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...
This week I attended a meeting of another industry advisory board for one of our vocationally-oriented programs. I’ve been attending those since my DeVry days, at four different colleges and in more programs than I can immediately remember. In every single case, without exception, the employers have had the same request: “It’s the social skills, the interpersonal skills.” It’s fashionable now to blame smartphones, and sure enough, some mimed the phone in front of the face with thumbs flying madly. But they said the same thing back in 2001, before smartphones were around. Phones in front of faces are symptoms, not causes. Some of it is probably a variation on “kids today…,” a complaint as old as generations. Some of it probably reflects the uncertainty that many younger employees have as they take jobs they don’t love just because they need to take something. Looking back at the way I carried myself at some summer-temp jobs at that age, I can’t say I was an...
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...
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