Doing college education "right"?

Here's a fascinating piece on the potential future of college education.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2007/0709.careycascadia.html

The Decline of American Declinism?

When I was in grad school, Paul Kennedy's book "The Rise and Fall of Great Powers" was all the rage, and most targeted the U.S. as the next domino to fall. Obviously, that didn't happen. As this piece from Policy Review makes clear, this view that "America is about to collapse" has been around for 300 years - http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/08/declinism.html. And this piece from The American argues that it isn't likely to happen soon either - http://www.american.com/archive/2007/august-0807/the-decline-and-fall-of-declinism.

We're poor judges of our own emotional reactions

Since a lot of decision-making is predicated on how we think a certain action will make us and others feel, this study is an interesting corrective to the typical worry about how concerned people might be about this or that action. http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2007/08/were-rubbish-at-predicting-how-what.html

What counts as a terminal degree?

This discussion generates more posts than any other on the CIC and CCCU Deans listserves. It's a thorny question, to which in a recent exchange, resident CCCU CAO wonk Dale Simmons noted that Calvin, Taylor, Bethel and others have tried to resist "market" or "differential" pay, and for good reason. Here's my, as usual, lengthy reply.

I tend to agree with anything Dale says, and in general, I believe he's on target here as well, that we should resist "differential" or "market" pay (or whatever you want to call it) as much as possible. But I feel compelled to add a few nuances to Dale's fine analysis.

1) From what I've seen, it's the "top tier" schools that appear to have been able to resist the "differential pay" pressures, in part, I would argue, because they are "top tier" and can therefore attract faculty in hard-to-fill fields with inducements that some of us don't have available (higher salaries across the board, national reputations, strong denominational affiliations, etc.). Therefore, despite being a Calvin grad myself, I'm not sure Calvin is the most appropriate model for most of us when we have these kinds of differential pay discussions.

2) "Fudging" pay scales by adjusting teaching loads or granting "terminal" status to MFAs, JDs, MBAs, etc. (with some years of professional experience) is "differential" pay, just by another name. We've followed the "fudge the scales" solution at John Brown University as well, except with Engineers where ABET pressures ultimately caused the institution to cave a couple decades ago, but we're under no illusion that this isn't market pay by another name. And some still think we should can the pretense and do "market pay" more directly.

3) Very little of this "inside the guild" discussion of pay scales is actually much connected to student learning outcomes. However you want to define those outcomes (via student evaluations, placement rates, acquisition of basic knowledge, development of critical thinking skills, etc.), according to the few national studies I've looked at, there isn't much evidence that we pay faculty according to what they actually help our students accomplish. Admittedly, that's an incredibly difficult issue to sort through, so I'm not suggesting that we jettison all of these "market pay" discussions in favor of more focus on "merit pay," but I am suggesting that much of this debate (which generates a lot of the posts on the CIC list) is a diversion from our main task, promoting student learning. Just to give a JBU example, this last summer we tried to analyze a combination of overall student evaluations, difficulty ratings, Integration ratings, and so on and then correlate them to various cohorts among our faculty. Our highest paid cohort (male full professors with terminal degrees) ranked near the bottom, and the lowest paid cohort (female assistant profs and instructors without terminal degrees) ranked at the top. So explain to me again why our pay scales should reward the first group at double and triple the pay rates of the second group?

How to fix Wal-Mart?

I'm taking MBA classes at the Sam Walton Business School with lots of Wal-Mart people, so this piece intrigued me. The basic argument appears to be that Wal-Mart succeeded via three things, probably in this priority order--a relentless focus on the customer, the robust development of a corporate culture, and a determined drive to reduce cost. The problem, those interviewed contend, is that the order has been reversed with cost reduction increasingly trumping everything else. Furthermore, the central office is listening too much to what the "models" predict and not enough to what their store managers are saying works at their particular stores.

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/aug2007/db20070820_358861.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_best+of+bw

Studying pandemics in World of Warcraft?

Another interesting example of using virtual worlds to study real-world situations - http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/76182-Scientists-Using-World-of-Warcraft-to-Study-Real-World-Pandemics.

Financial accounting applied to higher education?

I'm just starting a Financial Accounting class and trying to think through how these concepts apply to higher education. Balance Statements are pretty much the same in both worlds. Retained Earnings are probably something along the lines of Endowment.

Cash Flow is a bit unusual, so you can have a higher educational institution with lots of assets but declining enrollment that leads to a cash flow crunch which, in extreme circumstances might result in the school closing (as happened to Phillips University in Enid, Oklahoma).

Ditto for Income Statements, because you typically lose money on every student. Combined with lots of fundraising money going straight to the Retained Ernings of endowment or the Balance Sheet Assets of new buildings, you get the cognitive dissonance of many faculty and students when the school appears on the surface to be getting richer while at the same time administrators continue to say that there's no money for salary increases and we need to raise tuition again.

Hitchens on Faith

Hitchens is my favorite curmudgeon, even when I disagree with him, as I do here. But I think he's on to something by emphasizing the fragmented, a la carte nature of contemporary faith and the reluctance of contemporary Christianity to think through its beliefs and respond to the challenges of the modern world. http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/09/hitchens200709?currentPage=1

Why Study Military History?

As a former military historian, I feel obligated to pass along this good summary piece from Victor Davis Hanson - http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_military_history.html.

Amazon-type computer ratings mixed with advising?

Okay, maybe I've spent too much time surfing Netflix and Amazon, but I've been wondering whether that technology could be used in our advising context as well. Let's say that we included a student's top 5 strengths, then how they rated certain professors on IDEA. You could then compare that information with other students who shared similar traits and course ratings to come up with a "if you loved Professor X for Western Civ, you're likely to be thrilled with Professor Y for Masterpieces of Lit."

This is obviously similar to what Netflix, Amazon, and other websites do. If you have an on-line evaluation system, we'd have the teacher evaluation data, and if we used a personality profile such as Strenthsfinder or MBTI for all of your students, you'd have the requisite student information. Plug both sets of data into an automated registration database, which many institutions already have, and you could have some computer program do the number crunching. You'd then have to do some validity testing to see whether or not this process is giving meaningful results.

Like I said, it's a little wacky, and it would probably make a lot more sense for a much bigger organization, but maybe it's an idea worth exploring?

More on the collapse of Antioch College

There's been lots of speculation about why Antioch collapsed and what its failure says about the state of higher education. Here's some more on that topic.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/when-a-college-dies/#more-1730

Natural Capitalism and Higher Education?

My introductory MBA course is focusing on the "value chain," and since the UofA and Wal-Mart are big into sustainability right now, there's lots of related talk about "natural capitalism" and how to rethink our various structures.

One of the basic points is that we currently think in terms of production (make something, use something, and then throw it away) instead of solutions to meeting needs. A company like Carrier, for example, is starting to lease "comfort levels" for a building instead of just building the air-conditioning systems. If Carrier can then find ways to provide the same comfort levels for lower long term cost, then they make more money, even if that means that they're producing fewer air conditioners.

Neat idea, but it hasn't quite caught on yet. We still prefer "owning" our stuff, such as buying music and books that we could get via a music service or check out from the library for less money and with less "waste."

But this has got me thinking about what might be the implications for higher education. Right now, we're often in the business of selling courses and seat time. You "buy" the course, you "use" the course, and then you throw away the books and the notes afterwards. That's the old production model.

Now let's think about this in terms of natural capitalism's service approach. What if (and there are lots of "ifs" here) you made a series of promises about attaining a certain level of content knowledge, demonstrating certain skills, getting placed into graduate school or a job, developing certain critical thinking abilities, etc. and then were told that you'll pay a package rate to get to these marks, however long it takes. You could incentivize both sides to try to accomplish these goals quicker, but the point is that you're putting a price on the outcome (such as Carrier's leasing of "comfort") instead of on the consumption activity.

Of course, this assumes all sorts of things like being able to define and test for those outcomes with enough accuracy that you could sell your product and be able to verify its effectiveness, but it would move us toward this "natural capitalism" approach. Not sure I'd want to attend this type of university, but with many of our JBU students already getting about a quarter of their credits via AP and CLEP tests, we're part of the way there already.

Of Millenials and Libraries

Interesting piece on what Millenials are really like (at least at Rochester) and how they really use their university library - http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i50/50a02601.htm?=attw.

The economics of a draft

As a former military historian who has done a lot of reading about renewing the draft, this was an interesting take from the Freakonomics guys - http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/restore-the-draft-what-a-bad-idea/.

Tornadoes to the rescue?

Here's one of those "it's so wacky, it just might work" ideas. Tame tornadoes to generate electricity and perhaps eventually to serve as global air conditioners. Hmm . . .

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/08/12/the_underworked_american/?page=1

And more wacky power generating ideas in this Business Week article.

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2007/tc2007096_843326_page_2.htm

The underworked American?

An interesting article that runs counter to the general perception that we're increasingly overworked in America. It may be that we're spending more time at work, but because of technology (dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, fast food, etc.), we're apparently spending a lot less time (the equivalent of 7 weeks a year on average) doing "other" work.

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/08/12/the_underworked_american/?page=1

The case worker approach to admissions?

As I was sitting in orientation for my Managerial MBA program, I was struck by how many different people and offices I was supposed to work through as a new student, despite the fact that this was a cohort model. I heard similar consternation recently about how Veterans Affairs handles its patients in that these wounded vets are being shuttled from one office to another. That's caused me to wonder about whether a case worker model might be more appropriate to the way we move students through our system, especially during their initial transition to JBU. I wonder if there are any good examples of universities doing that?

Are we investing too much in higher education?

http://www.american.com/archive/2007/august-0807/backing-back-to-school

Yes, but as the author also points out, for an average investment of about $20,000, the average person makes over half a million dollars over a lifetime, so how can we be "overinvesting" in higher education if the financial rewards are still so high?

On the other hand, I tend to agree that our overall standards in higher education have declined and that we're probably enrolling as many or more people in college than our economy really needs. See this article for those arguments.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NGY0NmY3MzMzOWU1NDZmYmE0MTE0NGJkZGVmYzNiZWU=

What's the value of Second Life?

After hearing lots of buzz about Second Life, I thought I'd give it a try. But within a few minutes, I was being asked to pay real money to do things in this virtual world. Not having any already existing contacts to lure/guide me into Second Life, I bailed.

And that's essentially the question that the Freakonomics guys asked on their blog today. What's the value of a social networking game like Second Life? Here's the discussion -
http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/2007/08/07/why-spend-time-on-second-life/#comments.

Review of "An Education for Our Time"

Think of a mixture of Newman's "The Idea of a University," the Virginia Military Academy, and Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged." Let's take classical 18/19th century educational ideals, combine them with military school rigors, and sequester our budding "ubermensch" in an isolated Western retreat where they will develop the skills that one day might save our country from the decadence currently overtaking it.

This is something of a "if I had unlimited resources, I would . . . " book. The author, Josiah Bunting III, novelist, decorated officer, and superintendent of VMI, is a good writer and intriguing thinker, but this book feels like it was written pre-9/11, and it was. It's very much of a piece with the other disgruntled, pessimistic, anti-Clinton, "Slouching Toward Gomorrah" works that conservative circles were particularly prone to in the late 90s.

As such, I didn't find too many things worth adopting in our contemporary JBU context, though I could certainly see what the appeal might be of the kind of education Bunting is promoting. Part of me wishes that I had had a school experience along these lines. And I think some of the "Classical Christian" groups would be particularly supportive of many the ideas mentioned.

But in the end, I'm much more optimistic about the current state of America and the world as well as being wedded to the blessings (and yes, I see them by and large as blessings) of our contemporary society to desire to create something like what Bunting is suggesting. Would it be nice if such a thing existed? Sure. Am I at all interested in trying to implement even small pieces of this particular vision? Not really.

Mike Huckabee wins the Republican debates?

I mention Mr. Huckabee because his wife served on our board of trustees and on my Academics Committee in particular. Glad to see that he's finally getting noticed. He's a good man.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0807/5257_Page2.html

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/951kqrer.asp

Opportunity matters more than equality?

http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_economic_inequality.html

This article raises an issue I've been struggling with in my job since day one. I like to believe that I'm a "fair" person, and I've spent a decent amount of time trying to insure that resources are equitably distributed across the academic areas that report to me.

This article, however, would indicate that I'm worrying too much about the wrong thing. People are, perhaps, happier when they're better off than their peers (when they get more resources than the next person), but concerns about inequality are generally overrated. What matters much more to most people is "opportunity."

One conclusion I could draw from this article is that the system by which resource decisions are made needs to be as objective and "fair" as possible, but the results do not. As long as people have opportunities to better their resource position, whether they actually do so is less of a concern.

Lessons from "The Prince"

I'm sure others have written more and written better reflections on how Machiavelli's The Prince might apply to their particular field. And I'm somewhat chagrined to admit that I've never read the whole book cover to cover. So what am I learning from this reading?

1) The competitive rivalries of Renaissance Italy still seem pretty relevant to today's world.

2) For most of my life, on the other hand, I would have said that "hereditary monarchies" have little relevance to contemporary America. Then we started the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton (?) years, and that's made me wonder whether we really are that different some 500 years later. Working at an institution named "John Brown" with lots of continuing influence by the remaining "John Browns" reinforces that thought. In some ways, the old city-states are now the "family businesses" over which the heriditary "monarchs" retain great influence in large part because they established the company culture, and the organization reveres them for it.

3) Conquering a "country" that is used to living under its own "laws" reminds me a lot of the situation confronting a new President or Provost of a univesrity in which faculty are used to doing their own things and are therefore fairly reluctant as a group to carry out much change. "A thousand points of NO" is the way I believe the USC President in The Contrarian Leader described it. In those circumstances, Machiavelli suggests "laying them waste" or residing with them. The former not being much in favor in our 21st century democratic culture, that means that any new leader of a highly individualistic group needs to spend a lot time getting to know that group, becoming one of "them," before he or she makes any major changes. Interestingly, this is exactly the advice that modern leadership and business books usually make that hiring outsiders as leaders typically fails, except in those circumstances where the new person spends a lot of time getting to know the organizational culture first.

4) It's even easier to "rule" when you've become the boss of your own group through your own skill and hard work. That again would make sense with the modern organizational advice that it's better to hire from within and that if you want to experiment with significant change, it's much easier to do by setting up an entirely new unit instead of trying to alter substantially the existing organization.

5) Here's one I've referred to a lot in my own life. "Injuries should be done all together, so that being less tasted, they will give less offence. Benefits should be granted little by little, so that they may be better enjoyed." In other words, if you've got bad news, a budget downturn, for example, get out all of the bad news in one fell swoop. But if you've got good news, then dribble it out bit by bit. Easier to say than to do, but it's been my experience that this insight is very true of human and organizational psychology.

6) And then there's the famous quote that a prince should have no other aim or study than war. But I think the more revealing and appropriate quote for our contemporary purposes is that
"when princes think more of luxury than of arms, they lose their states." A contemporary business study, for example, shows that when CEOs are building or remodeling homes, the performance of the companies they lead declines. In general, the bigger the homes, the worse the organizational performance. In our contemporary context, this quote is typically translated as "grow or die," which doesn't have to be equated with growth in quantity, but can be associated with growth in quality as well. If you're not always striving to get better, others who are will eventually pass you by.

7) Another famous quote is that "it is necessary for a prince, who wishes to maintain himself, to learn how not to be good." As harsh as that sounds, it's probably not so different than our biblical injunction to be "wise as a serpent" because Machiavelli then goes on to say that the prince should use this knowledge as it is appropriate, not that the prince should always act with evil intentions.

8) Perhaps the most recognized Machiavelli quote comes from chapter 17. "It is better to be feared than loved." But then Machiavelli goes on to explain that being hated is even worse, so "fear" in this context is more like "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." It has more to do with awe and respect. A prince can be thought cruel and harsh, but not rapacious. Which means that taking the occasional "life" (translated, perhaps, as firing someone) is warranted, but taking people's property (reducing "budgets" and/or "salary" while you the leader continue to live in comparative luxury) is what will really doom your leadership. I'm always reminded of the historical discussions regarding revolutions is that they do not typically occur because people are oppressed, especially if they have been so for some time. They occur when large numbers have something taken away from them that they feel is "theirs."

9) Of course, there's the usual political advice that even if you personally don't have all of the wonderful traits people might want (which Machiavelli defines as "mercy, faith, integrity, humanity, and religion" and notes that no one can really possess all of them in great measure), then at least you have to appear to have those gifts. Appearance, in the public realm, matters more than substance.

10) Since the biggest danger for the leader is to become hated, "princes should let the carrying out of unpopular duties devolve on others, and bestow favours themselves." Unless, of course, people come to see you as the "weak" leader who has to have others do your dirty work for you. In which case, they'll "fear" the person doing the unpopular duties and "hate" you. Pithy quotes are always difficult to implement, especially when they contradict other pithy quotes.

11) Leaders gain their reputations from great causes, great prowess, and firm decisions (being a "great friend" or a "great enemy"). The one I've been struggling with the most is the "great cause." How do we define that greatness? We have various conversations with faculty members and other constituents, and the responses are all over the map. Even the top academic administrators can't come to some consensus on that score. I'm still pondering this one.

12) A leader has to be completely devoted to his ministers and vice versa. The USC President, obviously a student of Machiavelli, makes a similar argument. Of course, Machiavelli has also contended that a "new" prince may have to "lay waste" to the allies who brought him to power, because there's no way that he can satisfy all of their demands and preserve the state he is now ruling. Once again, this one's easier to read than to implement.

13) Princes need to be great listeners and seekers of advice, but only from a limited group and only when he asks for it, otherwise he'll appear indecisive and get overwhelmed with contrasting perspectives. Guess you'd say that this is the "representative" model of governance as opposed to the "democratic" model? One of the complaints about Bush is that he's allowed Cheney too much of a private, back-door advisory capacity that has made him appear weak and has disaffected the rest of the "ministers."

14) Finally, all else being equal, it's better for a leader to be "impetuous" than "cautious." This is similar to "fortune favors the bold." Of course, this advice runs counter to "first, do no harm" and lots of other quotes. Since I clearly tend toward the "impetuous," I agree with Machiavelli's argument, but as with much else in this short book, and as Machiavelli himself frequently notes, a lot will depend on the circumstances in which the prince finds himself.

The rise of the non-traditional "traditional" student?

Some of the articles and books that I've been reading contend that more and more students want that "consumer-friendly" variety of course offerings that allow them more convenience and flexibility. On-line, low-residency, and once-a-week night courses all fit that bill, even now for traditional on-campus students. I personally haven't seen too much evidence of that desire at a place like JBU, but perhaps that's mostly because we're so rural and our student population is so heavily (and increasingly so) residential.

But if we were to leverage that approach, what might it look like for our sort of institution, and how might we get there? A reasonable first step might be to develop some of our existing "elective modules" into more standardized courses that could be offered in more systematic ways. That step could be leveraged as follows.

1) Offered in a low-residency format (in addition to our existing on-line Core courses) so that students from around the state could have access since their numbers aren't always concentrated in just one area.

2) Offered to students who don't yet meet our existing work and age requirements (coupled, perhaps, with changing those requirements to emphasize work experience or completing a certain number of these JBU modules and removing the age requirement).

3) Offered to on-campus students as well as an alternative delivery mechanism that could run year round? We might then have both on-line and low-residency Core/Electives available to all of our PS and TUG undergrad students.

3A) These combined student populations would likely entail some careful calibration between TUG and PS. Differential pricing might become an issue, for example, but we'd probably just do what we do now with the on-line courses and charge traditional undergrads their full rate (except in the summer, in which case we use the summer rates) because what they're really paying for with their extra tuition dollars is the on-campus experience, and they're still getting that even if the course delivery in this case is different. Faculty teaching these courses, however, would probably need to continue teaching them as overload/adjuncts for cost reasons and to be consistent with the Advance model. To assure compatibility and quality with the on-campus program, we'd likely need to include some type of pre and post tests as well, an idea we might want to consider for our existing courses also (if we want to buttress Dick's concept that these are programs are "comparable" to TUG and if we want to make that case to the government and to accreditating agencies).

4) Eventually perhaps offered in both low residency and on-line formats as a package Associates Degree that would largely replicate our existing Core Curriculum. So, in addition to supporting our current PS and TUG students, this program might eventually draw in students on its own basis as well as potentially feeding students into our various PS degrees and TUG majors.

We'll see if anything comes of these ideas, but they certainly seem to be effective approaches at other institutions.

VPAA vs. Provost?

The definitions are overdrawn in order to make the argument, and I think everyone in academia struggles with these competing pressures of idealism (VP) vs. pragmatism (Provost), but the article lays out the issues fairly well - http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2007/08/2007080201c/careers.html.

Don't give the customer what he wants?

Here's another example of how students are both the customer AND the product. So if businesses say they need MBA grads with more leadership and communication skills, but students say they need more courses in fundamentals such as accounting, which do you emphasize in your curriculum?

http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/08/2007080204n.htm?=attn

Combined Liberal Arts & Economics/Finance degree?

Since I started out as an econ/liberal arts person, and am now in some ways coming full circle back to that combination, this program was interesting to me. It appears to combine the "liberal arts" side of Business with a traditional liberal arts degree. Not sure this would work at a lot of places, but it's intriguing - http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/02/bard.