flynn056

An idea came up on campus again this week that comes up from time to time.  Couldn’t we save everyone a lot of time and angst by coming up with a common first semester that all, or nearly all, students could take? At first glance, it seems to make a lot of sense.  We know what the highest-enrolled classes on campus are, and most of them are taken early.  A common first semester, perhaps with a meta-major course built in, would streamline advising and registration and make it far easier to ensure that students take courses that count. I could see the idea working well at a selective, residential liberal arts college.  It’s a variation on the “freshman seminar” idea, with the goal of starting everyone off on equal footing and ensuring that everyone has a similar foundation on which to build.  We might focus more on skills than on the canon, at least at first, but the general idea is similar. The catch is that the students aren’t.   Very few of our students ta...

Every so often, I have one of those conversations in which an initial misunderstanding inadvertently lays the groundwork for a good exchange.  That happened this week with Paul Glastris, the editor of Washington Monthly, who called to take issue with my critique of WM’s latest college rankings issue. WM’s rankings are intended as a sort of rebuttal to the US News rankings.  The US News rankings reward wealth and prestige, so they tend to reinforce existing hierarchies.  As Glastris put it, “the hierarchy within the profession of higher education is not aligned with the public interest.”  So instead of looking at “inputs,” WM tends to focus on student outcomes, with a special focus on lower-income students. My critique was that the US News rankings gain their power through their broad appeal to a constituency of parents and prospective students; the sheer size of the constituency, and the subsequent effects on enrollments, gives it influence.  For all of its we...

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/08/28/universitys-999-online-textbook-creates-confusion-and-outrage (pause) (scratch head) (cough) (shrug) I got nothin’. (walks off stage)

When I taught writing, I told the students that they needed their intended audience.  Were they writing for children, for educated adults, or for specialists in a field? Factors like those would affect the choices a good writer would make.   That wasn’t how I was taught, but I think it holds up.  It moves away from the idea that there’s an objectively correct way to write, and towards the idea that writing takes place in (and assumes) a context.  Rather than pure self-expression or channeling of a muse, the point is to communicate to a reader. I thought about that in looking at Washington Monthly’s latest college guide .  It’s an alternative to the US News rankings. The US News rankings tend to reward wealth, reputation, and exclusivity, as opposed to performance with the students they actually get. (Judging by the number of stories about colleges and graduate programs sending US News false data, the rankings must carry great weight.)  The Washington Mon...

I was struck, in reading the recent Hechinger Report piece on conditional acceptance, at how negatively it was portrayed.  Within the frame of reference they used, it’s understandable, but I can attest that it looks very different from here. In this context, conditional acceptance refers to selective universities or colleges allowing applicants to enroll, but not right away.  First, they have to spend some time at another institution, often with requirements around courseloads and GPA’s. If the applicant follows the plan and meets the requirements, she’s in.  The piece profiles one student who applied to Cornell on the condition that she spend a year at Ithaca College first; she took the deal. The practice is portrayed as secretive and somewhat ethically suspect.  It’s a way for selective institutions to allow in some students who won’t “count” in their selectivity statistics.  It can be a consolation prize for the marginally talented uberwealthy, or for filli...

“Why don’t they see it?” Melinda Karp’s article about colleges struggling to move from reform proposals to actual implementation struck a chord with me.  I’ve been in the “why don’t they see it?” position enough times to have obsessed about this for a while. Karp was a longtime member of the CCRC, second-in-command for a while.  Now she’s working with colleges across the country to help implement some of the reforms that she studied and championed.  (Full disclosure: we’re friends.) Her piece describes how easily sand gets in the gears, and some of the steps that colleges need to take to get from here to there. She comes at the question from the perspective of a researcher; I come at it from the perspective of a practitioner.  We notice many of the same things. She notes, correctly, that some colleges want something like “Guided Pathways” to come prefabricated, or as a simple checklist: do this, this, and that, and voila!  That rarely works, for a set of reaso...

I never acquired a taste for basketball, despite The Boy having spent years playing it.  But he did, so I’ve spent plenty of time at his games, and have taken him to college games.  It’s a running joke with us that whenever we watch elite teams -- either high-level college teams in person, or pro teams on tv -- I groan whenever a player misses a free throw.  It’s even worse when a player at that level misses two in a row. That’s because free throws don’t change.  Theyre the same distance and angle every single time, and have been since the player’s childhood.  They’re unblocked, by definition. They aren’t rushed. To my mind, elite players should sink free throws as a matter of course.   They’re a sort of standardized test.  A shot from the field can be different from others, depending on all sorts of variables, but a free throw is a free throw.  It’s a constant. You can compare free throw percentages over time and actually learn something. It...

Technological progress has been great for nostalgia.  Anyone over 40 (maybe 30?) knows the experience of going down a rathole on YouTube, seeing clips from shows you watched as a kid and having the uncanny sense of vague recognition combined with abject horror that you once thought they were good.  Spotify does the same thing for music; the songs my parents played a lot when I was a kid are sort of familiar, but when I hear them now, they often register differently. This week I discovered that Google Earth can do the same thing, but with places.  I harnessed the eye in the sky to look anew at houses I grew up in, or frequented as a kid.  It didn’t go as planned. The house in which I spent ages 2-13 looks about the same, except that the trees are bigger.  But doing the 360 degree view, I noticed that the house across the street is boarded up. A quick look on Zillow confirmed that it was foreclosed on a couple of years ago, and now sits opaque, with a menacing-l...

A major textbook publisher has announced an all-you-can-eat subscription version of textbook purchasing.  A student pays a set rate per semester, and has unlimited access to new copies of the latest books provided by that publisher.  It’s being touted as a major money-saver for students, and in some cases, it probably is. That said, I have major misgivings. The most basic is that the “Netflix” analogy is misleading.  Netflix carries movies and shows from many different studios.  But this publisher only carries what it publishes. It would be as if Netflix only carried content provided by Fox Studios.  Fox produces a lot of stuff, some of it (probably) quite good, but it’s only one producer. If something you wanted was produced by somebody else, well, too bad.  For that, you’d have to go outside of the subscription and pay extra, without any sort of deduction from the subscription price. If the subscription covered everything in print, I’d be more open to ...

Thanks to Melina Patterson for highlighting this one.  It’s a bill for a semester at the University of Houston in 1975.  The total is $152.50. Correcting for inflation, that would be slightly over $700 now. At $700 a semester, most students could work their way through.  But it’s juuuuuust a bit higher than that now. In the year-to-year series of incremental changes, it’s easy to lose track of that sort of thing.  Take a step or two back, though, and the changes are seismic. Take that trend line and project it forward, say, twenty years.  Assuming that real wage growth continues at its current pace, such as it is, there’s no earthly way to make that sustainable.   -- These two stories next to each other do a nice job of encapsulating the dilemmas of folks trying to make college budgets sustainable. One is about a consultant urging colleges to pare down their programmatic offerings, in order to attain greater operating efficiencies.  Each new progr...

A left coast correspondent writes: So I’m now a division chair at a large community college in California.  One of the most surprising aspects of my job has been just how hard it has been to evaluate course equivalencies.  Often times students come to us with syllabi that do not have complete information allowing our college to determine equivalent courses.  Our Admissions and Records department handles standard cases but anything tricky or incomplete gets sent to me. Tracking down information from colleges is often challenging.  Faculty coordinators and department chairs are often unresponsive.  Maybe it’s because it’s summer (right when a lot of students are trying to get enrolled, but also when a lot of faculty at other colleges are on break…), but I have a lot of unreturned emails and phone calls.  Some colleges do not have a department admin support person who can answer questions. And don’t get me started on how hard it can be to figure out who to ca...

In college, entirely by accident, I discovered that the laundry room in my dorm made an excellent study space.  Something about the white noise of the dryers provided just enough external stimulation to allow my restless self to focus, without getting distracted.  I carried that into grad school, where the local laundromat became a favorite study spot. Something about it just worked. A good study space is a real find.  I always had trouble studying in my dorm, mostly because it always seemed like I should have been hanging out with friends instead.  The library could be a great spot, or not, depending on my mood and the time of day. I even found a few nooks and crannies around campus that did the trick.   The key wasn’t so much the presence or absence of other people as it was the overall feel.  It had to feel distant enough from the dorm that the distractions of the dorm weren’t there to compete for attention, but still familiar and safe enough that I co...