Changing Higher Education

Learning outcomes information and the quality of higher education

But the biggest problem with American higher education isn=t that too many students can=t afford to enroll. It=s that too many of the students who do enroll aren=t learning very much and aren=t earning degrees. For the average student, college isn=t nearly as good a deal as colleges would have us believe.  Kevin Carey

 

 Kevin Carey, one of the most articulate critics of American higher education, has a powerful new article entitled A That Old College Lie@  in the Winter 2010 issue of Democracy.  (Some of my previous posts about Carey=s work are: Sept.1, 2006; Oct.11, 2006; April 13, 2009).  Richard Vedderer also has an excellent recent post talking about Carey=s article.

Carey begins by writing about Pell grants, and the plans of the Obama administration to increase them. He points out that Pell grants have become less important over time as college costs have increased much more rapidly than CPI.  As a consequence, student borrowing is increasing, as are loan default rates.  With this, he segues into his main theme, which is given by the quote that begins this post.  He argues that students at all levels of colleges and universities are not learning all that they could be, and that Aquality@ of American higher education is not what we imagine or claim it to be.  He rightly points out that what we (and much of the world)  think of as the Ahigh quality@ of the American system is Adriven by the top 10 percent of institutions and the students who attend themBHarvard, Stanford, MIT, and the like.@ 

Carey argues, however, that we actually know very little about how good our institutions are at helping their students to learn.  Publicly available data on that subject is almost nonexistent.  As a consequence, Aquality@ is actually primarily Aprestige@, and prestige is defined through combinations of Awealth, admissions selectivity, price, and a generalized sense of fame that is highly influenced by who=s been around the longest and who produces the most research.@  Learning is just simply left out of the mix that defines quality in higher education.   However, if comparable information on teaching and learning were readily available, a number of problems would be addressed.  For example, this information would enable newer institutions to compete more effectively with the old guard, thus increasing competition and leading to greater cost controls. A resulting customer focus on teaching and learning would lead colleges to allocate their more of their resources to that end, rather than, e.g. high priced professors who don=t teach.   

Carey point out that some groups have recently begun to collect information on learning outcomes that would greatly aid parents and students in making informed choices when picking a college - and would help us to give a new and important redefinition of quality.   However, he argues that this information in being held captive by the colleges themselves, and by educational lobbies that represent the colleges.  One has only to review some of the submissions made by such organizations as ACE and AAU against the outcomes focus of the Spellings report to see the merit in Carey=s argument. 

Finally, Carey tells us what needs to be done:

The Obama Administration has proposed huge new increases in Pell Grants and other higher education programs, amounting to more than $70 billion over the next decade. It should require institutions receiving these funds to provide more information to the public in exchange. It should invest in R&D to develop new methods of gauging student success. And it should be prepared to fight a scorched‑earth political battle against the entrenched special interests that will, if history is any guide, surely rise in opposition.

None of these points will surprise readers of this blog.  However, Carey says it all very well, and covers a lot of important points I have not mentioned in this post.  The one issue he did not cover that I think is missing is the Bologna process, which focuses on learning outcomes in higher education (see The Bologna Process- a significant step in the modularization of higher education Sept 12, 2008).  The Bologna process now involves 46 European nations, and dozens of institutions in South America.  Our refusal to seriously consider learning outcomes risks leaving us outside the next big global movement in higher education. This could result in the US losing its leadership role higher education, and becoming a follower with lots of catch-up to do.  

Carey=s solution is one that the Obama administration really should consider- this is an unusual opportunity to move American higher education to a more effective plane, increasing our ability to cope with the changes going on in the wider world. 

A missing skill in the globalization of higher education

Inside Higher Education had an excellent article last week entitled Outsourcing Teaching, Overseas that captures many of the problems faced by higher education institutions as they struggle with globalization:

How to teach university degree programs offered overseas is a complicated question. Does a university rely on faculty from the home campus to travel abroad for a year, semester or month at a time to teach, hire a new cadre of faculty at the overseas location, deliver coursework through distance education, or some combination thereof?

 The article describes one approach used by the Utah State University John Huntsman School of Business to offer a Utah State bachelors degree in economics in China.  This program is described in the annual report of the School in the following way:

Utah State University has been offering degree programs through cooperative agreements with partner universities in China since 2000. Currently, the programs are offered at Northeast Dianli University (NEDU) in Jilin City, Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT) in Beijing and Institute of Advanced Learning (IAL) in Hong Kong.....

Students in the degree program in mainland China (at NEDU and BIT) pass the rigorous Chinese national college entrance exam, which identifies the top 6% of high school graduates. Once admitted to our partner universities, the students apply for admission to Utah State University and are admitted if they meet our admission standards. The students become matriculated USU students upon successfully passing our intensive English language courses offered by IELI (Intensive English Language Institute)....

In our model, various USU departments agree to provide the specific courses required in the degree program, including general education courses. Departments assign “lead professors” to write the course syllabus, pick the text book and other instructional materials, and to write exams and other assignments for the course. The teaching materials are provided to “local facilitators” (faculty at our partner institutions) who have been approved by the USU department to deliver the lectures and other course material on-site in China and Hong Kong. Lead professors and local facilitators are in contact each week to make sure that the courses are on-track and to deal with teaching and evaluation issues. Final grades are assigned by the lead professor.....

It is anticipated that we will continue to admit 100 students each year into our programs at NEDU and BIT. In our program in Hong Kong, at IAL, we anticipate an increase in enrollments to 150 each year. Hence, we believe that we will have as many as 800 students in our degree program in Asia in the near future (accounting for students who drop out or transfer to Logan). This number is likely to exceed 1,000 once the Hangzhou program is approved. It is likely that we will graduate more than 300 economics majors each year at these locations.

On the “factual” side, these quotes tell us that the program is offered in several sites, and is attracting a pretty significant number of students.  The students are high quality, having passed the Chinese national college entrance exam plus intensive English language tests. The annual report emphasizes that the student body is so small at present because the Chinese government limits enrollment. So it sounds like this is a successful program from the student’s perspective.

The concerns discussed in the Inside Higher Ed article relate to the 3rd quoted paragraph above, describing how the courses are taught.  Phillip Altbach's comments in the Inside Higher Ed article certainly express the concerns of many:

My view, and I am in a small minority on these matters I think, is that foreign degrees should be taught by faculty from the sponsoring university faculty, and not be random local scholars, even if they are ‘approved’ by the home campus faculty. What USU is really doing is ‘franchising’ their degree -- in a McDonald's way -- which is common especially among low prestige British universities in countries like Malaysia these days. Those British institutions have in some cases gotten themselves into hot water with the British quality assurance agencies and the press for low standards, inadequate supervision and the like. USU may well get into that bind.

This captures, I believe, the cultural and philosophical conundrum that a university must resolve as it seeks to globalize.  At one level, it would be nice to have faculty from the sponsoring university teach courses all around the world, as suggested by Altbach.  Unfortunately, that is highly unlikely to happen - past experience clearly tell us that faculty generally do not want to be posted to some other part of the world for extended periods.  Once is fun, twice is a problem, and three times is impossible.  Even regular short stays are often difficult to make work.  I know of one top  university with two offshore sites where courses are taught in a way that only requires their faculty to be there for two weeks at a time, once each year.  After several years of running this program, the only way to get regular  faculty to commit to this offshore teaching is to make two weeks at one site, two weeks at the other the entire teaching load for the year! This is not the way to solve our budgetary problems!

How the Recession of 2009 Will Affect Post-Secondary Education - viewed from Canada

I thank James Pringle at Ryerson University in Toronto for calling my attention to a report from the Educational Policy Institute with the challenging title On the Brink:How the Recession of 2009 Will Affect Post-Secondary Education. The report was written by Alex Usher and Ryan Dunn .  The report focuses on post-secondary education in Canada, but many of its insights and conclusions apply to higher education more broadly.

The authors look at impacts of the recession, first on endowments, followed somewhat later by decreasing state revenues and corresponding decreasing support of post-secondary education. They discuss increasing tuition to meet some shortfalls, and the differences between Canada and the US in terms of options in this arena.  They discuss a number of institutional response options to revenue shortfalls, none of which will surprise most of my readers.

I particularly liked the discussion of what the authors dub the “Peak Post-Secondary” Scenario.  They note that around 2014 the main cohort of baby-boomers begins to retire, and at that point, costs of health and elder care begin to rise rapidly, and the percentage of workers begins to decline, thus permanently exacerbating pressure on state budgets.  Consequently, just as the recession recedes, societal priorities are likely to be pushed away from education by demographic pressure .  Thus the “Peak Post-Secondary” Scenario calls for permanently declining per-student revenues. 

In almost any scenario, the authors suggest that Institutions will need to increase revenues from non-traditional sources.  In the “Peak Post-Secondary” scenario this becomes urgent. Among the new sources, the authors recommend cross border education, but not just any cross border education:

But cross-border education is not solely about picking up bodies overseas and shipping them here; that might have been an adequate description of the game twenty years ago, but things have moved on since then. The establishment of a broad middle class in many developing countries has vastly increased the demand for post-secondary education. In particular, demand has boomed for education branded (if not provided) by large, established, Western universities is very strong in much of the world. Large public universities from North America, England and the UK have a good name in Asia and Africa – much better in many cases than the local university. The growth market in education for major Western universities lies not in attracting ever-greater numbers of students but rather in modularizing knowledge, delivering it in locally-appropriate forms through international educational partnerships, and certifying students at the end of a course or period of studies.

Sounds like a description you might have read in some of my previous posts!

However, the authors point out that revenue generation is unlikely to be sufficient to resolve the financial problems of post secondary education in the future: Institutions are also going to need to tackle their cost base. At this point, the authors begin to struggle with the challenges of fixing our near-universally broken cost/price model.  They suggest one possible change that is quite logical- and sure to be greatly controversial:

One might reasonably expect, therefore, that Peak Post-Secondary will lead to a reengineering of tasks and costs, and in particular the creation of a two-tier faculty. This will see some faculty paid to concentrate more on research and teaching graduate students, while others will be paid primarily to teach – and in some cases teach an increasingly standardized curriculum.

They suggest that this common curricula, which they view as being at the undergraduate level only,  could have both financial and educational benefits:

By adopting common curricula, many hours of instructor time could be saved – time which could be used to increase student/instructor contact and assist students in developing mastery over freely-available subject matter courses.

Obviously a break from our image of thousands of post-secondary institutions each offering its own special hand-crafted education.  However, it might well offer some educational benefits in that it focuses more on the issue of learning rather than curriculum development.

The report ends with a very important call to reality that sums things up in a way that I heartedly endorse:

Only those institutions and governments that re-think the delivery of education itself, by measuring inputs and outputs and deciding based on evidence where dollars can best be spent, can hope to come out of this recession in better shape than they came in.

What Moody’s doesn’t say in its recent report on higher education

 Moody’s Investor Service recently put out a report entitled Global Recession and Universities: Funding Strains to Keep Up with Rising Demand. It provides a very interesting and informative view of some aspects of the higher education scene as observed from outside of the system. The report came to my attention through posts in GlobalHigherEd (on whose server the report above resides) and University World News, and I thank both for their nice articles.

Moody has looked at universities at selected areas around the world, and how they are handling the global downturn.  Moody’s ultimate interest, of course, is to be able to rate these universities as they access capital markets, so the focus is on aspects of the environment that can or will impact their financial stability.  I will describe some of their observations that I find most interesting, and then will talk about the part of the report that I find most important - the things that are not said.  I will not try to describe the whole report, but recommend that you simply read the original - it is only 13 pages long. I also will focus on the parts of the report that refer to US universities, since that is the group that I know the best.

As a minor point, the report emphasizes public institutions, stating that public universities “most likely accounting for between 80-90% of all students enrolled in tertiary education.” A recent OECD report claims that private higher education now accounts for 30% of tertiary enrollment globally.  This relatively minor discrepancy does not invalidate any of the conclusions of the report, of course. 

Moody’s notes that recessions generally lead to enrollment increases for a variety of reasons, but warn these increases may not be uniformly distributed:

While enrolment declines are possible at individual institutions due to particular market, reputation, and management challenges, we expect higher education overall to enjoy a significant “tail-wind” in student demand for spaces over time. This is especially likely for universities that are “access” oriented with less restrictive academic requirements and a mission focused onskill development. Many prominent universities that function as comprehensive research institutions focused on maintaining strong academic quality reputations and high entrance standards may see the greatest impact in their advanced degree programs.

On the other hand, Moody makes a strong point regarding fundamental changes in funding:

Moody’s believes that the magnitude of economic changes in some countries may place pressure on historic funding and financing patterns of higher education. This would likely be driven by two conflicting trends– increased policy directives to expand university programs and more limited ability of governments to fund the desired expansion Not surprisingly, many countries now face significant budgetary challenges with large competing demands on government dollars.

While some aspects of spending on higher education have been temporarily boosted through stimulus spending, this is largely financed by government deficits and may be difficult to sustain beyond the near term. At the same time, the desire for rapidly rising investment in higher education to support higher participation rates and expanded research capacity suggests the need for significant new operating and capital dollars over an extended period. These trends may well become clearer as the ability to fund higher education comes under greater pressure.

In  regard to this desire for greater revenues, in the understatement of the year, Moody’s cautions: raising student fees is usually a politically sensitive decision.

For the US, there is a timely warning regarding globalization:

In general, we also believe the level of global competition and pooling of talent for faculty and students will continue to increase. As U.S. universities cut back significantly on hiring and capital spending,  non-U.S. faculty and students may be susceptible to recruitment to
other leading universities or home countries. Over the past three decades, the number of students enrolled outside their country of citizenship has risen dramatically, from 0.6 million worldwide in 1975 to 2.9 million in 2006, a more than four-fold increase. Developments like the Bologna Process in the European Union, and similar efforts in other regions, may further encourage the trend of crossing borders to enroll in higher education.

Overall, Moody’s is looking at financial stability impacts of increasing student demand (good), research funding (good), uncertainty of state funding (bad), conflicting demands for services (mixed), political pressures(bad).  So what is missing?  Actually, it is not so much that something is missing, but that the financial problems and dangers become clearer if one looks at them from a slightly different angle, one that will be familiar to readers of this blog.

Two more, very different, meetings

My friend Joe Duffey keeps sending me announcements about meetings in some vain hope that he can keep me more aware of what is happening in the world.  I feel compelled to comment on two of his recent alerts because they do say a lot about what is going on. One depresses me, the other I find very hopeful.
1. The World Summit on University Ranking- this is the depressing one. 
Readers of this blog know how I feel about university rankings: I dislike them greatly.  I could spend a day listing all of the reasons why, but will just run over a few. First, the idea that the overall quality of universities can be reduced to a single number in silly.  Every great university has some really terrible programs, and many otherwise mediocre institutions have some superb programs.  When trying to rank programs (as the NRC does), one finds that the reputational data are squishy (who really knows very much about the programs at more than a hand full of rival institutions?), and the “harder” data are rather arbitrarily chosen (it can be easily measured).  In the end, the statistical uncertainties of the data leave almost everyone in a statistical tie, but that doesn’t stop anyone from dropping the uncertainties and using the numbers as absolute. 

Because research data are easier to obtain than teaching data, rankings focus on the research.   This effective devaluing of teaching and learning in our self analyses is not healthy, and at some point will lead to difficulties in our relations with the societies that support us.

Whatever data are used, some person then must decide how to weight different inputs in order to add it up to a definition of  the best university.  Obviously, however, there is absolutely no unique way to combine the data.  One way is arguably as good as another.  This does not stop anyone either.  In fact,  the rankers like this aspect, since it means that an almost endless number of rankings can be published, each leading to a happy financial or reputational ending for someone.

Rankings are, of course, a celebration of the status quo.  Consequently, they punish institutions that are trying to respond innovatively to the changing world.   This would be of little importance if so many governing boards and presidents were not focused on “improving their rankings”.  Thus badly needed innovation - including cost cutting innovation - becomes even more difficult to carry out.

Finally, when making “world” rankings, most often the criteria are based on venerable Western universities.  Why? Why should looking like Harvard be a good idea in many countries of the world?

So overall, I think we can all be quite concerned that we now have an International Rankings Expert Group.  They are producing a product that by definition is flawed, and serves almost no good purpose.

2.The Global Higher Education Forum 2009-  this is the hopeful one.
This is almost the anti-meeting to the one described above;

The Global Higher Education Forum (GHEF) brings together scholars, policy makers, researchers, academics and administrators to reflect, analyse, discuss and debate on a wide variety of issues pertaining to global higher education in a south-south context. In particular, GHEF2009 will focus on the theme of Global Higher Education, seeking to ponder and reflect on the benefits and challenges and at the same time, envision the way forward for emerging and expanding, rather than for established, higher education systems.

This is a group that actually wants to think about alternative approaches to those which are celebrated above- approaches that may be enormously more valuable for the countries involved. As pointed out in the Background and Rational of the meeting:

In view of the many similar initiatives by different regions and groups to promote the development of higher education through a common platform (which is increasingly biased towards European/American models), the deliberation on the practicality and appropriateness of Asian, Latin American and African countries following the same pathway is timely. The current global economic meltdown presents another interesting backdrop and context to analyse and deliberate on the suitability of European/American models for expanding and emerging higher education systems in Asia, Latin America and Africa.

There is a wonderful article in GlobalHigherEducation written by two members of the organizing committee, Morshidi Sirat and Ooi Poh Ling, describing the goals of this forum. We should all wish them success.

British Universities in China: the Reality Beyond the Rhetoric

This is the title of a very interesting recent multi-authored discussion paper of Agora, a British think-tank for higher education. Although the paper is about British universities in China, most of what is said carries over directly to everyone’s globalization efforts worldwide. The director of Agora, Anna Fazackerley, provides a thought provoking introduction that provides an excellent context for the rest of the contributions. She points out the importance to institutions of thinking strategically about their globalization efforts, and having a clear understanding of what they hope to gain from them. She also emphasizes that the Chinese are in complete control of the process in their country, and that it is therefore critical to understand what China itself really wants when it allows foreign universities to enter. As part of the answer to this question, she suggests that "It is becoming apparent that one of the main uses of British universities to China will be their expertise in science and engineering".

The paper contains six contributions from individuals have considerable experience with higher education partnerships in China and throughout Asia.  Their comments are all well thought out, and quite thought provoking.  They point out the positives and negatives of working with China, and describe some of the sources of difficulties. The paper concludes with 3 case studies of different models of UK-China higher education partnerships. One of these is about the Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (Interesting activity at the for-profit/non-profit interface: Laureate, Jan. 14, 2008).  The other two are the University of Nottingham’s Ningbo campus,  and the joint degree program between Queen Mary College, University of London and Beijing University of Posts and Technology. 

All this makes for very interesting and valuable reading.

Why has globalization had such a small effect on higher education - and when will that change?

I recently wrote an article that addressed these provocative questions. It has been accepted for publication in New Directions for Higher Education, to be published by Jossey- Bass. I will just cover some of the main points of the article in this post, and point interested readers to the preprint.

I argued the first premise of this question - that globalization has had a small effect on higher education - by using the taxonomy that Samuel Palmisano defined to classify the stages of industrial globalization (see Globalization and internationalization, June 7, 2006).   I argued that most of what occurs in higher education today fits Palmisano’s 19th century “internationalization” model of hub-and-spoke activities.  I then described the relatively few activities in higher education that fit the early 20th century “multinational” phase, and the even more uncommon higher education activities that have real parallels with “globalization” as the term is generally used in the business literature.  I argued that the “international” activities have little potential to cause major change in higher education, but that both the “multinational” and “globalization” stages have the potential to cause as radical change in higher education as they have in industry generally.   

Is “excellence” a useful mission for higher education?

I have commented on the essential “nation-state” identity of universities, and how globalization-driven changes in the nature of government are leaving universities without a clear sense of future mission (see e.g.A nation state institution in a market state world, 3/28/06).  Michael A. Peters, in Knowledge Economy, Development and the Future of Higher Education, makes some excellent points about the “default” university  mission that has evolved.

He begins (p.166) by quoting B. Readings (The University in Ruins) regarding some of the consequences of the break-down of the link between the university and the nation state:

The economics of globalization mean that the university is no longer called upon to train citizen subjects, while the politics of the end of the cold war mean that the university is no longer called upon to uphold national prestige by producing and legitimating national culture.

Peters goes on to write:
Readings suggests that excellence has become the last unifying principle of the modern university.  When Ministry policy analysts or university administrators talked about excellence, unwittingly they bracket the question of values in favor of measurement and substitute accounting solutions for questions of accountability. As an integrating principle excellence has the advantage of being meaningless: it is non-referential.

Societal Expectations

In a recent post (Who are our customers for education:II Society as customer. April 22, 2007) I discussed possible societal expectations for higher education in an increasingly globalized world.  In this, I drew some parallels with societal expectations for American corporations as they expand globally.   Interestingly, the most recent McKinsey Quarterly (unfortunately subscription only) has an extended look at societal expectations regarding corporations.  Insofar as these expectations may be pertinent in understanding the societal expectations for universities as they expand, it is useful to review some aspects of what they found.

Interestingly, globally, 84% of executives of large corporations and 89% of consumers believe that corporate obligations to shareholders must be balanced by contributions to the broader public good. However, when executives grade themselves in their performance on this scale, only 68% of them say that corporations make a  “generally”or “somewhat” positive contribution to the public good.  The consumer’s view of the success rate of corporations is much less positive: 48% believe that corporation are making a “somewhat” or “generally” positive contribution to the public good.  However, although the executives grade themselves on this measure with some consistency around the world, the consumer’s viewpoint varies radically according to geographic location. Only 35%-40% of consumers in Europe, Japan, and the US say that large business makes a generally or somewhat positive contribution to social issues, while consumers in China (76%) and India (78%) view large corporations as positive on these measures.

The UC Berkeley Energy Biosciences Institute - a link in the knowledge supply chain?

There has been a lot of conversation and concern over the proposed Energy Biosciences Institute at UC Berkeley.  The UC description of EBI puts it directly into Pasteur’s quadrant of research that is both fundamental and applied to problems of importance to society:   

The Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI)  is a new research and development organization that will bring advanced knowledge in biology, physical sciences, engineering, and environmental and social sciences to bear on problems related to global energy production, particularly the development of next-generation, carbon-neutral transportation fuels.

However, the controversy stems not so much from the nature of the research, but the partnership behind the project, which involves an unusually close university-corporate relationship:

EBI represents a collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and BP, which will support the Institute with a 10-year $500 million grant. EBI's multidisciplinary teams will collectively explore total-system approaches to problems that include the sustainable production of cellulosic biofuels, enhanced biological carbon sequestration, bioprocessing of fossil fuels and biologically-enhanced petroleum recovery.

EBI will educate a new generation of students in all areas of bioenergy, and will serve as a model for large-scale academic-industry collaborations. By partnering with a major energy company, EBI will facilitate and accelerate the translation of basic science and engineering research to improved products and processes for meeting the world's energy needs in the 21st century.

This relationship will involve both the presence of 50 or so resident BP scientists on the campuses of UC and the University of Illinois, and a shared governance (and funding) process involving both BP and the academic institutions.  Details are still being worked out, but faculty, understandably and appropriately, have raised numerous issues relating to commercial influence on research and academic freedom, and the impact of this new entity on university internal issues of shared governance.

From my perspective, this partnership is another step for Berkeley towards a leadership role in what I earlier described (What business are we in? March 1, 2006) as management of the knowledge supply chain. In that earlier post, I suggested that one of the roles for universities in the future could be to both create new knowledge, and to see that that knowledge moves swiftly and effectively to the end users.  This would involve new types of close partnerships -process networks (see What has offshoring got to do with research universities? Feb.22, 2006) - between knowledge producers and users working towards a common goal.  Such partnerships need not be either exclusive or permanent, but would focus on an area where the partnership could bring mutual benefit. Of course, many partnerships already exist between academe and industry, but this EBI arrangement, through its scale and aspirations (including creation of the new discipline of Energy Biosciences), would seem to move to the next plane.