The Problem with Departmental Revenue/Cost (non)Analysis

All across the country struggling colleges (and universities) are hiring one of several academic consulting firms to help them get a handle on their finances. The ACTUAL problem the institutions face is low enrollment but this is experienced as "this place costs too much to run" (because tuition revenue is below expenses) and like management everywhere their brains turn to cutting labor costs. In the absence of a vision for what the academic program should look like (or in the presence of an unwillingness to put such a vision on the table), they turn to consultants to help them identify where to cut academic programs. One element informing decisions about academic restructuring in general and instructional personnel in particular is the so-called program cost structure analysis.

The basic logic of this analysis is to identify all the faculty FTE that staffs courses in a given area, identify the compensation of these individuals and then add in the cost of the program's share of administrative support and operating budget and then compare this with the "revenue" the unit generates through crediting a fraction of effective per student tuition for each credit hour earned by students in the program's courses. Then we either subtract one from the other or form a ratio and characterize the program as "in the black" or "in the red" a "net revenue generator" or a "net cost center," etc.

Distortion and Bias on the Cost Side

When such analyses use actual faculty salaries rather than average faculty salaries they bias the result by faculty seniority.  Since faculty are sometimes on leave and since senior faculty retire and get replaced by new assistant professors this introduces big year to year distortions that make comparisons problematic.

Suppose biology, for example, has had three senior retirements in recent years all of whom have been replaced by new junior faculty. If we look at the department 4 years back it looks very expensive, if we look at it today it looks very inexpensive.

Now, some will answer this observation saying you have to budget for the actuality of today. Point taken. But the stated purpose of this analysis is to understand the relationship between cost and demand.  We are trying to understand something about the liberal arts college of today. If we do the analysis and find that philosophy is more expensive per student than marketing but the reason is marketing is a brand new department that only just hired faculty last year and we make strategic long term decisions on the basis of this information we are going to be making mistakes.

The solution is simple: use weighted average cost that takes into account the actual distribution of the college faculty across pay levels.  This permits program to program comparisons unbiased on the cost-side of the equation.

Distortion and Bias on the Revenue Side

One piece of the demand and revenue side of the analysis is simply looking at student course registrations - how many students do we teach.  

This is a fair measure and it's not hard to zero in on how many students each faculty member has to teach each year to "pay their salary." When I did this computation a few years ago it came in at around 95 per year.

But using aggregate course registrations as a measure of student interest is problematic.  Many courses in the curriculum have numerous prerequisites and many courses are mandated as part of various minors and majors and general education schemes. And some courses are scheduled in a manner that reduces the number of potential enrollees (not necessarily out of poor scheduling strategy: languages may need to meet 4 times per week, some courses have required labs and labs may need to take up an entire afternoon).

A course that has an absolute prerequisite will almost necessarily never have more students in it than the prerequisite. Departments and programs that are more hierarchical will offer more courses that are necessarily smaller.  Courses with no prerequisites have a natural advantage. English, for example, has dozens of courses with no prerequisites or only English 1 as a prerequisite, a course that every student is required to take.  This gives the English program a huge advantage over, say, biology or biochemistry.

Programs that manage to control general education requirements and get more of their courses to count for GE will have enrollment numbers inflated over "actual student interest."

The Upshot

The bottom line is that there are a number of structural distortions that make credit hours generated an invalid measure of student interest, especially in comparisons among close cases.

When both the numerator and denominator in a metric are subject to biases moving in different directions the metric is not a valid measurement of what you think it is a measure of. Employing such a metric for comparisons between programs, development of curricular strategy, and ending instructors' careers is, at best, problematic.

Sometimes an analysis has a data problem ("garbage in, garbage out") and that's probably true here. But the far more serious problem lies in the methodology.

How to Fix

There really is no excuse for not using average faculty compensation, unless we do not care about chopping out a part of the curriculum simply because of when we hired the faculty who teach it. The other problem is much hairier.  The very nature of knowledge affects the results here, as do contemporary ideas about assessment that encourage a pedagogical trajectory from "introduction" through "practice" to "mastery." Taking into account how different programs manifest these is not easy.  But failing to take them into account undercuts the believability of one's results.

Bad Methods Yield Non-Actionable Answers

Originally published June 2017

Having drunk the KoolAid of rubrics and assessment, many the untrained academic administrator epitomizes that old saw about a knowing just enough to be dangerous. Suppose a manager wants to make a decision based on multiple criteria. An academic manager, for example, might consider

• Employee Type
• Organization Needs and Employee Expertise
• Employee Productivity
• Employee Versatility
• Engagement in Critical Roles

The plan is to rate each employee on each dimension and then add up the ratings to yield a score that will permit comparison between employees for the purpose of decisions about whether to retain the employee or not.

The individual ratings will be some variation on High, Medium, Low.

The use of rubrics such as this is all the rage in higher education. Unfortunately, they are frequently deployed in a manner that reduces 

Ratings are not normalized

By having some categories top ranking count 3 and others 2 points we introduce a distortion into the final score. Type, match, and productivity "count" more than versatility and critical role.  If that's intended, fine, but if not, it skews results.

Ordinal Scales Do Not Contain Distance Information

Any fool, as they say, knows that "high" is more than "medium" which is more than "low" and "low" is more than "none."  When we have a scale that has this property we call it an "ordinal" scale; the elements of the scale can unambiguously be ordered from low to high.

What we do NOT know, though, is whether the "distance" between a high rating and a medium rating is equal to the distance between a medium rating and a low rating.

Although it is extremely common to look at an ordinal scale like "high, medium, and low" and assign 3 to high, 2 to medium, and 1 to low, this is a serious methodological error.  It invents information out of thin air and inserts it into the assessment. The ways in which this distorts the answers that emerge from the measurement cannot be determined without careful analysis. Just writing 3, 2, 1 next to words is not careful analysis.

Criteria Overlap Double Counts Things

Suppose some of the same underlying traits and behaviors contribute to a needs/expertise match and an employee's versatility and that this trait is one of many we would like to consider in deciding whether to retain the employee. Since it has an impact on both factors its presence effectively gets counted twice (as would its absence).
Unless we are very careful to be sure that each rating category is separate and distinct, a rubric like this introduces distortion into the final score by unintentionally overweighting some factors and underweighting others.

Sequence Matters

When using rubrics like this we sometimes hear that one or another criteria is only used after the others or is used as a screen before the others. This too needs to be done thoughtfully and deliberately. It is not hard to show how different sequences of applying criteria can result in different outcomes.

Zero is Not Nothing

A final problem with scales like these is that even if the distance between the ratings were meaningful, it is not always the case that we have a well defined "zero" rating.  Assigning zero to the lowest rating category is not the same as saying that those assigned to this category have none of whatever is being measured.

The problem that this introduces is that a scale without a well understood zero measurement yields measurements that cannot be multiplied and divided. This means that we cannot think in terms of average ratings as we often do.

Rankings are Just Rankings

The upshot is that ordinal scales are just rankings, just orderings, and without a more well established underlying numerical scale rankings are very hard to compare and combine in a manner that does not obscure more than it illuminates. Decisions based on naive uses of quantification are as likely as not to be wrong and influenced by extraneous and unacknowledged factors or just be the result of random consequences of choices made along the way.

Managing the Wrong Problem

Originally published June 2017 We have a revenue problem, not a cost problem.

Imagine an educational institution that finds itself running a budget deficit - projected revenues just do not balance projected costs. It's a very familiar scene in higher education in 2017.

And so what happens?  The Board of Trustees says "balance that budget!" and the Administration hears "tighten your belt!"

Cost Cutting is Easy. Revenue Growth is Hard.

Why don't we hear "strengthen your revenues"?  The answer is pretty simple: cost cutting is easier work.  Cutting costs means looking inward and relying on bureaucratic authority. One can tell one's reports to cut costs by X% and then hold them accountable for results. They in turn tell their reports to do the same and wait for results.  And the work is done by poring over budget reports and having meetings with PowerPoint slides full of numbers.  The work flows down the bureaucracy. Bureaucracies are more comfortable when work flows down. This process is NOT rocket science.

On the other hand, to pay attention to and do something about revenues, people have to look outward, become informed about the outside world, take in new ideas, struggle to understand opportunities and communicate them to colleagues, do the very hard work of finding out what the world wants and telling the world what you can do.  This IS rocket sciencey.

What Usually Happens

By my estimation, it's easy for a college over the course of, say, two years to deploy thousands of hours of its best people's time and creativity talking about how to nibble away at the margins of the expense side of its budget.  A 20+ person budget committee will meet several times a month, C-suite folks and their staff will meet even more often, faculty meetings, committee meetings, and all-campus meetings are devoted to the task. Consultants are hired to crunch data, in-house people crunch the data again. It's probably not too far off the mark to imagine the institution puts more energy into this than anything else during this time.

Because.What.We.Are.Good.At

It's not surprising, though, because most institutions have a management team that has been selected on the basis of their ability to manage the status quo, to keep things running as they are (perhaps with modest expansion and growth). The "technology" of innovation, growth, expansion, rethinking business models, being entrepreneurial, leveraging resources, finding efficiency, building strategic platforms on which new revenue streams can grow, all of these are beyond their ken. It is easy to predict that we will put all our energy into saving and so very little into earning.

And when we DO turn our attention away from cost-cutting, the furthest we usually get is to devote ourselves to RETENTION. We tell ourselves that each retained student is $15k net tuition we have next year that we might have lost. Retention attention activates our missionary zeal and provides concrete focus for building programs and hiring staff. But we are inclined to measure neither the cost effectiveness of these efforts nor their fundamental limitedness - perfect retention will only ever get you back to the already anemic enrollment you started with.  And when your best people are working on this, they are not working on growth.

There is No Smaller Right-Size

This is a very big problem. When most institutional energy and brainpower is devoted to cutting costs and stemming losses, very little is leftover for actual expansion of the revenue pie.  Most colleges that are struggling will not achieve anything close to a sustainable business structure via cuts and retention. They have fundamental structural deficits related to their size and there is not a smaller size that works. All of the efforts at cost management and loss prevention are efforts at managing the wrong problem.

Is it real? Can we win? Is it worth doing?

Originally posted 16 June 2017

I saw the best minds of my institution distracted by madness, meeting endlessly in vain, poring themselves over balance sheets all day looking for the do-able fix...

I've watched and listened for the last several years as my institution thrashed and muttered things about reinventing itself and formulating a new business model and becoming financially sustainable.

Most disturbing has been what strikes me as an almost fanatic commitment to not running the college like a business because of a fear of "running the college like a business."

What I mean by that is that people who are rightfully concerned about those who would turn education into a financialized commodity, an institution that serves corporate overlords, and all the rest chased away ordinary business and organizational management sense driving higher education toward amateurish and disastrous practices.

I've spent the last few years looking for translatable lessons that might be useful for those of us who actually understand education to build our institutions into robust, successful, and sustainable enterprises so that we can hold off the small-minded interests that would be delighted to take advantage of our incompetence.

---

In a 2007 Harvard Business Review article George Day describes a powerful method for assessing risk and reward tradeoffs in innovation. I think Day's ideas can be adapted to the situation of a small college like ours and I a lot of the decisions and discussions that have occurred over the last several years, and especially in the last few months, demonstrate the pathology of an organization behaving in precisely the opposite direction from these ideas.

Day is writing about how an organization should evaluate innovation opportunities. He advocates for any potential innovation to be evaluated by asking "Is it real? Can we win? Is it worth doing?"

 These questions can be adapted to an evaluation of both ongoing operations, innovations, and remedial moves taken in response to emergency conditions.

Let's start with "is it real?"

The question refers both to products and markets. In our case the two are closely related but should be assessed separately.

When we say "product" we mainly mean the programs we offer – majors, degrees, courses, credentials. When we say "market" we mean both the market of people who want to buy our product – enroll – and a post-graduation market for people with the credentials we offer.

Is the product real? In industry this means "does the technology to build this thing actually exist?" In higher education we have to ask whether there are courses, or whether courses could be designed, that would add up to some credential or program we ponder.  We have to ask is this the kind of thing that one can do in four years or two years or alongside the rest of one's education? Is it coherent? Legible?

Is the market real? Is there actually a desire/need for what we are thinking of doing?  Can the student for whom it is perfect actually purchase it?  Is the size of the market big enough for us to be able to get this off the ground?  WILL the potential "customer" buy it (at the price at which we will need to ask)?

Can we win?

Again, the question has two sides: the "product" and the "company."

Can the product win? Is this thing we want to offer better than the alternatives? How established are the alternatives?  If the people who would want our thing are currently using something else, why would they switch? Can we survive expected responses from the competition?

Can the organization win?  Do we have superior faculty and staff who can work on this? Do we have the necessary experience and skills to do this well at the necessary scale and over the necessary time frame?  Are there effective internal champions to create and sustain interest and enthusiasm?  Do we really understand the market and have the capacity to listen to its signals?

Is it worth doing? 

Is this move likely to be profitable? "Profitable" is a simple idea - do returns exceed expenses - but we need to think carefully about what goes into this. When are we going to have to invest how much capital?  What marketing expenditures are necessary to give the idea a chance? What future development and revision will starting this commit us to?  What are we doing now that we will do less of as we divert personnel and resources to this new endeavor?

Does this project make strategic sense? Does this new program or change fit with our organizational growth strategy? Or is it taking us off in a direction that will distract us from what we are trying to do?

An extremely important part of thinking about whether something makes strategic sense is whether the project will generate a platform on which other things can be built. Does the initiative allow us to develop policies and practices that can be used for other things? Are we building up skills and experiences among our faculty and staff that we can use to build and enhance other programs?

The "is-it-real-can-we-win-is-it-worth-doing" filter is not a magic bullet, but it is an example of some adaptable wisdom that could make a gigantic difference in the ways faculty and administrators think about change and renewal.

Take "writing across the curriculum" seriously and reduce messy GE subsidies

Imagine an institution in which the English department offers each year 13 or so sections of a "rhetoric and composition" course enrolling about 200 students for a 1.25 semester credits. These credits are covered exclusively by adjuncts. Suppose this represents about 18% of the department's total credit production and it is produced by about 12% of its FTE. Having guaranteed enrollment and deploying only adjunct labor to teach it might amount to a "GE subsidy" that is messy in that it might allow departments to appear artificially more efficient.

The institution currently believes it is experiencing an "under deployment" of its tenured and tenure track faculty. This is perceived to be especially true in a few departments.

The institution has for many years flirted with variations on "writing across the curriculum," but has never seriously implemented a program based on that idea for beginning students.

Proposal: all introductory rhetoric and composition classes will be taught by tenured and tenure track faculty in departments across the college. The college will make the fact that "freshman comp" is taught exclusively by full time faculty one pillar of its brand.

Benefits:

• Since instructors will inevitably draw on their own discipline and the majors they teach in, the first year comp course will effect broad liberal arts exposure for all first year students, can serve as a second gateway to possible majors in addition to intro courses. 
• Having instructors of these courses spend a little time together will yield the elusive cross-program collaboration that will almost certainly have healthy knock-on effects. 
• The program undercuts the tendency of students to think of writing as something associated with English courses but not others. 
• Majors could permit inclusion of the writing class as an elective reducing the need to staff electives. 

The FTE deployment will be managed and incentivized by a fair algorithm that favorably adjusts departmental credit hour production expectations to account for the size limits on composition classes.

NOTE: technically, this move INCREASES the cost of staffing first year composition since TTT faculty are more expensive. But if the perception that these faculty are currently under-utilized, then this can be a cost effective solution.

1. Essentials of liberal arts

1. What are the essential components of a quality liberal arts education, and how can we ensure that we remain, first and foremost, a first-rate liberal arts college in the midst of change?

2. Can we restructure and still be liberal arts?

2. Are there ways we can restructure ourselves that will still allow us to deliver what we deem to be an essential liberal arts curriculum? 
1.  Could we, for example, think about majors and/or graduate programs with fewer requirements? Majors vary from 10 credits to 16 or 17 — can this discrepancy be reduced?
2. In smaller departments, are there still ways that we can combine smaller classes, have them offered less often, combine senior seminars, or the like?

3. Can interdisciplinary work be the key?

3. Are there ways that interdisciplinary work can help us achieve both goals? That is, to ensure students access to a high quality liberal arts education with coverage of a sufficiently broad and deep curriculum, while also ensuring that the college is on sound financial footing?

4. Can the white paper help? New programs? Revenue growth possibilities?

4. Can the White Paper help us to think about this: Are there other ideas for programs, collaborations with other colleges, etc. that can help us ensure that we remain true to our mission and values while we do this restructuring work?
1. Are there new programs, majors, collaborations, etc. — noted in the White Paper or not — that folks would like to work on developing? Short term? Medium and long term?
2. Where do we reasonably see revenue growth possibilities in the next year? The next 2-3 years?

5. Other conversations we need to have?

5. What other conversations do we feel the faculty and board need to be having about how to address these budget concerns?
   
   For example: How can we carry out our goals of shared governance during a time with looming budget cuts?
   
   What else?

Four Modest Suggestions for General Education Reform

Tell Them Why I

Develop coherent and persuasive description of why we have a GE program and what it is supposed to achieve.  Address it to the students who will study in the program.

Tell Them Why II

Build into orientation each year an academic address in which a faculty member is charged with coming up with a creative and compelling explanation of, argument for, the GE program both in principle and in particular. A few years of this will provide us with some internal dialog on what it means and why it is there as well as providing a foundation for all subsequent advising around GE.

Collect data

Write a short bit of code which would count ALL gen-ed fulfilling courses to see how the distribution is. In other words, take as given that we have a set of areas and we have a set of courses that relate to them. Apart from meeting minimal requirements, what does the distribution of "general education" actually look like for a class of graduates? (coding note: need to filter by major so we do not bias results based on distribution of majors).

Use Design to Change Attitudes

Move away from the "check box" mentality by re-configuring Banner and MAPs so they don't simply indicate that a requirement has been fulfilled, but rather track and document how and how many times each requirement has been fulfilled, providing both student and anyone who looks at the transcript a visualization of her general education. Include the rationales described above in the transcript/MAP.

Thus, instead of this…

They'd see this:

(Not 95) Theses on General Education Reform, etc.

General Education reform has a long history in higher education of being a no-win zone. Correct that: in any given GenEd campaign there is often a player or group of players who manage to get something out of it (e.g., an administrator or administrator want-to-be who gets credit for shepherding the program through to approval (and to be fair, it's probably good training) or a department that gets a influx of resources it will never lose (even when GE is next revised) or sometimes a group of faculty who have opted out of discipline-based work and now rise to institutional importance).

The kudos and benefits, though, are almost never dependent on whether the program actually works and there is never any accountability for problems associated with the diversion of time, energy, and resources required by the program.

I share the Camelot-esque urge to champion the life of the mind, to fight against the forces of mediocrity in the modern world, really educate our students for the 21st century, and just generally to work for a better tomorrow, but I've seen this windmill tilted at too many times not to offer some ideas, collected over the years, about GenEd revisions. Offered partly in the spirit of provocation and healthy debate, but mostly on the (naive) optimistic belief that it IS possible to do better at higher education reform than is usually the case. The problem is that the ruts in the road are deep ones indeed.

1. IT MAY JUST NOT MATTER


1. Almost no one will ever select a college on the basis of a general education program unless the program is that there are no GE requirements.
2. The process usually begins with someone saying "everyone knows the current system is broken and needs to be updated." Ever was it so. Ever will it be.
3. After the program is in place, students and faculty will invest a lot of time and energy "getting around the rules" to make individual educations make sense.
4. GenEd gets revamped every decade or so. Neither the stuff of GenEd nor the nature of students really changes THAT much. Thus the "new" is mostly recapitulations and recombinations of old. 
5. Where is cost-benefit analysis when you need it? How much goes into the process? How much does it cost to implement? What's the outcome? Listen and you'll hear that the value can't be measured.


2. DECIDE ON FUNDAMENTALS


1. GenEd is an introduction to the breadth of inquiry in the university?
2. GenEd is a set of skills and areas of knowledge that every graduate should possess?
3. GenEd should inculcate a set of values that specialized training in majors omit?
4. GenEd is basic skills that are necessary to succeed in specialized training in majors?
5. GenEd should inculcate ideas students need as citizen but not taught in the major?
6. GenEd should insure that students do not graduate as narrow vocational specialists?
7. GenEd should be material common to all/most majors to make education more efficient?


3. ORGANIZATIONAL DECISION MAKING IS ORGANIZATIONAL


1. The design of a GenEd program is an organizational process, not an intellectual one.
2. GenEd rules shape/channel resources (enrollment, FTE, budget); much of the conversation is actually about that.
3. No GE program worth doing will please all. A compromise no one opposes is likely crap. 
4. Who is GenEd for? What is GenEd for? Who benefits? Who pays? Write the answers out.
5. The problem with the current program is usually implementation, not concept.  "GE is a mess" is unhelpful starting point; it's a mess because of implementation, and the same people will implement the new one so it likely will have the same implementation failures.
6. Least Common Denominator is very weak conceptual foundation for GenEd. Be skeptical about "what EVERY student should have."


4. PROJECTION AND PROCESS


1. Many proposals for GenEd translate as (1) students should have my (our!) values (2) every student should study what I teach.
• General rule: if it's my pet peeve or my pet project, it's not general education.
• Leaders should discourage "my 'baby' is the be all and end all" talk. 
• Perhaps a simple rule that you cannot advocate for your own area as part of GE.
• Keep track of which disciplines' are most certain their subject is essential.
2. Alternatively, use bottom up approach. Ask each "major" to write down: "A student of X needs some W and Y as foundations for, extensions of, and complements to X." Encourage inventive thinking. Then build on that database.


5. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE


1. Look to history: GenEd as contrasted with major course of study. 
2. Liberal arts is not same as humanities and fine arts.
3. How come it's not a crisis that art students can't do math?
4. "The Core" and related terms mean different things in different institutional contexts. 
5. The "outside the course" rhetoric in higher ed discourse is sort of "anti-professor." 
6. When did "community engagement" become a fundamental responsibility of educational institutions? Why did this happen? Ask questions; don't take things for granted.


6. REQUIREMENTS 


1. Let's be at a little skeptical about imposing morality/ideology via "requiring everyone to take a course on X." Very hard to find examples in history of this working well.
2. Best test of a GE concept might be thought experiment: would it work if not required? 
3. All of the "values," "mindsets," "orientations," etc. that one is inclined to require courses on because they are institutionally important should be a part of everything we teach. If not, then they are NOT actually institutionally important, you are just wishing they were.


7. CRITICAL THINKING


1. Nobody knows what critical thinking is. Perhaps start by figuring out what we mean by it.
2. Ask anyone who says "it's a problem that..." to explain how they know that it is a problem and how we could detect when it was not a problem anymore.
3. Purge all documents of "red herrings" (things that might very well be true and good but which distract from matter at hand). For example "faculty need support for digital technologies and data management in the classroom" or "need to acknowledge how hard faculty already work blah blah blah."
4. Perhaps outlaw any sentence that included the phrase "we used to..."
5. "Competencies" is a buzz word. Interrogate buzzwords; don't parrot buzzwords.


8. LANGUAGES AND GLOBAL LITERACY


1. Arguments for foreign languages often amount to (1) other schools do it; or (2) it's good for you (plus, usually, unsaid, "it was good for me"). Maybe, but, as champions of critical thinking, we should do better at motivating what would be a really big student and institutional investment and diversion of resources. 
2. Studying a language or going on a study abroad may not provide "global literacy" - it often turns one into a fan of one country, region, language, etc. It may transcend localism, but it's not necessarily "global" per se.
3. Do students currently chose to take foreign languages? Have the foreign language departments managed to enroll to capacity? Find out why before trying to accomplish this with a requirement. 
4. Ask why would we require, say, four semesters of this one of area of learning but not others?


9. GET EMPIRICAL


1. What is the actual evidence that things like "community engagement" are really something that we are not doing enough of? How do you know?
2. The future of higher ed for small second tier institutions will be strongly based on transfer students. Almost all GenEd will of necessity be something we accept as already done as a part of the transfer articulation agreements. This is likely simply part of the physics of the future of higher education in the US for many schools.
3. Every time someone suggests "X" is our core value, ask two things. First, does X really distinguish us from other places? Second, can we ethically have students on average incur $30k in debt for an education based on X? Is that what families sacrifice for?


10. BUILD ON GOOD IDEAS


1. Is your accreditation agency dominated by people from institutions you admire?  Are its publications ones you look to for inspiration?  What good is likely to come from basing a curriculum on their concepts? The answer is one thing: it is a path to a "compromise" that would not be a mere medley of all the competing ideas we faculty have. This might be important, but be clear about it.
2. Are you impressed by the ideas of the folks who are pushing assessment nationally? Do they strike you as the right sources of new GE ideas?
3. Are the thought leaders from American K12 education who have started to work in higher ed space the ones you would turn to for ideas on improving college and university education?


11. BOLDNESS


1. Institute multiple general education requirement schemes. See which ones students opt for. See which ones seem to deliver best results.
2. Have a fully articulated general education program but don't make it required. Can you persuade students it is a good idea.
3. Structure your requirements as "do at least 4 of these 7 things" and keep track of what people do and engage in some serious research about why they make those choices.
4. Provide a strict, cohort based option (you are given a schedule of GE courses when you start and the group takes them together over a few years) and see how many students sign up for it and what effects it has.

Hi My Name is Dan and I'll be Your Server

In a talk on October 14 blogger Audrey Watters described a dystopian future in which there were only 10 universities in the world.  The narrative arc of her provocation was that the rest of the "industry" would be replaced by variations on MOOCs and distance learning.  The real point of her talk (spoiler warning) was that this was not a necessary future, but one that some contemporary educational visionaries' ideas are pointing that direction, whether they know it or not.

I envision a different dystopian higher education landscape.  In my version, the rest of the institutions do not disappear.  Instead, they become "outlets" or "franchisees" of a small number of education "suppliers."  The business model analogy that's most apt, I think, will be chain restaurants.  Think about the food court at the airport or the restaurants in a strip mall or scattered around either suburbia or most city centers. This will happen because small colleges and universities will face the "make or buy" decision and everything will point in the direction of buy -- that is, to outsource the core educational content functions.

The entrepreneurs who run these establishments deliver a dining experience to customers who more or less beat a path to their door.  For better or worse they get a dependably consistent product.  It's challenging for others to compete with them because they have all the advantages of scale and name recognition and proven processes of food preparation.

If you look around at the contemporary practices of the big education companies (mostly publishers) and countless education startups, what you will see are the seeds of an industry that will (or want to) capture the entire constellation of things that happen in colleges and universities with the exception of student faculty contact, student-student contact, and research.  Before long we will likely see a separating out of education per se and research (for better or worse, well underway), then we can move toward a future in which colleges and universities partner with the education franchisors.  The colleges will be able to put a local wrapper on the experience and they'll have faculty and staff to "deliver" it, but the actual content, practices, and raw materials will be provided by the supplier.

What role will faculty and staff play?  Hard to say.  But if the best we can muster in defense of the ways we do college education is some variation on "relationships matter" then we might well find that that's the only part we (the we now is "we faculty") will play will be to serve up the corporate content and help students to get the most out of the experience.

Like Watters' narrative, not a necessary future, just a possible one.  To avoid it, I think we need to pay attention to efficiency and productivity within our institutions.  Otherwise, we'll get lapped by entities that are so much more productive that our claim to difference in kind will be drowned out.

CLAIM: Credit Hours as a Basis for Educational Accounting Will Disappear

There's lots of talk about competencies versus seat time as a means for tracking educational achievement.  I'm not sure if I think of this more as a prediction or a recommendation, but I suspect credits and credit hours will fall by the wayside over the next decade.

This is tricky business for a number of reasons.  Post-Bologna Process European higher education has actually moved more in the direction of a credit system (ECTS) motivated by the principle that students should be able to move around among institutions and across national borders.  Similar concerns exist in the US system where maintaining the pathway from junior colleges to four year institutions is a priority.

The credit hour is also intimately tied to the tuition-driven business model.  Measuring learning in terms of inputs translates easily to designing the college or university in terms of easily tracked outputs and tying these to the main factors that go into producing them: teaching and classrooms.  We can depend on a degree amounting to about 4 years of tuition paid to somebody and it helps to regulate the flow of people through the process.  A side benefit of this is that it also ensures an average level of maturation during the process -- regardless of the effect of the education itself, students are at least about four years older  Accounting for education in terms of credits also makes it possible to avoid the actually difficult tasks of comparable evaluation and certification.

But there are a number of things that weigh in favor of this outcome:

• For better or worse, conversations about the bottom line quality of degrees shifts the focus from time spent in school to what was learned there
• An ever widening distribution of levels of academic preparation will require more and more remedial and introductory level instruction unless the entire model shifts to simply "value added" (as in, the students know more at the end than at the beginning but with varying levels of achievement depending on the starting point)
• The availability of alternative learning venues will undermine our capacity to say, in effect, "you have to learn it from me."
• In the extreme our monopoly on the credential itself could easily be threatened by alternative certification processes.
• The trans-disciplinary nature of the problems of the next fifty years will almost certainly require graduates to solve them via intellectual "mash-ups" that combine knowledge that may or may not come in 14 week sized chunks.
• Organizationally, most institutions of higher learning are not nimble enough to respond to changes in their environments using courses, majors, and traditional departments.  Abandoning credits is one way to acquire some nimbleness without dismantling the entire system.

Of course, the conversation will go nowhere in the absence of a viable alternative.  Contemporary views vary, but there seems to be an emerging consensus that we have not yet figured out what might replace the credit hour.  The ECTS and the United Kingdom's Qualifications and Credit System and Lumina Foundation's Degree Qualifications Profile all manner of "badges" proposals are among the frameworks that are out there.  Missing from all of them, I think, is an exploration of their impact on the organization of our institutions.  That would seem to be a necessary component if we want to move the conversation forward.

See also

1. Carey, Kevin. 2012. "Who Will Hold Colleges Accountable?" New York Times December 9, 2012
2. European Commission. 2013. European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) 
3. Fain, Paul. 2012. "More Cracks in the Credit Hour." Inside Higher Ed December 5, 2012
4. Schneider, Carol Geary. 2012. "Is It Finally Time to Kill the Credit Hour?" Liberal Education Fall 2012, Vol. 98, No. 4
5. Tsigelny, Igor F. 2011. "Educational Credits in the USA and Credit Transfer from the UK and European Union." Analytical Reports in International Education Vol. 4. No. 1, November 2011, pp. 87-93
6. WES staff members. 1999. Working with ECTS (European Credit Transfer System) 
7. Young, Jeffrey R. 2012. “‘Badges’ Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 8.

State of the Art

Came across this email to myself from a spring 2011:

I found it to be a surprisingly uncritical book review masquerading as an essay. Several of the books mentioned along the way are terribly flawed and yet all we get is some gentlemanly disagreement about tenure or salaries. The stuff that's passing as social science-ish commentary on higher education should alarm us.

I don't recall what book that was; unfortunately, many plausible candidates.

Facilitating Course Level R&D in an Educational Bureaucracy

My institution developed an online tool for proposing new courses and/or revising existing courses.  It is called the Course Approval and Revision Process (CARP).  The software presents 8 screens on which the instructor has to enter information that goes into a course database.  The sections are:

1. Basic Course Info.
2. Related Courses
3. Instruction Schedule
4. Grading & Restrictions
5. Learning Goals
6. Measures of Student Learning
7. Assessment Plan
8. Library Resources (Optional)

Who or what is this operation for?  It is built around the needs of a committee (the Educational Policy Subcommittee of the Faculty Executive Committee) that reviews courses before they are set before the faculty for approval.  A few other entities have also found themselves "represented" by the software.  These include the learning assessment operation run by the Office of Institutional Research and the General Education committee.

Fundamental Design Flaw

This system is designed to serve the bureaucracy.  For it to function, instructors have to be coerced to transform what they do in thinking about a course into the form that CARP can digest.
The right design would be to produce a tool that instructors would find useful and from which CARP could transparently extract what it needed.

How It Works in Practice

Instructors need to specify things like course title and description, what sorts of instruction it will include, how often it will be offered, whether there are pre-requisites, and how it will be graded.  These constitute items 1 through 4 above.  Then, items 5, 6, and 7 are about assessment.  The program picks up learning goals from the institution and from the department's records in the assessment database.  That's actually pretty useful as it means each person who proposes a new course gets to see how lame the existing learning goals are.  Unfortunately, since the goal is to get the course approved, the result is usually just that the instructor picks a few.

Then, for each goal checked, the instructor has to specify "measurable criteria."  Fortunately, the software does not yet have any AI components that can reject work in progress; one can move on by entering "TBA" as long as one repeats it enough times to hit the minimum text length requirement.

Then you haver to enter an "assessment plan."  This means describing assignments that will be used to measure student learning and then a plan for assessing student learning.  The difference between these is pretty vague, but they do have examples.  Here is what you learn about assignments:

The purpose of assessment is to improve learning. The focus of the learning is the established goals. The assessment plan is the way in which the course will be measured to determine the level of learning in the course relevant to the goals and criteria that are established for the course in order to improve the learning in the course. What evidence is collected (e.g., papers, exams, presentations, etc.)? How is the evidence evaluated against the goals for the course (e.g. rubrics, performance evaluations, etc.)? How will the evaluations be recorded (e.g., scores tabulated, written summaries, etc.)? On what basis will conclusions be drawn about the learning taking place? What will be done with the findings?

And here is an example of the assessment plan.  Or, no, we will not quote that here because it is so lame we can just describe it:  final papers will be rated on a four point scale for each learning goal.  The aggregate results will be discussed at a department meeting and plans will be made to improve.

That last step is called in the assessment business "closing the loop."

But what if this process were actually designed, start to finish, with actual teachers in mind?  What would it look like?  That's where we will go next.

Course Level R&D

Where do new (innovative, exciting) courses come from?  How do we encourage the continuous improvement of existing courses?  What do we even mean by that?

The improvement of an existing course might mean:

• adjusting the topics covered by the course so as to be more up to date, more useful to students, better coordinated with other courses (reducing duplication or improving sequencing)
• making it more attractive to students to increase enrollment
• making it more fun for those who take it
• making it more effective for those who take it
• making it easier to teach

Some of the ways that these things could be achieved are sometimes mistaken as being course improvements in and of themselves--using the latest teaching techniques; using more technology--but we are only interested in this as possible means to the above ends.

The usual source of the kind of changes we have in mind are: imitation, inspiration, and mandate.  An instructor adopts what sounds like a good practice from a colleague, suddenly gets an idea for a cool thing to do in the class, or she is told by a chair or dean to start doing X.

As Bill McKay once intoned, "There's got to be a better way!"

And as teachers by vocation we should be really interested in exploring these.  

An App Proposal

What if there were an application environment that would allow an instructor to organize her materials, present the material to students, track their performance, perform experiments, engage in continuous course revision, collaborate with others teaching the same course at her institution, a related course at another institution, and those teaching this course's pre-requisites and courses for which this course is a pre-requisite, AND have a current version of the course always on file with the central administration.

Features

1. Standard course management system (CMS)
2. The "Lecture Studio" - a platform for lecture/presentation preparation
1. Standard lectures and slide shows but also video/audio, clickers, etc.
2. Record a screen capture
3. Record a video
4. Record an audio
5. Slide library
6. Graphics library
3. Exercise/problem bank
1. Templates for problem production (allows show/don't show answer)
1. Graphic production tools and data driven problems
2. Shared problems
3. Item testing facility
4. Community with others teaching same or similar course
5. Syllabus management system with revision and forking capability (GitHub for courses)
6. Course module management: break courses into free-standing modules with clear pre-requisites and "antigens" that help determine where they will fit.
7. Integrated web bookmark organizing (social bookmarking by others teaching same course)
8. Integrated custom textbook capability
9. Integrated with library databases (contract with content providers to make journal articles available on course by course basis)
10. Integrate with your Zotero bibliography (and your associated PDF library) making it easy to include correct bibliographic information in course materials AND to assemble readers.
11. Narrative evaluation diary
12. Maybe throw in a good calendar function too.  One that had the capacity to track hours spent on teaching.
13. Social media window?  You-tube channel channel?

First stage of development to be a clustering of existing sources in an orderly fashion.  Start to develop organizational tools that would help someone deploying them keep things coordinated, organized, and minimize transaction costs and duplication of effort.

And in this corner, Minerva, goddess of wisdom...

Another online education venture in the news yesterday as "The Minerva Project" announced it had recruited Steve Kosslyn (most recently director of Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and before that Dean of Social Sciences at Harvard) as first dean (http://bit.ly/ZQ1JYT). 

The "Minerva Project (dot com)" : http://www.minervaproject.com/ has been around for about a year now. Their advisory board includes Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, and Bob Kerrey, ex- of the New School. Unlike Coursera and EdX, their model seems to be a little more of a direct competition with the "college experience."

They have a focus on quick progress to advanced courses that starts with a fixed introductory curriculum ("During their freshman year, all students will follow the same core curriculum focused on subjects including multimodal communications and complex-systems analysis.") and movement among several physical campuses around the world. Some sources have price point about $20k and initial recruitment focus on brightest minds in the developing world. Iniital campus (2015) to be in San Francisco.

It would behoove us (faculty) to stay on top of developments like this. The alternative is that we are going to hear about it from boards of trustees and college presidents who have been wowed at conferences and in the higher-ed-admin-media (a phenomenon we might call UVAitis). Consider this from Kerrey:

"What he's got is one of the best private-education ideas I've ever heard," says Kerrey. "I think he's going to be successful, and as a consequence, university presidents across the country are going to be able to say to their boards and their faculties, 'We have to change.' He's going to have a very, very positive impact on all of higher education in America." Leigh Buchanan, "A True Elite Education at Half the Price," Inc. Magazine, 30 October 2012 (http://bit.ly/ZPXqgj) 

Sources 

• (http://bit.ly/ZQ1JYT) "Minerva Project Wins Leading Stanford Scholar," EdSurge Blog Tony Wan, EdSurge 12 March 2013 
• (http://bit.ly/Z1NHPx) "Minerva Project: Positioning and EdTech Questions" Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed, April 4, 2012 
• (http://bit.ly/ZPYdOc) "A New "Elite University" Gets $25 Million in Seed Funding," Inside Higher Ed, Audrey Watters April 3, 2012 
• (http://bit.ly/ZPYBfK) "An Idea Too Sensible to Try, Until Now," Kevin Carey, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 11, 2012

King & Sen on (Trouble) Future of Universities

Gary King (Harvard) and Maya Sen (Rochester) apply solid political science analysis to the challenges facing contemporary higher education. They consider market threats, political threats, and the potential for wise responses by universities and colleges.

Other papers from the symposium:

• Editor's Introduction 
• "Chin Up; Chest Out; Don't Panic" by Michael Laver 
• “Let's Not Railroad American Higher Education!” by Henry E. Brady 
•  “Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: Innovation, Adaptation, Preservation” by Nannerl O. Keohane 
• Comments on “The Troubled Future of College and Universities” by Virginia Sapiro 
• "Paying the Piper: Higher Education Financing and Academic Freedom” by John Mark Hansen

Click here to acess PDF if it does not appear in window below.

King and Sen on Using Social Science to Improve Teaching

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The Liberal Arts and Time's Arrow

"Liberal Arts Education" as a concept is unfortunately dominated by its own legacy.

When most of us think about the liberal arts our thoughts tend to look backwards.  Some of us fondly recall our own liberal arts educations and the value we perceive it to have had for us.  Or we think about what we've been teaching for years and years.  Or we hearken back to the invention of the modern liberal arts in the late nineteenth century or to the classical liberal arts of the middle ages.

If you listen carefully, you can almost hear us thinking, "If it was good enough then, it's good enough now..."

But it's easy to miss something important.  To understand what a liberal arts education is we should not simply look at the lists in the course catalogs of bygone eras.  Instead we should look functionally at how those lists fit into their time.  Generically, what the liberal arts are is a collection of intellectual disciplines that are appropriate to the training of generalists in their time, of subjects, the mastery of which provides a foundation, a launching platform, for the leaders of an age.

I think that, often, both those who feel an imperative to discard the liberal arts and those who feel the imperative to preserve them come at the question with the wrong idea.

A higher education system that well serves the society that supports it will have a diverse array of parts. Some parts need to be tuned to producing experts at delivering current practice in the professions. Some parts need to be highly specialized, training people to be experts at producing the things of today and solving immediate problems to create the things of tomorrow. And some parts need to prepare people to solve the problems we don't yet know that we have. And we need to train people who can move back and forth among the various experts, who can consolidate their work into emergent solutions for emerging problems. And we need people who have broad capacities to examine and understand the very system in which all the above perform. And some parts of it train people broadly prior to their becoming one of those specialists so that the narrowness of their training does not become a liability.

The mistake that the discarders make is to see the importance of the practically trained and the expertly trained as telling us that we do not need the more generally trained.

The mistake of the defenders is to think that yesterday will always tell us how to train those generalists of tomorrow.

Our challenge as educators is to look forward to figure out what the liberal arts for the 21st century should look like. It's not an easy task, to be sure. But the first right step to take is to be sure we are facing in the correct direction.