Prediction Number Two

Tags

access to education, Bologna Process, higher education, Use of time

Last December I went out on a limb and suggested ten predictions that would change the game in higher education in the United States. I always thought that people who made predictions (“especially about the future”) lacked a certain humility.

But, as a blogger I must have opinions and so I made a few predictions. Prediction Number One, to my chagrin, began to unfold during the first few days of the year. Since then it has caught the political winds and is moving at a much faster clip than I had predicted. Sorry about that.

Now, only three months into the year, we began to see Prediction Number Two come to fruition.  The prediction says in part:

Number Two: In 2011, the Feds will continue their attempt to push the Capitalized Universities (CUs) further away from the educational trough.

And concluded that:

The Feds will hurt CUs in the short-term with lower sales and lower profits, but this will only serve to make the CUs a stronger competitor and cause it to move into more of the Traditional Universities’ (TUs) traditional areas. The CUs will successfully adapt, the TUs will need another strategy.”

One of those “let’s go get them policies” dealt with the Department of Education’s Rule Section 600.9. This policy would have forced institutions of higher education to first apply and then be approved to conduct business in all states in which they currently enroll students (including those state where students are taking courses via distance learning).

The policy’s objective was to complicate how CUs conduct their business. No longer will CUs be able to accept students from every state without first being authorized to do business in that state. This is analogous to a book store in Alabama with an internet presence, being forced to register (and pay taxes) in each state where their consumers reside. Seems Un-american.

This is a very puzzling policy. Most targeted changes in policies hide their purposes while taking away the bacon. This one while transparent in its aim to harm CUs, misses the target in a way that it actually favors the CUs. If I were to be running a CU I would not mind this gift from Regulatory Heaven.

The reason is that CU’s resources being far superior to the TUs resources would enable them to task a team of executives and attorneys to file the necessary papers and be approved to do business in 50 states within a month.

TUs would have a much more complicated path. TUs would have to be organized as a non-profit corporation in each state, which would make them subject to another more complicated set of regulations, with no assurances that students would materialize. TUs will be better served to become CUs but, oh my heavens, the shame of becoming what you for so long fought against!

What’s more, CUs already have students in most states and most CUs are licensed to conduct business in those states, (any business including education). This means that the policy designed to slow down the progress of CUs, will paradoxically speed it up.

Representatives of the TUs are up in arms as they should be. The American Council on Education, in a letter dated March 2, 2011, addressed to Secretary Duncan and signed by Molly Corbett, Board President of ACE, made my prediction come true. She wrote:

Dear Secretary Duncan:

On behalf of the 60 higher education associations and accrediting organizations listed below, I write to express our serious concerns regarding the state authorization regulations in Section 600.9 of the Oct. 29, 2010, final program integrity rule. These final regulations significantly expand and complicate the existing federal requirements for institutions to be “legally authorized” in a state. While the final rule reflects changes from the draft proposal, these changes do not address the concerns we raised during the rulemaking process. In addition, the final rule includes an entirely new and problematic provision regulating distance education programs.

And concluded as follows:

We believe the best course of action would be to rescind the new state authorization regulation in its entirety. This is a conclusion we have not reached lightly and only after determining that our concerns cannot be addressed through modification. As finalized, the regulation creates serious concerns for our private, non-profit institutions—in particular for religiously affiliated and other mission-based institutions— and threatens the ability of both public and private institutions to serve students through effective distance education programs.

This will not mark the end of the Feds (and State Regulators and Regional Accreditators) attacks on CUs.

There’s a new regulatory move targeting at the CUs (but not so obviously) to limit the CU student’s access to Federal loans and guarantees, by eliminating the student’s ability to borrow for a second loan, usually applied for to do summer study. Congressional Republicans want to go even deeper. House Resolution 1 calls for a 24 percent reduction in the Pell Grant program, which is primarily dedicated to low-income students. The Senate has yet to act on a twin measure.

So far TUs have only whispered dissent but are probably undecided about what to do.  The reason given for the new regulations, is that the Pell fund is going broke due to the expanded demand caused largely by the CUs ability to recruit students. CUs more than TUs use this provision.

However, the new limitations on the Pell grant will result in an increase in the average “time to completion” for undergraduate students (i.e., the amount of time it takes a student to get a baccalaureate).

American students’ time to completion of a baccalaureate is horrendous. This is partly due to the Feds definition of full-time student as one taking 12 units per semester. Do the math. Most baccalaureate degrees are 120 units, if the student is only taking 12 units per semester, it will take 10 semesters (or 5 years since summer school is used by only 9% of the students), and thus by Fed feat, the 4-year degree becomes the 5-year degree.

This expanding effect (in the years the 12-unit full-time definition has been in place), is confirmed by the most accurate data available, which calculates that the average student in a 4-year program already takes 4 years and 9 months (or 5 years) to complete it.

Currently, only 30-35% of the students who enroll in a 4-year program actually graduate in 4 years, another 10-15% graduate in 5 years and the rest (approximately 10-15%) graduate in six. But you would observe quite correctly, that even the highest percentage (35+15+15) only adds up to 65%. What happened to the other 35% that enrolled?

Those students never made it. They were interrupted by a “life event” –got married, got pregnant, moved out-of-town, lost the job that allowed them to attend school—or were simply not able to do the work. Some of them will never return to school and some of them will go to join the ranks of what we euphemistically refer to as the “underserved.”

These “underserved” are the CUs market because the CU offers a second chance on the student’s terms. Although the CU costs more and is less prestigious, eventually half of those “underserved” graduate. Next time you hear that CUs only graduate 30% of its enrollment, remember, half of those had already failed once before.

Using the new phrase of the moment, the 12-unit full-time rule and now the second loan rule will amount to “kicking the can down the road”. It will not result in any reduction in the total amount of money the Feds spend on students (assuming they finish in seven or eight years as most of them will) but it will create an inferior productivity (output) rate in comparison with our global competitors. This will cost us income (tax dollars) and will push us down the slippery slope which has ranked the US 12^th in the world in the number of citizens with a baccalaureate.

So what now? If we move ahead with the changed Pell rule, let’s change it in a way that would aid productivity, let’s raise the minimum to 15 units per semester. If we continue with the proposed Pell policy as it is, we will increase the time to completion (a cost burden to students, universities and society).

Here’s the 11^th prediction, we will soon rank 15^th in the world and deliver  just the opposite of what President Obama’s State of the Union “Winning the Future” promised.

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The Year of the Rabbit

Tags

3-year baccalaureate, access to education, Ahmed el-Tayeb, Bologna Process, decrease in state funding, European Higher Education Area, European Student Union, for-profit universities, going global, state budget cuts, stratergy

One of the pleasures of the winter holidays is the time it affords to read materials other than the obligatory academic journals and students’ term papers. This year, like every year, most major magazines I caught up with published a review of 2010. I avoid reading those reviews because I already experienced those events (I did not like them much then!).

The major magazines also attempt to forecast the more salient issues of 2011 and some of their guesses are pretty good while others are pretty ridiculous. If they can do that, fearing no shame, why can’t I?

So what is the Tao of 2011? Chinese astrology tells us that on February 3, 2011 the Year of the Rabbit will begin. The I Ching says that in “the year of the Rabbit without concentration you will fail.” So watch what you are doing, focus on your intent, don’t go looking both ways, except when crossing a street.

Heeding the rabbit’s caution and remembering Yogi Berra’s uncertainty about predictions and, because my business is higher education, I thought I would suggest ten events that are likely to have a significant effect upon higher education in the United States in 2011. Here it goes.

Number One: Early in 2011 cities and states that are broke now, operating with deficits, and projecting deficits through 2012, will begin to either default or furiously renegotiate their outstanding bonds. Because colleges and universities that borrow do so with tax-free bonds under the authority of their state, their bonds’ perceived risk will be lumped with the “municipals” and it will cost substantially more to borrow money for anything. At the same time, state’s contribution to higher education is expected to decline, precisely when demand from 18-24 year olds is projected to grow sharply (fueled in part by the nature of this recovery). This will exacerbate the financial issues already being faced by the whole of higher education, from decreased state contributions for public universities, to tapped-out Federal pools for loans and new requirements for additional reserves for private universities. This will lead to a new musical hit, maybe a country western or blues or more rightly a rap, on how being a CFO of a college or university in 2011 “ain’t nothing but pain.”

Number Two: In 2011, the Feds will continue their attempt to push the Capitalized Universities (CUs) further away from the educational trough. The Federal case has been weakened by the revelations that the GAO study which gave it impetus did not live up to its title: “FOR-PROFIT COLLEGES Undercover Testing Finds Colleges Encouraged Fraud and Engaged in Deceptive and Questionable Marketing Practices.” The GAO was forced to send corrections on critical data presented to Congress. Nonetheless, a series of changes in government regulations applying mainly or only to CUs and new legislation now in Congress, will move forward to limit the use of CUs business model for attracting students. The Feds will hurt CUs in the short term with lower sales and lower profits, but this will only serve to make the CUs a stronger competitor and cause it to move into more of the Traditional Universities’ (TUs) traditional areas. The CUs will successfully adapt, the TUs will need another strategy.

Number Three: Some universities will have no choice but to raise tuition and students will respond adversely to those attempts. For universities, the cost of tuition has been a proxy for quality, i. e., the higher the tuition the better the college is perceived. This has worked to their advantage as they tried to maintain services while costs rose and state contributions declined. But for students and other payers, higher tuition means higher debt burdens. I predict that this year students will react like their European counterparts and provide political pushback. (See Hell No We Won’t Go and Off with their heads.)

Number Five: An aging faculty and administrative staff will bring about a wave of retirements this year. Most of us are running on super lean staffs so the retirements will require new hires (projected at 15-18 percent) however budgets will constrain replacing all vacancies. Will universities know how to reallocate funds for new hires so as to reflect their strategic objectives? I don’t think most will or can. Lack of a robust faculty pipeline, particularly in areas of high need, such as health professions, engineering, basic sciences, will push starting salaries up? 15-20 percent for faculty and 20-25 percent for administrative roles. This will be partially ameliorated by a willingness for faculty who could retire, to remain on the job

Number Six: Some major universities will begin to use Bologna processes successfully. The Tuning Process will expand and be supported by regional accreditation agencies. The 3-year baccalaureate will be proposed and will become available from traditional state universities, just to overcome increases in “time to completion” which has the average student taking 5-plus years to complete a baccalaureate in the U.S. today. (See here)

Number Seven: While somewhat attenuated by the tight financial picture, this will be the year for venturing abroad.  A campus abroad will be initiated by dozens of universities and expanded for those already present.. Data will drive the movement. India will require an additional 5 million professional degreed people in 2012. China will add 7 million to the demand by 2013. But here at home, by the year 2020, President Obama wants us to produce 23 million more graduates than we are producing now. Most attempts will not succeed and will distract from the main business of a TU in the United States. Heed the caution of the rabbit and remember that “without concentration you will fail” (Look up my thoughts on global strategy, part 1, 2 and 3)

Number Eight: We will require a massive improvement in productivity, in order to meet our own need in the U.S., and this is not likely to happen this year. When budgets go south, CU’s cut back and get more done with fewer people. TUs can do that only to a very limited extent. They can restructure programs, close some, open others, make them leaner, faster, delivered through media. Nearly all universities will attempt to increase productivity, but their level will remain stubbornly at that of the 1950’s when no one had ever heard of a computer.

Number Nine: Regional accrediting bodies and other regulators will tighten their reviews to meet social pressure to show outcomes. “Quality”, now a noun, will become a verb. As it was in the 70’s that the noun “impact” became the verb[1] “impacting.” talking about quality in higher education will become so commonplace that “quality” the noun will metamorphise. But what will the new word be? Quality-ing?

Number ten: Seven of the ten predictions above will unfold just as I predict. Three will not. At this time, I can’t tell which will be which, but a predicted .700 batting average ain’t bad.

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[1] Technically a Gerund (Verbal Noun)

Europe joins the U.S. in abandoning higher education as a public good.

Tags

articulation agreements, Bologna Process, for-profit universities, higher education, Stanford University, tuition increases, UC Berkeley

Europe’s first university, the University of Bologna, started with students hiring their own professors who would read and explain the classics and soon, it seems, we will be back to the same student-supported model, except that now the state is permanently there, regulating as if it was still paying for it.

Last year England decided it could no longer afford to subsidize higher education to the extent they had for the last 500 years. Things must be very bad in the realm for something like that to happen. Allowing higher education support to decline has traditionally been political dynamite in England. Conversely their American cousins across the pond were lowering their support of higher education every year and no one in the US noticed or protested very effectively. But when, in 2009, Tony Blair proposed a program whereby students would have to pay a higher proportion of the costs, the BBC reported “That move proved even more contentious in Parliament than Mr. Blair’s decision to wage war on Iraq.”

This year there are new cuts proposed that continue shifting the

Sign protesting tuition increases in the UK

cost of higher education from the taxpayer to the student, but they are modest in comparison. Compared to the U.S., England’s reform could be said to be negligible. In England, the entering student contributes approximately 47 percent (£3,290 of an average tuition of £7,000) towards their annual educational costs. In the U.S. the average student entering state supported institutions pay 72 percent of the costs. In England, the state partially subsidizes the gap, and also lends students the money to pay their fees and living expenses. These student loans are repaid once the graduate is employed at a job paying £15,000 [about $25,000] a year or more. In the U.S. interest accrues from day one and the borrowers must begin paying as soon as they leave school, whether or not they are employed. Nonetheless, the BBC predicts, “A new proposal for graduates to contribute more to their education could spark a rift in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.”

Demand for higher education is increasing rapidly around the world. In England of fifty years ago, only 5 percent of the 18 year olds went to college, now it is forty-five percent and rising. Other European governments have experienced similar increases and responded to this high demand in the same way, by forcing students to contribute a higher percentage of the costs. Germany, Spain, Ireland and England have already submitted proposals to their parliaments. Der Spiegel of Germany contends that the increase in higher education tuition is responsible for the ruling party’s decline, “… after forming a coalition with Chancellor Merkel, the Social Democratic Party (which was the guardian of free education) slipped to 23 percent of the vote.” In Spain the national newspaper El Pais documents an even longer history of free higher education (900 years) and asks the government whether they can afford not to continue with the investment. “In a time of unemployment when youth can either go to college or live on welfare, the government has chosen welfare.”

This week the University of California at Berkeley announced it will be the first public university to charge out-of-state residents $50,649 for tuition, fees, room, and board. The price for in-state residents is $27,770. In California, higher education is no longer a public good; it is now a private burden.

Students Protesting Tuition Increase at Berkeley Paul Sakuma/Associated Press

There are 100 universities in the U.S. that belong to the $50,000-plus club, but UC Berkeley is the only public institution. In 2009, there were 58, so the club has expanded considerably in the face of decreasing endowments, decreasing support and currently increasing demand. This demand will flatten out over the next decade and that makes for the perfect storm.

The number of 18-24 year olds in the U.S. will decline by more than a million over the next decade and assuming the rosiest projections, that the percentage of that population going to college increases to 70 percent (from 49 percent now) over the same time, it would then make the overall demand stay flat. This will force universities to raise tuitions every year, because it would not be likely that the taxpayer will see increasing their contribution as a good idea. Decreasing value of endowments, decreasing support from state and private sources, flat demand and increasing student-paid tuition is a horrible set of circumstances for Traditional Universities (TUs).

What an excellent opportunity for Capitalized Universities (CUs). TU’s are raising their tuitions to levels above the CUs resulting in CUs becoming economically more competitive. At the same time, CU’s traditional market of 25-40 year olds without a degree will increase substantially over the next decade. This is not a market TUs have traditionally served well. We can project that CUs will continue to advance in this market.

Presently, the Senate is going after the CU’s and in particular their participation in the student loan program. The Senate wants CUs to provide evidence at time of recruiting that their students will be able to secure a job (an impossible thing to do) when they graduate. These threats to CUs have resulted in the price of their stock to fall to the point that Apollo Group Inc., owners of the University of Phoenix, is selling at 9.8 times earnings, clearly a bargain for a growth stock with a promising future.

TU’s cannot continue to raise tuition and fees in order to survive. This is analogous to when a Wal-Mart opens in a small town, forcing local retail stores to raise their prices to maintain their income, and gradually these higher prices resulting in their loss of sales. TUs will experience the same fate and some will be forced to close as well.

Some universities are taking on debt to cover current deficits. Stanford University has borrowed millions in order to replace the income their endowment is no longer producing. When an institution borrows to meet operating expenses, things are very, very, bad indeed. Stanford has “kicked the can down the road” as the popular phrase of the day goes. Why shouldn’t they when everybody else seems to be doing the same thing? But for Stanford it could be fatal.

There will come a time when the Stanford University bonds will have to be paid. A scenario might ensue whereby Stanford fails to attract enough students to break even, as they gradually raise their tuition to $100,000 a year, and then payment is due.

In that scenario I can see Apollo Group purchasing Stanford’s bonds and merging it into their system, nuclear accelerator and all.

Are degree majors still the precursors of careers?

Tags

Bologna Process, European Higher Education Area, Interdisciplinary Studies

The phenomenon of changing careers has grown exponentially since the greedy 80’s got it started. More than likely, all those career shifters did not major in their new career. Does it matter that the new bank manager is a historian or that the new public relations manager has a degree in Ethnic Studies? Obviously not to their employers. So, if it is likely that in the future multiple career change will be the norm, what is the point of the currently narrow academic major?

Engineers need an appropriately narrow major in order to find their first job but soon enough they are doing something else; they become academic administrators, corporate officers, bureaucrats and entrepreneurs. Their degree may have “prepared” them for a life of linearity and an applications orientation, but all those geology courses the Petroleum Engineer had to take, do not help much when the subject moves into a career as a lobbyist. A teacher who must have a major in the subject she wants to teach, leaves the profession after three years (on average) and becomes a Life Coach. Haven’t seen a degree on Life Coaching yet.

Should we keep producing disciplinarily defined majors taking nearly all of the coursework within one discipline? Could we help students better if we prepared them for the predicted twenty-job and three-career future with a broader and interdisciplinary curriculum?

The Interdisciplinary BA is beginning to grow in all sorts of universities, in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the European Higher Education Area, spurred  by the Bologna Process. Once the homeless orphans of the academy, Interdisciplinary degrees are beginning to be accepted as the kind of broad preparation that Liberal Arts used to provide. But this trend may be conflicting with another trend. While some policymakers are promoting policies that call for cross-pollination of their disciplines, others are promoting a more narrow and occupationally-defined outcomes-based education, focused largely on the hypothetical first job.

This conflict seems to come from some policymakers focusing on the short term problem of a graduate finding a job for which they have been well prepared and others looking ahead a few decades, to what will happen after that first job. There’s also a difference (as it should be) between the focus of community colleges versus four-year colleges. The big push at the latter is for more interdisciplinary research, interdisciplinary publishing and globally-oriented degrees and at the former, a more responsive attitude toward employers.

University of Central Florida

Is the rise of the interdisciplinary degree good, bad or indifferent? I’ll give you some personal experience. When in high school my oldest son was ranked number one on his instrument, the bassoon, in statewide competition in Texas. He was admitted to the University of Texas at Austin with a scholarship in Music. Five years later he graduated as a Petroleum Engineer. What happened? The Music school wanted to control his curriculum and refused to give him credit for a course he had taken in advanced mathematics and so he walked across the campus to the Petroleum Engineering building, which did allow him to take music courses if he wanted to. But two years into his first job, he is heading into management, a profession in which he has not one college credit.

My youngest son wanted to be a Psychologist until he realized that the school he went to did not provide insight into the human mind, but training in the experimental method and statistical analysis, so he now has a degree in Asian studies and Japanese, and will soon move to Japan to work as a teacher.

I have a degree in economics but I teach organization and leadership in higher education and consult on institutional strategy. There isn’t one of my lawyer friends who is practicing law and my old doctor is now the owner of five restaurants.  My department’s administrator has a degree in computer science and the head of the place in which I exercise used to be a dentist. Nowhere in this list of arguably successful people is there a person who majored in what he or she is doing now.

Should this trend define what we do with students in college? Students are way ahead of us and are redefining themselves on their own. In my own campus 60% of the entering freshmen are “undeclared.” But this development is more than just manifested uncertainty, it is also an effort to prepare for variety. They seem to me to be searching for a passion to greet them with the next course and professor, and this may leave them with a broad education but without a major.

Northeastern University Interdisciplinary Studies

Soon we may see the following exchange. “So, young man” asks the HR person “What was your major in college? You seem to have left it out of your application.” You reply…”I majored in everything and nothing. I am interdisciplinary, global and adaptable to what the world will bring.”

The HR person smiles and says…“Young man, you are hired!”

But which department can handle such a degree? Interdisciplinary degrees today are housed in a Center or administered by the Provost’s office, which is both good and bad. Good in that it gives it a priority and visibility, bad in that it lacks the stability a department can give it.

Perhaps in the future there will be a new department, called “The Department of Future Uncertainty.”  A National Association of Future Uncertainty (NAFU) will soon follow and most certainly it will publish an online International Journal. If that’s the case, the BS in Future Uncertainty will come with a motto borrowed from Yogi Berra…”It is hard to make predictions, specially about the future.”

Move Back to the Future

Tags

access to education, American Graduation Initiative, Barack Obama, Bologna Process, Community College Summit, Germany, industrial training, Metropolitan College, stratergy, Tea Party, technical training, UPS, Wal-Mart

Community Colleges in the United States got their day in the limelight last week at the White House Summit on Community Colleges. Unhappily, political support and kind words were all they got. They needed much more to help them perform their vital role.

Last spring, President Obama announced an unusually well-conceived plan to speed up the production of Community College graduates, who are now dropping out at rates exceeding sixty percent.  He said “at the start of my administration I set a goal for America: By 2020, this nation will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world…Today, I am announcing the most significant down payment yet on reaching this goal in the next ten years. It’s called the American Graduation Initiative. It will reform and strengthen community colleges from coast to coast so that they get the resources students and schools need – and the results workers and businesses demand.” Congress failed to support this down payment.

Some would say that the Tea Party movement and their lack of support for any new government initiative are to blame. Pundits call this knee-jerk opposition a “populist” philosophy. If that is so, why would a populist movement charge against the type of government spending, (which is offset by the end of a government subsidy of private sector college lenders) which is a model in populism? Why would tea partiers be the enemies of the least elitist of all initiatives in education? My hunch is because the tea partiers are not populists at all, they are just simply not part of the deal.

Results from a survey of a national sample of Tea Party members carried out by Quinnipiac University in March of this year reported that 72 percent of them have less than a college degree. These are people who have, in essence, been left educationally behind. Also, over 70 percent of them are white and middle aged or older and they believe that the end of their productive life will be less predictable than they ever thought it would be. Conversely, in majority, community college students are young and non-white. The tea partiers fail to comprehend the relationship between educating the Social Security and Medicare contributors of the future and their own membership in these American safety net programs, which in the Quinnipiac sample tops 60 percent.

What can community colleges do to respond to the challenge posed by President Obama, when their enrollment has been frozen by budget cuts and their programs are in danger from the expert attack of the Capitalized Universities?

For the time being, they think all they can do is polish their image and improve their self-concept (and of course, sign resolutions). The Summit produced a “Call to Action”  resolution signed by six national organizations which sounds more like a “Call for Redemption.”. Why have community colleges not engaged in what the resolution calls for (quality, low cost, employer-relevant programs)? Well some have, and they are fulfilling the dream.

Wal-mart offers its employees a 10% discount on tuition from the University of Phoenix. Even if the student is a part-time employee, they can pursue a bachelors, masters or doctorate online, which means (strategically) that if you want to enroll at a University of Phoenix program and you are unemployed; you should explore a part-time job at Wal-mart and save thousands of dollars on your education, get an income and a full set of health benefits as well.

Or look at United Parcel Service, who with the leadership of Jefferson Community and Technical College and the University of Louisville, created something called Metropolitan College. This is not a college at all, but a special program designed to starve off the threatened move of UPS from its hub in Louisville if it could not find new ways to recruit and retain qualified workers for its Next Day Air operation. They were experiencing a 100 percent turnover in 1998, but by 2007 the turnover rate was 20 percent and Metropolitan College was the reason. Notably, this was not accomplished without a significant investment by UPS ($6.5 million), and the public sector, ($2.7 million).

I think is that the most productive strategic direction community colleges can pursue consists of three ingredients, 1) honor your roots, 2) duplicate the efforts of those who have got it right and 3) get off your pretentious soapbox.  In a previous post I suggested three no-cost moves colleges should make to improve retention in their academic programs (“Move closer, Move Up or Move In”). Here I suggest a different move for a different goal for community colleges based on the three ingredients mentioned above which is a variant of the “Move In” strategy, which I call…”Move Back.”

The basis of my thesis is that the pursuit of prestige has created a “soapbox of pretensions” on which most community colleges faculty and administration stand. They would like to be known as academically rigorous four-year institutions, which most of them have tried to become; abandoning their original mission as occupational, industrial, practical educators of the non-academically-oriented. My advice is, “move back” quickly, to your original mission, before you lose your way altogether. The road you are on is occupied by better-equipped 4-year colleges and the road you are abandoning is being quickly occupied by your competitors.

It is significant to note that Germany, which occupies a much lower ranking than the U.S. in the percentage of students who have finished a college degree, is doing better economically than we are. The reason for this is that Germany has maintained its post-war emphasis on “occupational, industrial, practical education” for the non-academically-oriented. These apprenticeship programs are responsible for Germany’s preeminence in the world in the very necessary machine tools of manufacturing which has actually kept their exports higher than their imports. This emphasis has not been easy to maintain, there are those who say that Germany is limiting its poor and immigrants to the technical programs when they could easily qualify for academic programs.

We faced this political issue here in the sixties. Community Colleges in the U.S. were originally expanded by President Truman to provide occupational programs, in high school and community colleges, until we learned that they were primarily populated by minorities who were “tracked” into those programs and away from academic pursuits. “Tracking” became illegal and eliminated from high school and community college programs yet today community colleges and not four-year colleges are still the ones who teach minorities and meanwhile our industrial base moved to the Far East.

This abandonment of tracking resulted in an abandonment of vocational education as an alternative to the academic high school. This would have been great if in fact minorities would have benefited from this practice and we could have maintained our supremacy in any part of the manufacturing spectrum, but we did not. Today, 40 years after tracking was eliminated minorities are ten times more likely to be underemployed and three times more likely to be unemployed.

I call for Community Colleges to “Move Back” and for its faculty to move out of community colleges if they want to be professors and join us in 4-year colleges, making room for teachers of industrial and vocational practice, who keep their eye on the ball, –technical, industrial employment,– not just a step to higher, higher education.

I call for community college Presidents and Chancellors to seek the prestige of being essential to the economic success of their communities and the nation instead of becoming what we don’t need, more 4-year colleges.

I challenge government officials and trustees to link themselves with employers, instead of trying to become more academically prestigious institutions. In other words I call on them to move back. Back to the Future that is.

European Student Union

Tags

American Student Union, Bologna Follow-Up, Bologna Process, European Community, European Higher Education Area, European Student Union, Learning outcomes, Ligia Deca, Romanian, stratergy, student-centered instruction, U.S. Student Association

European college students are members of an umbrella organization consisting of 44 national student unions from 37 countries representing more than 11 million students. The ESU serves as the students’ voice within the European Union’s Bologna Process and most importantly the Bologna Follow-Up Group, which is something like the accountability group keeping the Process honest. The ESU members, of course, do not always reach a consensus on issues but they do speak with one voice. That voice has belonged to a Romanian student Ligia Deca, their Chairperson for the past two years.

The seminal organization, created in 1982, changed its name to ESU and rose to prominence in 2002 to consolidate several national student unions. In the United States, the American Student Union started in the Depression Era. Historically, students were united on ideological grounds for the purpose of opening academia to dissent (mostly from the left).  In 1946, the organization evolved into The U.S. Student Association with a more mainstream agenda. ESU is a mixture of the two. Based in Brussels, the ESU lobbies the European Community, just as the U.S. Student Association in D.C. lobbies the U.S. Government, but the ESU effectively represents the diverse political and ideological causes of their constituency.

One of the major concerns of ESU (and reflected as one of Bologna’s Goals) is to make higher education more “student-centered” which they express as: “teaching should no longer be seen as a ‘one way process’ from teacher to learner. Real education can only come about through ‘discussion, projects and challenging the critical mind’.

Student-centered learning is therefore about students as ‘active participants’ in the classroom, as partners who contribute to reaching the required outcomes of a course or programme.” This belief that learning is achieved through the collaborative efforts between both faculty and students may not be accepted by those faculty members claiming learning as their exclusive domain.

There’s nothing radical or unreasonable in the student’s request to have the faculty involve them in their own learning. As a professor, I am sold on the idea and practice it in all my courses. Alarmingly, 70 percent of the European faculty members do not agree that instruction should be student-centered.

In a 2010 survey of their members ESU asked students’ opinion on what should be done about student-centered education in Europe’s universities. Over 75 percent of the students rejected the idea of having national guidelines or accreditation dictate teaching method. Their point of view expressed both their rejection of regulation in general and their recognition that learning is controlled by the faculty member. Yet an impressive 100 percent of the respondents want to have freedom to help choose the content, 80 percent of the students want to be evaluated not just with an exam but on “learning outcomes” and 82 percent want to have a role at evaluating their teachers.

When I began to teach I was told to write down my lecture and read it to the students. That is what my peers did and that’s how I was taught. Fortunately for me the person appointed as my first year mentor was a retired professor who had read Vygotsky and understood that learning was a social experience, an interaction between teacher and student, an open forum where students come to conclusions rather than memorize content.

It is hard to imagine what went wrong, when a people who discovered the basic foundation of student-centered instruction, the Socratic Dialogue, abandoned it. Bologna University was created by students in 1088 as the ultimate student-centered institution. European historians tell us that most of Europe gravitated to teacher-led and content-centered instruction during the Inquisition, established in 1478, perhaps because much of what faculty said, was going to be judged severely. Faculty could not afford dealing with the opinions and questions of students.

I’ve sat in classrooms as an observer in Spain and Italy, and all the classrooms were exclusively teacher-led. Students were evaluated via a single written test and graded on seat time and the ability to remember content.

We don’t have a survey of U.S. students on the same topic but my own undergraduate  students tell me that teacher-centered instruction is the norm for them and that reading from a written lecture has been replaced by reading from a Power Point. If you are a teacher you know that it is a lot easier to arrange the experience around you and what you know. But easy is not best. I have yet to be faced with a teaching philosophy, which states that this is the way it should be. It is a practice without a theory so it must be the result of human nature, the individual’s impulse to control their lives and make things easier for themselves.

Student-centered curriculum requires teachers to be awake, to know the curriculum very well and to cultivate the ability of leading by following, as Lau Tsu suggested.

Europe is undergoing a major transformation in higher education and the biggest hurdle is that of creating learning environments out of their teaching environments. No innovation, no 3-year degree, no Tuning or anything else can compare with the benefits Europe would derive from following the students.

ESU’s members believe in large majorities (80 percent or more) that European institutions need a quality improvement system (not a ranking or accreditation system) and that students should be involved in creating these. I give them an A for holding those opinions.

A panacea

Tags

3-year baccalaureate, Australia, Bologna Process, higher education, Japan, New Zealand, OECD, Use of time

Experts are fond of hedging their bets by suggesting that their solution to a problem is  “no panacea.” In Greek mythology, Panacea was the Goddess of cures. According to F. Graf (Greek Mythology) “panacea is used to depict a resolution to a large, multi-faceted problem.” Well, here’s my solution to the biggest problem facing our nation today, according to the experts. And because it solves the problem, by itself, I do offer it as the “Goddess of Cures”.

The problem is that we have fallen to 12th in the world on the percentage of college graduates. My panacea is to adopt the 3-year baccalaureate as the norm.

A comment on the September 17^th post raised a very important question; deserving additional discussion. The question from Amy Gibson is:

“Can you in fact say that the three year program will retain more students and graduate them faster, is there any data on that?”

Unfortunately, there are very few three-year bachelor programs in the United States; and comparing the three-year program to the traditional schedule in terms of retention and time to complete has not been performed at this time. To seriously assess the benefits of the three-year program, institutions need to create an experimental three-year program to test the benefits. It is important to note that in every college and university in the U.S. there are a number of students every year who complete the 120 units in three years, despite the lack of a formal three-year schedule.

Comparable data are available from the 32 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, (OECD) Headquartered in Paris. This is the most comprehensive international database available in the world. They report:

Overall, tertiary-type A (equivalent to the baccalaureate in the United States) graduation rates tend to be higher in countries in which programmes are mainly of shorter duration. Tertiary-type A graduation rates are around 40% or more in Australia, Sweden and the United Kingdom, where programmes of three to less than five years are the norm (95% or more of graduates follow programmes of three to less than five years). In contrast, in Austria and Germany, most students complete programmes of at least five years’ duration and tertiary-type A graduation rates are below 25%. In the future, with the implementation of the Bologna process there may be fewer programmes of long duration in European countries. Poland is a notable exception: despite typically long tertiary-type A programmes, its tertiary-type A graduation rate is over 40% [i]

This difference in graduation rates between countries with shorter duration of their baccalaureates and others of longer duration is the only quantitative indication we have that duration of the program affects retention of students. The U. S. is ranked in the middle of other countries, averaging 37.8%. There is a problem with these statistics, with regard to Australia and New Zealand, their graduation rates are artificially inflated by the fact that it includes a large percentage of international students. OECD notes:

Therefore, the adjusted graduation rates – when international students are excluded – for Australia and New Zealand are at 36% and 37% respectively.

Our low average graduation rate, while greater than Australia and New Zealand is not enough even to replace our retiring workforce and that is what concerns us here in the United States. It puts us at par with Italy and the Czech Republic, but ironically way ahead of Austria and Germany where the typical time to completion is five years. According to the Lumina Foundation we need 23 million more graduates than the 39 percent rate would give us. But there’s an additional problem. In the United States, our average time to completion has risen to 4.97 years (in 2007) and therefore, if the hypothesis that taking less time increases the graduation rate, then the opposite is likely to be true, that we can expect our increasing average time to graduation will continue to depress our graduation rate.

Given our current drop-out rates and the expanding time to completion, we will never attain this goal of replacing retiring employees even when we graduate 90 percent of the high school students and 50 percent graduate from College in the average 4.97 years.

OECD Education at a Glance 2009, page 66

So what does this all mean? It means that only a program to complete the baccalaureate in three years can turn around the decline and give us the students we need. The number of Universities adopting this plan would determine the degree to which we are able to successfully replace the retiring workforce. Nothing else is likely to achieve this important goal.

A reader of our September 23 post thinks I am making things too complex and suggests a simpler explanation:

You need to explain it in more basic terms. “If you have a car factory that produces one car every four hours and you change that so that it produces one car every three hours, how many more cars can it produce in a 24 period?” Answer 2

Should we be worried about lower graduation rates in the United States? Of course.

Our economic and social system depends upon an educated electorate, working with state of the art technologies, designing the future. We cannot do this unless we adopt a three-year degree program as the norm for all state colleges and universities.

If we fail to promote the three-year program, we will rapidly descend into an irrecoverable downward spiral feared by Karen Shore on the September 17^th post:

“Hate to be an alarmist, but we could be making toys for the Chinese by 2025.”

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[i] OECD Education at a Glance 2009, page 67

Time lost is gone forever

Tags

3-year baccalaureate, Bologna Process, European Higher Education Area, higher education

In this and the following post, I am presenting some of the previous week’s comments because I believe these commentaries deserve further discussion. The previous posting elicited many different kinds of responses including the Blog, my email, cell phone and even in-person.

None of them were more humorous or personally on target that this tongue-in-cheek response from “Moorehouse”.  Referring to my suggestion that a standard 120 unit college degree should take only 36 months, he/she writes:

“You mean I have to neglect the necessary elements of character development found in getting drunk every night and partying with my old high school pals who never went to college, during an entire summer? (That I must) Stay in stuffy old dorms, take even more classes, hang around with a bunch of nerds, neglect the pleasure of taking the family’s cash ahead of inheriting it and so on and so on??? Do I have to do that??? Sign me up!”

Many years ago when I was devoting my time and energies to researching and improving K-12 education, I was influenced by the theories of Hank Levin, a professor at Stanford University. Levin proposed that instead of “slowing down” the pedagogic speed of teaching “disadvantaged” students, (a practice some called “compensatory education” and others called “dumbing down”) we should accelerate instruction (i.e., deliver instruction at the same level than it was delivered to gifted and talented students).

This was not an intuitive idea (as are nearly all of educators’ ideas which are based on research findings); therefore, logically it must be wrong. Levin evolved his theories in 1980 but it was not until 1986 that an experiment was funded in the San Francisco Bay Area. By 2000, a Federally-funded study[i] revealed that, “Schools have reported substantial increases in student achievement, parent participation, community projects, student research, and artistic endeavors. Third-party evaluations have shown gains in student achievement of 8 percentiles in a national evaluation and about 40 percentiles in an urban sample of six schools when compared with similar schools not undertaking reforms. The accomplishments suggest that a school based on acceleration is superior to one using remediation for students in at-risk situations.”

Henry M. Levin

So, if that’s the case why isn’t everyone practicing accelerated instruction? A colleague who practices Marxist philosophy says “Capitalism needs for the masses to remain ignorant and dependent in order to meet their exploitative aims.” I have lived and studied in both Marxists and Capitalists societies and I disagree. I think instead that evidence can never defeat “common sense,” which is another way of saying “uninformed intuition,” as the propeller of popular opinion. That’s why 18% of Americans do not believe we have landed on the moon, 28% think President Obama is not a Christian, 20% think that he is a Muslim, or that 30% think he has not proven that he was born in the United States.

But evidence supports the efficacy of accelerated instruction. Boredom is a more powerful anti-motivator than any other school induced activity.

I agree that it is almost always the case that adolescents mature in college and how they mature is important. Of course you don’t have to go to College to mature, as many thousand prove every year. But if you go to college to “mature” some people argue, you need 4 years to do that, not the 3 years I was proposing. Summer breaks with leisurely out-of-school activities would seal the deal on maturity. That’s what “Moorehouse” is satirizing.

This is a tough world where vast amounts of new information needs to be processed quickly, understood correctly and acted upon immediately. Giving adolescents five months off a year (including summers and in between vacations) prepares them for a world that does not exist. Who else in the society will be entering full time employment but only work 7 months a year? As I finish writing this, I am reminded of what a friend (another university professor like me) observes. He says his schedule is 24/7, “that is, 24 hours a week, 7 months out of the year.” I suggest two months is more than enough time to recuperate, restore and redirect energies in pursuit of a goal, both for the professor and for the student. However, this idea seems counter-intuitive and is not in line with the rest of society.

Another argument against accelerated instruction is that students change their major and thus need more time to redirect their attention. If students change their majors so often that it requires five years of college and 150 units to graduate them, I would call that a rich kid with time on his hands and money in his pocket. Finding oneself may not happen until middle-age, so what are we to do, keep them in college until their hair is white and they trade-in the convertible for a mini-van?

It is time to look at college for what it is, a place to begin understanding the world around as an adult, learning what has been discovered by others, advancing new knowledge, and yes, earning a degree that tells employers you can do something. (Maybe, we think, we swear, to the best of our knowledge.) But for God’s sake let’s use our time properly and do it in 36 months.

More comments about other comments next post

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[i] Bloom, Howard; Ham, Sandra; Kagehiro, Susie; Melton, Laura; O’Brien, Julieanne; Rock, JoAnn; and Doolittle, Fred. 2000. Evaluating the Accelerated Schools Program: A Look at Its Early Implementation and Impact on Student Achievement in Eight Schools. New York: Manpower Development Research Corporation.

“Ahi está el detalle” (And that’s the rest of the story)

Tags

3-year baccalaureate degree, Bologna Process, Cantinflas, Clifford Adelman, European Higher Education Area, higher education, Paul Gaston, time to completion, Use of time

The famous Mexican comedian, Cantinflas, appeared in over 100 films, including the original Around the World in 80 Days. In probably 99 of those he engaged in a routine where he would (usually when caught red-handed) put together the most improbable of arguments.  When the straight man pointed out the fallacies of his case, Cantinflas would immediately agree by saying, “ahi está el detalle” (literal translation “that’s the detail”) or as Paul Harvey would say in conclusion of his radio broadcast “And that’s the rest of the story.” No matter how often Cantinflas played the bit, I would invariably laugh. Ahi está el detalle now describes what is missing in the structure of American Higher Education and is not a laughing matter.

I have been observing the Bologna Process for a long time and was doubtful it would ever work (see my previous blog “The Bologna Process Succeeds?”).  Presently, the United States has only begun to become aware of the Bologna Process goals. A new book by the distinguished scholar Paul Gaston[i] argues persuasively that the United States needs to adopt the Bologna Process principles. Another distinguished scholar, Clifford Adelman[ii] has been following the process for years and also promotes the Bologna Process principles.

I do not claim these authors’ level of familiarity with the Bologna Process. However, their observations, while cognizant of it, have not yet recognized one of Bologna’s innovation as crucial. This “ahi está el detalle” is the innovation of the 3-year baccalaureate presently lacking in the United States and which has been adopted by 95% of the countries participating in Bologna, most of them since 2002.

The lack of the 3-year degree may by itself  explain why the United States is now ranked 12^th in percent of citizens holding college degrees. A decade ago the United States was ranked 1^st.

Examining those countries that exceed us in college degree holders, I was unable to detect any remarkable increase in their high school graduation rates compared to the United States. It is true that high school graduation in the United States has remained at more or less 70% level over the past decade. Yet, according to OECD “levels in Germany, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, and Switzerland have (also) been stable over the last decade.”[iii] Germany, Greece, Ireland, Japan, Korea and Norway have for the last 20 years, graduation rates of 90% of their high school students having increased 7% since 1995. This increase, without a parallel increase in college enrollment, would not explain our relative decline either.

I cannot discern a significant increase in college enrollment as well. In some cases, such as Australia and New Zealand, the number of students enrolling in higher education places these countries in the number one and two positions respectively. But that is misleading because as OECD explains. “High proportions of international students influence entry rate levels. In Australia and New Zealand, the impact of international students is so huge that their entry rate dropped significantly when international students were excluded, causing them to lose their top two ranking positions.”[iv]

Our current catch-up policy efforts are being directed toward a multitude of goals, all of them important and significant, but not in themselves explanatory of our falling behind. The College Board has created a Commission on Access, Admissions and Success in Higher Education, which has set forth 10 goals in order to bring the U.S. back from the brink. They range from lowering tuition to improving early childhood education to reducing the large attrition rate. Each of these goals will provide positive results, but they will not give us the push we need in the short term.

A clue as to what has set us back can be found in a working paper presented earlier this year to the National Bureau of Economic Research by John Bound, Michael F. Lovenheim, and Sarah Turner.[v] In this paper, the authors present evidence that “Time to completion of the baccalaureate degree has increased markedly in the United States over the last three decades…” Students in the United States are taking longer to finish the traditional 4-year degree, an average of 4.97 years, or one full school-year longer. This reduces the total number of graduates by 20 percent. The number of students completing in 4 years fell 14.6 percent to 26.1 percent. Those most affected by this trend are those who begin their postsecondary education at public colleges outside the most selective universities and amongst low-income students. These are the same students who are the most rapidly growing segment of our college-going population.

So, while members of the Bologna Process are effectively graduating students in three years, 25 percent faster than us, we are taking 20 percent longer than our 4-year model to achieve the same. And that 45 percent difference is the primary reason we fell behind. I can hear Cantinflas describing the 3-year option, which is missing in American Higher Education as, “Ahi está el detalle”

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[i] Gaston, Paul L The Challenge of Bologna: What the United States Higher Education Has to Learn from Europe and Why It Matters that we learn it. 2010 Stylus Publishing, Sterling, Virginia

[ii] Clifford Adelman has written on this topic in several publications such as “The Bologna club: What U.S. Higher Education can learn from a decade of European reconstruction” (2008) Institute for Higher Education Policy, Washington, D.C.

[iii] Education at a Glance 2009 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. You may retrieve a copy at my website:

[iv] Iden.

[v] Increasing Time to Baccalaureate Degree in the United States by John Bound, Michael F. Lovenheim, and Sarah Turner NBER Working Paper No. 15892 April 2010 You may retrieve a copy at my website:

Failure and Success at Herding Cats

Tags

access to education, articulation agreements, Bologna Process, Common Application, Common Black College Application, European Higher Education Area, higher education, Lumina Foundation, partnerships in higher education, SuperAPP

The idea began with 15 private 4-year colleges who wanted to improve their marketing for new students by pioneering a common, standardized application form that every institution would share. The prospective student would complete one application, which could be sent to all 15 colleges and thereby save time and increase his or her chances of getting admitted to a college without endless repetitive applications. While it sounded like a great idea, there were not many buyers.

The Common Application (CA) association began offering a common application in 1975 and today, thirty-five years later, it has reached 400 colleges (barely 20% of the 4-year institutions in the US).

From the beginning, the CA process appeared like a solution in search of a problem. Admission officers wanted the freedom of having their institution-specific application and did not see the student having to complete several applications as a particular problem.

Today there are many alternatives to the CA. There’s the Universal College Application (UCA), the Common Black College Application (CBCA) and the SuperAPP but none of them have increased participation markedly. The UCA, introduced in 2007, has added fewer than 75 colleges to the list using a common application. Of the 103 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) only 35 have signed up to the CBCA. SuperAPP, a private-sector effort, which began just this year, is more promising. They claim to provide for the individual requirements of 1,400 of the 4-year colleges, but a call to six admission departments of listed members revealed that no applications have been received by any of them this year. SuperAPP, while eliminating many of the limitations of the other systems, still has to attract enough applicants to make participation on the part of colleges and universities pay off.

I bring this to your attention because an even more important effort, which I wrote about last week, the Tuning policy of the Bologna Process, has the potential of going the way of CA. Such slow growth implementing Tuning nationally would spell failure for America, not just American higher education.

Tuning would be fully useful only if the vast majority of colleges and universities signed up; and then the content of each bachelor degree would become more transparent and easier to assess. It would facilitate mobility, be informative to employers and new applicants and modify our understanding in higher education of what we do and how we do it.

The potential benefits of Tuning are not easily appreciated and this innovation could go the way of CA if it weren’t for Lumina. The Tuning policy has found a creative and powerful friend in the Lumina Foundation.

Lumina’s plan for Tuning is faculty-led and their process is a blend of their policy-making and community-persuading method. There’s an interesting video online that provides a synthesis of what Tuning is all about and a look at the early stages of the process and the challenges that remain. You can access it here: http://www.luminafoundation.org/podcasts/tuning-adventures-in-learning.html

Given what is at stake, America’s competitiveness and Americans’ social and economic welfare, Lumina’s agenda could not be more important. However, if 35 years from now, Tuning has only been adopted by 20% of the colleges and universities, the process would have failed, we as a nation would have failed and our standard of living would have declined to that of a third world nation. Tuning brings cohesion, cooperation and efficiency to our individualistic, uncooperative and inefficient system. While that sounds great to me, I’m afraid the higher education community likes things just the way they are.

Lumina has undertaken this challenge with their eyes open. They have also opened their heart and their wallet recognizing their special role. “As the nation’s largest private foundation focused exclusively on getting more Americans into and through higher education, Lumina has a unique leadership opportunity—and responsibility—to create a national sense of urgency in order to stimulate action in higher education and public policy to achieve the big goal. Lumina Foundation will be a catalyst in America’s pursuit of the goal and the critical outcomes.”  To create a national sense of urgency, that’s what needs to happen before Tuning can work. I’ll tell you from personal experience, that’s what herding cats is like.