flynn056

I was intrigued to see Wayne State University’s announcement about forgiving outstanding debts of former students to get them to return.  The program will cover up to $1,500 per student. Off the top of my head, it sounds like a potentially great idea.  When we look at the records of students who were previously enrolled and didn’t return or graduate, a shocking number of them have financial “holds” on their accounts.  Sometimes the holds are for significant amounts, but sometimes they’re relatively small. “Relatively” is the key word there.  If you’re really broke, even a “small” amount of money can be prohibitive.  For a student who’s already skipping meals to make ends meet, a fifty dollar debt may as well be fifty thousand.  For-profit colleges knew that, which is why they didn’t charge application fees. Yes, there’s an obvious “moral hazard” problem with debt forgiveness.  A student who sacrificed to pay her debts may be annoyed to discover that ...

This article from the Atlantic does a fantastic job of laying out the steps that Amarillo College is taking to address students’ basic needs.  Its approach is working. I was lucky to get to know its president, Russell Lowery-Hart, in the Aspen program, and to consider him a friend.  He walks the walk. His leadership is purpose-driven, and the purpose is to enable students to climb out of poverty.  Everything follows from that, whether it’s connections to social services, a food pantry, emergency financial aid without formal applications, or shorter semesters.  The common denominator is respecting the humanity of students. The article briefly mentions this, but it’s worth amplifying: Amarillo College has eliminated achievement gaps by race.  That’s an extraordinary accomplishment. It’s the sort of thing that should be studied, learned from, and used as a source of hope.   Having recently embarked on some efforts along similar lines here, I can say with c...

Kim Weeden made a great point on Twitter on Tuesday about exceptions to college policies.  As she put it: What an administrator says: "this is the rule, but students can petition for an exemption." What a sociologist hears: "this is the rule, but middle- or upper-class students who grew up thinking it's their right to question school authority figures can petition for an exemption.” She’s correct on that; students who feel entitled to push back -- a group that often correlates with higher social capital -- will be likelier to find workarounds to sticky situations.  I saw that myself this week, when The Boy got himself into a bit of a scheduling pickle. Luckily for him, he had two educated parents on hand to help him figure out a solution. If he hadn’t, he could easily have run into an unnecessary conflict that could have snowballed.  In this case, social capital showed itself quietly, in the form of a sequence of conflicts prevented before it started. That said, e...

Should history, as a discipline, be classified under “humanities” or “social science?” I’m sort of amazed that in the decade-plus that I’ve been writing this column, I’ve never asked the question directly of my wise and worldly readers.  It’s worth asking. It matters because of distribution requirements.  Different types of degrees -- AA as opposed to AS as opposed to AAS -- require different distributions of credits in the various categories.  The “distribution requirement” model of general education is out of favor among reformers, but it’s still very much alive on the ground, as students who don’t check the boxes before trying to transfer can attest.   In New Jersey, the state has answered the either/or question with a firm “yes.”  In the context of AA degrees, it can count for either, and it even gets its own category.  But in AS and AAS degrees, it doesn’t. And that begs the question of whether the state got it right, which is, to me, the much more in...

I don’t live in Connecticut, but I have ties to it.  I know people who work at colleges there. I’ve done two NEASC site visits there.  I was even once a finalist for a community college presidency there, back when they still hired presidents.  Hell, my last hometown was on the state line. All of this by way of saying, I’ve been keeping a close eye on it, and it has been getting harder to watch. Connecticut’s plan to consolidate twelve community colleges into one was rejected by NEASC, but the main architect of the plan, Mark Ojakian, has indicated that he plans to press on anyway.  His plans have occasioned a flurry of no-confidence votes across the system. The governor who appointed him is term-limited out at the end of this year. Yet, to coin a phrase, he persists. I actually understand the temptation, but would strongly recommend a different approach. Ojakian’s public concern is reality-based; the community college system has been underfunded for years, and is...

Most community college alumni live within fifty miles of their alma mater.  Yet as a sector, we’ve done a far weaker job of recruiting alumni support than our four-year counterparts. A recent study echoed what we’ve long known about the geographic distribution of graduates.  Selective colleges and universities scatter their graduates to cities around the country. That makes sense, given that that’s often where they came from in the first place.  Colleges that draw more locally tend to graduate more locally. Community colleges are the most local of all, and our graduates reflect that. Admittedly, the distinction is muddier than that; nearly half of all bachelor’s degree grads in America have significant community college credits, even if they never got the associate’s degree.  And many associate’s grads go on to get bachelor’s and beyond, so the same student will show up in the alumni lists of multiple places. But the larger point remains; community college grads ...

It’s Baaaaack... https://www.chronicle.com/article/It-s-Time-to-End-College/243448 https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions_of_a_community_college_dean/project_based_education_a_response_to_mark_taylor In 2009, Columbia professor Mark Taylor proposed in the New York Times doing away with existing college and university departments and majors in favor of an ever-shifting set of constellations organized around themes of current interest, such as “Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life, and Water.”  I objected that redoing the entire curriculum every seven years, as he proposed, wouldn’t make any practical sense. Among the reasons: [I]f colleges redid their curricula every seven years or so – his suggested lifetime for the project-based constellations he favors – that would involve every seventh year putting entire new programs through the shared governance process, coming up...

A piece in the Chronicle a couple of weeks ago asked whether faculty offices have a future. It isn’t a terribly thoughtful piece, which is a missed opportunity.   I’ve seen full-time faculty offices handled differently in different places.  At CCM and Brookdale, they’re typically fairly large, and usually shared. At Holyoke, they’re typically very small, but private.  I can see arguments for each. Given faculty schedules, a “shared” office often only has one person in it at any particular time, so the imposition of sharing is less than it might seem.  Private offices allow for a bit more idiosyncrasy, which can be very good or very bad. (I’ll just note that faculty status does not give automatic immunity to “hoarding,” and leave it at that.)  Whichever way they work, though, they provide a working space, a meeting space, and a place to hang out on campus. I’ll admit, too, to enjoying reading the cartoons on faculty office doors.  Maybe that’s just me. ...

As a writer, I hope to be read and understood.  This week, I was thrilled to see that someone went from understanding to acting. As IHE detailed Thursday, Marion Technical College in Ohio has taken the “buy one year, get one free” idea that I wrote about last year and turned it into an actual program.  Students who complete at least 30 credits with a GPA of 2.5 or higher will be eligible for free tuition for the rest of the degree. The idea is to reward completion, and to turn what some see as a handout into an earned benefit. MTC improved on the idea by adding a textbook stipend and mandatory advising to it.  I can’t wait to see the results for the first cohort this fall. I’d love to see a variation on this program enacted at a state level.  It would free up philanthropic giving to focus on the freshman year, dual enrollment, and/or textbook or food scholarships.  It could also wind up costing a lot less than it looks at first blush, because it would create a...

One of the shocks of moving into community college administration is discovering how many “academic” decisions are made based on financial aid rules. Some folks on campus are floating an idea that I have to admit makes a certain kind of bureaucratic sense.  It involves restricting the windows during which students can change their majors to the periods between semesters.  A student who decides in, say, October that she picked the wrong major would have to wait until January to switch. It’s driven by financial aid.   Federal financial aid only covers courses in (or, sometimes, prerequisite to) a student’s major.  The idea is that aid is for “degree-seeking students,” so it should cover only degree-seeking behavior.  In the minds of the Feds, courses outside of one’s major are clearly larks, and the taxpayers shouldn’t be on the the hook for larks. It’s a position that makes sense in the abstract, but that falls apart when you meet actual students. Actual students...

We recently had an internal search for an interim administrative position.  Four people initially applied, each with an individual letter. It’s the little things.  The salutations of the four letters were as follows: “Dear Members of the Committee,” “To Whom It May Concern,” “Dear Dr. Reed,” “Dear Matt,” I’m not sure of the etiquette, but I had to smile at the range. Wise and wordly readers, what’s your preferred salutation in a cover letter?