Changing Higher Education

One wonders why they protest so much??

In Another ranking of higher education - with a radical twist, I reported that OECD was thinking of doing international comparisons of national outcome measures for higher education.  I suggested that this focus on outcomes rather than inputs might lead to an interesting and enlightening set of information. 

It is not surprising that the American Council on Education is working to derail this effort since that organization has been very active in efforts to stop outcomes testing in the US.  Once again, David Ward (Pres. of ACE) argues that there are too many variables - funding methods, mission, etc. Further, he raises the possibility that the national rankings will be used to rank individual institutions, and that funding agencies might misuse this data.   Clearly, ACE is simply continuing to trot out its usual “we are too complicated to be held accountable” arguments, in this case bolstered by a threat of yet another ranking system for institutions of higher education. 

It is not obvious that the OECD effort would produce data that could be used to create another ranking system, given the way that previous OECD data has been reported.  However, since there are a  number of such ranking systems already in existence that focus on input measures, the fact that Ward focuses his displeasure on this particular possibility would seem to indicate that he thinks rankings based on outputs are even more misleading than rankings based on inputs. I would have argued the opposite. 

There are some obvious weaknesses in the system that OECD has outlined.  However, I think American higher education would be greatly strengthened if its leaders stopped focusing on preventing accountability measures, and worked instead to make sure the right measures exist and are adopted. 

Another Global Ranking of Higher Education - with a radical twist

A recent article in the Economist informed me that the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is planning a new global comparison of universities.   Readers of this blog know my suspicions of national rankings in higher education (see, e.g.Better Rankings-but do we need them? Oct.11, 2006)), and my concerns regarding international rankings are even higher.  A recent post on Beerkins’ Blog has an excellent discussion of the problems with both national and international rankings. However, the OECD comparison will look at the issue from an entirely radical perspective - learning outcomes for the different national systems of higher education!

The Spellings Commission report has engendered considerable discussion in the US regarding the desirability of looking at learning outcomes, and/or whether any useful measures of learning outcomes can be developed considering the multiple goals of higher education (see also Spellings and transparency, Oct. 3, 2006).  While we in US higher education debate this issue at great length, generally making every argument that will forestall it happening, it looks like the OECD is going to move ahead to come up with some global scorecards on effectiveness of national approaches to higher education!

Real income vs educational level- a problem for higher education

An article in Foreign Affairs, and recent reports from the Pew Trust and ETS all have recently made similar, and very important, points about education and the American economy.  The first article talks about falling real wages and the relationship to protectionism; the Pew Trust looks at decreasing economic mobility in the US, and ETS considers the impacts on the US of a “perfect storm” of divergent skill distributions, the changing economy, and demographic trends.  Taken together, these reports raise some important questions for higher education.

Kenneth F. Scheve and Matthew J Slaughter, writing in the July/August 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs, discuss generally falling wages in the US, and their connection with increasing protectionism.  They point out that real income growth recently has skewed significantly in favor of high earners, with a strong correlation to educational level. They report:
Less than four percent of workers were in educational groups that enjoyed increases in mean real money earnings from 2000 to 2005; mean real money earnings rose for workers with doctorates and professional graduate degrees and fell for all others....Even college graduates and workers with nonprofessional master’s degrees saw their mean real money earnings decline.
In particular, the mean real earnings of college graduates fell by almost 4% between 2000 and 2005, while the mean real earnings of the MBA, JD, MD group rose by about 10%.  Hardest hit, not surprisingly, were high school dropouts, whose mean real earnings dropped by about 5% over that time period.

Offshoring Executives, not Executive Jobs

The January 12,2007 Los Angeles Times has a fascinating article entitled “Cisco’s executive migration.” Cisco hopes to have 20% of its senior managers working at its Globalization Center in Bangalore by 2010.  They will be a “mixture of rising stars from San Jose and Bangalore and  talent plucked from acquisitions and competitors worldwide” - a very international mix.  IBM, it turns out, already  has about 150 executives living in emerging markets.  This includes their Global Procurement office, now located in Shenzhen, China, which moved last summer with its American vice president in tow.   

The author of the article, Rachel Konrad, says that all of this shows that “moving resources to far-flung parts of the world has evolved from cost arbitrage to strategic imperative”.  This conclusion is very much in keeping with the conclusions of Hagel and Brown that I discussed in What has offshoring got to do with higher education?

Anna Lee Saxon, dean of the School of Information at UC Berkeley is quoted as saying,” People are finally realizing that the only way to create cultural capabilities, linguistic skills and personal social relationships is to move executives abroad.”  We in universities should know (but often seem not to) that an extended stay abroad  is the only way to accomplish the same goals with students.  Education in this age of globalization will certainly call for greatly increased emphasis on a period spent in another culture - at least if we want to turn out the kinds of graduates that Cisco and IBM are looking for.  See also my extended comments on time abroad in Modularity in university higher education: Education . 

Does the future of higher education belong to the for-profit sector?

My friend Joe Duffey very kindly called to my attention a very interesting article that I had somehow missed in Change Magazine.   It is  A Tectonic Shift in Global Higher Education, by John Daniel, Asha Kanwar, and Stamenka Uvalic-Trumbic.  Sir John Daniel is a person of wide experience in higher education, having headed Laurentian University and the Open University, and served as assistant director-general for education at NATO.  When he co-authors an article predicting a “Tectonic Shift” in higher education, it deserves some attention.

The authors point out that the number of higher education students worldwide is growing much more rapidly than was predicted, and will probably reach 120 million by 2010.  Not surprisingly, this growth is centered in developing countries.  For example, China passed the US in number of students enrolled in higher ed in 2005, and Malaysia plans to increase enrollments almost three-fold in the next four years.  This anticipated growth will require resources beyond those that developing countries can afford, and they will have to look for new approaches to the provision of higher education.  The authors point out that “developing countries will soon account for the majority of enrollments in higher education worldwide”, and that therefore the approaches adopted by these countries “will effectively define the global profile of higher education in the 21st century.” Daniel et al argue that the most likely provider - and therefore the group that most impacts the evolving global profile of higher education - will turn out to be for-profit higher education. 

Better rankings - but do we need them?

Kevin Carey, author of the very nice Washington Monthly article Is our students learning?  that I discussed in Educational value added, Sept.1, 2006, has sent me a copy of his new report College Rankings Reformed: The Case for a New Order in Higher Education.  This report nicely fleshes out a number of arguments made in his shorter article, and adds some new recommendations on how to improve rankings.

Carey understandably focuses his discussion on the US News and World Report (USNWR) rankings of colleges.  He argues that one can catagorize what is actually being measured by the various components of these rankings.  When he does this categorization, he find that the USNWR rankings are based 25% on fame, 30% on institutional wealth, 40% on exclusivity, and only 5% on quality! That, indeed, does not seem to be the best way to measure the effectiveness of the colleges or the quality of their programs.

Spellings and transparency

Now that the Spellings Report is out, and the Secretary has announced a plan of action, the pundits and bloggers have made their opinions known (see, e.g. Lombardi’s column in Inside Higher Education and the subsequent comments, or Seery’s column in the Huffington Post and subsequent comments). The comments generally range from slightly neutral to quite negative. They run from discussions regarding the difficulty of measuring the important outputs of higher education, to claims that this report is simply part of a larger Bushian conspiracy against progressive thought.  Along the way are numerous statements that only academics have a right to judge the academy, and that government should stay out of it.

My take is a bit different from those of many commentators, as readers of this blog will recognize.  I believe that the concerns raised by the Report regarding the future global dominance of American higher education are very real, and supported by considerable data (see e.g.Measuring Up 2006:The national report card on higher education , or Education at a Glance 2006).   I believe that comments by various faculty (see blogs mentioned above) that learning in college is the responsibility of the student, not the faculty, are simply wrong, and that there is real joint responsibility for good outcomes. In general, we in the academy have not kept up our end of that joint responsibility because we have ignored research that shows how we could change our teaching to improve learning outcomes significantly. As a result, many of our students are not learning what they need for success in a knowledge economy. (see previous related posts How people learn May 1, 2006, A D- in science education April 14, 2006, How are we doing teaching cognitive skills? July 4, 2006)

Whither English?

These are great times for native English speakers and the universities of the English speaking world, right?  The rising tide of globalization has made English the new must-have skill, giving us native English speakers a major advantage, and assuring the Anglo-American universities of a never ending supply of students from around the world who want an English language college degree.  But before you relax and break out the Champagne, you may want to read a new book by David Graddol,  published by the British Council, called English Next.  He suggests that things are not completely as they seem.

Graddol begins with a very interesting analysis of the transition from modernity, in which language played a key role in defining the nation and its identity, to postmodernity, in which the forces of globalization are leading to more complex concepts of individual and national identity, and to new forms of multilingualism. Because so many of the drivers and enablers of globalization have a major “English factor”, English is playing a central role in this transition.  As Graddol notes, “On the one hand, the availability of English as a global language is accelerating globalisation.  On the other, the globalisation is accelerating the use of English.” (p.22).  English has become a key component of the took kit of skills that the postmodern worker must have, and English is being introduced as a required second language in grade schools in many countries of the world, including China.  Since older workers are also upgrading their English skills, Graddol reports that computer models show that within a few years “Nearly a third of the world population will be trying to learn English at the same time.” (!) (p.101)

Harvard forms a task force - improved teaching is in.

The news out of Harvard is that they are setting up a task force to study ways to improve teaching.  And, surprise, it is possible that the timing of the announcement has something to do with the fact that  Derek Bok is back as president. As reported in the Boston Globe, “The task force's chairwoman, Theda Skocpol, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, said she was inspired to propose the idea by the book that Bok published just months before taking over after Lawrence H. Summers's resignation. The book is called Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should be Learning More.”

I have mentioned Derek Bok’s excellent new book in previous posts (e.g. How are we doing teaching cognitive skills?, July 4, 2006).  It describes a lot of  very humbling data on the effectiveness of teaching in colleges and universities of all sizes and shapes around the country. It also points out that research has shown us ways to make student learning much more effective, but that that research is quite generally ignored by faculty in their teaching.  Would he have written this provocative book had he known he was to resume the presidency of Harvard?  Who knows - but at least it is leading to some introspection at one of our great institutions.

Educational value added

Kevin Carey has written a very provocative piece for the Washington Monthly called Is our students learning?: The measurements elite colleges don’t want you to see.  In it, he addresses the issue of measuring the educational value added by an institution.  Although the article is addressed to the “elite” institutions, it is clear that his points apply to all of higher education.

Carey asks us to imagine reading a “best mutual fund” guide that does not include the bottom line of rate of return.  Most of us would find that an unacceptable guide for investing our retirement funds, but, Carey argues, that is pretty much the kind of guide we use when choosing a college. While acknowledging that finding the bottom line for education is more complex and difficult than finding the bottom line for a mutual fund, Carey makes a number of interesting proposals.