flynn056

I haven’t been able to attend this year’s #RealCollege conference, but I’ve been following it on Twitter, and I was struck by a line there delivered by DeRionne Pollard, the President of Montgomery College.  She implored reformers to “fix systems, not people.” She’s right, and it sounds easy.  It isn’t. You’d think that a focus on systems, rather than people, would be an easy sell.  A focus on systems suggests that many of the issues a college faces can be solved by the people already there.  It allows for the acknowledgement that most of those people are hardworking, well-meaning, and professional. In a sense, it lets incumbents off the hook.  You’d think that would be popular. Often, though, those discussions fall flat.  They fall flat for a few interconnected reasons. The most basic, and frustrating, is the inability to see those systems in the first place.  “Why can’t students get to class on time?” Well, why assume that all students have reliabl...

In light of the Kavanaugh/Ford hearing, it seems like a good time to revisit this piece from 2012.  The short version is that gender studies is actually one of the most useful and practical things you can take.  The Senate, and the country, would be infinitely better off if senators were more aware of some basics. -- IHE had a good piece yesterday on student success courses and initiatives at two-year colleges, but it left out two key factors limiting the spread of success courses: transferability and credit limits. Many four-year colleges that teach their own freshman seminars don’t take community college freshman seminars in transfer.  That creates a moral dilemma for community colleges, where we want students to succeed, but we also don’t want to make them pay for credits that won’t go with them. Recent moves to put hard caps on the number of credits in a degree make matters worse.  New Jersey just passed a 60 credit cap for associate degrees, which will require...

There will be another recession.   That matters for all of the human reasons that recessions matter -- people losing jobs, losing homes, living under a gnawing fear that ages them quickly.  But it also matters for higher ed policy. Wednesday’s piece about the different permutations of “free community college” in various states, including my own, noted that several of the proposals were able to gain political traction by making the criteria so narrow that very few students actually qualified.  That keeps the cost down. During relatively flush times, when tax revenues are up and community college enrollments are down, it’s easier than usual to push for some version of free community college. Versions that don’t cost much are easy to fold into large budgets when revenues are strong. But a recession will come.  I don’t know exactly when, but it will.  They always do. And if history is any guide, the next recession will reduce tax revenues to states, while simult...

This one is radioactive.  Without getting too specific, for obvious reasons, I’ll try to show why. Apparently the University of Wisconsin system is developing a protocol by which colleges who fired employees for misconduct, or who were preparing to do so when the employees resigned, can reveal that when called by prospective employers to check references.  The IHE article outlines some of the mechanics of the process; the short version is that referees with a sense that something was amiss are instructed to refer callers to HR central. HR central will do the reveal. The article correctly notes that there’s a widespread fear of litigation around disclosure of charges, particularly if they were never settled.  That often leads to new employers unknowingly hiring folks who’ve engaged in misconduct before. The process is meant to offer a way for, say, Hypothetical State U to inform North Wherever State U that Professor So-and-so abused his authority with students.  NW...

This one is a question for practitioners, so it may be a bit wonky.  Consider yourself warned. My state recently passed a law mandating that public two-year and four-year institutions have “reverse transfer” agreements, through which students who transfer “upward” prior to graduation can have some credits transferred back to the two-year school to finish the associate’s degree.   The idea is twofold.  First, it gives the student a fallback option if life happens during the junior or senior year and she has to step away.  It’s better to leave as an associate degree grad than as a dropout. Second, it gives two-year colleges the credit they’re due.  As long as we must be measured by graduation rates, let’s at least let the graduation rates reflect students who got what they wanted and went on. But I’ve never heard of students pursuing the reverse transfer option in any significant numbers.  At a recent visit to a four-year public college to discuss reverse tr...

The best facts, as a writer, are the ones that contradict a widely-held bit of dogma.  They call into question things that you didn’t know were questionable. (I’ve heard the same said of science.  The breakthrough moments aren’t marked by someone proclaiming “Eureka!” They’re when someone notices a result, raises an eyebrow, and mutters “That’s weird.”)  A recent Washington Post column offered a great fact. It was about the relative predictive value of standardized test scores, as opposed to grades.   That narrative usually goes in one of a few ways.  There’s the “standardized tests are evil” line, which is well-worn in academic circles.  It typically points to the low predictive value of test scores for anything other than subsequent test scores.  It also often points to cultural bias in tests, and/or to racial or economic gaps in scores. Counter to that is the “level playing field” line, which holds that for all of the flaws of standardized tests...

Harvard, undergraduate population of approximately 6,800, just completed a five-year capital campaign that generated $9.6 billion.   Brookdale, undergraduate population of approximately 11,800, has an annual operating budget of about $84 million. Readers, it’s time for some math.  For the sake of argument, let’s pretend not to notice that capital and operating budgets are not the same thing.  I’ll use relatively round numbers. One percent of 9.6 billion is 96 million.  Ten-year Treasury bills are running at about 3 percent right now.  (Score one for Marketplace!) So if that money were invested in ten-year treasuries -- a thought that would make any self-respecting fund manager shudder at such risk aversion - it would return about $288 million per year.  I’d say that’s before taxes, but, of course, Harvard is tax exempt. The $288 million is real. (They’d almost definitely go higher-risk, higher-reward, but I’m trying to keep it simple.) Brookdale could i...

I’m guessing someone out there has tried this, but I haven’t actually seen it.  Any wise and worldly readers with knowledge of it are invited to share. What if we applied the blended format to learning communities? “Blended” courses are the new version of “hybrid.”  They replace some, but not all, of the seat time of a traditional class with online activity.  For example, a hybrid chemistry class might do the “lecture” part online, while doing labs in labs.  Hybrids tend to have the most success with learning outcomes of any format, since they can draw on the best of both worlds, but they can be a tough sell to students. Learning communities take many forms, but the simplest -- and most common in my experience - involves two courses in different disciplines sort of teaming up.  For example, a writing class might pair up with a criminal justice class, so the writing would have a theme. The same students would be in both sections. Ideally, the professors would ...

I’ve had issues with reports from Third Way in the past, so I approached the latest one, by Douglas Webber, warily.  It’s about the lifetime economic returns of a bachelor’s degree. It’s relatively thoughtful, and it wins points from me for noting that the real issue with student debt isn’t the amount of debt that students carry, but whether they complete the degree or not.  (That’s why the sizes of outstanding balances are _inversely_ correlated with repayment rates. Someone who dropped out after a semester or two is much less likely to repay loans than someone who graduated, even if the graduate borrowed more.) But a key omission jumped off the screen: “For data availability reasons, I only examine the returns to a Bachelor’s degree for individuals who did not attend graduate school.” Hmm.  I don’t know about the availability of the data -- I’ll defer to experts on that -- but I’d bet good money that the average salary among those who went on to, say, medical school...

Several years ago, it was commonplace to argue that for-profit colleges were an existential threat to public higher education.  (I even did that towards the end of my book.) Now, for-profit colleges are taking on water and losing market share much more quickly than their public counterparts.   I’ve been mulling over what happened.  Having worked in both sectors, I’ll offer a few thoughts. The dominant model of entrepreneurial higher education is shifting from imitation to infiltration.  In other words, we aren’t seeing as many fully parallel institutions setting up shop and going toe-to-toe with community and state colleges as we did fifteen years ago.  But we’re seeing much more of a for-profit presence within the operations of public colleges than we used to. That presence ranges from e-packs to LMS platforms to ERP solutions to research on colleges themselves.  In some cases, such as Purdue Global, for-profit and non-profit have merged, and it’s still ...

I’ve been hearing variations on “crisis in the humanities!” ever since college.  Back then it was largely about content; it was the early stages of the “canon” wars.  But even then we used to hear, on a regular basis, that fewer students majored in the humanities than used to. It was mostly measurement error.  Humanities enrollments spiked around 1970, then subsided to their historic level by the early 80’s and stayed fairly steady for the next few decades.  The postmodern wave came and went, with no discernible impact on enrollments one way or the other. Narratives of decline that took 1970 as the point of contrast were based on mistaking an aberration for a norm.  If you move the start date back several decades, it becomes clear that the period from about 1965 to 1975 was a fluke. Once enrollments regressed to the mean, the subsequent battles over multiculturalism, cultural studies, postmodernism, and the like didn’t move the needle. Over the last five years...

On the way back from the Michigan trip, The Boy and I were talking about the various schools on his list, and how he compares them to each other.  It quickly became clear that the ranking process is more complicated now than it used to be. I’m old enough to remember when college admissions was mostly a one-step process.  You’d get in, or not. There were a few variations -- waitlists, say, or the early decision option -- but they were understood as variations on a theme.  Students who were applying to multiple places would mentally rank them in a preference order, and as long as the decisions came back in binary form, that was pretty much that.  Students applying to selective places might do a “reach” or two, a couple of good bets, and a safety school or two. Now, it’s a two-step process.  Rejections are still rejections, and probably always will be.  Waitlists are still waitlists, with all of the nail-biting that may imply.  But acceptances have taken...