Changing Higher Education

An educational system built for another time, another student demographic

Complete College America has just released a very interesting and important report entitled Time is the Enemy: the surprising truth about why today's college students aren't graduating- and what needs to change. The report moves beyond typical IPEDS information that focuses on full time students who enter as freshmen, thus ignoring part time and transfer students. Thirty three states provided information on their public systems that went into this report. A couple of caveats: The data do not track educational pathways of individual students (as is now available in a few instances), but rather use gross data such as entries, graduations, drop-outs, transfers from one part of a state's public system into another part of the same system. Thus, for example, transfers to private (either non- or for-profit) institutions and public systems in another states are not included. In addition, the labels "full" and "part-time" student are defined by the status of the student in the first term of enrollment, which may or may not be descriptive of the way many of today's students follow their education.These and other similar caveats aside, this report provides an excellent first look at a much larger and broader set of students than are described by IPEDS.

The report contains two striking demographic facts that underline problems in the way that we typically view higher education:

• 40% of public college students are able to attend only part time
• only 25% of college students are "traditional" in the sense that they are attending full time, attending a residential college, and have parents that are are paying most of their bills 

Carl Camden and Michael Spence on the future of employment

The most recent McKinsey Quarterly (registration required) has a very interesting pair of interviews entitled The US Employment Challenge: Perspectives from Carl Camden and Michael Spence. Both of these relate to the question I have posed in  several posts - how do we need to be educating our students so that they can excel in this rapidly changing world?  

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Carl Camden, CEO of Kelly Services brings a though-provoking perspective to the subject of the changing nature of work and employment. He argues that we have generally not recognized the myriad implications of the increasingly short job cycle - the time for a job to appear and disappear, either in terms of a location or a whole category of jobs.  One of the major consequences is an increase in free-agent workers:

So jobs aren’t permanent, locations aren’t permanent, and workers are returning back to what I would call a free-agent type of work style. Independent contractors, part-time employees who move in and out of the workforce, temporary employees, consultants who move in and out of the workforce—that group of individuals in most of the industrialized world is already 25 to 35 percent of the workforce, on its way to becoming 50 percent of the workforce, I think, over the next decade.

A New Culture of Learning

What happens to learning when we move from the stable infrastructure of the twentieth century to the fluid infrastructure of the twenty-first century, where technology is constantly creating and responding to change?

This critically important question provides the impetus for a thought provoking book entitled A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. The authors, Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown, have the perfect backgrounds and credentials to address this challenging question in a thoughtful, meaningful and provocative way.  Readers of this book will find a well thought out perspective of learning that is very different from the one which dominates all levels of education today. 

The authors start with the obvious - information abounds, it gets easier every day to get it, and the world (and consequently information) is changing more rapidly than ever before.  Along the way, they help us to recognize the multiple ways in which we all learn outside of the classroom through experiences of all kinds, with perhaps a bit of emphasis on play and failure. Through stories, they begin to draw out a description of a new culture of learning, one which involves using the new informational resources in a way that responds to personal needs, and results in sharing that experience in a way that helps to recreate the space of knowledge. 

Potential disruptors in the higher education space

As regular readers of this blog know, I have been using Clayton Christensen's concept of disruptive innovation to frame issues in higher education since 2006 (Disruptive technologies: when great universities fail?).  Christensen's work describes corporations (and industries) that are considered to be enormously well run and successful, but are essentially destroyed in a relatively short time by some new competitor that brings a new innovative approach to meeting the needs of the customers. The disruptor's new product is less expensive than the traditional product, and has some attributes that are quite different. Initially, the disruptor's product does not meet the customer's needs so well as the established product. Over time, however, the disruptor's product improves, and customers come to find its additional attributes to be very useful.  Christensen also differentiates between this disruptive innovation and a sustaining innovation. The latter is used to improve established products. Christensen shows that continual application of sustaining innovation often leads to an established product that is "better" than the customer needs -- or wants to pay for. Thus the very quality of the established product may well be one of its weaknesses. Eventually a tipping point arrives, and customers rapidly migrate to the new product that is both less expensive and has additional useful attributes.

Christensen describes characteristics of traditional companies that have fallen prey to a disruptive innovation. I always felt that higher education fits to a T his picture of an industry that has a high probability of suffering a major disruption.  Fortunately, you no longer have to view the issues through the lens of my interpretation of Christensen, because Christensen and co-workers have recently turned their attention higher education. A number of their works have now appeared or will soon appear. I previously did a post on his recent Disrupting College; Christensen and Eyering have a book appearing in August on the Innovative University:Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out; and Michael B. Horn, a regular Christensen collaborator, has recently published an excellent paper Beyond Good and Evil:Understanding the Role of For-Profits in Education through the Theories of Disruptive Innovation.  All highly recommended.

With all of this, I thought it useful to introduce a blogroll on some companies, institutions, think tanks, etc. that seem to me to be doing interesting things that might well turn out to be disruptive for various aspects higher education, and/or sustaining for others. The blogroll will not seek to be all-inclusive. Rather, it will be indicative of areas in which I find that very interesting things are happening. I will  add more sites to the roll from time to time as I see things that attract my interest.

Data mining higher education records in search of improved outcomes

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has just funded a potentially very interesting and useful study at WCET. Unfortunately, I have to go through a few explanatory layers of acronyms in order to explain that sentence, but stick with me. WCET stands for the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies, while WICHE stands for The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. WICHE was created to facilitate sharing of resources among the higher education systems of the West, and has 15 member states.  

The grant focuses on identifying variables that impact student retention and progression.  The study itself will involve data mining of student records from an interesting mixture of instituions: American Public University System, Colorado Community College System, Rio Salado College, University of Hawaii System, University of Illinois Springfield, and University of Phoenix.  The aggregate data to be analyzed contains records of over 400,000 students:

Each of these postsecondary entities has performed extensive research on their own datasets.  The combination of large data sets across a wide variety of types of institutions (public/private, two-year/four-year, traditional/non-traditional) will seek to find patterns identifiable only through analyzing large data sets representing a widely diverse set of students.

The financial return from attending a more selective college

Stacy Dale and Alan B. Krueger (DK) recently have done a very interesting and important study (Estimating the Return to College Selectivity Over the Career Using Administrative Earning Data) that joins the growing literature estimating the financial return to an individual for attending a very selective college. Whether or not you agree with their very unexpected and counter-intuitive conclusions, their results certainly are thought provoking!

The real crisis in higher education?

I begin by noting three articles (from among many similar ones that have appeared) and a personal interaction that raise important questions for higher education:

California visual effects firms facing a bleak landscape

Foreign locales are luring away productions and work with tax credits and cheaper labor, causing once-successful companies to close.

This is the headline of an article in the LA Times describing the financial plight of many California visual effects firms.  Lower costs elsewhere, growth of worldwide pools of talent, and widespread availability of cutting edge technology are the villains. The jobs being lost are high paying, and involve very high levels of skill.

The technology represents the cutting edge of filmmaking, involving teams of digital artists trained in 3-D modeling, computer animation and computer graphics....

California-trained visual effects artists are still in demand, but often now have to travel overseas for work.

Another study showing students are not learning

A recent article in InsideHigherEd reported on a meeting of higher ed experts to talk about the just-released Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa.  Both the description of the meeting, and the numerous comments made by readers of the article are quite interesting and informative.

The book describes a study of 2,300 college students moving through a range of 2 and 4 year colleges and universities. The authors utilize surveys, transcript analyses, and the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) to evaluate how much the students learn during their college experience. The answer: not much.  As reported in an earlier InsideHigherEd article about this book:

• 45 percent of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" during the first two years of college.
• 36 percent of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" over four years of college.
• Those students who do show improvements tend to show only modest improvements. Students improved on average only 0.18 standard deviations over the first two years of college and 0.47 over four years. What this means is that a student who entered college in the 50th percentile of students in his or her cohort would move up to the 68th percentile four years later -- but that's the 68th percentile of a new group of freshmen who haven't experienced any college learning.

Participants at the meeting discussed several limitations of the study, including important questions not asked in surveys, and the use of the CLA as a surrogate for “learning”. Nevertheless, the article reports that the participants at the meeting concluded that this is a very important – and disquieting - report that may lead to some positive actions.  

Ignored in all of this discussion seem to be the large number of earlier studies and reports that reach essentially the same conclusions. Derek Bok’s Our Underachieving Colleges summarized a large number of these studies quite effectively.  As he points out, not only do not improve much in critical thinking (CLA), but they improve even less in the important area of postformal reasoning – understanding how to work with ill-structured problems. By the way, the sad results described above from Academically Adrift are almost exactly those reported by Pascarella and Terinzini in How College Affects Students V 2 based on other studies.  Consistency, unfortunately. 

My favorite quote from Bok’s book is:

“With all the controversy over the college curriculum, it is impressive to find faculty members agreeing almost unanimously that teaching students to think critically is the principal aim of undergraduate education......Ironically, the fact that college faculties rarely stop to consider what a full-blown commitment to critical thinking would entail may help to explain why they have been so quick to agree on its importance to the undergraduate program.”

From the InsideHigherEd articles and their attached comments, it seems that some are rethinking the statement that critical thinking should be (or is) the “principal aim of undergraduate education” as they are faced with increasing data that it isn’t happening.  Instead, there are statements along the lines of “ the students are certainly learning domain knowledge.” Unfortunately, that also does not seem to be the case, or more precisely, they are not learning it in the most useful and important ways. In areas where data exist, it seems we often do a good job of giving our students an “algorithmic” understanding of their domains, but few end up with an  understanding of the underlying concepts that really define the domains, or move very far in the development of expert thinking in the domains. (See previous discussion  of expert thinking in  How people learn)

In my own field of physics, tests given to students at hundreds of institutions ranging from community colleges to the best research universities show that students who have finished a physics course on the average think less like experts than when they started the course. There is a “universal” result, valid across institutional size and quality, size of class, etc. that students on the average understand less than 30% of the concepts that were taught in their class, even though they may answer traditional test questions quite well. I wrote about this in A D- in science education. All in all, this is not data that support the idea that students are currently are learning domain knowledge significantly better than they are learning how to think critically.  And, indeed, how can one really learn domain knowledge if one cannot think critically?

The good news, as pointed out in Bok’s book and numerous other works, is that learning research has shown a number of ways to change traditional approaches to teaching that lead to greatly increased student learning. It is “just” a question of implementation.

The comments made in the articles mentioned above about the weaknesses of the CLA and other tests being used to measure student learning certainly are correct. None of the instruments being used are perfect in measuring what they claim to measure.  In addition, as many critics point out, there are certainly major outcomes of education that are not being measured at all. However, a very broad spectrum of studies using a variety of instruments do show consistently that student learning is much less than we commonly claim.  

To me, this suggests two responses. First, we should not continue to spend time picking at the flaws of current instruments that seek to measure learning – rather, we should focus on developing better instruments.  At a minimum, this will require that we in higher education ask ourselves what we believe the valuable outcomes of higher education to be. In addition, however, we need to know what our students and alumni and their employers think are the valuable outcomes of higher education. Like it or not, without the approval and support of those groups, we are an endangered field.  With that information in hand, we can begin to develop better instruments to measure these outcomes.  And using these new instruments, we can work much more effectively to improve learning in our institutions.  (This is happening now in Europe through the Bologna Process. See The Bologna Process- a significant step in the modularization of higher education )

Second, for the shorter term, there are numerous approaches that have been shown to lead to better learning.  These should be more universally adopted while we wait for even better approaches to be developed.  Pressure will continue to grow on academe to show improved outcomes, and the patience of the society that supports us is finite.  

Limits on the globalization of the American model of higher education?

Clara Lovett, president emerita of Northern Arizona University, has recently published a very insightful Commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  The Commentary focuses on recent globalization experiences of American business schools, both successes and limitations.  The lessons she draws from these experiences are then extended to American higher education more generally.  

Lovett begins her story with the 1990's, when "The comparative advantage of American business schools as sources of well-prepared graduates turned into something resembling a global monopoly...".  At that time, American schools ramped up international recruiting to their home campuses, drawing students primarily from "elite, Westernized, Anglophone families", students who had academic backgrounds that matched well with those of  American students and the resources to pay high American tuitions.  Soon, responding to the international demand for American degrees,  American business schools began to branch out around the world in the most promising markets.

Although successful branches were opened in many world sites, difficulties began to appear, some arising on the home front.  It was, of course, impossible to replicate home-campus conditions in the new branches, and many faculty felt very uncomfortable about the resulting programs. Accrediting constraints added  another level difficulty.  Externally, international political events often made overseas operations more difficult.

Lovett's key point, however, is that something much more fundamental was at play:

In retrospect, however, it is clear that demography and culture, not politics, placed limits on the ability of American business schools to clone themselves successfully abroad, even when conditions were favorable and suitable local partners could be found. 

Even with the branch campuses in place, the children of the elite were still going to the US for their schooling. The new offshore campuses were attracting  primarily students from families in an emerging middle class - students for whom study in America would be a major financial burden. The offshore campuses also attracted young women for whom study abroad was considered to be culturally inappropriate.  This offshore group belonged to a very different demographic that was less well prepared than the group going to America in terms of traditional academic credentials, mastery of English, comfort with Western norms.  Of course, the American model of elite higher education, with its blending of research and teaching,  is the most expensive model of higher ed ever invented.  Pricing offshore programs at the high levels demanded by this model put these programs out of reach of most middle and lower income students.  Thus the realistically defined potential student body turned out to be less than predicted.

More damaging to the model was the unwelcome realization that not all of the world works just like America. Students, although they were hungry for access to many of the components of the world-famous American MBA, and the networks to which it provided entry, did not find it met all of their more actual, contextual needs.  Thus:

Graduate students in the United Arab Emirates, for instance, noted that to function in their region, they needed to apply principles of Islamic finance even while learning those of Western finance.

US faculty are, by and large, not in a position to speak knowledgeably about many of the problems of actually doing business in other countries and other cultures. Consequently,the door was left open for foreign institutions to "borrow" what they could from American higher ed, and then add country-and culture-specific material and pedagogies to provide a more powerful local product.   Thus, there is a proliferation of "other models" being developed, some of which already are being exported to countries with similar cultural conditions. 

Lovett finds that higher education leaders around the globe are quick to acknowledge the core strengths of the American approach, including peer evaluation and academic freedom. Nevertheless, those leaders see the key challenge of the century to be making higher education accessible to an ever increasing number of students, most of whom will be in countries where economic, social, and political conditions provide constraints that make the American model of limited applicability.

As a consequence, according to Lovett, in order for American higher ed to remain a major player on the international scene:

it means joining colleagues across the globe to develop alternatives to the academic models developed in Western Europe and the United States in the past couple of centuries.

In the light of the resistance to change that so characterizes American higher education, this will be a tough prescription to fill!  However, since the model is already breaking down in the United States, we may have our own internal impetus to move in the direction suggested by Lovett (see The business model for higher education I and II).

Readers might also be interested in looking at an article on a related topic that I recently published in the Times Higher Education entitled Don't assume one (US) size fits all.

Unexamined premises in reporting on the for-profit higher education front

Your Taxes Support For-Profits as They Buy Colleges

So goes the headline of an article in BusinessWeek by Bloomberg columnist Daniel Golden.  I have seen a dozen articles recently with the same message in large and small publications (including seemingly unlikely places such as Going Concern: Accounting news for accountants and CFO’s). Many of these seem to be minor rewrites of the above article and a subsequent article by the same author. 

The issue that attracts so much interest and passion is pretty well encapsulated in a paragraph in Golden’s article:

The nation’s for-profit higher education companies have tripled enrollment to 1.4 million students and revenue to $26 billion in the past decade, in part through the recruitment of low-income students and active-duty military. Now they’re taking a new tack in their quest to expand. By exploiting loopholes in government regulation and an accreditation system that wasn’t designed to evaluate for-profit takeovers, they’re acquiring struggling nonprofit and religious colleges -- and their coveted accreditation. Typically, the goal is to transform the schools into online behemoths at taxpayer expense.

 Aha- many for-profits are “buying accreditation”, and that must be bad!...Or must it be bad?  What are the assumptions that  seem to underly the paragraph above?

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First is an assumption that some of our laws and institutions are not up to dealing with the rapid changes taking place in this area.  It is quite possibly correct to have this view of our laws and institutions, but one could say that of many areas of modern life.  I assume “loopholes in government regulation” of this paragraph refers to the two-year rule that requires for-profit institution to be in existence for that period before being eligible to qualify for federal assistance.  The rule obviously did not envisage this situation in which the for-profit in not starting a new institution, but taking over the management of an existing one.   The Department of Education undoubtedly will consider whether it thinks a rule change is needed, given these new circumstances – whether a “loophole” exists.  Golden has made his opinion clear, but the pertinent government officials have not.  As for accreditation, it likely struggles with evaluating many of the activities of the for-profits.  However, as Kevin Carey recently has eloquently described, accreditation struggles with evaluating many of the activities of traditional non-profit institutions. It is not just the for-profits that are sometimes getting a “free pass”. In my mind, a more correct conclusion is that all of higher education is becoming so complex that the traditional approach to accreditation needs to be reexamined and reinvented.

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The second assumption is that the for-profits will be getting student aid from the federal government is somehow a raid on taxpayers’ monies.  However, they are getting this aid by teaching students, which is the reason that Congress had in mind in setting up the programs.  It is the same reason that non-profits get the aid. Associated with this “raid” assumption is the fact that the for-profits seem to be able to grow the programs they take over rapidly. From another perspective, that growth can be taken to show that there are many prospective students whose educational needs are not being met by traditional educational institutions.  That would probably make Congress happy.   A complaint sometimes lodged against this growth is that it is a result of advertising power, and that the money being spent on advertising could better be spent on education.  True enough.  However, the for-profits have some leeway in their spending since they are run much more efficiently than most non-profits, and do not have so much per student sunk into very expensive “social” infrastructure such as residence halls, athletics, etc.  So the non-profits are also spending a lot of money per student on non-educational expenses – including, by the way, recruiting.

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A third assumption is that “online” is somehow really lower quality.  In terms of learning, Department of Education studies (see Is online learning ready to become a disruptive technology, July 29, 2009) have shown that online is not inferior to classroom, and may be better.  Obviously, online does not bring the social learning benefits of the real campus experience.  However, for most of the students who are signing up for these programs, traditional four year residential programs may not be possible or even desired. Thus, these programs are not likely to be of lower quality as perceived by the students.

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The really big underlying assumption in all of these articles, however, is the conviction that for-profit higher education is inherently inferior to non-profit higher education because the former is interested in profit, the latter in education.  This assumption might be correct, but the reality is there is little if any actual data to show that it is, at least in the core area of student learning.  We lack data on learning outcomes from different institutions, so it is not possible to say that Harvard University does a better job of education than the University of Phoenix.  It is obviously true that incoming Harvard students are generally much better academically prepared than incoming Phoenix students, but we don’t know which institution provides the greater growth in knowledge, critical thinking, etc.  As Derek Bok himself has pointed out, even our great non-profit institutions do not lead to nearly so much growth in these areas as we all imagine.  Some of the for-profits actually spend large sums of money creating new courses, using not only subject matter specialists, but also education and media specialists, in an effort to remedy some of the learning problems Bok identifies. Few non-profits do as much. And in any case, the real comparison of educational quality should not be between the 100 top non-profit colleges and universities and the for-profit world, but between the for-profit world and the roughly 4,800 accredited non-profit institutions that are not in the top 100.  That is where the prospective students are really making their choices. In making policy, we must not ignore the enormous range of quality that exists in those 4,800 non-profit institutions that have obtained accreditation, as well as in the for-profit sector itself.

On the other hand, it is true that  several of the for-profits have gotten into very visible difficulties over time by pushing the rules too far in the search for profits.  One of the major problems has been the linking of admissions salaries to students recruited and funded by government scholarships.  However, it is to be noted that in the most recent GAO report on this problem, there were roughly as many non-profits cited as for-profits. Everyone needs to make their enrollment targets, no matter what their profit status. For some of the less financially robust non-profits, making those targets is a matter of institutional life or death. Thus, this problem is more general than the profit status of institutions.  There are also concerns regarding whether some for-profits are admitting unprepared students in an effort to increase enrollments.  Very low graduation rates are one indicator of a problem in this area, and several of the for-profits do have lower graduation rates that might be desired.  This is a complex issue, however, and there are questions as to whether appropriate comparison groups of institutions have been assembled to evaluate whether the profit motive is influential in graduation rates. In any case, Carey’s article states that the Department of Education reports that over 250 accredited non-profit institutions in the “lower echelons of higher education” have graduation rates of less than 30%, putting them right into the midst of some of the for-profits that are cited as reason for concern.   Similar concern often is voiced in discussions of default rates, which are higher at many for-profits than at non-profits.  Again, Carey tells us that the Department of Education has identified over 200 non-profit, accredited institutions that have default rates similar to those of the worst for-profit offenders. It is logical to assume that the financial health of the non-profit may influence the preparation level of admitted students in a way similar to what may be occurring in some for-profits.

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One important thing  must be remembered when we think of traditional non-profit higher education – the top 100 institutions cannot be used as a surrogate for the whole.  Within the roughly 5000 regionally accredited non-profit institutions lies enormous variability in all dimensions: academic rigor, fiscal stability, mission, honesty, concern for students, etc. Many of those institutions bear only very faint resemblance to the top 100 institutions.  Within the for-profit sector there is also considerable variability within these same dimensions, but with very little overlap in most dimensions with the top 100 non-profits. There is, however, significant overlap with large portions of the remainder of the non-profits.  The for-profits obviously are the “new kids on the block”, and sometimes behave in ways that hurt their own long term interests and, in fact,the interests of all of higher education.  However, in general, that negative behavior is not so much different from that which can be found in the non-profit world as well.

 I think we make a mistake when we look at higher education through the lens of for-profit or non-profit.  What are important are not the drivers, but the outcomes.  The drivers, in any case, are quite complex for both sectors, and more overlapping than we often acknowledge.  The focus should be on producing desired learning outcomes, and assuring fair and honest treatment of students.  Casting a bright light on bad institutional behavior is appropriate, desirable, and necessary – but we should look at the entire field of education, not just one component.  There are enough problem cases in both sectors to go around, and new approaches to accreditation are likely to be necessary in order to improve the entire, rapidly changing,  field of higher education.

The business model for higher education: II. How might it be fixed?

In the previous post,The business model for higher education: I. What doesn't work? , I described some of the approaches used by a fictional corporation, VPI, to create ongoing financial health, and looked at higher education’s use of similar approaches. The mainstay of higher education’s search for financial health thus far has been to increase price faster than CPI, while the use of other common corporate strategies has been quite limited.  This post uses the corporate model to suggest several approaches that might be useful in redefining the business model for higher education. In fact, many of  the things higher education might chose to do if it could not raise tuitions faster than CPI are things that already have been done at  many institutions at a relatively low level, or have been discussed widely.  For them to become a major component of the activities of higher education institutions, however, would require major changes in perspective and view of mission. 

OECD Feasibility Study for the International Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO)

The OECD Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) is a ground-breaking initiative to assess learning outcomes on an international scale by creating measures that would be valid for all cultures and languages. Between ten and thirty-thousand higher education students in over ten different countries will take part in a feasibility study to determine the bounds of this ambitious project, with an eye to the possible creation of a full-scale AHELO upon its completion.

 The OECD has just announced a project with the grand title that I took for this post, that has the potential to change much of the ongoing discussion in the US regarding assessment of learning outcomes (see, e.g. Learning outcomes information and the quality of higher education).  The OECD is initiating a very interesting pilot project to see if it is possible to create measures of learning outcomes valid across countries and cultures.  (A very useful earlier OECD report on learning outcomes can be found here.)

The OECD expresses concerns that the current ranking systems used in higher education almost ignore what should be the key point of such a ranking: the quality of the education that the students receive.

 Rankings tend to give research, award-winning faculty, and older, pre-1920’s universities priority over teaching and learning.

As a consequence:

Current ranking systems threaten the diversity of higher education. Universities are under pressure to cut programmes and redefine missions in a fight for survival that depends on clambering into the top 10, 50 or 100 universities. They may throw their best assets overboard in the rash attempt to keep their university afloat. Such pressure breeds an unhealthy copycat behavior among HEIs, the result of which can only be a bland standardization.

This project, then, has as a major goal the development of instruments that individual institutions can use to measure their own effectiveness in the area of student learning. Change within universities can then be driven by the goal of producing greater student learning, rather than by the goal of making it into the upper echelons of an ultimately meaningless ranking.  

The project actually has 4 strands that will ultimately be used to look at student learning.  They are:

1.    Generic – Analytic skills, critical thinking, written communication, etc

2.    Discipline specific – looking at the “above content” part of learning: the capacity to use what has been learned, often in novel situations

3.    Context – learning takes place in the context of the individual institution, which involves physical and organizational characteristics; education-related behaviors and practices; psyco-social and cultural aspects; and behavioral and attitudinal outcomes.

4.    Value added- given the characteristics of the incoming students at a particular institution, what intellectual advances occur over the course of the degree?

For the first of these, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, appropriately modified for use across cultures, will be used to show proof of concept.  For the second, two fields, economics and engineering, will be used to see if meaningful instruments can be developed. According to Inside Higher Education, the Australian Council for Educational Research will lead a consortium working on this aspect. For the third, existing data, such as persistence and graduation rates, surveys of student expectations, quality of student-faculty interactions, self-reported learning gains, will be gathered and analyzed. Ultimately, surveys of alumni and employers will join this mix. The fourth strand will not actually be included in this pilot project since the time required to create the instruments will exceed the period of the pilot. Instead, this will be a time of reflection on the types of methodologies that might be used in a larger project

Although the OECD document does not make it clear, Inside Higher Education reports that the US is participating in this study in two ways: providing some financial support and some students in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Missouri, and Pennsylvania will be part of the test cohort for the Generic strand.  This is in stark contrast with the situation two years ago, when the Bush administration declined to participate in an earlier stage of this project.  Thus it appears that the interest in outcomes assessment that was so prominent in the Bush administration has not disappeared with the coming of the Obama administration, as many in higher education had hoped.

 

Online learning continues as a higher education growth area

In a post last year, Is online learning ready to become a disruptive technology? (June 29, 2009), I discussed the recent Department of Education study that compared learning outcomes in online classes to those in more traditional face-to-face classes.  In general, the studies found that students in the online courses learned more.  I suggested that these results indicated that online learning was finally growing up, and becoming a serious competitor for our more traditional modes of presentation. 

 The recently released report of the Sloan Consortium, Learning on Demand: Online Education in the United States, 2009, adds interesting data to this discussion.   The study showed that the number of students in degree-granting postsecondary institutions taking at least one online course increased 17% from fall 2007 to fall 2008.  From 2002 to 2008, there was an annual compound growth rate of 19% in the number of students taking at least one course online. In the fall of 2002, slightly fewer than 10% of students fit into this category; by fall of 2008, slightly over 25% of students did.  Eighty two percent of these students are studying at the undergraduate level.

The report suggests that most institutions that are interested in offering online courses and programs are already doing so.  In fact, the larger institutions dominate the field, in part because their size and established position has enabled them to scale up their online offerings in response to growing student demand:

Academic leaders at all types of institutions report increased demand for face-to-face and online courses, with those at public institutions seeing the greatest impact. …In all cases the proportion reporting an increase in demand for online offerings is larger than for the corresponding face-to-face offerings. Over three-quarters (76 percent) of public institutions report increased demand for existing face-to-face courses and programs, compared to only 32 percent of private nonprofit institutions. Likewise, nearly all public institutions (87 percent) say the economic downturn has increased demand for their existing online courses and programs. A smaller proportion, but still a majority (58 percent), of nonprofits see the economic downturn increasing demand for their existing online courses and programs.

 

Thus, students themselves have shown some preference for the online courses over face to face meetings.

Chief Academic Officers showed increasing belief that learning outcomes for online courses were equal or superior to those of in class courses. Over the period 2003-2008, the percentage of CAO’s expressing that belief rose from 57% to 68% (maybe some of them read the DoE report mentioned above!) However, at the same time, chief academic officers report a small decrease in faculty acceptance of online learning. As the report rightfully notes: Future studies will need to track these results paying particular attention to any possible relationship of perceived faculty acceptance to the rate of growth of online offerings at the institution.

The results, in general, paint a picture of increasing use of online courses as a sustaining, rather than disruptive, technology in Christensen’s terms (see Disruptive technologies: when great universities fail? March 3, 2006). Survey results for for-profit institutions generally were remarkably similar to results in the non-profit sector.  Thus the survey gives no indication that, at this time, online learning is providing the for-profit sector with a disruptive edge.  An issue to be followed!

Law Schools don’t like learning outcomes, either

I earlier had marked an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education for comment, and then put it aside under the pressure of other events.  However, it goes so well with yesterday’s post that I thought I should comment briefly on it now. The headline of the article of interest reads

Law Schools Resist Proposal to Assess Them Based on What Students Learn

It seems that the American Bar Association (ABA) is proposing to change some of its accreditation criteria:

Instead of judging law schools primarily on "input" measures, such as faculty size and library holdings, the proposed revisions would look more at "outcome" measures, such as what students are actually learning.

Horror! What follows in the article are a number of quite suspect arguments from deans regarding why the ABA should not make such a radical change, e.g.

“Given the fragility of the legal profession and the fragility of law-school finances, it's a tough time to think about taking on a major process of assessment," Lauren K. Robel, dean of Indiana University's Maurer School of Law, said during an interview here.

Another argued it would be a mistake to make changes at a time when the legal landscape is in such flux.

And of course, the usual favorite:

"It is worth pausing to ask how the proponents of outcome measures can be so very confident that the actual performance of tasks deemed essential for the practice of law can be identified, measured, and evaluated," said Robert C. Post, dean of Yale Law School.

I would suggest that in times of “fragility of legal profession”, and “legal landscape is in such flux”, it is critical to begin to understand what students are actually learning.  Otherwise, there is no hope of making changes in curriculum that will reflect the evolution of the field. Now, when changes in the profession are occurring, is the time to start. There is little pressure for educational change when everything is going well. 

Obviously, Dean Post is right at one level. There is no off-the-shelf listing of learning outcomes needed to practice law, nor are there likely to be obvious ways of measuring those outcomes when they are identified.  Isn’t it fascinating that we know so little about the utility of what we charge so much to teach, and we use that very ignorance as an excuse not to learn about the utility of what we do?  Nope, now is the time to start learning about the various outcomes needed to successfully practice the law, and developing the means to measure those outcomes – and who better to do that than the law schools themselves?  Would they prefer that some outside agency do it instead??

Having fought the ABA for years on their use of input criteria, I find it amazing to find myself on the same side as the organization at last. Wonders will never cease!  However, the origin of these fights may also say why many of the deans are so opposed. The old ABA accreditation, based on such inputs as faculty size and library holdings, has been one of the major levers used by law school deans against their administrations in their efforts to inflate their budgets. 

Higher Ed.'s societal obligations in a globalizing economy

The American Association and Colleges and Universities (AACU) just released a survey of employers that looks at the characteristics employers want to see in the graduates they hire, and a related paper from the AACU Board called The Quality Imperative.   The survey (which does not in any way contradict others that I have seen previously) reports that only one in four employers feel that higher education is doing a good job in preparing students for success in the global economy.  Not surprisingly, employers would like to have graduates who have both in-depth and broad range knowledge and skills   Highest on their wish-lists for learning outcomes are several intellectual skills, e.g. critical thinking, that, as emphasized by Derek Bok in Our Underachieving Colleges, we don’t teach very well.  The learning outcomes that 70% or more of the employers felt should get increased emphasis from higher ed are:

The ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing            (89%)

Critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills                            (81%)

The ability to apply knowledge and skills to real-world settings through

 internships or other hands-on experiences                                  (79%)

The ability to analyze and solve complex problems                         (75%)

The ability to connect choices and actions to ethical decisions    ( 75%)      

Teamwork skills and the ability to collaborate with others in diverse group settings     (71%)

The ability to innovate and be creative                           (70%)

Concepts and new developments in science and technology             ( 70%)

The Quality Imperative jumps off from this survey and the recent national emphasis on access, to make the very pertinent opening point:

The current focus on college-going, while important, short-circuits the core issue of educational quality. Yet both employers and educators know that the quality shortfall is just as urgent as the attain­ment shortfall.

What needs to happen in education can be described in a nutshell as:

To prosper in today’s knowledge economy, in sum, all Americans will need a contemporary blend of liberal and applied learning.

To describe what this might mean, the AACU paper makes a number of recommendations of needed change, focusing on a very useful set of “Essential learning outcomes” to help meet the challenges.  In addition they make a recommendation that I consider to be of paramount importance:

Ensure that all fields of study help students achieve demonstrable competence in the essential learning outcomes, including the ability to apply their learning to new settings and unscripted problems.

In other word, we actually need to measure what we are doing, so that we – and everyone else - can see if we are being successful in doing what we say we are doing.   It will be interesting to see what the AACU does, other than publish these two pieces, to encourage its members to step up to the plate on these vital issues.

 ********

Reading these two reports made me think of a lovely article by Michael Hiltzik that appeared in the business section of the Dec. 31, 2009 LA Times.

Hiltzik’s article was occasioned by the centenary of the birth of Peter Drucker, one of the most interesting business thinkers of recent times. Drucker considered the role of the corporation in society, not just as a creator of wealth, but as a partner in achieving the goals of society.  Quoting Hlitzik, quoting Drucker:

The business enterprise is a creature of a society and an economy, and society or economy can put any business out of existence overnight… The enterprise exists on sufferance and exists only as long as the society and the economy believe that it does a necessary, useful, and productive job.

And quoting Hiltzik again

He also warned that an enterprise that fails to “think through its impacts and its responsibilities” exposes itself to justified attack from social forces…. He held that the purpose of a business is to serve the customer by providing a good or service useful in both personal and social terms.

Thus, a corporation that focuses solely on the chase of profits, to the exclusion of satisfying its social role, will not over time be successful.  And, in doing so, it may stimulate reactive political measures that ultimately will be good neither for the corporation, nor for society.  Sound like what is happening today?

******* 

So what possible rational relationship could exist between these two items? Possibly none, but let me give it a shot.

Essentially everyone in higher education would say – and brag- that we provide a social good.  We are, however, also quite fond of telling society that we know what it needs better than it does –society will think short term, we think long term, ergo, etc.  And we then say that we already are doing what needs to be done quite effectively, and that everyone should just trust us.  

The report described above actually shows an area in which society – or at least employers – wants the same thing as the academy. Eighty one percent of employers want us to do more to teach critical thinking and analytic reasoning skills.  By comparison, according to Bok:” With all the controversy over the college curriculum, it is impressive to find faculty members agreeing almost unanimously that teaching students to think critically is the principal aim of undergraduate education.”   However, even with this pretty complete overlap of goals, it turns out, according to the results quoted by Bok, that we actually do a terrible job in teaching these critical skills. Bok argues that our failure results from our unwillingness to acknowledge and face the changes in our learning approaches that would be required in order to improve critical thinking amongst our students.  So our support of this societal goal actually is rhetorical rather than real.

If one goes down the lists of learning outcomes given by the AACU, one finds numerous areas where many would argue that “we already do that, and well.”  In general, however, there is little actual data to show how well we achieve the desired learning outcomes. Where data exists, more often than not they seriously call into question the effectiveness of our approaches.

I imagine that if Drucker were to look at this situation, he would warn us that unless we can demonstrate that we are in fact doing things that society needs as we move into globalization, we risk suffering some of those political and financial outcomes that he had envisaged only for aberrant corporations.  So we should pay very close attention to the AACU's call for "demonstrable competence" in areas that will be essential for the future health of our society.

Another advance in learning outcomes - in the for-profit sector

 Well, it had to happen!  The Yahoo! Finance page from January 11 carried an article that begins:

The Council for Higher Education Accreditation, a national advocate and institutional voice for self-regulation of academic quality through accreditation, has awarded the 2010 CHEA Award for Outstanding Institutional Practice in Student Learning Outcomes to Capella University (MN), one of four institutions that will receive the award in 2010. Capella University is the first online university to receive the award….

“Capella University is a leader in accountability in higher education. Their work in student learning outcomes exemplifies the progress that institutions are making through the implementation of comprehensive, relevant and effective initiatives,” said CHEA President Judith Eaton. “We are pleased to recognize this institution with the CHEA Award.”

Capella University is not only the first online university to receive the award, it is, I believe, the first for-profit.  Capella University is owned by the publicly traded Capella Education Company.  The Capella Learning and Careers website, which describes their learning outcomes, is quite impressive and well worth a look. Capella is regionally accredited by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.

I have noted before the emphasis many for-profit higher ed providers are placing on developing learning outcomes. It is a natural, credibility-building stage in their trajectory as disruptive innovators in higher education (see, e.g post of Aug.5, 2008). CHEA is the accreditor of the accrediting groups, and thus a major force in maintaining quality in American higher education.  Recognition by CHEA as a leader in accountability is therefore a significant step in this process.  It is worth noting that Capella University is both for-profit, and on-line, thus representing two main forces of disruptive innovation in higher education. 

By the way, Dr Michael Offerman, vice chairman of external university initiatives at Capella, has a very nice blog that presents an often different and useful perspective on issues in 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. 

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.

Is online learning ready to become a disruptive technology?

In 2000, I wrote an article in Change discussing major disruptive impacts on higher education that distance learning might produce (see, How about distance learning, March 3, 2006).  In it, I brashly postulated that:

The experience will certainly be different from that found in the classroom of a great teacher, but in the end DL may well provide a competitive or even superior way to learn.

A recent analysis by the Department of Education of learning outcomes achieved by various on-line learning courses compared to those of traditional courses finds that my “in the end” may actually be now!

The DoE identified over a thousand empirical studies of online learning between 1996 and 2007. From these studies, they chose a set to subject to meta- analysis with the goal of answering 4 research questions:

1. How does the effectiveness of online learning compare with that of face-to-face instruction?
2. Does supplementing face-to-face instruction with online instruction enhance learning?
3.. What practices are associated with more effective online learning?
4. What conditions influence the effectiveness of online learning?

The analysis selected from all of the empirical studies using three stringent conditions:

Limit the search to studies of Web-based instruction (i.e., eliminating studies of video- and audio-based telecourses or stand-alone, computer-based instruction);
Include only studies with random-assignment or controlled quasi-experimental designs; and Examine effects only for objective measures of student learning (e.g., discarding effects for student or teacher perceptions of learning or course quality, student affect, etc.).

The results of the meta analysis are both impressive and thought provoking :

•    Students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.
•    Instruction combining online and face-to-face elements had a larger advantage relative to purely face-to-face instruction than did purely online instruction.
•    Studies in which learners in the online condition spent more time on task than students in the face-to-face condition found a greater benefit for online learning
•    Most of the variations in the way in which different studies implemented online learning did not affect student learning outcomes significantly
•    The effectiveness of online learning approaches appears quite broad across different content and learner types
•    Effect sizes were larger for studies in which the online and face-to-face conditions varied in terms of curriculum materials and aspects of instructional approach in addition to the medium of instruction

Bologna finally comes to the US

Thanks to the Lumina Foundation, an exciting educational experiment is underway. InsideHigherEd reports that Lumina is leading a US project that applies the  “Tuning” approach of the Bologna process to  several different undergraduate majors.   Numerous higher education institutions of differing size and mission in Utah, Indiana, and Minnesota are participating. 

The Bologna process, overall, tries to bring some consistency to the meaning of degrees around the Bologna region in order to facilitate movement of students around the region, and acceptance of degrees by employers (see The Bologna process - a significant step in the modularization of higher education, Sept 12, 2008). At the same time, the process does not seek to challenge the differences in approach and viewpoint that characterize the various member states. Thus, there is agreement on the intellectual capacities that should describe someone who has attained a degree of a certain level, but no limitations on the approach that got the student to that point.   Clifford Adelman has just published another detailed and very insightful report on the process,  The Bologna Process for U.S. Eyes: Re-learning Higher Education in the Age of Convergence. Highly recommended.

The Tuning approach is the discipline specific part of this process. The approach seeks to create guidelines that faculty can use as they develop statements of expectations for such things as learning outcomes and  levels of learning for individual disciplinary degrees.  The process involves surveys of graduates, employers, and academics to get a clear picture of the learning outcomes that should be expected of specific disciplinary degree programs in the 21st century.  The process has moved along well in Europe, and has led to the formation of a Latin American Tuning Process that now involves institutions in about 18 Latin American countries.  High time the US joined the world and experimented with the approach! 

It is disappointing, but no surprise, that InsiderHigherEd reports that Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, is concerned that all of this could provide a threat “academic freedom”.  This is the usual argument advanced to derail attempts to define desired learning outcomes or to measure them. However, at one level, Nelson is certainly correct.  If faculty do not participate fully and creatively in helping to develop appropriate and meaningful statements of desired learning outcomes, someone else will eventually impose standards - and those externally  imposed standards quite possibly will provide a threat to academic freedom. 

Another sad story about outcomes assessment

Kevin Carey has written a number of very compelling articles relating to the use of outcomes measures in higher education(see Educational value added, Sept.1, 2006) .  One of his more recent was an op-ed, Blocking Public Comparisons Obstructs Knowledge, Too, in the Chronicle of Higher Education.   His “case study” for this article is the State University of New York at Buffalo, which apparently is suffering mightily from the economic downturn.  The President, John B. Simpson is turning to the legislature for both increased aid, and the ability to raise tuition.  However, as Carey points out:

Yet even as the SUNY system lurches toward financial crisis, it has squandered a golden opportunity to make its case to the taxpayers and their elected representatives, to demonstrate success in doing what the majority of those people care most about: helping students learn. By refusing to provide public, comparable measures of student-learning results, New York's great public-university system has sown the seeds of long-term marginalization. In that, too, it has plenty of company nationwide.

The situation facing President Simpson is particularly difficult because in 2003 the SUNY Trustees passed a resolution calling on the SUNY system to come up with uniform “before-after”measures of student attainment of general education goals. In other words, value added measures in the core area of general education.

What Carey describes as happening after that is not surprising -nor is it the type of response that is limited to the SUNY system:     

But in the year following the resolution, SUNY leadership was subjected to intense pressure from New York's Faculty Senate and other interest groups opposed to the plan. As a result, SUNY put in place a watered-down scheme in 2004. Value-added estimates of learning growth were no longer required. Instead of common systemwide measures, every university would choose its own standards, tests, and sampling procedures, making institutional comparisons difficult. They would also be made impossible because campus-specific data would be "used for confidential in-house discussions." The results, it was stressed, should never be used to "punish, publicly compare or embarrass faculty, courses, programs, departments, or institutions either individually or collectively.

Unfortunately, as Carey points out, even the resulting hodgepodge of measures contained some embarrassing results for specific programs, so additional efforts were required to water down the program.  He reports that a system task force studying implementation of the assessment program stated:

Institutions responded very strongly against the requirement that institutions must report to System Administration the percentage of students who 'exceed, meet, approach, or fail to meet standards

Creativity and the Research University:II

This is a continuation of Creativity and the Research University
II. The creative faculty

The issues are different here from those encountered in looking at student creativity, because we are dealing with a class of accomplished scholars who have already shown capacity for creativity.  Thus the environment in which the faculty work becomes a critical determinant of whether or not they can reach their creative potential.

Amabile describes some of the environmental conditions that help to promote creativity.  Among them are:

• stability of employment - this lowers attention to problems not related to the main tasks of research and teaching
• low bureaucracy - similarly, this enables faculty to keep their attention on the important things
• encourage rational intellectual risk taking, accept failure
• encourage interdisciplinary conversations - this help connections into different networks of knowledge
• expectations high but reasonable
• rewards not controlling - faculty choice in tasks, methods

In many ways, we see that the university is set up relatively well to meet most of these conditions. Tenure, for example, provides the desired stability of employment - for those who have it. Faculty are given broad choice by the university in how they will carry out their tasks.  However, even here there are reality constraints that can lessen creativity. For example, funding for the research component of the employment is increasingly difficult to obtain, and faculty generally find themselves devoting larger fractions of their effort to finding needed research funds. The funding, when found, often is narrowly defined and can squeeze out any significant creative flights of fancy. Worst of all, many universities push their faculty to have the largest possible grants at all times - it helps the rankings. Such controlling pressure probably does not lead to the highest creativity.  As Amabile has pointed out, the external funding can be most useful if it comes after the “aha” moment of creativity, since at that point it is not controlling, but facilitating.  Thus some relatively small internal funds to support research through the necessary first idea steps ultimately could lead to increased creativity of proposals.

In addition, other improvements need to be made in the existing university structure.  Bureaucracy, unfortunately, has grown significantly in universities over the years due to both internal and external pressures. Universities tend to have very intrenched administrative systems and groups, and in many institutions strong leadership will be required to create the kinds of administrative restructuring needed to create organizations that more closely meet tomorrow’s needs. For example, on many campuses I hear very vocal complaints about inefficiencies in the research offices, which seem not well organized to meet new requirements of the Federal Government, alert faculty to new research opportunities, provide timely grant financial data, etc.  Internally, the important principle of shared governance has often led to a profusion of sometimes overlapping faculty committees that both demand considerable time on the part of the participants, and lead to frustration on the part of other faculty who feel that their ideas and innovations are being subjected to unfair or confused scrutiny. 

Finally, many of our leaders do not do as good a job as they should of creating a supportive atmosphere of high expectations in their institutions.  Distinguished senior faculty are the most important players in creating this atmosphere of supportive expectations.  For example, I.I Rabi was a Nobel-prizewinning physicist at Columbia, one of the founders of modern quantum mechanics.  He was legendary in his ability to stimulate his colleagues to “try harder”. One of his colleagues was quoted in Rabi’s obituary as saying “The most spectacular thing about Rabi was that during a 15 year period there were four Nobel Prizes all in different fields of physics at Columbia.  Although Rabi wasn’t involved in the specific work, he was the key motivating person.” According to a widely quoted (and perhaps apocryphal) story, Rabi would roam the halls of the department, dropping into offices to ask about the latest research of individual faculty. When it had been explained to him, he would ask, “ Is this the most important problem in your field? If not, why aren’t you working on the most important problem?” With more senior faculty helping to define expectations like that, we would have a much more creative atmosphere!

One of the areas where universities generally are not really good is in encouraging interdisciplinary conversations.  Many claim to do it well, but when you look at it closely, few are actually good at it.  It is interesting to look at the brand new King Abdulla University of Science and Technology (see my comments here and here), which is organized with the goal of actually being at the forefront of  interdisciplinary knowledge creation: 

KAUST is a modern research university unlike any other.  The University is designed to allow physical and human networks – operating largely without regard for organizational or national boundaries – to flourish, thereby creating a critical vehicle for the exchange of ideas and the development of new knowledge.

The KAUST approach is obviously not the only one for increasing interdisciplinary activities and conversations.  However, it does give some feeling for the elements to be considered, and the significant organizational changes that might be required to maximize interdisciplinary exchange of ideas.

Transatlantic joint and double degree programs

A fascinating report Joint and Double Degree Programs in the Transatlantic Context has just been published by the Institute of International Education and the Freie Universitat Berlin .  It describes the results of a survey of American and European universities looking at the rapidly increasing phenomenon of transatlantic joint and double degree programs. The survey was not meant to be representative of activity in an absolute sense (only 180 institutions participated), but rather to show trends and developments.
The report notes:

One of the more prominent recent developments involves the emergence of transatlantic degree programs, such as dual diplomas, joint degrees, consortia and other forms of curriculum cooperation arrangements. Among European countries the introduction of joint and double degree programs has long been a vital part of internationalization strategies in higher education, helping to create stronger links and flourishing institutional partnerships,as well as preparing students for a global workplace. In the North American context, such programs have been until recently a less common feature of internationalization strategies for higher education institutions. However, the interest in curriculum cooperation is gaining momentum not only in the U.S. but in most countries around the world. In an increasingly global and competitive higher education market, collaborative programs, or “codesharing” as airlines would call it, can offer a set of advantages and are an important asset in the struggle
for attracting the best and the brightest.

The report also describes another troublesome aspect of American higher education that such programs may help correct:

Another challenge to transatlantic academic exchange is the increasing predominance of short-term study abroad programs in the U.S. While Europe still remains the leading destination for U.S. students who study abroad, the length of study abroad sojourns has declined dramatically in the past decade. Currently, only 6% of all U.S. students who study abroad, spend a full academic year in the host country, according to IIE’s Open Doors Report. The majority of study abroad programs are short-term programs of eight weeks or less, which may have only limited impact on the development of intercultural skills and foreign language immersion. Medium-term and long-term study abroad sojourns, especially if conducted in a structured way in cooperation with local partner institutions and including exposure to local student body and faculty, hold far greater opportunities in this respect.

Among the many  findings are that double degrees are much more common than joint degrees, but that European institutions offer about twice as many joint degrees as do American institutions.  The US institutions focus on undergraduate joint and double degrees, the European institutions on graduate programs.  The most common programs are in business and engineering.   The most common partners for European institutions are US institutions and other European Universities, but there are a significant number of partnerships with Latin American and Asian institutions as well. For the US institutions, European partnerships are the most common, and Asian partnerships play a somewhat more important role than is the case with European universities. 

At several points, the report indicates the importance of the Bologna process (see The Bologna process- a significant step in the modularization of higher education , Sept 12, 2008) in stimulating such programs in Europe. One very interesting sentence caught my eye:

Built on consecutive, intertwined modules, European BA programs are beginning to find new ways of integrating study abroad components into the curriculum.

Another competitive aspect of Bologna that we in the US should carefully note!

Creativity and the Research University

The world is obviously in considerable turmoil at the moment, and predictability is in shorter supply than usual.  The role of the US in the world is changing rapidly, and we must struggle to maintain our competitiveness in many dimensions.  Under these trying circumstances, I am tempted to reflect once again on what the role of the research university might be in the next decades. One of the keys to being successful in the competition of  a global knowledge economy is to be more creative than the opposition.  Thus it would seem to be a worthwhile time to reflect on what higher education can do to help creativity.  This is an open ended question, and thus the following should considered to be a beginning,  an imagination of some of the changes that might lead to a more Creative University.  I invite my readers to jump in with their take on this question.

I see that universities can contribute to the creativity of three constituencies:

• students - how do we educate students so that we unleash their creative capacity?
• faculty - how do we organize our institution and reward faculty so that they can reach their creative potential?
• regional - what role can a university play in helping a region to become a center of economic growth in creative technologies?

Before talking about these three roles, let me review some general characteristics of creativity that I find useful in thinking about this issue.  I have spoken before about Csikszentmihalyi’s systems approach .  He emphasizes that a creative idea comes out of a three-part system composed of: a domain consisting of symbolic rules and procedures; a field composed of the judges or gatekeepers to changes in domain; and the person with the idea. Csikszentmihalyi emphasizes that all must work together for an idea to be judged as creative, i.e. enter into the domain. As a consequence,  there is no such thing as a creative idea in the abstract. Rather the idea must be judged as creative by some set of humans - and the judgements may change over time as the people in the field change.

Teresa Amabile has looked in detail at the characteristics of the creative person. Clearly, there are “talents” and “personality characteristics”correlated with creativity that are to large degree innate, especially for those of great creativity.  However, there are also a number of aspects of creativity that can be very important for almost everyone. Amabile defines these as: teachable domain relevant skills; teachable creativity relevant skills; and motivation.

The domain relevant skills are really the set of facts, approaches, and connections out of which one can construct a creative solution to some problem. These  include a broad knowledge of the basic factual knowledge of the domain, the principles that pull together these facts, the techniques or scripts that have been developed to manipulate information in the domain, and an understanding of what is considered to be “new” in the domain.  A critical component of domain skill is that the facts be organized and stored in the individual’s mind according to general principles, not specific contextual tidbits.  This is often referred to as expert knowledge, and it leads to flexibility of thinking within the domain, rapid recall of facts, etc.

There are many creativity relevant skills described by Amabile and others. Among the most important are: breaking perceptual set, that is being able to see objects, ideas in new ways ; understanding of and comfort with complexity; keeping responses open as long as possible; suspending judgement; using wide categories to categorize information in order to better see relationships; having the ability to break out of well used algorithms, scripts; and knowing  creativity aids (heuristics)  for generating new ideas.

Amabile has shown that creativity most often correlated with intrinsic motivation - self determination.  And correspondingly, extrinsic motivation most often negative in stimulating creativity - it is the opposite of self determination. Extrinsic motivation can be positive, however, if it seems to confirm competence without connoting control.  It can also be beneficial if it enables the individual to do exciting work, again, without seeming to connote control. For example, after the famous “aha” phase of creativity, there is a period in which considerable work is needed to test the viability of the idea, and move it along to a point that the field can begin to evaluate it. Extrinsic motivation (resources) can be invaluable and positive at this point.  In my view, two of the most important results concerning the motivational aspect of creativity are that failure is a necessary part of the creative process that can provide valuable information, and that institutional encouragement of creativity is very important.

Yet a third aspect of creativity that can be useful in imagining what a university can do has been described by Richard Ogle, who views creativity from a network perspective. He also emphasizes that the creative person is not alone. She is hooked into a network of ideas created by others - the domain, and into a network of the field that will judge her ideas.  Learning how to get into these networks is critical, and much of creativity can be viewed as being able to see how to hook into a different network of ideas and bring some of these ideas back to your network.  My favorite demonstration of this aspect is described in my discussion of InnoCentive, Inc.

I will consider the first of these three areas of the creative university, the creative student, in this post, and the other two in a subsequent post.

Changes in science teaching - and learning

The New York Times had a very nice article yesterday (1/12/2009) on new ways of teaching freshman physics. I have written previously about some of the drivers behind these new approaches (A D- in science education) . A key driver was the demonstration that students generally were learning only a small percentage (about 30%) of the concepts  that were being taught in the courses, and that this result was independent of lecture quality, class size, or institution.

The article focuses on MIT’s new method of teaching freshman physics courses, Technology Enhanced Active Learning, or TEAL .  I visited MIT last year to look at the changes, and found them to be very impressive.  The old lecture and lecture hall are gone, replaced by an interactive space where students working as groups learn from each other and from other groups, with a faculty member providing guidance and brief presentations of principles.  Data I was shown on learning were very positive, and indicated that the new methods were working very much better than the old.  Still, as I talked to some of the senior faculty in the department (i.e. my age peers), I found significant support for the old methods of teaching and learning - “they worked for you and me”.  The article notes this ongoing discussion in the department. It also notes that no other science department at MIT has changed its teaching approach.  That raises the question - have the other fields (e.g. math, chemistry, biology) looked at whether their students are really learning the concepts being taught in their courses?

Up the street from MIT at Harvard, Eric Mazur was one of the very early proponents of these new methods of teaching.  He has an article in the January 2, 2009 issue of Science (p.50, subscription required) describing his own transformation from lauded lecturer to leader of the movement away from lectures.  He also tells us what he thinks has been accomplished:

Data obtained in my class and in classes of colleagues worldwide, in a wide range of academic settings and a wide range of disciplines, show that learning gains nearly triple with an approach that focuses on the student and on interactive learning

That is a pretty good argument for interactive learning.  However, Mazur also describes the personal cost to him of the changes

So, evidence is mounting that readjusting the focus of education from information transfer to helping students assimilate materials is paying off. My only regret is that I love to lecture.

Change is hard, even when it is desired.

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.