flynn056

“I paid $250,000 to have someone tell me to read Jane Eyre, and then I didn’t.” - John Mulaney There’s plenty to chew on in the latest IHE poll about college faculty attitudes about technology, OER, and assessment.  (Least surprising finding: skepticism about assessment remains strong.) But at least in the OER section, it strikes me that we need to ask a different question. The survey asks the following: “Faculty members and institutions should be open to changing textbooks or other materials to save students money, even if the lower-cost options are of lesser quality.”  I honestly don’t know how to answer that in the abstract, given that there’s “lesser” and then there’s “lesser.” But it’s also the wrong question, because it focuses on the book itself. The book is irrelevant in itself.  What matters is whether students read the book, and, if they do, what they’re able to do with it.  That entails a few issues, which are separate but related. If the student can’t...

A new correspondent writes Briefly - I started college in 1983 at a CA community college. I did OK for a while, earning some credits. I was in a very topsy-turvy time in my life - I was an artificially antisocial punk rocker and music shows were more important than anything - and consequently I did not finish my AA in Fine Arts. I had a great job that paid OK for 20 years so I didn't feel the pinch of not having a degree. That all changed when my husband nearly died, got a liver transplant and we decided to change our lives and move from super expensive CA to more affordable Georgia, 7 years ago. Here in GA I can't find a job making more than about $12 an hour - I was making nearly twice that in CA.  I have tons of experience, but in way too many areas - the job I had in CA was family owned and we all pitched in and did everything. But I am not an "expert" in anything, and the fact that I'm now over 50 (though I look much younger, which is an asset) makes me feel ...

On Twitter this week, Laura McKenna asked one of my favorite questions.  Looking at a local for-profit college, for which tuition is high and post-graduation starting salaries are low, she asks why a student would choose it over a community college. Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote the definitive book on this, Lower Ed, but it’s worth revisiting from time to time.  (If you get a chance, the documentary “Fail State” is also terrific on the subject.) From within the walls of a community college, if I wanted to compete with for-profits, what would I do? Advertise.  A lot. The students targeted by for-profits don’t always know about the traditional status hierarchies in higher education; sometimes they don’t even know that a given school is a for-profit.  Instead, they go by name recognition and location. And don’t focus on changing the minds of the influential; go after the folks who are desperate for a life change. In olden times, that meant certain tv shows; I’m not ...

The new Century Foundation report , “Policy Strategies for Pursuing Adequate Funding for Community Colleges,” lacks a catchy title, but it’s well worth the read.  If you have a chunk of time, I recommend it. It takes as a starting point the basic fact that applying “performance funding” models to colleges that are underfunded from the outset amounts to punishing them for being underfunded in the first place.  Models like ASAP -- which feature heavy advising with low ratios, as well as stipends for public transportation -- are much more expensive per student, but they’re so good at helping students finish that they’re cheaper per graduate.  The problem is that most public funding is per student, not per graduate. And it lags results, so to afford it, you’d have to get the results before you start the program. The space-time continuum doesn’t work that way. That means that many community colleges lack the funding to implement measures that they know would work.   On...

Reading the headline to this piece in the Chronicle, it was all I could do not to roll my eyes.  The headline implied incredulity that public flagship universities would offer discounts to middle-class students. There was a time when it was simply assumed that public flagship universities were largely for middle class students.  Now it’s considered noteworthy when they gesture towards remembering the bulk of the electorate. I say, bring it on.  And that’s not only because I have a kid on the cusp of college.  It’s also because I’m annoyed that he would have received more help if he had spent high school perfecting his jump shot, rather than studying hard and working part-time jobs. At some point, a culture gets what it pays for.   -- Last Sunday we went to a backyard wedding.  This bears explanation. It was crazy-cold, with the kind of wind that goes right through you.  We were there for hours. Going inside was not an option. And given the occasion,...

No, college president is not the hardest job in the nation.  It’s mostly indoor work, and generally speaking, it pays pretty well.  But I saw a lot of truth in Josh Kroger’s piece in IHE last week in which he made that claim.  This week I even saw some of the issues come to life. Kroger pointed out, correctly, that colleges don’t have the luxury of a clear single purpose.  As nonprofits, most of them don’t exist to maximize their endowments. They have stakeholders ranging from students to employees to employers to voters to donors to accreditors to legislatures, most of whom don’t listen to each other.  They have budgets, but they aren’t about maximizing profit; there isn’t a bottom line in the same sense that there is for most businesses. Leaders -- and I’ll include folks beyond presidents in that -- have to simultaneously balance conflicting imperatives and still move forward.  That’s a much more complicated decision matrix than leaders in most industr...

I wrote and posted this in 2017, right after the Charlottesville murder.  Recent news about the Federal government’s move to deny that transgender people even exist, let alone have rights, give it fresh relevance.  I’ve updated a couple of references, but otherwise, I think it holds up. Community colleges serve people with very different political perspectives, and that’s by design.  Their mission is to take all comers, and to serve the needs of the entire community. That means working with people from different backgrounds, with different tastes and different politics.   Most of the time, that means that leaders of community colleges have to be relatively circumspect about partisan politics.  That doesn’t mean giving up the right to vote, but it does mean making sure that you don’t inadvertently alienate someone whose political or economic support would have benefitted the college or the students.  Supporters come from many sides, and their support makes...

“The food here is terrible.  And such small portions!” - old joke Responding to critiques can be a challenge.  Responding to contradictory critiques can be much harder.  That’s how I felt last week reading Ryan Craig’s piece in IHE about community colleges’ alleged over-reliance on associate degrees. The usual degree-related critique lobbed at community colleges is that too few students finish.  The debates around the validity of the IPEDS grad rate are well-worn, at this point, and there’s plenty of debate to be had about apportioning responsibility among the institution, the student, and the larger political economy.  Still, though, both sides to that debate seem to share the idea that graduation is a good thing, and that more students graduating would be a good thing. Craig, a Yale grad and managing director of a venture capital fund that aims to “disrupt” higher education, takes the opposite view.  His critique is that too many students get associate d...

I felt a little guilty about the post earlier this week about the EFC calculation on the FAFSA, but judging by the emails it generated, it struck a nerve. An industry that forces so many of its customers into material deprivation can’t last.  My fearless prediction is that the next recession will cause an industry bloodbath. -- Speaking of terrible policies, 99 percent of the people who applied for Public Service Loan Forgiveness were denied . It’s horrifying.  In the community college world, we have many younger faculty with significant student loan burdens who have been planning on loan forgiveness as a part of being able to have families and move forward with their lives.  To get the rug yanked out from under them after many years is appalling. Yes, glitches happen.  I’ve been in management long enough to know that no system is seamless.  But a 99 percent fail rate is not a glitch. It’s a feature. I understand that different administrations have different p...

We have a number of dual enrollment and early college high school arrangements with local high schools, both public and private.  They allow students to take college classes for transcripted college credit while still in high school. In the ECHS programs, students who earn enough credits can complete an associate degree at the same time as a high school diploma. OVer the past few years, I’ve learned some in-the-trenches lessons about working with dual enrollment and early college programs.   In the spirit of public service, a few lessons learned along the way: Not every student will pass every class.  You’d think that would be obvious, but ECHS programs are often built on relatively prescriptive “crosswalks” or curricular paths that assume that everybody will pass everything on the first try.  Be prepared for what happens when a few students don’t, but don’t want to leave the program. Tutoring matters.  A lot. This is easy to overlook in the beginning, but do...

I’m not a huge science fiction fan generally.  I like Star Wars, and the first couple of Star Trek series, but it never became a way of life.  My preferred style of science fiction, as with fiction generally, is either optimistic or funny.  I was born too early to really enjoy the dystopian trend of the last couple of decades. The EFC that the FAFSA returned the other night falls into the “dystopian science fiction” category.  I do not care for it. To avoid  getting unduly specific, I’ll speak in percentages.  Having finally filled out the various entries, The Boy and I held our breath and clicked “submit.”  In a flash, our Expected Family Contribution displayed. That’s the amount that the official formula thinks you can afford to pay before any aid needs to kick in.  It’s the amount that a college that advertises that it meets “full need” will expect you to cover. The figure was...I’m struggling for the right word...preposterous.  I did a l...