0 Struggle at CUNY

Readers of this blog ought to be interested in changes at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York affecting the pay and resources of their graduate students.

In a nutshell, the same market-based approaches to education inflicted on k-12 schooling and more recently undergraduate education are now being brought to bear on graduate education.  Characteristics of that sector that some find undesirable-- for example longer times to degree--are being attributed to student laziness and treated with new rejiggered incentives.  The President of the CUNY Grad Center recently equated his students with roaches, who check into a model and never check out.

The pushback on the part of many CUNY grad students is merited and admirable-- while some of the so-called reforms are good on their face (who doesn't like fellowships?) their roll out and implementation suggest deeper problems.  It seems that too-little consideration has been given to the effects on access likely to occur with such a completion agenda, and this is especially problematic at an institution with such a long history of opening doors (and admittedly, then often slamming them).

I'm eager to learn more about these events, and encourage those of you in New York to share what you know with us.

0 Money Matters, but So Does Avoiding Red Tape

Cross-posted from the original over at the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

“There’s no such thing as free money,” Joanne, a middle-aged African-American mother of two sitting across the table from me declared. “But for me, getting this college degree depends on whether I have enough money to afford it.”

Solving the problem of college affordability lies at the heart of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s $3.3 million Reimagining Aid Delivery & Design project, which has spurred a series of reports covered weekly in the news this year. While the reports run the gamut of possible suggestions, from tying aid to students’ academic backgrounds to replacing the Pell Grant with a federal-state matching grant, they all have a similar refrain: Whatever the solution, it must be cheaper—it simply isn’t possible to request any additional spending.

Similarly, when I visit Washington policy makers and talk about the needs of the Pell Grant recipients I’ve been studying for the past five years, and describe how financial scarcity is affecting their lives, most listen sympathetically and then apologize, sadly, noting there’s no more money to be found. I get it: They are pragmatists and politicians, unfailingly realistic, and simply asking me to get in line with the new normal.

So if there’s “no free money” and yet more money is essential, what are we to do? First, it’s time to search for answers outside of Washington. And second, we have to consider the possibility of finding solutions outside the narrow higher-education-policy space. Maybe we can learn new things in communities across the country, where hard-working people are thinking beyond the usual silos, connecting the dots to develop new approaches.

Back when I was a graduate student, I spent time conducting research at community colleges across the country as Bill Clinton’s infamous welfare reform was enacted. I watched as programs providing supports to low-income, parenting, community-college students were shuttered, in the name of a “work first” approach to poverty alleviation.  While many students were receiving federal financial aid, the additional child care and transportation they got met their many unmet needs above and beyond the stated institutional “costs of attendance.” Welfare reform ended those supports, and widened the gulf between America’s education and poverty-reduction agenda. College for all, my colleagues and I wrote in our book, Putting Poor People to Work (Russell Sage, 2006), was clearly more hype than reality.

In 1998, as welfare reform was getting under way, Joanne began attending classes at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. She came for a few sessions and was excited about the opportunity to get an education, but quickly realized that the cost of her 45-minute subway commute was draining her budget. She began hopping the subway turnstiles, trying to stay in school and get by. She looked for help at BMCC and didn’t find it. And after a month, she decided that hopping turnstiles wasn’t OK, wasn’t what she really was about, and she dropped out of school.

As advocates like those at the Center for Law and Social Policy have pointed out, transportation is a common barrier to community-college success, as is a lack of housing and food. But usually, community colleges do not have the power or resources to provide vouchers or free rides, nor are they in the business of coordinating social services. And post-welfare reform, they were explicitly disarmed from doing so.

Fast-forward more than a decade. The recent recession hit Joanne hard. She lost her job, and in 2011 re-enrolled at BMCC to try again. This time, as she walked through the doors of her school, she saw a new green sign: Single Stop USA. She walked in a Pell Grant recipient, and walked out equipped with food stamps, transportation vouchers, and child-care benefits.

This wasn’t a typical city social-services office with long lines and suspicious counselors who often treat poor women like Joanne with disrespect. Right in the middle of campus, between her classes, she had a 15-minute appointment with an electronic evaluation process facilitated by a knowledgeable counselor who equipped her with the money and support it seems she needed to make a degree possible. This spring, she will complete her associate degree.

Single Stop sprang into being in the years following welfare reform, arising to pull together the fragile strings of the remaining social safety net and knit them well enough to give the working poor a bit of a landing. Originally located in community-based organizations in New York City, where it was homegrown by the Robin Hood Foundation, in the last three years, the small Harlem-based nonprofit has found homes in 17 community colleges around the country.

In the last 12 months alone, Single Stop served almost 20,000 students. All told, its efforts brought an additional $38-million into the hands of those students, not by increasing the Pell Grant or encouraging them to take on debt, but simply by helping them navigate complicated social services to get the benefits already allocated for their use. Using trained professionals who help students see the importance of efficiently using existing resources to push toward a college degree, and by working closely with colleges to promote a focus on the whole student in order to promote academic success, Single Stop complements the development of both individuals’ soft skills and their financial resources. For every $1 the program costs, it brings $14 in benefits students wouldn’t have otherwise had.

Can we assume that additional money is pushing students like Joanne toward degrees? It’s too soon to tell—there haven’t yet been any rigorous comparison-group evaluations. Thus far this year, I’ve tried to find out by visiting six community-college campuses in New York and Miami where Single Stop is functioning, and interviewing administrators, staff, and students.

Good stories like Joanne’s abound. So do horror stories of tremendous need—community-college students sleeping on grates, suffering strokes, going without food for days—which would make anyone wonder about cruelty of the college-for-all rhetoric unbuttressed by sufficient support.

But even before demonstrating clear impact, Single Stop USA has already proved one thing: If money really matters for college degrees, we may be able to find a lot more of it by bridging unreasonable divides between public agencies, reducing paperwork, and repositioning the community college as a point of connection as well as education. That’s a pragmatic solution we may be all able to live with, and it’s a good place to start.

0 Crisis in Academic Governance & Standards at CUNY

The following is a guest posting by Robin Rogers, associate professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). Robin authored the popular "Billionaire Education Policy." She can be reached via email at robinrogers99@gmail.com
Follow her on Twitter: @Robin_Rogers

The City University of New York (CUNY) is in the middle of a clash over budget-driven higher education reform that could rival the Chicago Public School strike, and that is bad for everyone. The epicenter of the crisis right now is in the small, unassuming English department of Queensborough Community College (QCC). 

At issue is CUNY’s implementation of a new program known as Pathwaysthat aims to make transferring among CUNY colleges, particularly from the community colleges to the senior colleges, easier and to improve graduation rates. It is also an attempt to make the CUNY system more cost-effective. All of this seems very rational. In fact, when I first heard about Pathways, I thought it might work. What is happening now, however, is tearing CUNY apart and threatens to diminish the noble CUNY system, with its unmatched diversity, which has been a center of both academic excellence and accessibility for decades.

Before getting into the decidedly local, and very shocking, details of what is happening at CUNY, and which reached a boiling point last week at QCC, I want to make it clear that CUNY is not a unique case. Similar dynamics are at work throughout higher education and, thankfully, some universities are handling it with  grace and wisdom. (For an example see, THIS is What Shared Governance Looks Like! ) That bodes well not only for those universities but also for the future of the institution of higher education.

As with all major events, the CUNY Pathways crisis has a long history and many facets. I’ll start with the event that was significant enough to merit coverage in the New York Times on September 17^th. Here is what happened.

On September 12^th, 2012 Interim Vice President of Academic Affairs at Queensborough College, Karen Steelecame to the English Department’s faculty meeting to discuss a proposed change to the department’s composition courses that would make it a 3-hour course rather than a 4-hour course and thus compliant with the new CUNY Pathways rule. According to a faculty member present, “She also brought a host of threats, including some of the ones that she later put into writing in her infamous emailwhich essentially threatened to dissolve our entire department.  It was clear that she expected our department to roll over and vote to pass the new courses – if you can call something a vote when only one outcome is acceptable and the other outcome results in the termination of your employment.“

Professor David Humphries, then the Deputy Chair of the English Department was quoted in the Times as saying “It’s hard to understand how teaching less English, less math, less science and less foreign languages could be good for students,” Echoing concerns expressed by many other faculty across CUNY campuses, including myself, Humphries continued, “Under the guise of streamlining transferability we’re actually watering down the students’ education.”

It gets worse. Much worse.

The English department voted against dropping the fourth hour of instruction on the grounds that it was academically unsound; their students needed more time. Then they elected David Humphries as Chairman of the English Department by an almost 3/4^th majority faculty vote.

On November 6^th, Election Day -- one hopes this simply reflects President Call’s finely honed sense of irony -- Queensborough College President Diane Call rejected the vote for Humphries. Instead, she replaced the faculty-elected Humphries with her own self appointed interim chair (who was brought out of retirement to take on the task) and announced that she would be conducting a national search for a new department chair. The interim chair would take over administrative tasks, while Vice-President Karen Steele – yes, you do remember that name – would assume tasks such as bringing faculty members up for promotion and tenure.

The English Department issued an open letter demanding that President Call reverse her decision and respect faculty autonomy in departmental governance. A petition is also being circulated, which you can sign and circulate online.

The events at QCC are only a part of what is happening at CUNY.  Now there is a lawsuit against Pathways by the faculty union. There very well may be another lawsuit over Call’s recall of a department chair, which appears to violate the bylaws of the faculty that requires that a petition to the Faculty Executive Committee be signed by a majority of the full-time faculty members of the department. Last week, Staten Island College faculty voted to reject Pathways. Other colleges and departments are taking similar action. Foreign languages, classics, and philosophy – the core of the traditional humanities – are extremely limited under Pathways. And so much more.

This promises to be an interesting and important week for higher education and for CUNY. If you want to follow what is happening on twitter, you can follow #CUNYPathways.

Full disclosure: I worked with Professor Humphries almost ten years ago when he was at Queens College, and I have the highest regard for him.

*******

Update: 11/13/11

The following email was sent to members of the Queensborough Community College English Department late this morning:

Colleagues—

It is my decision to accept the recommendation forwarded by the English Department for Dr. David Humphries to serve as its Chairperson, effective November 14, 2012.

In a lengthy meeting with Dr. Humphries yesterday, he expressed his willingness and ability to advance the important work of the English Department in curricular and personnel matters. I have confidence in and appreciate his sincerity to unite the department as a community, in the best interests of the College and our students.

Thank you.

Dr. Diane B. Call

Interim President

Queensborough Community College

0 Things That Make Me Go Hmm....(Part 2)

Hot off the presses, recent news that has me scratching my head, or otherwise up in arms...

(1) Raising tuition in expensive cities in the midst of an economic crisis. Yep, that's what CUNY thinks is the right thing to do. Hat tip to Tom Hilliard, who pointed me to this incredible inane comment from a CUNY administrator: "What's really driving some of the issues here is the concern about debt and debt upon graduation, and our students as a whole take out little debt, for obvious reasons. The tuition's affordable for those who can pay." Um, yeah.

(2) The White House wades into the quagmire of university admissions, promoting creative thinking on how to achieve diversity. In one sense, just in time, since it sure looks like the Supreme Court is going to end the use of race in admissions by June. On the other hand, I wish the Administration would issue some cautions about how criteria like first-generation status and high school attended are hardly clean proxies for race. Plenty of folks want to do something less controversial, which socioeconomic diversity proxies will accomplish, but they can't and shouldn't pretend the outcomes achieved will be the same.

(3) Jerry Sandusky is innocent? So he says. "I didn't do those things. I'm not the monster I've been made out to be. I didn't engage in sexual activities with those kids." Others told me similar things during a recent trip to Penn State. I don't know, call me naive but I'm inclined to believe the testimony of the 8 or more adults who say they were raped, over the guy who likes to call anal sex "horseplay." I don't care what his "motives" were-- I care what his ACTIONS were. And by the way, does he sound drugged or drunk to anyone else?