0 How to Turn Higher Education into an Engine of Inequality

Step 1:  Build an enormous and expansive set of opportunities for higher education and tell everyone that a college education is necessary for economic and social security in America-- but refrain from working towards public consensus on providing a free higher education for all.

Step 2: Create the illusion of access with a program of financial aid distribution that isn't backed with a real entitlement program tied to college costs.

Step 3: Do nothing to stem the behavior of bad actors and those who encourage them. Allow colleges and universities to raise prices and engage in rankings wars based on flawed metrics that distort the market.  Fail to require states to maintain their effort to ensuring affordability.  Allow, even encourage, private business to step into the gaps.

Step 4: Allow the value of need-based aid to decline while redirecting aid towards politically popular programs benefitting the non-needy.

Step 5: Refrain from fundamental reforms addressing the core crisis in the system, and instead introduce small modifications aimed at overcoming individual deficits rather than structural problems.

And here we are!

ps. I highly recommend the CLASP report that includes these figures.

0 Faulty Chronicle of Higher Education Survey Deserves More Scrutiny

As a person who appreciates insights into the thinking of various actors in higher education, I get excited whenever a newspaper invests its resources in fielding a large survey of college faculty, administrators, students, or those who hire them.

Thus, I was initially excited to see the results from the latest survey conducted by the Chronicle of Higher Education and America Public Radio's Marketplace, on how employers view the skills and talents of recent college graduates.  Reading through the results, one began to think the story contained provocative information on business's view of online education, for example.

But then I got to the story's end, and stopped cold. There lay the description of survey methodology: The findings on these pages come from a survey developed, fielded, and analyzed by Maguire Associates Inc., a higher-education consulting firm, on behalf of The Chronicle and American Public Media's Marketplace. Maguire invited 50,000 employers to participate in the study. Experience.com, a career-services consultancy, helped develop the sample by providing a contact list of employers that recruit recent college graduates. The survey was conducted in August and September 2012. There were 704 responses.

First, that's the sum total of all details we're given about the sample.  We know nothing about the characteristics of the sampling frame or the respondents.  In other words, we have no idea whether these employers are representative of specific sectors, specific states, etc.  And equally importantly, while the author didn't do the math for us, a simple calculation reveals a response rate of just 1.4%.

This is insanely low.  So low, in fact, that I don't think the results should be published at all-- let alone featured on the Website.  And if they are, a major banner is needed proclaiming at the start of the story, "PROCEED WITH CAUTION!"  I said the same thing regarding an Inside Higher Ed survey last year, and that one had a response rate of 7%.

Yes, I understand that surveys are expensive to field and really costly to do well, but at the very minimum the public deserves far more clarity and transparency in reporting on methods than the Chronicle has provided here. In addition, there are clear best practices for fielding web surveys (which I have to assume this was) and it sure doesn't seem like Maguire Associates followed them.  For example, Paul Umbach of North Carolina State wrote a nice piece specifically for those conducting higher education research that lays out the issues point by point. Given that low response rates may lead to sample bias (affecting generalizability), low power, and inaccurate estimations, the researchers should have randomly sampled from the target population only enough people to have sufficient power-in other words, going after a fraction of those 50,000 with solid methods instead of surveying all of them with weak technique.  And the overarching goal should have been to achieve a decent rate of response to reduce the possibility of a non-representative sample-- in this case, the response rate is pathetically low (this is as low as I think I've ever seen) and no information on representativeness is provided.  This doesn't seem uncommon for Maguire Associates-- this 2011 survey report says nothing about their sampling or response rate, nor does this one from 2010, but this one from 2005 and this one from 2008 provide at least some of the information that Chronicle readers deserve.

It's unethical to publish this information like this. So I recommend that the Chronicle do what I asked Inside Higher Ed to do-- take it down! And consider working with a more credible survey firm next time, please.

0 A Delicious Revenue-Generating Idea for UW-Madison

This story in today's New York Times made me happy because it emphasized an approach to revenue-generation consistent with the mission of many public universities, especially land-grant institutions: develop ways to produce excellent agricultural output.   Washington State University is selling beef, including Wagyu, and marketing it to alumni-- among others.

This is a perfect fit for UW-Madison, which could strategically expand its exist talents via the Babcock Dairy (ice cream and cheese) and Bucky's Butchery, as well as the excellent crops that could be produced by star faculty.

Here's a sample line of potential UW-Madison products that could be marketed throughout the Midwest and indeed across the country to our adoring alumni. 

1. Ice cream It's already available, but why not ship it to alumni who miss it? As a friend put it, who wouldn't want to try ice cream made by the flagship university of America's dairyland?
2. Cheeses (we have award winning cheddar, already in gift sets, but why not market this in tandem with the book store?)
3. Cuts of beef, pork, and lamb --all of which Bucky's already offers; this need only be scaled up.
4. Bucky sausages (these already exist)
5. Bucky's Hot Sticks (these already exist)
6. Former Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Bill Tracy's famous corn (and canned corn)
7. Professor Irwin Goldman's beautiful beets (and canned beets)

Moreover, the  Madison community could easily facilitate a community-supported agricultural model, which might also produce food for the campus and the child care sites therein.

This is the kind of money-making activity that benefits the school without compromising any core values and actually growing educational opportunities for students in an area highly-supported by the state legislature. It's worth serious thought.

ps. I've been informed by uwbadger74 on Twitter that a UW Regents policy prohibits these sorts of activities because they compete with private businesses. That policy is here, and should be revisited.

0 Rethinking External Service Providers

Note: This is an uncommon blog for me, an effort to simply engage readers in helping me think through a set of issues that I've been pondering but never had a chance to really study. These are initial, baby ideas, and shouldn't be taken as my final word on the subject. Thanks.

Some recent exchanges on Twitter, including with folks attending the Students for Education Reform summit, and people responding to the latest KIPP evaluation report, have me thinking about the role that external service providers play in schools.  I know there's been a fair bit written on this topic, but perceive that there's a lack of clarity and cohesion when it comes to some crucial issues.  By writing this, I'm hoping to get some input and ideas, and perhaps even recruit a co-author to write an article on the topic.

First, let's define what I mean by external service providers.  I am conceiving of them as running the gamut from external management organizations, typically defined as for-profits and non-for-profits that operate entire schools under contract (e.g. Edison Schools), to other types of comprehensive school design providers (e.g. KIPP), to those that provide a specific type of service, be it a teacher mentoring model (e.g. New Teacher Center--where my husband works) or benefits provision (e.g. Single Stop USA--which I'm studying).  While I think the latter types are usually separated from the former, I see little reason not to place them on the same spectrum when considering the issues I'm concerned with here.  (See if you agree with me, or not.)

In each case, a school's  use of these external entities has the potential to generate conflict with community norms and interests and grassroots activists, and to bring unintended consequences by serving as an existence proof that intervention from external actors can serve to outperform locally grown efforts.  Of course, whether you view any of these things as problematic depends on your politics-- and that's precisely what's bothering me.

Is there a non-political, value-free way to assess these external service providers? The conversations I've been observing suggest that perhaps the answer is no.   For the very notion of protecting the rights of communities to determine their own solutions without intrusion, and the idea that even a well-meaning external provider might take the place of local workers, these are inherently evaluated with a perspective that includes a moral judgment.

I think it's for this reason that my friends and colleagues arrive at such very different assessments of these actors.  I'm uncomfortable with the fact that many on the Left are supportive of efforts like NTC that encourage strong mentoring of new teachers (a value-laden approach, even if local mentors are used), but unsupportive of other models, like KIPP.   Similarly, those on the right seem ok with KIPP but reluctant to support actors that will bring greater benefits access to community college students.  I think external service providers are differentially cast as "supportive" or "intrusive" based not merely on how they operate but what they provide-- and thus critics need to focus clearly on that content rather than on the idea that external actors are simply inappropriate.

Similarly, I think the way we define the outcomes which should be measured to assess the performance of external service providers is also a political act.  A narrow focus on student achievement, without measurement of impacts on local community members or the local labor force, belies a focus on the individual vs. the social.

So...this is what I'm thinking. Perhaps it's something that has already been written about-- and frankly it's an area I've not studied deeply, so please point me toward the right work.  Thanks!

0 The MOOC Industrial Complex

These days, every education reform movement seems to generate profit for multiple partners.  Take No Child Left Behind, the latest testing and accountability regime. As many scholars have documented, billions of dollars have flowed to corporations providing the tests, textbooks and "supplementary education services" required by that federal policy.  Advocates say this is appropriate since it means the market is functioning freely to provide high quality services, while critics note that absent government regulation (carefully limited under the law) public goods are quickly becoming private ones.

In recent blogs about MOOCs, I questioned their business model, asking why supposedly cash-strapped universities (like mine) would choose to engage with them when there is no evident monetary return?  I received little response from MOOC advocates on that question. But the answer is becoming increasingly clear.

Many universities have stated that MOOCs are the kind of innovative activity that donors would like to support, and that we would gain new donors if we engaged in creating them.  University foundations, including UW-Madison's, seem quite confident in this-- to the point that they are putting in their own dollars for the initial investments to get MOOCs off the ground.  While it's possible that this is sheer altruism, it's doubtful-- their leaders always expect a return on investment.

Where will it come from?

Why, the industry that supports the MOOCs of course.  For example, today's New York Times  documents the growing testing industry associated with online proctoring, helping colleges "keep an eye" on online test-takers. Unfortunately that article failed to investigate the money involved in this effort, focusing instead on the quality of the services provided to prevent cheating. This is unfortunate, since tracking the dollars created by the work of educators, ultimately benefiting the corporate bottom line is exactly what the "paper of record" should be doing.

What other entities will benefit from the instructional activities provided by public and non-profit universities?  Write in and let's start a list.  And while we're at it, let's think hard about the likelihood that these corporations will eventually constitute those "benevolent new donors" our universities are counting on.


ps. I keep meaning to direct my readers to this excellent commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I highly recommend reading it in full.

0 How to Evaluate a MOOC

Since we're already doggie-paddling around the deep-end of the MOOC phenomenon, it seems high time to begin thinking about how to assess MOOCs.  This is far from straightforward, since they are not typical courses and might best be conceived of as extension or continuing education activities.

Very few colleges and universities are revealing their assessment practices for MOOCs; Duke is one exception.  This report explains that selective university's experiences with one course, and demonstrates how their administrators and faculty thought about measuring success. In my view, some of it is good, and some of it is exactly what not to do.

So here is my overview of an initial evaluative framework for thinking about whether or not a MOOC was a "success." I'm posting this with the explicit intention of generating discussion to refine this framework and build it out, so please add your two cents.

The framework has three components: an assessment of costs expended to generate and implement the MOOC, an assessment of its intended impacts in multiple domains, and as assessment of unintended consequences.  Only by considering all three can one make an informed decision about whether a MOOC was worthwhile, yet reporting on MOOCs suggests that many institutions are focusing on only one or two of the three.

1. COSTS
1. How many total hours of effort were required to build the MOOC?
1. How many of these were on the part of the faculty member?
2. How many involved TA time?
3. How many involved staff time?
2. What technological costs were incurred?
1. How much was spent to get the MOOC off the ground?
2. What are the regular maintenance costs?
3. What are the costs of upgrading the MOOC?
3. How many hours of administrative time were devoted to meetings about the MOOC? 
1. How much time and money is spent advertising the MOOC?
2. How much time will be required to regulate it?
3. How much time will be required to assess its outcomes?
2. IMPACTS
1. On Students.  
1. How many students initially enrolled in the MOOC?
2. How many of these were students were not already enrolled in the university?
3. How many countries are represented among MOOC users?
1. How many of these countries were previously not served by the university, or represent new relationships?
2. How many of these countries are home to under-educated populations?
4. How many of these students had no college experience prior to the MOOC?
5. How many of these students already held a college degree of any kind?
6. What percent of the total initial enrollment completed the first week of the course?
7. What percent of the total initial enrollment completed the first assessment?
8. What percent of the total initial enrollment completed the entire course?
2. On Faculty.  
1. What was the professor's level of satisfaction with the course, as compared to satisfaction of teaching a usual university course?
2. What new contacts for the professor resulted from the MOOC, related to his/her research agenda?
3. How did teaching the MOOC inform the professor's research agenda?
4. How did teaching the MOOC change how the professor approaches his/her regular university courses?
5. Is there any evidence that the professor and/or his/her research gained more recognition in the community where MOOC students came from? (e.g. media mentions, etc)
3. SIDE EFFECTS
1. How many course releases (from campus teaching) were required for the professor to teach the MOOC, and how many students on average are taught per course (typically)?
2. How many press mentions occurred regarding the MOOCs?
1. How many were positive?
2. How many were negative?
3. What did state legislators say about the MOOCs?
1. How many felt the MOOC was a welcome activity?
2. How many felt the MOOC was an unwelcome activity?
4. What is the dollar value of the activities incurred by the MOOC contracted out to the provider rather than performed "in-house"?

As I said, this is just a rough start.  Write in, and help me flesh this out!

0 Nick Jones: Candidate for UW-Madison Chancellor

This post is the second in a series of four.

It's hard to say much about Nick Jones, candidate for chancellor of UW-Madison, because hardly anyone seems to know who he is.  He's spent most of the last 30 years at a single, very elite private institution-- Johns Hopkins University-- where he's currently the dean of the Whiting School of Engineering.  About 10 years ago, Jones left Hopkins about about two years to work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but quickly returned. Apart from engaging in various engineering-related activities, he doesn't seem to have done much in higher education leadership.

That said, Jones is well-liked by those in the Hopkins community, and appears to be good at fundraising. Very nice.

But this is a case where having been a dean and the product of one institution may simply not be enough. He talks in terms of sports metaphors when describing his current job, noting that  "I’m an offensive lineman. Basically, I run interference for my faculty. At the end of the day, it’s the faculty who are on the field, trying to get stuff done and put together creative ideas. My job is to facilitate and make that happen. I have to get out in front and clear the path so that they can do what they do. I help get any impediments out of the way, such as administrative ones, and bring resources to the table to help make their aspirations come true."  Well frankly, being chancellor at Madison is going to require dealing with many more types of impediments and resources will be hard to come by-- and the job is first and foremost to help students, not faculty.

Johns Hopkins University is, to be quite frank, not a training ground for leading UW-Madison at all. It's small, very privileged, and well-known for being incredibly siloed. Jones seems quite nice, but frankly unprepared for this work.

0 Kim Wilcox: Candidate for UW-Madison Chancellor

PREFACE:

There are four candidates for UW-Madison Chancellor. This week I will profile each of them, contributing information gleaned from "off list" discussions and sleuthing. As I noted in my last couple of blogs, unfortunately that sort of due diligence was not undertaken by the search firm.

I'm doing this in the spirit of sifting and winnowing, with an eye towards helping us identify the candidate who best suits UW-Madison with its many strong traditions-- foremost among them our tradition of shared governance. I hope you will join me in that spirit, refraining from engaging in name-calling or sheer speculation, while sharing any useful information you may have, using the comments function on this blog.

Until December 2012, Kim Wilcox was the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Michigan State University, where he also served as a professor in the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, a member of the MSU Foundation board of directors, and on the board of directors of the Spectrum Health – MSU Alliance Corporation. 

Earlier in his career, Wilcox was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and vice provost for general education coordination at the University of Kansas. He was born in Michigan, and received his bachelor’s degree in audiology and speech sciences from Michigan State University, and his master’s and doctorate from Purdue University, both in speech and hearing science.

This is not Wilcox's first attempt at a chancellor position. Last year, he was up for the position at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, and according to some sources earlier he was considered for a similar job in Minnesota, in a search he pulled out from. It seems he's been looking to leave his current job for awhile.

While also a public university, Michigan State is a very different academic environment from UW-Madison, most critically with regard to its top-down style of governing. The president and provost hold a great deal of power, and make nearly all campus decisions with the deans--and without consultation with the faculty. This sort of background is not an asset when it comes to preparing for the chancellorship of UW-Madison. 

Some colleagues find Wilcox to be the ultimate technocrat, citing his love of metrics and accountability, and noting that under his leadership faculty governance is an "empty enterprise." Others who are more fond of him seem to generally be students and faculty who've known no other approach to decision-making, and are pretty happy to be "allowed a voice" in decisions.

One of the key issues on which people speak most vehemently about Wilcox is in regards to his efforts to restructure academic departments. Here is a video of Wilcox -- around the 6 minute mark, he announces his suggestion for consolidation of some departments within a college, “reducing the number from 13 to 6.”  These efforts mainly focused on the liberal arts, the Classics in particular-- which he apparently proposed eliminating--but I'm also told he would have eliminated Geology if a big donor hasn't intervened.  Commentary on discussion boards tend to center on these issues-- for example see this message board and this reaction to the Classics decision.

When it comes to student enrollment, it has been said that “under Wilcox's direction, MSU has grown its enrollment to more than 49,000 students while raising the academic credentials of the entering class, increasing the percentage of students from underrepresented groups, decreasing the average time to degree, increasing the graduation rate for undergraduates and decreasing the percentage of students graduating with any accumulated debt” However, while an examination of MSU's data digest (h/t to that helpful grad student, you know who are you!) supports most of these claims, it's also worth noting that during Wilcox's tenure, the racial/ethnic gap in graduation rates widened by 40%. The reliance on adjuncts at the university also increased, as did the concentration of racial/ethnic minorities in that group of faculty. Overall, I find little evidence that Wilcox has systematically worked to address issues of achievement gaps at MSU, a major issue on that campus and ours.

To conclude: while I have little doubt that the search and screen committee found much value in Wilcox's portfolio of materials, I have serious concerns about his ability to adapt and thrive in our campus governance system. I am also quite unsure that he will treat the issues of diversity that we face on this campus with the seriousness of purpose that they deserve. For this reason, at this point he is not my choice for chancellor.

Postscript: Wilcox was up for the position of chancellor at the University of Wyoming and did not get it.

Postscript:

Just received this email about Wilcox from MSU colleagues-- seems important enough to share:

There are quite a few serious "negatives" here that anyone who might be in a position to have influence should know about. One point, for example, is the statement Wilcox made to the NYT Education Life section that appeared on Dec. 29, 2009: "Kim Wilcox, the provost and vice president for academic affairs at Michigan State, notes that universities, his included, used to offer majors in elocution and animal husbandry. In a major re-examination of its curriculum, Michigan State has added a dozen or so new programs, including degrees in global studies and, in response to a growing industry in the state, film studies. At the same time, it is abandoning underperformers like classical studies: in the last four years, only 13 students have declared it their major." As if his condescension weren't bad enough, the statement he made here was simply false. We graduated five to six majors per year with an average of 25-26 majors on the books each of the four years he cites. This, with three regular faculty members. The stated reason for cutting programs, especially in our case, was the budget, but, again, the numbers simply weren't there. There were also serious violations of governance and procedures when Classics was eliminated.

         

0 Asking More from Our Next Chancellor

Over at the Nation, Scott Sherman makes an excellent case that we are obligated to sift and winnow for a college president or chancellor who will address the real social and economic issues confronting public higher education-- rather than merely "adapting" to the new normal.

Sherman writes, "Why should we fret about the presidents of our colleges and universities? Because American higher education is plagued by severe difficulties on many fronts—from soaring tuition and runaway student debt to the loss of public funding, the endemic corruption in college athletics and the erosion of the liberal arts—and the presidents won’t resolve those issues by kibitzing in the gilded suites of Wall Street. The time has come to demand more from them, and to hold them to more elevated standards. The finest presidents of the past—Conant, Robert Hutchins, Kingman Brewster, Clark Kerr—were not perfect men, but they exercised potent leadership, and sometimes they were quite courageous."

As we move through this chancellor search process, I concur with Sherman that we should seek a man or woman with courage.  We must avoid technocrats, those "agile climbers who reach the top without making too many enemies or mistakes."  It seems to me that we have at least one in the current pool (more on that later).  On this point, like Sherman, I think folks like William Bowen are entirely wrong to advise presidents to speak rarely and carefully on matters of public policy.  I agree firmly with Jonathan Cole of Columbia, whom Sherman quotes as stating the following:

“Presidents have done a very, very poor job of using the bully pulpit for higher education...They have done particularly poorly at educating the American people about the value of the university—its centrality to the future welfare of this country. They have done abysmally on the humanities, failing to educate the public about why the humanities are central to the university, and why they are even central to the sciences in the future.” For Cole, it comes down to guns or butter. Presidents “have failed to explain why the public ought to be supporting the universities as a nondiscretionary item in the budget. You can train three or four students at Berkeley for what it costs to incarcerate a prisoner in California.”

Cole told Sherman that "there aren’t many presidents who are fighting against the powers that be.”
Well, that's tragic, and so so sad indeed.  We absolutely must look for the possibilities of one in the candidates coming soon to visit our campus.  Perhaps s/he can grow into such a leader.

0 Due Diligence: When it Comes to Madison's Next Chancellor Now Is the Time

There's hardly ever been a more difficult and auspicious time to lead a public flagship university. Yet at the same time, I believe it's among the greatest opportunities, and anyone would be beyond lucky to have the job.

The last chancellor of UW-Madison nearly undid our relationship with our state. In my opinion, then and now, she was nothing short of disastrous.  And, we have learned since her departure that her employment could have been avoided if only the search had involved a genuine due diligence process before she was brought in for interviews. For example, had due diligence occurred, we would have known-- before she came to woo the campus with her charisma-- that as long as Biddy's around, no one needs to have good ideas, for she has them all. In a setting like ours, where shared governance prevails, and we know that good ideas come from all sorts of places, she clearly wouldn't have fit.

Due diligence is a must when hiring any leader. And it's incredibly important that it happen before people come for in-person interviews on campuses and in communities-- since at that point there's no going back. In fact, in processes like ours, the naming of candidates for interviews is really the end of the "search and screen" process- the faculty, staff, and students have done their jobs.  In this case, the search and screen was asked to proffer 5 candidates-- and it offered 4.  Clearly, its members have been working hard. But now their jobs are essentially done, and the decision is up to UW System President Kevin Reilly and a team of Regents: Charles Pruitt, Regina Millner, Brent Smith, David Walsh, and Student Regent Katherine Pointer.

Since I was curious, I asked Search Chair David McDonald about the process for vetting candidates, and learned that until this point the four candidates have only been vetted using print and online sources, and their "on-list" references (e.g. the people they said to call).  Apparently, no additional investigation into their backgrounds has occurred. This is very disappointing.  We just saw the effects of similar mistakes with the search for a new superintendent of Madison public schools-- and here we are again.

So given this state of affairs, I urge people across Wisconsin, and our alumni, to go out and help us learn all we can about the candidates order to help ensure we get a chancellor that will lead this great institution forward in ways that respect our history, our context, our mission, and all of the families of Wisconsin.

Of course, I've been doing my homework as well, and in the coming days I will begin to blog about my assessments of each candidate. I am doing this publicly, and independently, as a concerned citizen and long-time employee of this university. My opinions are just that-- mine.  I will not pretend that sharing them matters at all, especially to the Regents. But this time around, I think it's best that all cards are on the table-- even if we don't get the chancellor we want, we need to know whom we're really dealing with.

The comment box is open, and my email is srab@education.wisc.edu .  Tell us, what do you know about Michael Schill of the University of Chicago, Kim Wilcox of Michigan State University, Nick Jones of Johns Hopkins, and Rebecca Blank of Commerce?