the structure of most of these rankings reflect wealth, that the issues of prestige and effectiveness are confused in the data simply demonstrate that in the absence of serious academic evaluations of substance and reliability, pop science will fill the void.

Having shunned this marketplace of ideas, having failed to engage the question of measuring institutional effectiveness and value in any meaningful way, and having continued in large measure to voluntarily cooperate with these commercial products, we should be embarrassed to take the high ground that the commercial ratings are deficient in academic seriousness. Actually, it is the academic industry that is deficient in evaluation seriousness; the commercial folks are just doing what they do by selling a popular product to the public in the absence of significant competition.