flynn056

(Hat-tip to Kim Weeden for raising the question on Twitter.) Why do colleges still have students do course evaluations?  Is it because administrators are knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers who don’t know that students’ evaluations of faculty are biased? Probably sometimes.  But even those of us who walk upright and know about bias generally accept their existence.  Why would we do such a thing? Mostly for lack of alternatives.   Are peer evaluations free of bias?  Of course not -- any one-on-one observation is vulnerable to the baggage the viewer brings.   Are administrative evaluations free of bias?  The same principle applies. What about pre-tests and post-tests?  First, good luck getting students to take both of those seriously.  Second, we all know the biases inherent in high-stakes testing. Third, not every course lends itself to such easily quantifiable information. Self-reports?  Puh-leeze. Here’s a sentence I have literally never...

Longtime readers know that I have about thiiiiis much patience for the “undermatching” hypothesis.  That’s the idea that it’s tragic and awful when a student who could have gotten into someplace selective chooses a less selective college.  Although some of the partisans of the “undermatching” hypothesis try to couch their concerns in terms of altruism -- save those diamonds in the rough from terrible schools -- I know lifeboating when I see it.  If you take for granted that the majority of schools are, and must be, terrible, then don’t talk to me about egalitarianism. That said, Monday’s piece in IHE about Texas’ 10 percent plan for admissions to the U of Texas actually confirms something positive that’s applicable across sectors.  Legibility matters. On campus, that’s the cornerstone of the “guided pathways” movement.  At its best, the guided pathways movement assumes that students who have talent and drive, but may not have parents who went to college, would ...

My erstwhile Massachusetts colleague Lane Glenn, president of Northern Essex Community College, posted a thought-provoking piece about public higher ed funding over the weekend.  Some of it is state-specific, such as the reference to “9C” cuts (midyear cuts to appropriated allocations). But the conclusion strikes me as applicable, and challenging, across the country. Glenn writes: So, rather than spend more time haggling over how to allocate diminishing resources through a formula that will never work effectively; the best way forward for our campuses and our students lies in creating a new social compact for community colleges in the Commonwealth that relies on partnering with policymakers, employers, and supportive organizations like the Boston Foundation and the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation to help us transition into our new role as public-private colleges with increased attention to fundraising, employer sponsorships, return on investment, entrepreneurial business model...

Apparently, Massachusetts has dropped performance-based funding for community colleges.  I’m hopeful that this will be the start of a trend. Performance-based funding sounds good intuitively.  If you don’t think about it very hard, it sounds like it would reward good performance and punish bad.  But it’s a terrible fit for community colleges. At a really basic level, community colleges were never built to compete with each other.  They were built to serve local geographic areas. If a community college outside of Oakland scores well, will students from Los Angeles take notice and move there?  If not, why pit them against each other? To the extent that it reflects the demographics of the students who attend a given college, it will tend to reward the affluent and punish the poor.  Over time, it pushes some colleges into death spirals. Given that most areas are served only by one or two community colleges, institutional death spirals don’t benefit anybody. ...

I was surprised to see the headline “Why Teaching Engineering Costs More than Teaching English,” but not because the content was surprising.  I was surprised that it was news. The recent piece summarizes a report from the National Bureau of Economic Research.  It makes the point that classes in some fields are more expensive to run than others, with the more STEM or vocational classes generally running more expensive (with the notable exception of math).   Faithful readers may remember this paragraph from a post this summer entitled “Things That Seem Obvious:” “Hard” vocational programs are more expensive to run than “soft” academic ones.  The least expensive classes to run are the ones that can run well with thirty students per section, and without any specialized equipment.  That tends to describe the Intro to Psychs of the world. Hands-on classes in vocational areas require more equipment, more people to tend the equipment, and more instructors per student...

On Monday, Laura Runge posed a series of questions to me on Twitter that deserve a longer response than a tweet or two.  First she asked “who do you see as your primary/secondary audience for writing on admin? When (why?) do you feel moved to write on admin?”  She followed with “As a scholar, my purpose in publishing is to enhance knowledge of my field, promote my career, and raise visibility and stature of my home university.  I wonder if writing on admin might work at cross-purposes for the latter two?” Or, put differently, why don’t my administrative colleagues elsewhere do something similar?  After all these years, where is everybody? Honestly, my first audience for writing has always been myself.  Part of that is because it took a long time to develop a substantial readership, but mostly it’s because I use the process of writing as a way to work out what I’m thinking.  The old model of “figure out what you want to say and say it” only applies to easy ...