flynn056

A friend in grad school once commented that she and I followed the Supreme Court the same way that normal people follow baseball.  So yes, I’ve been mulling over the Janus v AFSCME case for months. Longer, in fact, if you count the version that didn’t get decided when Scalia died.   I’ve been working in unionized public higher education since 2003.  At all three community colleges, and in both states, representation fees were part of the order of the day.  I’ve known faculty who swear that the union is the only thing standing between them and penury, and I’ve known faculty who wanted absolutely nothing to do with their union.  Having also worked in a decidedly non-union setting -- DeVry -- I’ve seen the differences. But here I’ll focus instead on possible long-term fallout. Assuming the ruling stands for a while, what’s likely to happen? The obvious immediate impact will be that the folks who only pay representation fees because they’re compelled to, will sto...

Longtime readers know that I’m a fan of C.K. Gunsalus.  Her “College Administrator’s Survival Guide” is one of the most useful and realistic I’ve ever read on the subject.  So it should come as no surprise that her latest piece in IHE, along with Nicholas Burbules and Robert Easter, struck a chord.  It’s about dysfunctional academic departments. This paragraph, about one style of handling difficult issues, jumped off the screen for me: Fourth, some faculty members may actively prefer to delegate such issues to leaders to worry about -- not only because they don’t wish to tackle them themselves but also because their us/them view is that the faculty ought to stand together versus “those” administrative people who get paid to worry about such matters. That attitude may lead, ironically, to granting to administrators even greater powers to try to solve matters. Meanwhile, because faculty members aren’t implicated in making those administrative decisions, they retain greate...

The Girl’s softball season just ended.  I enjoy the games, mostly, but I have to admit some paternal guilt that she inherited my skill at hitting.  And truth be told, I’m not above rooting for the occasional rainout. Still, I can see some life lessons from softball, even for those who may not be particularly good at it. Umpires aren’t always right.   This applies particularly to strike zones, which seem to move from game to game.  After taking a series of called third strikes on pitches that sort of resembled strikes, from a distance, with sun glare, if you never read the rule book, I started advising TG to swing at almost anything that didn’t bounce first.  The called strike zone extended from the eyes to the ankles, and several inches off the plate in either direction. The umpires were wrong, but they were the umpires. Some adjustment of strategy was clearly in order. Merit and results are only loosely connected. Some piddling little ground balls result in g...

“What are you going to do to turn around our falling enrollments?” Lots of Boards ask this of prospective presidents.  It’s the wrong question. It’s understandable; certainly, if a turnaround were in the offing, it would make a lot of financial issues go away.  Growth forgives many sins. And the growth period for community colleges nationally was long enough that many people assumed implicitly that growth is normal and natural.  Demographic tailwinds can make even mediocre leaders look smart. But since about 2010, enrollments have been dropping, and they’re likely to fall off a cliff around 2026.  That’s because birthrates fell off a cliff in 2008, and 2008 plus 18 equals 2026. When I opined last week that part of the issue with birthrates is that parenthood has become crazily expensive, many folks responded that the real issue is women’s wage levels; as those climb, fertility drops.  To which I say, that’s true at a macro level, but obviously inapplicable to ...

It was a week of milestones. The Girl graduated the 8th grade, which was exciting enough on its own.  It’s the end of middle school. Where we live, several middle schools feed into a regional high school, and students also have options of various specialized high schools, so the transition to high school is more than just everyone switching from one building to another.  Everyone gets reshuffled. As easy as it is to be cynical about graduations from every little thing, I actually understand this one. Their worlds are about to change. The ceremony was cute, as they tend to be.  The 7th grade band did what it could with the graduation march.  The designated student speakers, two of them, did very well; if you had told me they were graduating high school, I would have believed it.  The ceremony was relatively brief, and the parents were well-behaved. (Experienced parents know that the worst behavior offenders are usually other parents.)  But the highlight ...

Does anyone else remember when Blockbuster Video went hybrid? For a while, it did.  It combined a Netflix-like ability to order DVD’s online with the option of in-store pickup and return.  It was advertised as the best of both worlds, and in a sense, it may have been. But in trying to do two things, it didn’t do either terribly well.  Now Netflix is a powerhouse, and Blockbuster an artifact. I was reminded of that in reading this piece about the online education conundrum.  It makes the case -- plausibly, in my view -- that purely online degree programs may offer the greatest convenience for adult students, but don’t necessarily get completion rates as good as onsite or mixed programs.  (Anecdotally, I’ve heard that the racial gaps in completion rates for online programs are even larger than for onsite programs, but I still haven’t seen good data on that.) And there’s an already-existing literature showing the paradox of online courses: individual course compl...

This isn’t intended as a pure defense of AP exams, or of standardized tests generally.  That said, I was struck at this line in the IHE story about several elite private schools in the DC area dropping AP exams and courses: “Taking AP courses has become so popular that doing so is no longer “noteworthy.”” “Noteworthy.”  In this context, I think that means it no longer makes a student stand out.  Making students stand out is the business that elite private schools are in. If your kid could get the same bump from your local public school as she could from the elite private, what is all that tuition for? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the elite private schools moving away from AP comes just after a wave of public high schools extending AP classes and exams to more low-income students and students of color.  As Yogi Berra reportedly said of some restaurant, “nobody goes there anymore. It’s gotten too crowded.” With the Great Unwashed streaming in, AP just does...

Josh Kim really nailed it with his post last week about differences between other industries and higher education.  At a family gathering, he noticed that people who work outside of higher education are free of the existential dread for the sector that we’ve come to consider normal.  If anything, the dread is probably even more pronounced in the community college sector than in the Dartmouths of the world. The key difference is the future.  Is the future looking up? In many industries, it clearly is.  We keep hearing about the economic recovery, and employers struggling to find good people.  That’s true in nearly every other industry than our own. You know how some industries like to say they’re recession-proof?  We’re recovery-proof. We manage to ramp up austerity even in the face of economic expansion. (To be fair, enrollments in this sector tend to be economically counter-cyclical.  So yes, we’re recovery-proof, but we’re uncommonly strong in rec...

Congratulations to the University of Chicago on going SAT/ACT optional.  Brookdale has been SAT/ACT optional since 1967, but hey, we’re glad to have the company. My take on standardized tests is similar to my take on student course evaluations.  They’re virtually meaningless in the middle, but sometimes helpful on the extremes. Someone with spotty grades but spectacular SAT’s probably has a story.   “Test optional” allows for that story, though, and without many of the other issues testing raises.  Here’s hoping more of the selective institutions discover what community colleges have known for decades. -- Course placement in dual enrollment courses is a bit less straightforward.  There, you don’t have the same depth of high school record to use as a guideline, and placement exams are subject to all the same flaws there as they are everywhere else. Multi-factor placement often relies on high school GPA, but I haven’t seen good data on placement criteria for stu...

As you know, my readers are wise, worldly, witty, discerning, and generous with advice. Happily, they’re also ensconced in many different institutions and roles.  Which means that they often see things I don’t see. I’m hoping that this is one of those times. The gender ratios among students at community colleges tend to hold relatively steady over time.  Nationally, for students over 24, the average is about 60 percent women. For a college looking to offset declining numbers of 18 year olds, men over 24 -- often with some college but no degree -- represent a major recruitment opportunity. The reasons for the imbalance probably run pretty deep.  I’d guess that opportunity cost plays a significant role; if men without degrees typically make more money than women without degrees, then it’s financially harder for a couple to send the man back to school than to send the woman.  Addressing that would go beyond anything a single college can do. But that doesn’t mean we sh...

Nathan Grawe’s book about demographics and higher education noted that birthrates across the US still haven’t recovered from the fall off a cliff in 2008.  Now a new study shows that the largest birthrate drops are among Latina, Native American, and black women. The implications for higher education, as Grawe’s book noted, are obvious: a birthrate drop in 2008, sustained for a decade, means a drop in 18 year olds starting in 2026 and continuing for at least a decade.  That’s especially true as we make immigration more difficult. The US has had an advantage over many of its industrialized competitors in terms of age because we’ve allowed more young people to come into the country.  As we reduce the number coming in, colleges will suffer a double whammy: fewer native-born students and fewer immigrants at the same time. That’s a body blow. But the larger question is why.  I’ll hazard a guess. It’s because parenthood has become insanely, stupidly, crazily expensive....

I’m in Monterey, California, where I was invited to give a talk to some up-and-coming community college Career and Technical Education folk on procrastination.  No, I didn’t write it on the plane. Monterey is a beautiful, if offbeat, place.  In the midst of a row of ice cream shops, seafood joints, and souvenir stands, it has a Salvador Dali museum.  He lived here for about ten years. Apparently, he was a big supporter of high school art programs while he was here.  (“When I’m taking a break from firing bullets of paint at canvases to depict the unspeakable psychosexual horrors of hell, I like to give back to the community.”)  He also threw a legendary surrealist party here, in which the guests included Gloria Vanderbilt and Bob Hope. Yes, that Bob Hope. (Old joke: How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?  The fish!) Monterey is also home to Rosine’s, a restaurant whose original cookbook has been a mainstay at home for many years.  I...