0 On Academics and Athletics

The Faculty Senate at UW-Madison is a very quiet place.  We meet monthly for about two hours and while the agenda is packed, hardly anyone asks questions or makes impassioned speeches (present company excluded, of course).

But on one issue, you can count on professors to speak up: athletics.

More specifically, the money paid to coaches and staff on campus invokes more vehemence and animosity from my colleagues than any other issue I've seen brought to the forefront.

I suspect the same is true at other schools.  For it's fairly uniformly the case that salaries in athletics are far higher than those in academics and rise much, much faster.

But of course, you might say. And how silly, Sara, to doubt that this is not only a good thing, but a smart thing!  For as we all know, athletics brings money and needed attention to universities, generates revenue that benefits the entire institution, and more than pays for itself. In fact, people who care about financial aid ought to be nothing but thrilled to have an awesome football program. Right? I mean, don't you remember that local banks have a history of contributing to financial aid when the players score touchdowns?

We hear this all the time. In fact, the budget for athletics is the one untouchable area of spending on campus, where no one dare ask hard questions lest we seem ungrateful or worse yet anti-Bucky.

This is silly. Let's stipulate to a mutual fondness for competition and sheer enjoyment of football. Let's agree that it's important to have fun, and that fun attracts applications. And let's even say that coaches "earn" those big salaries.  So what?  The relative salaries of coaches and faculty is merely the canary in the coal mine. The larger issue is over the relative status of academics vs. athletics on campus and what that imbalance says about the state of higher education at major universities.

As public universities struggle to stay afloat and talk of unbundling their instruction and research and just about everything else they do, it's time for sports to be placed on the table too.  Because despite all of the protests to the contrary, rigorous analyses suggest that more often than not, athletics competes with academics for dollars.  And while there's often no state funding invested in athletics, there's no reason in the world for taxpayers to stand for activities that undermine the educational investments they're paying for.

A recent brief from the Delta Cost Project asks and attempts to answer some really good questions using national data. It's time for such questions to be asked and addressed by athletic boards, including  UW-Madison's.  Here are points with which to start:

• How much more do we spend per athlete compared to spending per average student?
• How do trends in athletic costs compare to trends in academic costs? Has spending been cut in athletics to the same degree it's been cut in academics? Do expenditures outpace revenues? 
• What percent of the athletic budget is spent on student financial aid for athletes?  How does this compare to the university's budget for financial aid for non-athletes?
• What fraction of total athletic budget revenue comes from ticket sales? What percent comes from student fees? From institutional subsidies? 
• What fraction of the money generated by athletics is distributed for the university's financial aid program? How does this compare to the amount distributed at peer institutions, especially when taking into account student unmet need?

Of course athletic departments like Madison's do use and publish data but the analyses are mainly concerned with public impressions, and this is why they highlight economic impact studies like these. The problem is that such studies do not address the direct and indirect impacts of athletics on academic programs and cannot assess what the university would look and feel like if it weren't home to collegiate sports.  Unsurprisingly, I don't see such information in the annual reports of the Athletic Board either (though admittedly these are only posted through 2010). 

For that kind of data, you have to look to places like the Faculty Senate.  Listen the angry voices of professors who've not had a cost-of-living increase in years but constantly watch the football and basketball coaches get enormous boosts. See the faces of staff members who are literally out-earned many times over by the "big men on campus."  Hear the relative roar of the crowds over touchdowns versus Nobel Prizes.  Watch the surprise on students' faces when they learn they are expected to attend class, not just games. There are effects of such choices. They're all around us.

Tomorrow, the UW Athletic Board will vote on the Athletic Department's budget for 2013-2014. The request is for $133 million.  That includes a one-time, $30 million expense for construction costs related to the department’s Student-Athlete Performance Center.  As Professor David McDonald has noted in the past, this is an Athletic Board with teeth.  It's up to that shared governance body to consider the critical balances in play on this campus and elsewhere, and to ensure that academics aren't outcompeted by athletics.

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 Stand with Michael Kissick

This is what bravery looks like.

My colleague Michael Kissick is an untenured professor at UW-Madison with an unyielding commitment to the Wisconsin Idea, free speech and vigorous sifting and winnowing.  He is a peaceful man who, like many of us, enjoys a good Solidarity Singalong.

But when he went to the Capitol on September 13, 2012,  he was told that he would receive a ticket for participating in that now famous activity.  Group gatherings of more than 4 people that are intended to "promote a cause", are now forbidden in the "Peoples' house."

Who decides what's promoting a cause?  Oh, well of course the Capitol Police do.

You can't expect any rational, intelligent person to accept this nonsense. And Michael is not. He's now represented by the ACLU and has filed a federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court this afternoon-- on behalf of all of us peaceful, free thinking citizens and our right to assemble.

Lord knows what's headed Michael's way over the coming days and weeks as this thing unfolds. I fully expect requests for his email and critiques of his personal beliefs and attacks on the rights of professor to think and do for themselves.

What happens to Michael happens to us all.  Stand with Michael.

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 The Higher Education Lobby Comes to UW-Madison

This morning, the UW System Board of Regents heard from a prominent speaker: Molly Corbett Broad, President of the American Council of Education.  Then, around noon, she joined a group on the UW-Madison campus to share a similar talk, but this time with an audience of faculty, staff, and students. Both talks focused on the theme of "higher education at a crossroads."

I had the honor of introducing President Broad to the second audience, in my role as Senior Scholar at the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education.  I also moderated the discussion portion of the conversation.

As I'm grateful to Broad for joining us, I feel it's among the most respectful acts to fully engage with her comments and offer my thoughts and questions here.  Simply receiving information from a talk without vigorously considering and debating the ideas is inconsistent with the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea.  So, with that in mind, here are my thoughts.

First, let's begin with 10 key points Broad made in her talk:

1. Today's undergraduates are quite different from yesterday's. In particular, they are often older, have fewer resources, and are especially interested in getting a return on their college investment.
2. Students' reactions to loan burdens are often inappropriate, given the sizable return to college degrees.  Broad noted that it's better to have a college education than to own a home. She also clearly stated that students who take on too many loans are greatly in need of financial education.
3. Many  colleges and universities are struggling financially to stay afloat.  Broad posited that this was an inevitable trend, unlikely to change.  She showed a slide indicating that 50% of universities are reporting lower enrollment growth.
4. The federal government, said Broad, is a minor player in higher education and it's best that it remain that way.  A growing role of the federal government, she said, would be unwelcome.  She told the audience to remember the old adage that those with the gold do the ruling (or something similar, implying that the federal government will try to control whatever it funds).
5. It is therefore problematic, noted Broad, that a growing number of undergraduates are "dependent" on the federal Pell Grant. 
6. There is a lot of variation among institutions, Broad pointed out. To illustrate this, she showed data indicating that the selective private universities admit just 13% of applicants and spend $75,000 on each student, while less selective privates admit 67% of applicants and spend $21,000 per student.
7. It is important, said Broad, that we provide better counseling to explain to students (especially those without family resources) that "not every student can afford to attend every institution."  
8. We have done a great job expanding access to college, say Broad. 
9. The classic iron triangle of higher education (which I've dissected many times, including in a blog for the Board of Regents) is now outdated, according to Broad, and must be rethought with a focus on innovation.
10. The key innovation lies in online courses and services.  Broad said "isn't it time for us to take lessons from private business?" and pointed to MOOCs.  Udacity, Coursera, and EdX "will help higher education meet the forces of change," she reported. Of course, Broad noted the usual concerns about academic quality, and then said that we could be confident that ACE was helping ensure quality control. Specifically, she said that ACE had been "retained" by the MOOCs to assess quality.

Before providing my own comments, here is a taste of what the audience at WISCAPE had to say in response. First, a graduate student asked about the implications for academic labor, noting his concern that graduate student training opportunities would be diminished if MOOCs were the main mechanism for course delivery.  Broad responded that graduate student experiences with regard to teaching were already subpar.  A staff member asked how we might alter tenure incentives to focus more on innovative teaching, and Broad said she didn't know.  A faculty member asked about how MOOCs generate money for their schools-- and Broad said that remained to be seen.  And finally, the Chief Information Officer of UW-Madison noted that broadband access, critical to online education, is woefully insufficient in some parts of the country, and asked Broad to do the lobbying to help shore it up. In response, Broad suggested that he contact the Obama Administration and let her know what they said.

Ok.  I was struggling to stay silent throughout all of this for one major reason:  There is a abundant gulf between the (mainly accurate) trends among undergraduates and institutions that Broad described and the solution she offered.  So I asked her: "If on the one hand we know that the number of economically disadvantaged students in higher education is growing, and many colleges and universities have fewer resources with which to serve them, how can we expect a solution (MOOCS) which provide less student contact (particular the hands-on kind important to success of first generation students) and no additional revenue to help?"  

Her response was that our current model is broken, and that she would not want to be the person to "underestimate the potential of disadvantaged students to benefit from MOOCs" as much as any other student.

Hmm.  Well.  

First, this must be the new version of the "soft bigotry of low expectations" for higher education.  Now it's the skeptic of MOOCs who doubts the potential of poor students, rather than the potential of the proposed educational plan? This was especially remarkable since the comment was directed at a researcher who spends inordinate amounts of time with the same Pell recipients she was discussing-- who, by the way, would take offense at being termed "Pell dependent."  (Recall when welfare receipt became welfare dependence, folks?)  What I know, from spending time on the campuses of community colleges and less-selective institutions, is that their students prize their time with people-- they are happy to have technology be a part of instruction, but it cannot replace personal interaction.  If anything, perhaps MOOCs are best suited to the sorts of students increasingly in the minority/nontraditional category of higher education-- like the artificial intelligence students with whom Sebastian Thrum discovered his love for teaching online.

Second, it is uncommon for academics like Broad to uncritically accept and repeat claims that a system is simply "broken," without questioning how and why it broke and for whose benefit it is broken. To her credit, Broad alluded to politics when questioning the right of the federal government to be involved in the work of colleges and universities.  But she did not address the broader trends resulting in the defunding of education and research, the push towards "innovation" generated in the private sector, or the increasing focus on the deficits of students rather than the institutions serving them.  When declaring the push for access a "success," she failed to note that the chances of attaining a bachelor's degree for students born in the bottom income quintile is less than one in ten.  Moreover, instead of pointing to states for diminishing appropriations for higher education and driving up tuition, and institutions for catering to the rich students rather than keeping college affordable, she blamed students for their poor choices with regard to loans.

In the end, the picture Broad painted today was not so much of higher education at a "crossroads," but rather a disturbing vision of colleges and universities frantically trying to pull up the drawbridge and create a new moat for their protection. To keep out those unwashed masses of unkempt nontraditional students, and prevent federal "intrusion" colleges and universities can no longer simply raise tuition-- the public will not stand for it. Instead, they must shift to protecting the elite survivors (the A institutions, I think she called them) by generating MOOC courses that can be launched into the cloud to create a virtual wall -- satisfying those new degree-seekers whom colleges and universities will never adapt to serve in person the way their administrators and professors will serve their own kids.  Such efforts will only thrive at the most elite places, since as Broad noted, MOOCs require course release time to develop-- and the reality, despite her statement to the contrary, is that such time is incredibly rare these days. 

Will "quality" postsecondary education survive?  Does is now exist?  Color me unimpressed by the fact that ACE has been "retained" by the MOOCs.  A look at ACE's website and reports suggests close ties between the two, and tight relations with the Gates Foundation-- not what you want to see when looking for independent assessment.  And more importantly, it seems that the persistence of elite status among those powerful institutions fueling ACE's fire depends on the success of the MOOCs.  For without these educational alternatives, a real revolution might erupt-- with the masses actually demanding the same types of rich college experiences that American undergraduates are famous for enjoying. 

0 Unintended Consequences of Tuition Reciprocity

Providing more students with a variety of college choices is a good thing.  But I'm beginning to wonder about the unintended consequences of policies that try to accomplish it.

Take the case of Wisconsin, which shares a tuition reciprocity agreement with Minnesota.  Many students, especially those living on the borders of the two states, and those who don't get a place in their flagship university, choose to attend college in the other state. That's very nice, of course, and very neighborly. And, according to the press, it helps the state attract "the best students."  But every policy has its downsides, and in this case there may be several:

(1) It seems to nudge data reporting toward the uninformative. Since both Minnesota and Wisconsin are treated as residents for tuition purposes, the vast majority of official reporting from the state and the campuses combines the two groups.  This makes it hard for the public to examine the characteristics of Wisconsin residents.  For example, say in order to assess equality of educational opportunities you wanted to compare the % of Native Americans among Wisconsin residents statewide to the % of Native Americans among Wisconsin residents enrolled at UW-Madison.  It's not in any publicly available report, since reports like these aggregate MN and WI students together.   (Sure, this could be changed without altering the reciprocity agreement, but right now there seems no incentive to do it.)

(2) It confuses discussions about key enrollment issues such as the cap on the proportion of non-resident students. Presumably, this cap exists to protect spaces for Wisconsin residents.  But the cap, which is now 27.5%, doesn't actually do this since in theory it could be met by enrolling 10% Wisconsin students and 67.5% MN students.  It says nothing about the distribution between WI and MN within the resident category. It also makes UW-Madison look like it enrolls relatively few non-residents compared to its peers, when in fact the opposite is true.  In fact, if MN students counted as the non-residents they really are, UW-Madison would have to ask itself whether having a large concentration (~12%) of MN students is the best way to diversify the student body.

(3) It may contribute to brain drain. This is typically defined at the out-of-state migration of bachelor's degree holders. But how many students migrate post-high school but before the bachelor's degree? How many students do we send to MN for college, because they are outcompeted by MN students for seats at Madison, for example? And how many of those return to pay taxes in WI?  I have no idea, but it's worth exploring.  If MN weren't an option, might those students still attend college -- but in Wisconsin, at one of our many universities facing declining enrollment?  Of course, we should consider this in relation to how many MN students who attend college in WI choose to remain here, and pay taxes.  To the best of my knowledge, this issue hasn't been examined in decades.

(4) It may reduce the incentive to invest more in UW-Milwaukee. Very few reciprocity students from Minnesota choose to attend Milwaukee, but many Wisconsin students who cannot get a seat at Madison seek Minneapolis instead.  As Provost Paul DeLuca has said, "Those well-qualified kids who want a big-city experience are inclined to think about Minnesota."  Frankly, that's a problem: we need to give them reason to think about Milwaukee, a research university in Wisconsin's major urban center.  Maybe if Minneapolis wasn't such a cheap option, there'd be more pressure to enhance Milwaukee or grow UW-Madison.

(5) It seems to cost UW-Madison tuition revenue it can't afford to lose. Madison currently enrolls 3,305 Minnesota students.  Each pays slightly more than resident tuition, but the surplus is returned to the state, to settle up with Minnesota. Madison keeps only the resident portion. If instead, all Minnesota students paid out-of-state tuition, or were replaced by out-of-state students who did, UW-Madison would have nearly $27 million more revenue from tuition. Some would be lost to financial aid, sure, but that's an enormous amount of money.  Now, I know that the issue of net tuition loss is frequently considered, and assessed to ensure that neither the entire state of Wisconsin or Minnesota loses in the deal-- but the fact that there's no loss to either state as a whole, and the fact that more MN students come to WI than vice versa, doesn't mean that individual campuses don't lose.  While overall, I think a system perspective on finance usually makes sense, if this revenue could be used to ensure Madison remains affordable, a change is worth considering.  At River Falls and Superior, where enrollment depends heavily on attracting Minnesota students, reciprocity may be a financial win, but at Madison it may be a net loss.  Since it clearly has different implications for college choices at each campus, a differentiated policy in this case could do little harm, and much good.

Ok, if Madison weren't a reciprocity option for Minnesota students, maybe they would end the agreement entirely-- but this is short-sighted and will likely affect their border schools too. A recent report from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau notes that when the reciprocity agreement originated in 1965, it involved only border campuses, and "to be eligible, the student had to be an undergraduate whose legal residence or high school was no more than 40 miles from the institution attended in the other state." Is it time to return to this?

To be clear, I'm not saying anything about the quality of Minnesota students.  I like them, I teach them, and I work with them.  This is a question about policy and how it works in practice.  It seems to me that the reciprocity agreement could be changed to exclude UW-Madison and still keep its positive features, while removing many of its potential negatives. Of course, the cap would have to be adjusted-- but not to admit more non-Wisconsin students--just to reflect actual reality.  And that, in terms of data reporting, would be a good thing.

0 10th Annual EPS Conference

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM

A Nation at Risk? Reflections on the Past and Future of U.S. Public Education

10th Annual Educational Policy Studies Conference

Madison, Wisconsin

March 21-22, 2013

All events in Room 159 of the Education Building, 1000 Bascom Mall, UW-Madison

FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Thursday, March 21, 2013

8:30-10:00AM: Public Discourse on American Education

            Michael Apple, Curriculum & Instruction & EPS, UW-Madison

Nancy Kendall, EPS, UW-Madison

Gloria Ladson-Billings, Curriculum & Instruction & EPS, UW-Madison

Chair: Bill Reese, EPS & History, UW-Madison

           

10:15-11:45 AM: Race/Ethnicity and the Evolution of U.S. Public Education

            Jack Dougherty, Trinity College

            Adrienne Dixon, University of Illinois-Chicago

            Michael Fultz, EPS, UW-Madison

            Chair: TBA

BREAK FOR LUNCH

1:00-2:30 PM: The Legacies and Future of Public Higher Education in the U.S.

            Harry Brighouse, Philosophy & EPS, UW-Madison

            Sara Goldrick-Rab, EPS & Sociology, UW-Madison

            Daniel Kleinman, Sociology, UW-Madison

            Chair: TBA

3:00-4:30 PM: From “A Nation at Risk” to “No Child Left Behind”

Maris Vinovskis, University of Michigan*

Chair: Adam Nelson, EPS & History, UW-Madison

BREAK FOR DINNER

7:00-8:30: The Chicago Teachers Strike: Reframing Education Reform and Teacher Unions

            Pauline Lipman, University of Illinois-Chicago

            Discussant: Chad Alan Goldberg, Sociology, UW-Madison

Friday, March 22, 2013

8:30-10:00 AM:  Place, Space, and Public Education

            Bianca Baldridge, EPS, UW-Madison

            Linn Posey-Maddox, EPS, UW-Madison

            Peter Miller, Education Leadership & Policy Analysis, UW-Madison

            Chair: TBA

10:15-11:45 AM: Future Challenges, Roles, & Opportunities for Public Education

            Robert Asen, Communication Arts, UW-Madison

Constance Flanagan, Interdisciplinary Studies, UW-Madison

            Constance Steinkuehler, Curriculum & Instruction, UW-Madison

Chair: TBA

            

0 Say What About the Flex Degree?

On June 19, the University of Wisconsin System announced an initiative called the Flex Degree which was described as competency-based online instruction.  That day, I blogged about it, noting that while I certainly had some concerns, there were enough potential positive effects of the program to withhold full judgment either way.

Friends on both sides were surprised.  Colleagues who know and respect the priority I place on access and affordability for all potential students thought I should have been more strongly supportive of the "innovative" initiative that has the promise to drive down costs.  Others, of the liberal activist persuasion, noted  Governor Scott Walker's involvement, and the strong likelihood of negative repercussions for faculty job security and the quality of education delivered.  Still, I demurred, deciding to wait to hear more.

Unfortunately, information hasn't exactly been forthcoming.  I keep up to speed, reading the papers and blogs, and talking with those "in the know" and yet, I still have no clear picture what this Flex Degree really is.  Perhaps it's because where I spend most of my time, UW-Madison, isn't involved?  Maybe faculty at Parkside and Milwaukee have a clearer picture of what's happening? Maybe this initiative doesn't involve us tenured faculty at all, leaving the process to the administrators?   I've tried to check things out-- and am hoping this blog stirs discussion so I can learn more.  All I've heard thus far is that the faculty at Parkside are seriously concerned about the effort, and had a disagreement about the program with their Chancellor, resulting in the displacement of their Provost.

The media's been the only source of information-- and the coverage alone is enough to raise concerns.  (Also, there is not one investigative reporter covering higher education in Madison now.) It's undoubtedly bad press for UW System when the Wall Street Journal leads its coverage with a headline "College Degree, No Class Time," as it did this morning. Here is what we "learn" from that story:

• A degree obtained online will carry the same name on it that degrees earned on campus do.  You won't be able to tell if the degree was earned at Parkside, Madison, or Flex.
• UW System official encourage students to obtain their learning from MOOCS like "Coursera, edX and Udacity."
• The charges for the tests and related online courses haven't been set but it will be cheaper than attendance on a campus.

Wow, seriously?  Each of these aspects raise trouble.  Why try to "hide" that the degree was awarded for learning acquired elsewhere, including via under-assessed methods like MOOCs?  How could the initiative possibly get past "go" without an assessment of cost-effectiveness?

Instead of concrete planning, it seems this process relies on a set of fairly broad, vague statements. Do what's good for the workforce. Do what the Governor asks. Do something "big" (According to UW System President Reilly-- the Flex Degree is a "big new idea").  Make it "fresh."

These are platitudes that have been circulating in the education reform crowd for years.  The rhetoric is typically framed as colleges and professors are "behind" (engaged in "the monastery model") and need to catch up. Interestingly,  Jeff Selingo of the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote in his blog yesterday about the perspective held by Aaron Brower, a professor of social work at UW-Madison and the lead administrator on the Flex Degree initiative.   From Brower's point of view, "Our students have all the information that we have as professors, so there is no premium on access to information."
 
Hmm. Well, first, that sounds right-- and simple-- but it's not really.  The people actually working to get online education right (and many are in the for-profit industry-- which doesn't mean their knowledge should be disregarded) know that "access to information" is far from sufficient for students and that professors really enhance that access by sifting, coordinating, distilling and analyzing that information for students.   The best initiatives thus far do not rely on technology alone-- they involve technology and people.  This is because, as UW Extension Chancellor Ray Cross puts it, "faculty are the guardians of quality."

Brower knows this, and knows it well. And I think, therefore, that the biggest problem with the Flex Degree at the moment lies in how it's being rolled out and messaged.  There are far more details available about this initiative than what's reaching our ears, but one has to look to meeting minutes to find them.  For example, reading the minutes from a UW LaCrosse meeting about the Flex Degree I learned that "Faculty are at the heart of the endeavor:  they will determine the outcomes/competencies and the assessments that will provide the evidence of student learning—nobody else can do this...Without faculty and academic staff involvement, the program will not attain the quality we envision, programmatically or pedagogically."  And I'm pleased that apparently Governor Walker has told Ray Cross that he'll provide new funding for this initiative, rather than grab at our base. 

So maybe the Flex Degree is better than it appears, and its communications arm is simply failing to message it correctly.  One powerpoint talks about the "First to Flex," a physical metaphor that doesn't work well when it comes to education. There is also this wordy, vague video on You Tube.


Bad media is a huge problem that could sink the whole ship.  Let's see that turned around, fast, before the nation begins to associate the University of Wisconsin with degrees that stand for nothing.

0 Do Academic Incentives Appear to Augment Financial Aid Effectiveness, Particularly after Enrollment?

The field of financial aid research is rapidly growing and expanding, which is a really good thing since the reliability and validity of evidence on effects pales in comparison to the magnitude of the national investment in aid.  Policymakers shoot me emails almost daily, asking "how can this be?"

Well, it's expensive and difficult to rigorously examine the impacts of expensive, complicated programs. Financial support for aid research is often difficult to come by; seemingly because at least to some foundations and other funders, "we know it all" about aid already and need to move on.

Expert researchers like Sue Dynarski and Judith Scott-Clayton know better than this, and bother to continue studying financial aid and write comprehensive reviews of existing studies on the topic for the rest of us.  I've relied on Dynarski's work continuously since my career began, and continue to be amazed at her ability to conduct incisive, beautifully executed work year after year.  This morning, she issued not one but two new papers from NBER, both on financial aid.  For that, we owe her and her co-authors quite a big thanks.

With that sincere respect for her work in mind, I want to submit one point of disagreement with one of the new papers. It regards a particularly difficult and controversial issue: whether financial aid ought to be reformed to include academic incentives tied to college persistence, to increase its effectiveness.  The abstract for Dynarski and Scott-Clayton's paper reads "for students who have already decided to enroll, grants that link financial aid to academic achievement appear to boost college outcomes more than do grants with no strings attached." This is not a new statement from these researchers, but the paper reiterates it, reviving the debate in the midst of the Gates Foundation's efforts to rethink aid.

A close look at the evidence presented in this new paper leads me to believe that while this is a reasonable hypothesis, it has just as little empirical support today-- or perhaps even less-- than it did a few years ago when the debate over this issue was especially hot.  Let's review.

On the question of the impacts of strictly need-based grants on college persistence, the authors point to two quasi-experimental studies (one by Eric Bettinger, one by Dynarski) with "suggestive but inconclusive evidence that pure grant aid improves college persistence and completion" as well as one study of a program targeting very high achieving students (Gates Millenium Scholars, studied by Steve DesJardins) that found no effects (unsurprising since their high outcomes were hard to improve upon).

In addition, they point to an early working paper (issued in 2011) from my ongoing experimental study in Wisconsin, which at the time, using one cohort of students, found null effects for a private grant program.  This is the extent of the evidence they display about the impacts of grants with no strings attached.  So it's important to note that our paper was updated and re-released last fall 2012 (not uncommon for working papers, and it did get press coverage) to incorporate findings from four cohorts of students and take into consideration that some students saw real increases in financial aid from the grant program while others did not.  The results suggest that grants with no strings attached increased college persistence by about 3 percentage points per $1,000 -- consistent with Dynarski and Bettinger's estimates of aid's impacts from other programs. Sure, those estimates are derived from a quasi-experimental analysis within our experimental study (not dissimilar to the approaches highlighted in the other studies cited), but if you want to be a purist about it, look at the experimental evidence only. That evidence suggests positive impacts as well, and raises the possibility that program complexity is moderating the impacts (another key theme in Dynarski and Scott-Clayton's research from 2006).

On the questions of the impacts of grants with academic incentives, the authors highlight several studies, with two figuring most prominently.  First, the MDRC performance-based scholarship demonstration. They point to evidence from the first, small experiment in New Orleans, which showed positive impacts.  Then, they suggest that the ongoing replication studies of those scholarships "appear to reinforce the findings of the initial study."  Unfortunately, that comment is outdated.  The latest reports on effects are showing null results. The What Works Clearinghouse issued a Quick Review on the New York City results (published in December 2012) last week, indicating the experimental test of performance-based scholarships in that city produced no detectable effects on college retention (the title of the study is "Can Scholarships Alone Help Student Succeed?" but please note that the study is of performance scholarships-- not scholarships alone).  (Full disclosure: I am Project Director on that WWC contract.) Recent conference presentations from the project reveal similar trends-- very little improvement, if any, resulting from the additional of performance based scholarships. Project director LaShawn Richburg-Hayes has been commendably careful to also point out that these scholarships are delivered on top of aid without strings, and also noting that it's unclear why Louisiana's results haven't been reproduced elsewhere.

Next, Dynarski and Scott-Clayton highlight Scott-Clayton's rigorous dissertation study of a West Virginia program. Her quasi-experimental analysis suggests that in West Virginia, effects of tying aid to performance had positive effects.  However, the most important claim for the argument here-- that effects were stronger when academic incentives operated than when they did not--does not tell us that incentives performed better than "no strings attached" for these students.  The two treatments occurred at different points in college for these West Virginia students, with academic performance required early in college, and no performance required later in college.  In other words, there is a key confound (year in college) compromising the results.

The truth is that the experimental work needed to test the hypothesis that academic incentives tied to grant aid outperform grant aid without strings attached hasn't been conducted.  It's clear that the effects of aid are very likely heterogeneous, and there are numerous variations in how aid is designed and delivered.  For this reason, across-study comparisons are very hard to make. We need to set up a horse race between aid and aid+incentives for a sample of students much like those whom we'd hope to reform aid for-- Pell Grant recipients, most likely.   Only then will we know if academic incentives really add value.  And even then, we won't know why-- without rigorous mixed methods research.

For now, the jury is out, and policymakers who pair academic incentives with need-based aid are flying blind.  They may have other rationales for doing wanting to do this-- some people feel better about distributing money when it comes with strings-- but they shouldn't pretend it's an evidence-based decision.  And like merit aid, it emphasizes the "reward" rather than "compensatory" rationales for distributing financial aid; a political norm-laden shift that probably isn't without consequence.

0 Questions for the UW-Madison Chancellor Search

The search for another chancellor of UW-Madison is well underway. According to news reports, the search committee is vetting 60 candidates, sifting and winnowing these to a shorter list of people who will be interviewed off-campus, before a small group of about four comes to campus for interviews.

This is a critical point in Madison's history, as we face key decisions about how we are funded, who we enroll, and how we teach.  Formulating the questions we want to ask the candidates as they go through the process is one way to think through these hard issues.  With this post, I'm hoping to spur thinking on this -- providing a few ideas to get started, and encouraging you to write in with more questions.  With any luck, the people who get to actually ask the questions will find some good ideas here.

A starting point:


1. There has recently been much discussion about the polarization of the academy and concerns expressed about the impacts that a lack of political diversity might have on the welfare of public universities in particular.  How do you conceive of the term "political diversity" and how would you address the need to build it on the UW-Madison campus?

2. What do the terms "innovation" and "disruption" mean to you, and how are they best produced on a campus like Madison's where shared governance is a central value?

3. Many universities, including Madison, are feeling pressure to increase "productivity."  How do you define productivity when it comes to teaching? Research?  What are ways in which you think the productivity of administrators should be measured? What about productivity among faculty?

Help us find the right person-- what questions should be added to this list?