AERA scheduling

The AERA conference schedule is finally up, and am I disappointed!

One thing you need to know about AERA is that it is huge, because it covers every aspect of education - financing public universities, teaching reading to autistic children, improving principal education, the state of access to education for girls in Uganda. So even though 13,000 people attend, there still aren't that many sessions in any one area.

In my area of higher education philanthropy, in fact, there is one session. (It's being put on by my colleague Noah Drezner.) Naturally, this would be at the top of my must-attend list.

Except, really it's second. The number-one session for me is, of course, the session I'm presenting in (it's a poster session and thus a pretty mixed bag). Guess what time it is? Hint: I won't be attending Noah's symposium.

But, you say, surely it's not the ONLY session you are interested in. Well, no. There's a paper about boards of trustees being presented at a roundtable which sounds quite interesting. I could go to that, surely ... if it weren't at the very same time. Then my colleague David Weerts is doing a roundtable, and there's a paper on the effect of prestige on alumni giving.

So out of four sessions (excluding mine) I'd like to attend, there are only two I can make, through no fault of my own. This also means that the people who are interested in my poster aren't likely to make it to my session - they're going to be at Noah's symposium.

Yes, there are a lot of sessions to organize. But most people tend to stick within one division, and the number of presentations for Division J (higher education) this year looks something like this*: 20 symposia; 230 papers in sessions of 4 each, or 56 paper sessions; 70 roundtables; and 134 posters. They run a lot of posters and roundtables at the same time, so let's say there are 2 sessions of each. That's 80 sessions overall, out of about 25 time slots. So there's three Division J sessions at any given time - it shouldn't be hard to avoid topic overlap.

Except, if you're astute, you'll notice that of my three overlapping sessions, one is a poster session and one is a roundtable. Problem: these sessions cover so many topics, there is bound to be overlap. For example, at 10:35 on May 1, there are 19 roundtable sessions of about five thematically-grouped papers each (not all are higher education). But this is fixable, too, with one of two solutions: 1) Run posters (and possibly roundtables) at their own time, like ASHE does. 2) Instead of running 19 roundtables at once, get a smaller freaking room and run only a few at a time, but ensure their topics don't overlap with paper sessions in the same division at the same time.

I know, I've never been in the no-doubt difficult position of having to arrange sessions, so there are undoubtedly subtleties I am missing. But this is one of the reasons I find attending AERA so frustrating, and one reason I'm likely to stop attending once I'm out of graduate school.

*based on accepted proposals. If there's something wrong with my math, correct me.

Link potpourri

For everyone freaking out about the name of the latest Apple product. Really, people? Menstrual products were the only thing you thought of when you heard the name?

"Humilitiation (the game) and J.D. Salinger." That is, elitist pride that comes with not having read a classic.

One of those "duh" papers that it's good someone actually did: Students who get FAFSA help are more likely to attend college. (Seriously, have you filled one out lately? Not easy.)

On the off chance you're interested, here's info on the quantitative seminar our department runs.

This novella is one of the most brutal stories I've ever read. It's also amazing and brilliant. You should read it.

"Effectiveness"

Part of my dissertation hinges on the notion of board effectiveness, and I am struggling to define it. There is an habit of defining board effectiveness by process rather than outcomes, since the latter are hard to observe, but let's set that issue aside for a moment - nontrivial as it is - and just talk about outcomes. But the question is, are we talking about board or institutional outcomes, and how can we separate them at top management levels?

This isn't just an education problem. Imagine a widget factory. Someone who works on the assembly line can easily be evaluated. More widgets = better performance, given a few caveats (ie, not sabotaging other workers). What about the manager of the assembly line? Once again number of widgets (produced by subordinates) is surely a part of it, but other things matter, too. A slightly lower production level may be worth it if turnover among workers is lower, depending on the company's cost structure, or a lower level of injuries or grievances. Higher up, another manager is deciding whether the widgets should be made with or without dongles and whether the plant should be retrofitted for efficiency or closed altogether. This manager's output is decisions and paperwork, which are hard to directly evaluate - do we compare them to the counterfactual, which is unknowable, or to the competition, which may perform better or worse based on unpredictable and unknowable factors?

By the time you get up to the president, there is almost nothing directly measurable (except for his or her treatment of employees, such as not sexually harassing them), and so the big cheese is measured on company performance. But we know that the performance isn't all about the president. Maybe the economy tanked, for example. Presidents are about as hard to evaluate as board members, except that most of their work is a group effort, not individual, so you ... what, take the company performance and divide it by 30?

Back to higher education boards: The specific, measurable components of their job are arguably only a small portion of what they ought to be evaluated on. If they're all donating generously, but the dropout rate is increasing and the campus restrooms are disgusting, are they doing a good job?

I'm sure there is a literature on this subject, not in specific reference to non-profits, but in terms of workplace evaluation. I don't know this literature, though, and it's not being used in any of the work I've seen on boards. Any suggestions or thoughts would be welcome.

Links

A provocative post about how changing the value of response sets in a survey results in different results. The gist is that if you are offered five choices, you assume the middle one is "average" and shape your response to that.

You've probably seen claims that the oldest entities around are nonprofits - colleges and churches. Here's a look at the oldest for-profit corporations, which are no spring chickens.

The tagline says it all: "How school lunch programs manage to promote obesity and hunger at the same time."

A rousing call for org theorists to study education.

California hurts

In California, the governor has proposed a constitutional amendment that would require 10 percent of operating funds be spent on the public universities. It's no secret that California higher education is in desperate fiscal straits and that reform is needed. From that amount of money alone, the plan sounds good (although let's not look too closely at the details, which involve addenda such as privatizing prisons, or the fact that it leaves out community colleges). Still, I find myself thinking this is not a good idea.

California's fiscal crisis has come on because the state is hamstrung in how it can spend its money and in what revenue it can raise in the first place. The ease of creating ballot propositions have led the state to cut property taxes and led to a host of partially funded programs and spending mandates. The folks in Sacramento ostensibly creating the budget have less say in how California's money is spent than in practically any other state, and any attempt to raise taxes to meet these spending needs is resisted.

Hey, I'm a tax-and-spend liberal. But you can't spend unless you tax, and you can't take all the power to make spending decisions away from the experts. It's not that average California citizens are stupid or ignorant. It's that thinking about the state budget is not anywhere close to their full-time occupation. Expertise ought to produce better spending decisions than voting a couple of times a year for what you want. (And if it doesn't - well, there goes any argument against supporting higher education. What do we need experts for?)

Why I'm glad I'm not in English any more

This year's MLA job market is the worst ever (since they've started keeping records). So, what ought graduates do?

Take a look at comment #7 from lms347: "If humanities PhDs would be willing to say, "Screw this. I can make more money and be just as fulfilled outside of academe" the way that some social sciences or science PhDs are willing and able to do, then maybe things would be a bit different."

Which gives the impression humanities PhDs are simply recalcitrant or closed-minded, yes? If only they would open their eyes!

Those social science and science jobs in industry or think tanks - you know what the required credential is for most of them? A PhD. You know what skills they require? Those learned in PhD programs.

Those alternatives suggested to teaching English and the humanities? Say, being an editor, or a high school teacher (both suggested by other commenters) - or perhaps working in a library or as a consultant - do you know what degree they require? Well, a masters would be nice. Maybe a teaching credential or some other degree that requires even more schooling.

Is it any wonder that after ten years of working on their PhDs, English lit graduates are more reluctant to seek non-academic careers than are economists? "This degree has to get me something - I spent ten years in poverty to earn it - so I'd like a job that uses it." That strikes me as perfectly natural. It's the system that is broken, with production not matching demand; it's not some curious flaw in the product.

Where's my flying car?

Predicting the future is always a dicey task, but you can't tell that from reading old education policy pieces. I feel like I've read a lot of articles from the 1970s and 1980s that take a current trend and assume it is the wave of the future. They never seem to anticipate that it's merely and ebb-and-flow phenomenon that will soon swing back, or that the status quo will be able to resist the reformist impulse. Remember the "private colleges will all fold" panic of the 1970s? Remember the predicted PhD shortage of the 1980s?

It's easy for me to sit here in my chair in 2009 and smirk, but the major lesson I've learned from this is not to count my chickens before they hatch. I tend to assume change won't happen, and if anything I'm too conservative in that.

The upshot is, you're never likely to open up your blogroll and see that today Turducken has predicted that soon we'll all be learning virtually, that public universities will sever their connections with their states, or that the adjunctification will increase to its logical end.

Link roundup

That hike I did in Bellingham? Changes are afoot.

Nice analysis of U of California tuition raises.

Board members behaving badly.

Do famous articles say what you think they say?

Faculty humor.

Funny video. At least for those of you who enjoy font humor. (Via John Scalzi.)

Books for new faculty members

As I've mentioned previously, I've been reading (and skimming) a lot of books aimed at helping faculty members. Many of these are aimed specifically at new faculty members; several more are targeted toward achieving tenure. Needless to say, I've formed some opinions of these books.

I can't tell you how objectively useful these books are, since I haven't actually started a faculty job yet, I'm a sample of one, yada yada disclaimer disclaimer. ( in other words, this is not, "In this study, we randomly assigned new faculty members to read one of ten books. New faculty who read Turducken's Guide to Achieving Tenure, or, Guess Which Part of Research-Teaching-Service is the Chicken were twice as likely to achieve tenure as those who read Cthulu's Top Ten Tenure Tips.") Nevertheless, I found some books more helpful than others. The biggest problems?

• Spending a lot of time on the applying to grad school or early grad school process in a book whose title guarantees it won't be picked up until well into the dissertation
  
• Dubious advice (ie, "List your marital status on your CV")
  
• Lots of remedial tips ("Many professors have offices, and these often have desks.")
  
• Vague tips that can't be easily operationalized
  
• A tendency to assume all fields are like the author's (ie, advising scientists that it is important to publish a book to get tenure)

With that said, here are the books I would recommend to grad students looking into faculty careers or new faculty members dealing with how to manage their time, run their own classes without drowning, and figuring out what exactly their job is. Because the one thing I consistently hear from assistant professors is that the first few years are painfully harder and that they work longer hours than they did in grad school. If that doesn't strike fear into a PhD student's heart, he or she doesn't have a heart.

1. James Lang's Life Life on the Tenure Track: Strictly speaking, this isn't an advice book - he does have one, and it is a fine book. This is merely an account of his first year as an English professor in a small liberal arts college. This book just tells you what to expect (yes, even if you'll be teaching grad students and carrying a heavy expectation of research) so that you will then want to go out and read the others. You should also give this to your spouse, your parents, and anyone else who will wonder if you are trapped under a heavy object and unable to reach the phone during that first year.
   
2. Emily Toth's first and second Ms. Mentor books: These have the enormous advantage of being funny and the disadvantage of not pretending to be comprehensive in their coverage. Although the first one is specifically for women, I think lots of the advice is applicable to any gender. Together, these books do the best job of conveying the culture of academe.
   
3. The Black Academic's Guide to Winning Tenure--Without Losing Your Soul by Rockquemore and Laszloffy: You may not be a black academic, but then again, neither am I. I am not recommending this book because it will make you a better person by making you aware of what some of your colleagues may be going through (although it might do that), but because it has some very specific, useful tips for how to organize your office and use your time efficiently.
   
4. Finally, Robert Boice's Advice for New Faculty Members: Nihil Nimus is an absolutely terrific book on how to be productive. You can read it now, and maybe that will save you some trouble, but I recommend buying it and putting it away until some time in your first year when you realize your first year is at least as miserable as James Lang's was (except perhaps without the chronic disease) and that you thought you could handle it but you can't and you are SO BEHIND and oh crap here comes the department chair ... that is, when you've hit academic bottom, because only then are you ready for change.

Hey! Check out us over here, in the ed school!

Articles like this one baffle me. If you don't feel like clicking through, here's a quick summary: professor of religion defends lecturing, believing that other forms of learning such as discussion can't take place without lecture first.

Now, what baffles me is not his conclusion. I don't have a dog in this fight. (If he argued that lecturing was the only valuable pedagogy, I certainly would take issue, however.) What I don't get is his mode of argumentation.

He refers to "conventional wisdom" and "entrenched opinions" and other synonyms throughout the article. Conventional wisdom says X, but his personal experience says Y. Ergo, X is wrong.

But why is he talking about conventional wisdom and opinions at all? There are scholars studying learning in a rigorous way in psychology, curriculum and instruction, and centers for teaching at nearly every college in the country. If the author was writing about chemistry, would he look to "entrenched opinions" for expertise? No, he'd look to chemists.

This happens frequently in conversations about higher education among scholars - despite being academics themselves, they seem to forget that there are academics dedicating their careers to understanding higher education and learning. Yet they re-invent the wheel and talk as if we know nothing about how education works. We're a long way from knowing everything, admittedly. But trust me, there are studies on how much students retain from various modes of teaching, and one person's experience doesn't add much of anything to our knowledge.

Sigh

As I continue to read/skim books of advice for faculty, today I encountered something disturbing. It's not the only book that does this, which is why I'm not calling it out, but it was particularly blatant in this case.

The book has chapters on minorities and women, and those chapters are aimed specifically at minorities or women. The presumption seems to be that whites or men have no need to learn about these issues, which is odd when the chapters discuss encounters one will have with Neanderthal colleagues. It is especially odd given that some of the women-only advice includes why one shouldn’t date colleagues; unless the authors meant to specify lesbian relationships, male faculty members are clearly just as involved. Why is this a women's issue?

At one point, a chapter mentions that students will ask, "Why do we have to learn about this multicultural stuff?" A good question, given that apparently faculty are excused from doing so.

Leaving Vandy

Former department chair heads to Texas.

ASHE part II

Thanks, Inside Higher Ed, for covering this session. I really wanted to attend it but had to be somewhere else. Now I know what I missed!

On the final day of ASHE, I went to quite a few different sessions, which varied widely in quality. One poor graduate student was incredibly nervous; she read too fast for me to follow her, without pauses (and yes, read, not spoke). I still have no idea what she did or what she found. I also went to the grad student luncheon (free book! thanks publishers). And I talked briefly to a couple of folks on search committees.

ASHE 2009

Another ASHE conference is coming to a close. This year has been unusual for the number of very good sessions I have attended. Perhaps that is because I am learning to choose sessions based on who is presenting, not just what I'm interested in. I've also been to several symposium and panel sessions, which tend to be more lively than traditional papers. Some of the highlights have included:

1. "The (Sometimes Uneasy) Relationship between Higher Education Researchers and the Media" - Editors from the Chronicle and IHE and several big-name researchers discussed how news outlets discuss what to cover and how to get your name out there as an expert.
   
2. "Developing New Theories of Higher Education as an Organization" - Michael Bastedo gave a good presentation, but Jason Lane's talk on principal-agent theory as applied to boards was very helpful for my own work.
   
3. "The Utility and Challenges of Critical Race Theory and Critical White Studies" - totally outside of my area, but I think it's a good idea to go to a few topics you don't typically study at a conference. This was a really great session, and I'm not just saying that because someone dropped an F-bomb.

I was also excited to see that this year's dissertation of the year winner was Gen Shaker, a fellow Center on Philanthropy grad. One thing I love about ASHE is catching up with my colleagues that I see only once or twice a year - it's extra nice when they win awards!

There are still a few events left today, and then I head down to Bellingham.

Major choices

William Chace laments the decline in the "number" of students studying the humanities in this article, then goes on to diagnose why he believes it occurred. I disagree with him in a lot of places (although not all - he does recognize that the rise of the humanities was a 20th-century trend rather than the state of affairs since time immemorial). Most importantly, the "trend" he analyzes isn't a trend at all.

Let's begin with the statistics he leads with. He reports the percentage of students in various majors, but reasons, "The number of young men and women majoring in English has dropped dramatically" (emphasis added). That's only true if the overall number of students remained the same - but it hasn't.

You can look up enrollment statistics in the Digest of Educational Statistics. The total fall enrollment in degree-granting institutions for 2007 was 18,248,128. In 1967, it was 6,911,748. In other words, the number of students tripled.

If, according to his statistics (he doesn't cite the source), 7.6 percent of students were English majors 40 years ago, that equals 269,558 English majors. If today 3.9 percent of students are English majors, that's 711,677 English majors - a net increase of 442,119. These numbers, by the way, are for all students, including those in two-year institutions, which tend to be more vocationally focused. If we limit it to four-year colleges, the numbers are 5,398,986 for 1967 and 11,630,198 for 2007. That's 210,560 English majors growing to 453,578 in forty years. To be perfectly clear: The number of English majors at four-year institutions has more than doubled. The percentages in the other humanities disciplines he cites tell similar stories. Foreign languages and literature grew by 16,218; philosophy and religion by 32,831; history by 245,619.

Now if one wishes to lament that this probably means a decline in the relative power or growth of English departments, one would have a fair argument. But this is not the argument Chace makes.

Am I being picky? Maybe. But I expect an English professor to understand the importance of word choice.

The increase in enrollment also points out another major factor in the changing rate of majoring in humanities - the link between socio-economic status and major choice. Most of the increase in enrollment comes from students of lower SES whose parents didn't attend college. Davies and Guppy found in one of the first relevant studies a decade ago that "working-class students who have reached college are more likely to view their undergraduate education instrumentally as a route to upward mobility, and are more likely to enroll in lucrative fields that are of a relatively technical nature, such as engineering or business." Most of Chace's arguments are about English departments themselves; any major trend is due to seeing overworked, underpaid TAs and being turned off by the latest trends in scholarship. But major choice is in many ways more about the student and about socially stratified perceptions of what is an appropriate major than about the lived reality of the discipline.

Document Analysis: New England’s First Fruits

I don't usually post my homework on here, but we recently had to analyze documents for my historical sociology course, and I thought my assignment might be of interest to the two people reading this who do philanthropy.

New England’s First Fruits; In Respect, First of the Conversion of some, Conviction of divers, Preparation of sundry, 2.Of the progresse of Learning, in the Colledge at Cambridge in Massacusets Bay, With Divers other speciall Matters concerning that Countrey is a pamphlet published in 1643 for use by fundraising agents who were attempting to raise funds for various causes in the Massachusetts Bay colony.(1) While it states that it was composed by “New-England Men who are here present, and were eye or eare-witnesses of the same,”(2) the precise authorship is unknown; it has been included with the papers of John Eliot, a colonist active in attempting to convert Bay area Indians to Christianity (Clark, 2003). It was printed in London at the request of Hugh Peter and Thomas Weld after their first year in London was not entirely remunerative (Kellaway, 1961). In modern terms, this document served as a piece of public relations.

The document is divided into three sections. The first, “In respect of the Indians, &c,” tells of missionary work to the Indians, their thirst for the Gospel, and of the extension of this work that would be possible with further funding. The second, “In respect of the Colledge, and the proceedings of Learning therein,” covers the establishment and early financial gifts to Harvard College as well as the current state of the college, including its rules and curriculum (the latter in Latin). The third section, which is not divided from the second by any heading or preamble, purports to give facts about life in New England and answers critical questions, with an eye toward proving the wholesomeness of the place and dispelling stories about poor soil, cold weather, weakness of colonial character, out-migration, and the likelihood of wanting clothes from England in the future. The rest of this analysis focuses on the second portion, which is regularly cited as the first example of fundraising for higher education in the United States. For example, according to one fundraising expert, “The first recorded instance of fundraising in the colonies was in 1643, when Harvard College conducted the first fundraising drive” (Lindahl, 2010, p. 73). Another more precise statement of its import as a bracket is an encyclopedia entry indicating that “the first systematic fund-raising appeal to raise money for an American institution was probably that for Harvard College” (Burlingame, 2004).

Given that the pamphlet was produced as a public relations product for fundraisers, certain biases are to be expected and were most likely not unconscious. Fundraisers then as now walked the line between presenting the object of philanthropy as a healthy, going concern worthy of funds, and as a struggling entity that that requires aid. Thus we read that “the Edifice is very fair and comely within and without” and the president is “a learned conscionable and industrious man.” In fact, what work is left for further donors is never explicitly stated. Perhaps this is the reason it “made little impression upon potential benefactors” (Kellaway, 1961, p. 10), or perhaps the style of the time was to leave “the ask” up to the fundraising agents. Other biases are due less to the stylistic conventions of the genre than to beliefs held in common by the English and their colonists. The Indians are represented as sincerely desiring to convert to Christianity (and as doing so out of a desire for salvation); Christianity is assumed to require English customs, including attire; the colonial seizure of North America is claimed to be “free and faire” rather than “with violence and intrusion.” While no instrument yet devised allows us to see with certainty the desires of the deceased, contemporaneous documents such as diaries, letters, and government and church records may tell us to what extent Indians embraced English ways and establish the degree of violence in this instance of colonization. Still, the preponderance of these documents originate with the colonists, and therefore tell only one side of the story. Similarly, the college is represented as a flourishing enterprise in First Fruits, while in fact operations had been temporarily suspended due to a lack of funds. Knowing this, even the segments that detail the college’s rules and the questions put to candidates for degrees are likely to represent ideals rather than actual practice. Students did likely study the trivium and ethics; it is less likely that all graduates lived lives as godly as the rules hope. Omitted altogether are the number of students at the grammar school and the college, how many were dismissed or left of their own accord, any details on tutors beyond President Dunster – any information that might suggest Harvard was less than flourishing. There are, again, plenty of other records that may contradict this image, such as record of the Overseers, diaries and letters, records of legislative support, and Cambridge village records. The pamphlet, then, is best used by scholars as an example of public relations than as evidence of Indian-colonist relations or the state of Harvard College in 1643.

(1)This analysis is based upon two copies available through the Vanderbilt Library; one is a poor quality facsimile of the original available online, and the other is a reprint, retaining the original font and text ornaments but with new pagination.
(2)It is unclear, however, whether “the same” they were witnesses to was the conversion, etc. of the Indians, the progress of learning, and the diverse other special matters, or whether it was “the instant request of sundry Friends, who desire to be satisfied in these points.”

Job search supply and demand

Interesting article on hiring in political science. Lots of what is covered is similar to education. What struck me, though, was this:

Several chimed in to say that they agreed that it would be far more humane to such individuals to be honest after two years, rather than letting them face a long time in graduate school to be followed by potentially fruitless job searches. Graham Wilson of Boston University said that most programs have "moved away from the tough evaluation" after the second year of a doctoral program and that they should return to a frank discussion of potential at that point.

When I was applying to PhD programs, there were two programs I was most serious about. One is the kind of program they are discussing above. Recent graduates made it clear that they brought in more students than they intended to graduate and then sorted after arrival. The other is the program I am in now, which intends to graduate everyone it admits. It doesn't always work; students still choose to leave - or are counseled to leave, particularly after comprehensive exams. Still, I think the overall numbers would show a difference in attrition.

It surprises me, then, that the third option of being more selective up front wasn't discussed as an alternative. Do admissions committees just not think they have enough data to make valid predictions about success? Do they count on a minimum number of students (or TAs) for some reason?

Shrinking engineers

An interesting study has found that, contrary to popular opinion, engineering programs don't have particularly attrition rates. (By attrition, in this case I mean switching to another major rather than leaving school altogether.) But colleges still graduate fewer engineers than they start with, because vanishingly few students switch into engineering from another major.

The comments to the article I link to suggest several reasons this is the case, some more plausible than others. One suggestion is that engineers come in with a stronger sense of what they want to do. It's possible, although I know of no data to evaluate this with. Another is that engineering culture is full of loud-mouth, drunken, conformist asshats. Again, I don't think there is data readily available on this point, although in my undergraduate experience engineers tended to be nerdy and while often conservative, hardly louder or drunker than anyone else - in fact they were more often teetotalers or antisocial.

The obvious reason, and one we can test with data, is that degree requirements are much more specific in engineering programs than in most other fields, and switching to engineering after even a semester would likely delay graduation. The next step for an alert graduate student would be to start examining course catalogs, then to perhaps move on to gathering data on what courses entering students actually take.

Boards of trust in the news

This article on the recent AGB survey about trustees makes some good points, but I can't agree with them all.

The first major point is that AGB did not survey trustees but instead senior administrators. There is nothing wrong, I think, with surveying those who work with trustees - I have been using data from a survey of fundraisers myself - but it should not be our only or even primary source of information about trustees. There are two reasons for this. First, there are facts we can only get at by surveying trustees themselves ("How much time did you spend last year in your role as a trustee?"). Second, there are questions of opinion and subjective questions that administrators and trustees might have very different outlooks on. These would include, "Is the president doing a good job?" and "How hard is it to recruit new board members?"

However, the author then objects to the finding that board members spend over half their time listening to staff. This strikes me as an inevitability. Board members must know what's going on at their institutions. As part-time volunteers, it's impossible for them to know as much as full-time employees (who, with the exception of the president, specialize in one particular aspect of the institution). If we want them to spend 40 or more hours a week in their trustee role, we have to pay them - at which point they are employees instead of trustees, and they are no longer on the same side of the agency problem. Now, perhaps trustees ought to be able to go to administrators and and ask questions rather than be served pre-digested information, but it's nearly impossible to eliminate their dependence of "information supplied by the institution." What other source is possible?

Next, the author chastises keeping boards in the dark. Fair point. Of course, board members themselves ought to share some responsibility for letting themselves be kept in the dark. If only 64% of private boards tell the full board (rather than, presumably, the compensation committee) the president's compensation, are the board members asking?

Finally, the last couple of paragraphs excoriate the state of American higher education in general. The implication is that nothing short of dramatically changing trusteeship will fix it, but since the charges include so many things and no specific solutions are suggested, I'll leave it alone.

But the last two sentences are worth noting: "The rising cost and declining quality that we see today in higher ed result, too often, from the belief that administrators are the real governance structure and that trustees exist to serve the institution first and the public interest second. It is time for trustees to wake up to this mindset and reassert their central governing role." I feel like something is missing as it is formulated - it's a simple fact that administrators ARE the real governance structure. What I think is being objected to is the notion that they OUGHT to be. As far as to what trustees serve, researchers, academics, and board members themselves have come to no agreement on that - on the rare occasions they think about it. And as far as I know, no one has done a survey of that yet.

Chugging along

PPI went off well last week, and now I'm diving back into analyzing gubernatorial election data, revising a manuscript, and chasing down institutions for participation in my dissertation. Right now I'm working at a coffeeshop - yes, I'm kind of broke, but a cup of coffee costs only twice what gas to campus does, and I get much better people-watching. The office has a sad, deserted feel in the summer.

Academic fashion

I loved this post on the academic fashions of women, but it has to be modified for my own field of education.

There are no Sexy or Athletic Academics. I've seen one or two grad students try Sexy, but never a faculty member.

The Bohemian Academic look is reserved exclusively for those who study international education.

Finally, we have another category that I suspect is missing elsewhere in academia - the Kindergarten Academic. These are often women who study early childhood education. The look consists of long, shapeless jumpers, cute embroidered tops, and jewelry that looks like a craft project.

Also, I would kill for the suit shown for the Professional Academic.

AERA recap

Here's the quick roundup of what I found valuable at AERA:

• Karri Holley: When you get an submission back from a journal, wait 24 hours (no less, no more) before considering the comments, and always revise and resubmit if possible.
  
• Frank Harris: Be politically savvy and cite relevant work by the editorial board in journal submissions. Aim to have one article out each fall, spring and summer.
  
• Kim Griffin: In relationship theory, there are three kinds of relationships: Friendship, where two people give and take; generalized exchange, where A gives to B who gives to C who gives back to A; and partnership, where two people both give to a third thing that rewards them.
  
• Bill Tierney: 1) Read a lot, and not just academic stuff. 2) Have fun. 3) Take risks. 4) Word hard. 5) Write well. 6) Demand the best of yourself.

Greetings from San Diego

I'm at AERA in sunny San Diego - sunny and rather windy. I haven't been posting because the Marriott charges outrageous rates for internet. Thank goodness I can check my email on my iPhone, so I'm not entirely out of touch.

So this is just to let you all know that I won't be posting much until I get back next week. Enjoy the silence.

Short bits

-A quote from Ernest Boyer: "During our research for College, we studied several view books ... Based on the pictures in these books, I observed that about 60 percent of all classes are held outside, underneath a tree, and by a gently flowing stream. It's an absolutely bucolic setting. In fact, I observed that almost every campus is either by a river, by a stream, or not quite so far from the shore. One recruiter told us that, 'water is very big in higher education this year.'"

-As I mentioned the other day, what is wrong with my ankle is apparently my hip. That is, I'm not using my hip to stabilize myself properly, and the tension is getting down to my ankle, which the therapist called "the weakest link." Since I can't vote my ankle off the island, the alternative is to strengthen the hip. I'm paying a lot more attention to it, and this morning in yoga I noticed that I finally figured out I've been doing something wrong in warrior all these years - using my ankle instead of my hip.

-I'm leaving tomorrow for San Diego and AERA. Updates here and on Twitter (#AERA).

Going to college

This post got me thinking about why high school graduation tests don't align with college admissions. Just to be clear up front, I am talking primarily about open-access institutions such as community colleges.

One obvious reason is that the K-12 education and public higher education are overseen by different bodies (except at times in Florida) and have different groups of policy-makers. And one of the most frightening specters to anyone in higher ed is the idea of being as highly regulated as K-12 (because, you know, it works so well there). So talk of aligning standards elicits an almost knee-jerk reaction.

But the other reason there isn't alignment is a deep-seated belief on the part of plenty of people that just graduating from high school isn't sufficient preparation for college. I found this belief lurking inside of me. It's a little voice that says, "Geez, anyone who barely passed algebra and took the lowest-level of courses offered with mediocre grades, do you expect them to be able to do college-level work?" Leaving aside special education programs for students with serious disabilities, which I think constitute a special case, why shouldn't a high school diploma guarantee college readiness? - in theory.

I'm not entirely comfortable with this reaction, and I'm trying to decide how much of it is a simple recognition of the status quo and how much of it is an argument that college entrance ought to have a higher bar than a high school diploma. Bringing this sentiment out into the cold light of day where I can look at it makes it squirm a little and say, "Um, I'm just talking the status quo. Never mind me."

But at the end of the day, while I do believe in greatly expanded college access and deplore the connection between socio-economic status and educational achievement, I really don't believe that everyone ought to go to college. Some people aren't smart enough, some people don't enjoy it, and some jobs don't require it.

And if graduating from high school equals the ability to do college-level work, than some people just won't be able to graduate high school. Yet we've decided as a society that a high school diploma is a personal and societal necessity; anything less than a 100% graduation rate is failure. But if I believe all this, it leads to the inevitable conclusion that a high school diploma should not be considered sufficient preparation for college.

Practically speaking, maybe we need a system like the Brits where diplomas are given by levels. At the moment, however, I'm less interested in thinking of a solution to the corner I've boxed myself into than in the discomfort I feel with my own assumptions. I often believe entirely incompatible things, but usually I'm OK with that.

P.S. Here's a totally different response.

Returns to education

"Go to college, earn more money." This is conventional wisdom and backed up by research. On average, college graduates make more money than non-graduates. Presumptively, this rising tide leads to a higher standard of living and more robust economy. This second point is less certain. Nations with a larger percentage of graduates have stronger economies, but how precise is the link? If 5% more citizens are college grads, is the economy exactly 5% wealthier? That's doubtful.

Why more education leads to higher salaries is arguable. The traditional argument is that college teaches skills that enable graduates to do more complex or difficult jobs. Some sociologists argue it's more about certification - "This person is smart and has people skills" - than about learning. The literature on professionalization suggests that by insisting on hiring college grads for prestigious jobs, other grads can monopolize a profession, keeping salaries up.

No matter the theory, I'm wondering about the mechanism at work and where its bounds are. Any of those theories are compatible with the following. Right now, for example, the U.S. has a shortage of nurses due to structural issues in universities (a whole 'nother post, that). If we doubled the number of RN slots in colleges without taking away students from any other programs, presumably these new nurses would have higher incomes than they would otherwise.

But let's imagine for a moment I'm a big baseball fan and think that there just aren't enough pro baseball players. After all, Nashville doesn't have a major league team. Therefore, we need more college ball players. There's a pretty obvious flaw in this argument, which is that there is already a large supply of potential major leaguers and that the demand for them is restricted because of how baseball is run (that is, MLB is a monopoly).

So we can say some occupations are like nursing and some are like baseball, but let's take the nursing example to a logical extreme. If we train every single person in the country without a college diploma to be a nurse, we would have an oversupply and nursing wages would fall. And a lot of those trainees would not be working as nurses, either. Clearly, the market demand for degrees matters.

Now, one might argue that a college education teaches skills such as critical thinking that would enable this oversupply of nurses to still come out ahead by starting their own businesses or some such thing. That's reasonable. But in my extreme example, every single person now has a degree, and we still have positions to fill that are very low-paid - day laborers, for example. As our economy is currently structured, the demand for college degrees is not perfectly elastic.

So, then, what is the point of diminishing returns to society (not to the individual) for higher education? I'm talking strictly monetary here - there may be excellent arguments for higher education producing better citizens or what have you, but I'm trying to focus on the strictly economic. Is that point still so unachievable that this is only a mental exercise? Let's say that only once 99.99% of adults have college degrees do wages no longer rise. I think more than one in a thousand people has serious issues of some sort that prevent degree completion, so worrying about it would be futile. If that point is a lot lower, at some point does college become compulsory (as some have argued is happening), or is the smart thing to do to skip college? If you're going to work as a barista anyway, the opportunity cost for college is too high.

There are a lot of different ways to take this, and it's stretching my brain, so I wanted to ask what your take on it was.

Great books

My post on Matlin led me to start thinking about what my favorite books in higher education might be. I do not represent this as a definitive list of the best or most important books in the field: This list is necessarily idiosyncratic and reflective of my own interests. it includes books ranging from the informative overview for the newcomer to the provocative.

The Chosen by Jerome Karabel. This book won more awards than Michael Phelps and might break a flimsy coffee table. It's also an engrossing and compelling look at the history of admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares is another book about elite admissions. This book was what inspired my original, now-abandoned thesis topic.
The Higher Learning in America by Thorstein "Pecuniary Emulation" Veblen. His rant on the commercialization of higher education from a century ago still is powerful, not to mention really funny. Captains of Erudition everywhere, beware!
How Colleges Work by Robert Birnbaum. The title tells you exactly what it is, and it is as accessible to laypersons and practitioners as it is to researchers. My criticism of this book is that the types of college governance he lays out are not empirically tested but are based on experience and gut feeling.

I was surprised to see how short this list turned out to be. Notice too that the first three books are written by sociologists and only one is by an education researcher, albeit one with an organization theory perspective. A few runners-up:

Best fiction: Stover at Yale by Owen Johnson with an honorable mention to Jane Smiley's Moo.
Best finance book: Tuition Rising by Ron Ehrenberg.
Best edited volume: The High-Status Track by Kingston and Lewis.
Best book that's not specific to the field and yet ought to be read by every higher ed researcher: The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills.
Best book based mostly on experience instead of research: The American University by Jacques Barzun.
Best book on the presidency: Legitimacy in the Academic Presidency by Rita Bornstein.
Best book on fundraising: Philanthropy in the Shaping of American Higher Education by Curti and Nash.

Stalking Norman Matlin

I've been reading an odd little volume called "The Educational Enclave: Coercive Bargaining in Colleges and Universities" by Norman Matlin. It's from 1970 and was published by Funk and Wagnalls.

Dr. Matlin had an odd career. He went to Yeshiva as an undergrad and then to the New School for his sociology doctorate, where his dissertation was on "A Heuristic for Education." He married and then taught in Puerto Rico in the early 1960s, where he met Carlos Albizu and joined him at his new graduate school for mental health professionals. From there on out, all Matlin's work was in psychology, much of it in Spanish. He retired about ten years ago.

This book seems to have left few marks on the world. I can only find one book review, and that review took it entirely seriously. Even the dust jacket suggests it is serious. Yet in spots I had real trouble believing this book was anything other than satire (see the sample below), and it's quite possibly the funniest commentary on higher education I've read - in places.

"Most of the student's contractual obligations require his presence, at stated intervals, at appointed locations. Minimizing the number of appearances is obviously beneficial. While the appearance or nonappearance of any particular student is of no great import to the institution, the simultaneous nonappearance of large numbers tends to be conspicuous. Prudence suggests that the nonappearance of students be staggered. In situations of comparative inelasticity, the relative infrequency of nonattendance allows for this solution with a minimum of formal organization. In situations of higher elasticity, a fair amount of cooperation and coordination among students may be necessary to maximize minimization."

In places the book is dead-on, and in others it misses the mark by a mile. The above excerpt is from his chapter on students, which also contains a very close examination of why student cheating is an entirely rational behavior, with a cost-benefit analysis of different types of cheating. It is terrific, although it fails to explain why some students don't cheat.

In the very next chapter, however, he claims that "private educational institutions set academic policy by maximizing profit ... For various diplomatic reasons, however, institutions prefer to consider that they are operating at a loss." This seems to me to be a gross misreading of the situation. Institutions prefer to be able to boast that they are operating in the black. They ask for funds in order to continue to be able to do so in the future or to "promote excellence," i.e. be able to spend more. (In order words, they prefer to consider that if their income is not increased at once they will only be able to offer a sub-standard educational product). I am not taking issue with his statement that institutions act to maximize profit but with his claim that they pose as operating in the red. An analysis of annual reports and fundraising appeals (now or from the 1960s) would show otherwise.

I have two theories I can't decide between:

1) This book is a parody. How could someone write about "maximizing minimization" in regards to skipping classes with a straight face? The book review frowns upon his pedantic language, but it is too pitch-perfect to be accidental ... or is it? This book was his last salvo in an area he was tired of. This explains his refusal to cite, his scorn for educational research that goes beyond the de rigeur posing, his grandiose thesis (he alone can combine economics and sociology!), and his willingness to fit every quanta of educational life into his grand unified theory.
...or
2) This book was Matlin's last effect to re-establish himself in the sociology of education, but it failed. The world in 1970 wasn't ready for a thesis that considered education to solely be a prestige-maximizing exercise, and Matlin was impolitic enough to, for example, fail to note that cheating can be treated as a moral activity and not simply an economically rational one. He also made the unwise choice to ignore the work of his contemporaries and only take into account giants like Veblen. Socially tone-deaf and convinced of his own brilliance, he had trouble finding a job in sociology. To quote Garbarino from his review, "the relentless translation of every bit of academic minutiae into sociological jargon over more than 200 pages makes for heavy going. ... The book would have benefited from a greater degree of selectivity in characteristics analyzed and a more straightforward style."

In other words, is this book a comedy or a tragedy? It falls short in some way no matter which light we view it in. Yet I've spent a lot more time thinking about this book than any other education book I've read in a while. For that reason I think it deserves more than the obscurity it languishes in.

Note: Sorry I haven't included a link. I bought a copy off of Amazon, but there are currently no copies for sale there or at Powell's - that tells you how obscure it is! - and no good pages to link to.

Now I have a headache

I am reading a report written by the Smith Consultancy. It was managed by Kindof University Association, which contracted it out to Smith. However, it was commissioned by the quasi-governmental Governments & Universities Council. Which in turn was funded by the government.

My head hurts. Surely there is a middleman that could have been cut out somewhere.

(All names are fictional, duh, to protect the bureaucratic.)

Job outlook

A friend asked me the other day if I couldn't get a job here in Nashville, and I said, "Well, not unless I want to work at Starbucks." Which wasn't really very funny, because it's tough to get hired anywhere at the moment, and I don't have experience as a barista.

All of you know the economy is tough. It's tough in higher ed too. At least two jobs I applied for canceled their job searches because of hiring freezes. I saw a posting for a faculty job at a public university here in Tennessee (not one I qualify for), and it bore the note "contingent upon state funding." Well, you can pretty much write that one off: Tennessee colleges are getting cuts in appropriations of over 20%.

But more specifically in Nashville, that means we can count out TSU, and Vandy doesn't hire its own grads as faculty. That's all the programs that have higher ed programs around here. And Vandy has a staff hiring freeze, so it's unlikely I could get a postdoc or a staff position. Quite a few of our grads have gone on to work at the state board of higher education or the Tennessee Higher Education Commission in the past, but those agencies are already frozen and are facing cuts.

Then envision this across not just Nashville, but the entire country ...

I'm not trying to elicit sympathy. I have another year of funding guaranteed, so I won't be out on the streets. Most people aren't so fortunate, even many students on the job market. It's just that the kind of job I thought I'd get used to be narrow because the kind of job I wanted was rare. Now the kind of job I think I'll get is narrow because jobs are rare.

Popular majors

Article: Division I athletes cluster in certain majors.

What I'd like to know, and what is missing from this article, is, "Do other students with similar academic qualifications end up in the same major?" We know that athletes, at least those in the "big" sports like football and basketball, have lower average SAT scores and GPAs than do their non-varsity peers. At many schools, sorting into majors occurs after students enter - students find they can't succeed in a certain program, or they have to apply for admission to competitive majors. At Vanderbilt, the sorting occurs even earlier; students must apply to the college they wish to study in (i.e., Peabody or Arts & Sciences) - and the students are not the same across colleges. It's easy to switch from a philosophy to a Spanish major, since they're in the same college, but harder to switch from Human and Organizational Development to engineering. It's likely that some clustering is simply due to the the difference in ability, not due to athletics per se.

This doesn't deny that inappropriately firm guidance or cheating don't occur, but clustering itself is not sufficient evidence to prove it.

Anathem

I read Neal Stephenson's new book, Anathem, this weekend. I used to be a really big fan, although his trilogy bored me senseless. (Even being the completeness freak that I am, I haven't yet managed to muster up any enthusiasm for starting the third installment.) Over his career his books have become increasingly didactic: at times, reading him is like reading Ayn Rand or Upton Sinclair. Of course, instead of being clobbered over the head about social systems, the reader is clobbered over the head with the intersection of philosophy and science. This tendency was evident as far back as Snow Crash, but it has grown. Most of the difference in weight between Zodiac and Anathem is in pages of technical explanations, not rising and falling action. I chose Zodiac deliberately, because both books feature a first-person narrator; other books are long in part due to following around a phalanx of characters.

I suppose that Stephenson has two hopes for readers (assuming I have a theory of mind for the author that is remotely accurate) - that after finishing his book they have a) enjoyed it and b) continue to ponder the arguments about space, time, math, etc. he uses. Being the perverse sort of reader that I am, I don't have much interest in (b). I am much more interested in the monastic communities that are central to the book, and in particular, in their long existence.

I do mean long - several thousand years. Over the time, they have changed significantly without losing their central purpose: the preservation and creation of knowledge. Civilizations have risen and fallen; population centers have moved with climate change.

Compare that with what we have in our presumably non-fictional world. Universities are some of the oldest institutions extant today; Bologna is coming up on its first millennium. A few madrasahs are older than that. The Catholic Church is even older at nearly two millennia. The Catholic Church is an interesting case. It wasn't founded with the explicit mandate to last 2000 years but simply survived. Contrast this with the government's attempt to keep radioactive waste buried for at least 10,000 years at at Yucca Mountain. Stephenson touches on the issue of storing radioactive material in Anathem, by the way, and I can't help but think that his solution - which involves people actually having the care of it - is a better on than burying it really deep, slapping some "stay away" signs on the site, and hoping geology and climate change don't destabilize it.

But how would you go about deliberately building an institution that could last for perpetuity - let's say as long as the planet lasts, or for as long as humanity lives on it? In modern America the first instinct would be no doubt to start amassing an endowment. But no monetary investment is going to be stable over these time periods. Precious metals and that sort of thing might be safer. Those are prone to pillaging, however. Another alternative would be to run as self-sufficiently as possible so as not to depend on any one economy.

One would want multiple sites, not only in case the local community brings out the pitchforks, but because of climate change, plate tectonics, what have you. Presumably individual branches would perish but the larger enterprise would roll on. That, however, brings up the difficulty of keeping sites in some sort of contact. It would naturally grow sporadic in dangerous or primitive times.

The institution would need to be able to cope with times of high and low technology. It might need to be irreligious to avoid holy wars, not to mention the waning of any particular faith. It would need to survive periodic co-option by governments. It would need to survive scenarios that the wildest sci-fi writers can dream up - massive overpopulation, near extinction, the singularity, nuclear war, alien invasion, etc. They need to survive the extinction of the culture they were founded in.

This last point strikes me as the most difficult. Most organizations on our planet haven't lasted because they were built to serve a particular civilization. That is true of today's organizations as well (the Catholic Church doesn't make much sense without Christianity), but globalization has meant that civilizations can expand their influence. Local crisis can't wipe out the Church the way it can Oxford.

The organization would necessarily change with the times - from magesterial to congregational authority, from wealth to austerity, from openness to insularity. Continuity would have to come from its purpose, and very few purposes can remain relevant over millennia. Even religious, alas, may not. Preservation of knowledge (Stephenson's rationale) may be subject to periods of primitivism.

This is all entirely speculative, naturally. Maybe the Catholic Church will survive until the earth is consumed by the sun. As the longest-lived organization, it's the likeliest candidate we have, and I realize its authority has remained centralized, it has never been insular, and it has always combined wealth and austerity. This is one of those untestable social science hypotheses - we can't know what form works best until we have millennia more data, and even then we can't know that some counterfactual would have worked better. That's one reason people write science fiction.

What students like

A news story caught my eye the other day about student preferences for online versus in-person class lectures. Interesting, I suppose, but it leaves me wondering, "So what?"

What students like has no business driving what institutions provide. I don't mean to suggest that student preferences can or should be entirely ignored; to quote Derek Bok in Beyond the Ivory Tower, "Students do not have much power to initiate policy directly. Nevertheless, they do exert considerable influence on policy - not so much by collective action but by their ability not to attend institutions they do not like and to force changes in curriculum and teaching methods by the slow, silent pressure of apathy and disapproval."

However, students are not customers but clients, which is a crucial distinction. Customers buy whatever they want, and sellers rush to provide it. Clients, on the other hand, may request things that are bad for them, but the service provider has a professional obligation not to provide it. Consider attorneys: They ought not break the law if that's the only way to get their clients off. Nevertheless, having contractually obligated to provide services, they ought to follow through to the best of their abilities. That's why one hires an attorney; he or she is supposed to know better than I do what the situation calls for. Attorneys that don't have a hard time finding clients.

Education professionals similarly owe their students what they have contracted to provide, which may vary by institution. (Perhaps it is training in how to do a certain job; perhaps it is to build character while teaching a variety of cognitive skills.) What drives the choice of teaching technologies should be "what works," not what students enjoy. Student enjoyment only delimits the choices - to those that don't cause students to drop out or fail to enroll in the first place. Student enjoyment may also have a place where technological choices are equally effective. In between these two extremes, questions of convenience and taste are beside the point.

Getting to who

As an undergraduate, I didn't place any importance on the fact of who wrote the book or article we were reading, except in a few kinds of courses. I was an English major, and in our literature courses the relevance of the author seemed self-apparent. The only other class where I can remember paying attention to this was a philosophy course, and my reasoning was probably similar: This is a course where you read the big works of important (mostly dead) people.

Why not in the rest of my courses? Because they were "just textbooks." In some cases, this was in fact true, but to my undergraduate mind a scholarly book about the development of the Gatling gun was in the same category as the heavy, glossy, intro to physical anthropology text.

This way of thinking makes perfect sense up until college. In high school, everything you are assigned to read is in a textbook, except in some English classes. The author of a textbook disappears behind "objective facts"; it's the job of a textbook author to pass on received wisdom, not make novel arguments. One geometry textbook differs from another in its pedagogical approaches, not in the theorems within.

In graduate school in the social sciences,* authors are radically important, except in the case of some quantitative methodology texts such as introductory stats. Almost everything you read is a scholarly argument for looking at things in a particular way, not a rehash of the known. Once you have a firm grounding in your field, the author's name will usually tell you more than the work's title does.

By the time you get to be a faculty member, the centrality of the author seems self-evident. As an undergraduate you'll see glimpses of this, when Professor Smith says to read chapter 5 in Jones. And the students are slightly baffled by this, thinking, "Why can't he just call it the green book? Or 'American History Since the Civil War'?" Because the author's name is seen as irrelevant - yes, less important than the color of the book!

This is one of the disconnects between the faculty way of thinking and the student way of thinking that seems to affect almost all students, not just the underprepared ones. (After all, that's how we think in ordinary life, too - referring to "that article in Harper's", not to "the latest Malcolm Gladwell piece.") It is a disconnect I've never seen addressed. No one explains to undergraduates the difference between a textbook and other kinds of (modern, non-fiction) texts used in the classroom. No one tells them why authors matter. It's simply assumed. Then when students go on to graduate studies, they struggle to learn this lesson by osmosis, leading to a great deal of frustration on everyone's part.

* Certainly in the humanities too, minus the statistics books. I'll leave it up to the scientists to say how it is in their fields.

When boards abdicate

One story that's been making news the last few weeks is the community college president who was fired for kegging it up with students. The board knew about the incident but didn't fire him until a photo of him made the rounds of the internet; the photo in question shows him pouring a keg of beer into a female student's mouth. You can see the photo along with a thoughtful blog post here.

There's a lot that's appalling about this case - since I'm studying boards, the board's blind eye comes to mind, but let's not forget the president himself. What really caught my attention, though, was a quote from a board member about letting the president's "personal life" remain personal.

Personal life? When you're a college president interacting with your students, you're on the job. That's not your personal life.

That means that while in some cases drinking with students might be OK, the president should have no expectation of privacy. (Those cases? The school allows alcohol. The students are of age. Drinking is being modeled responsibly - this does not include pony keg chugging.) And the board should recognize this.

Judging from other information, though, this was a board that long ago became a closed system existing to protect the president, abdicating its responsibility to lead the institution, which includes assessing and monitoring the CEO.

Your local library

So, apparently faculty have changing views of their campus libraries.

Since some of you probably can't access the article, here's the salient point: "However, it also confirms that researchers increasingly find what they need through Google Scholar and other online resources, a trend the report's authors anticipate will accelerate as more and more knowledge goes digital. ... But only 48 percent of economists and 50 percent of scientists value libraries as gateways."

There is something wrong with this view. Google Scholar allows you to find articles, but - and this is a very important but - not to see most of said articles unless one is connected through an institution that has paid for access to those sources. So when I hop on to Google Scholar to find articles on lemur femurs, it's the VU library that gets me there. And I'm very aware of this because after many of the results it shows "findit@VU." The physical library may not be a gateway, but the virtual library is.

Are other scholars really too thick to notice this, as the piece seems to suggest? Or are they simply not relying on articles? Some scholars may be taking the easy route. I know students who won't bother to use anything that is on microfiche. From reading dissertations, I know a lot of them don't bother to scan other dissertations first. But many economists increasingly publish working papers online themselves long before they appear in journals. They may, quite validly, be sidestepping the library. Yet I don't think that you can completely bypass the library in any field.

Today, you can learn something new

I have my laptop back - far earlier than I was anticipating it. In celebration, I offer you a random history of higher education tidbit. It's a bit of academic history that seems to never have received its share of scholarly attention. Seriously, this would be prime material for a historian in this field, but alas I am not one.

Remember the good old days when women went to "finishing school"? I was wondering about finishing schools, specifically, whatever happened to them? You never hear them mentioned by name. Did they close? Turn into "real" colleges? I finally got curious enough to do some searching around.

Wikipedia tells us that American finishing schools were primarily on the East Coast and included the Seven Sisters. There's one more reason not to trust Wikipedia: Finishing schools were distinguished in part by not offering baccalaureate degrees, or by offering no degrees at all, while the Seven Sisters were pioneers in offering education to women equal to that of men. But I couldn't find any article willing to name names, at least for American institutions; there were and are finishing schools in Europe. Finally I found a 1924 article from the American Journal of Sociology comparing marriage rates for Vassar grads to those of finishing and preparatory school grads. It named the five comparison schools:

• Lasell Seminary for Young Women: Now a co-ed baccalaureate-granting institution, but it didn't become one until the 1980s. It didn't even offer associates degrees until the 1940s. Its degrees are vocationally oriented.
  
• Brearley School: Sounded familiar. This would have qualified as a prep school rather than a finishing school; today it is still an elite private school for girls.
  
• Ossining School: Can't find anything on it, which suggests it is now closed. Presumably it was in Ossining, New York.
  
• Bennett School: Transformed from a two-year to a four-year school and became a victim of the 1970s. (During this decade a lot of private colleges closed. In fact, the policy wonks were worried it was the end of private higher ed.)
  
• Dana Hall: This name I knew because children's author Cynthia Voigt graduated from there. It remains an elite boarding school for girls.

The upshot of this is that only Lasell and Bennett were actually finishing schools - although we can't tell about Ossining.

Qualitative research pays less

See the post here. (Note that this is extrapolated from assumptions, not based on something like a salary survey.)

Concentration of higher ed, Part II: Proximity doesn't automatically produce synergy

(Before I get to this, Smanda has weighed in with some interesting points in response to the first part about how distance education can affect the location of colleges. Scroll down and check it out.)

I know I promised a post on the benefits of colleges working together, but before I get to that, I have another downer post. Even when colleges are geographically positioned to cooperate, and it's in their best interests, they often don't. Of course, sometimes colleges act against their own interests for stupid reasons, like inertia or pride - but it's not always cupidity or stupidity. There's nothing mysterious about this, no conspiracy, just human nature and its organizational equivalent, red tape. Let me give you a specific example.

My sister is a seminarian. Her institution (we'll call it #1) is fortunate enough to be located in a major urban area, in the same neighborhood as one of the nation's elite universities. Right next door to her seminary is another one of a different denomination (#2), and both belong to a city-wide consortium of seminaries. As you may know, seminaries in general are having financial difficulties these days. Costs are rising, their fundraising is minimal, the mainline churches supporting them don't have much more money because they're shrinking, and the alumni aren't in a position to give much back in the way of donations. Moreover, seminaries tend to be below optimally efficient size, and they can't cross-subsidize programs with lucrative new programs, since they have narrowly defined missions.

Under these circumstances, consortia and cost-sharing agreements are a brilliant idea. The trouble is implementing them.

For example, #1 and #2 share a bookstore. This makes excellent sense. But other efficiencies are limited by church policy. You can't run a student health clinic efficiently at that size institution; the obvious solution would be for #1 to pay the major elite institution for access to its clinic. Unfortunately, the church body doesn't allow this, because not all of its seminaries can do this, and they want them to be "equal." (Of course, they're not truly equal now. The one in a rural Midwestern area obviously has fewer local possibilities for internship-type experiences, for example; the urban seminary charges higher rents.) Mandating equality tends to level down, not up.

But if the problems were just caused by these school's denominational affiliations, it would be a problem peculiar to seminaries, and it's not.

For example, there are savings that could be implemented consortia-wide rather than denomination-wide. Right now every school in the area has its own email system and servers. Surely a joint IT department would be cheaper, and it would solve problems such as a server going down and there not being staff on-call to get it back up! Email is not a mission-central core function, so outsourcing it would not be like outsourcing teaching. IT issues are the sort of problem that plague very small schools of any type, not just seminaries, yet cooperative agreements tend to be out of their financial reach because they are broke. They'd have to spend money now to save it later, but they don't have it now.

They're not far different from grad students. Frequently it would be cheaper for me to buy the economy size, or the one-year yoga package, or the bicycle to save on gas, etc. But I can't get up the cash required for the initial investment, and credit card interest rates would negate the savings. Schools that need cooperation the most are in the same boat.

Should higher education be more concentrated?

I started to reply to a comment Jaya left the other day, but my response got out of control length-wise, and I figured it should be its own post. She wondered about the possibility that someday, colleges might relocate so that there would be more schools geographically proximate to each other, which would offer some obvious benefits.

I don't think so, for a few reasons.

One, of course, moving itself is enormously expensive. Long-term, a new location might be cheaper, but schools would have some difficulty getting the money together in the short term. Sufficient incentive may overcome this, but remember that after Katrina, the one thing none of the area colleges did was consider relocating, despite the virtual certainty the another flood will happen again someday. I do know of one school that is relocating in the near future, but from an urban area to a more suburban/rural one - getting farther from its neighbors, not closer. The cost barrier was overcome in this case because its present location is now primo real estate.

Two, most colleges are extremely regional. The best predictor of whether a student goes to college is how close he/she is to one, and the best predictor of which one a student goes to is again location. The subset of schools this is most true of are also the most penny-pinched. Elite schools with a national reach and the students that attend them are an unusual (and small) segment of the educational marketplace. Princeton, for example, is not tied to its region, but it also can afford to stay in New Jersey. Community colleges in particular exist to serve a particular community, not even an entire region. College-access advocates would have a fit if colleges were moved away from local constituents to where other schools already exist, leaving a pool of students without a nearby institution. Of course, one can easily debate the power your average educational pundit has!

Three, most politicians would be opposed to a college in their district relocating. State reps would object to moving their local colleges elsewhere, because they are a key producer of jobs and state revenue for the area. (Even those congressmen who aren't so keen on providing the funding.) Moreover, the cities that would receive the institutions wouldn't be happy, either. Cities that have a large concentration of nonprofits (including colleges) have been increasingly complaining about the reduction in property taxes that results. (PILOTs, or payments in lieu of taxes, are becoming more common.) A city that already has several institutions of higher education isn't likely to think that one more will be a major engine of economic growth.

Now, note that I don't believe all these arguments are socially good ones. I think the access argument is, but the one about costs is not - it's just a reflection of the way things tend to work, not how they ought to. There are considerable benefits to informal synergy and formal consortia; the model of the Claremont colleges ought to be more widely replicated, I believe.

The overall tone of this post is a big "no, not gonna happen," but that's not because I don't believe there are benefits to co-location. (I'm definitely anti-sprawl when we're talking about things other than education, after all). I'm going to save the benefits for a separate post, however.

Cost of gas in academia

The rising gas prices are affecting all sorts of parts of the American Way besides our love affair with the road. The latest issue I've seen is with adjunct professors. (I've included the link, but it won't work for most of you.) Adjunct professors are the pieceworkers of academia, hired to teach and paid by the class. Unlike full-time faculty jobs, these positions do not include committee service, student advising, research or publishing. There are adjuncts who just teach one class a semester for whatever reason and are not pursuing a life in academia, and gas prices aren't affecting most of them so much.

The ones who are feeling it are full-time adjuncts. These tend to be people who want to be hired as full-time, probably tenure-track, faculty, but haven't found a job yet. This is partially due to a restructuring of academia in the last few decades that has reduced the percent of tenure-track faculty in favor of more "contingent" faculty, as they are also called. So these folks teach one class here, two there, a third here, and cobble together enough money to live on, albeit without health insurance. Another name for these folks is "freeway fliers" because they spend a lot of time driving between schools.

Can you see where this is going? The cost of gas is making this lifestyle less tenable. Yet cutting back on the farthest gigs probably reduces one's income to the point of starvation, causing one to look for a new job altogether. Schools could raise the rates they pay, but at some point most of the efficiencies of using contingent labor are gone. (The flexibility to hire and fire at will remains.) Schools may have no choice but to hire more tenure-track faculty members - or to say they can't afford tenure at all any more but continue to hire full-timers. The costs to institutions go beyond salary and benefits; they likely include finding offices to put the new faculty in, since adjuncts are unhoused. The costs to low-cost community colleges in particular could be tremendous.*

I suppose this is good news to observers (including me) who look askance at the "adjunctification" of the job market, but it puts schools and administrators in a very difficult position, changing their costs in a way they have little control over at a time when budgets are already tight.

It's also one of those gas-price issues that takes some time to deal with after the problem arises. Let's say a very proactive administrator decides today to start hiring more tenure-track faculty member. The institutional permissions to do so could take a year to get. Meanwhile, the institution is still using adjuncts. It's like deciding to move closer to your job - you have to sell your house and buy another and actually move, and what about your kids' schools? At this point, a lot of people are just waiting it out, hoping prices go back down.


* If you're not in academia, you may be asking, why not just hire an adjunct at current rates to teach a full load at one place? Because at a certain point he or she would have to be considered a full-time employee, with benefits. And industry norms frown on hiring full-timers without official job searches, for one thing, and there are actually tenure implications, for another.

So you want to be a president

There are a lot of people studying higher education at the graduate level who aim to some day be college presidents. It's getting to the point where my response is, "Another one?," while trying to restrain myself from patting them on the head. Statistically, you see, most of them just don't have much chance, any more than your average aspirant to the presidency of the U.S. or would-be pop star.

Most college presidents followed what is known as "the traditional path." That is, they started off as professors, then eventually became a department chair, an assistant dean, a dean, a provost, and finally a president. They may skip a step or two, but it's rare to go from prof to prez. (It does happen.) The number of non-traditional presidents was rising for a while, but it has plateaued at well under 50% of new appointments. Keep in mind that "non-traditional" includes not only non-faculty tracks within colleges (i.e., student affairs) but also non-academic careers like government or business - and the latter seem to make up the majority of non-traditional hires.

Presumably, higher ed grad students are not aiming to go non-trad outside of academia. They may wish to move up through student affairs; they don't plan to become real estate moguls. Like any institution, academia has fewer places as you move up the ladder - there are more profs than chairs, more chairs than deans, more deans than provosts. (The exception is that there are not more provosts than presidents, since each school has one of each.) So ponder this: If you wanted to be promoted, would you be better off entering a field where lots of your colleagues want administrative posts (education) or where only a few do (physics, sociology, nursing, take your pick)? The competition is even fiercer on the non-faculty side of the house.

Now those who study higher education do have a particular advantage in that they often vhave theoretical knowledge of running institutions of higher education. But they also have the disadvantage of having degrees in one of the least respected fields of academia. Surf on over to the Chronicle of Higher Education forums and see what other disciplines have to say about ed doctorates if you need examples. This mitigates any advantage those studying higher education have over their competitors.

Essentially, the smart way to aim at the presidency is to study a field outside of education that has the repute of some degree of rigor, where few of your colleagues have people/leadership skills. (May I suggest economics?) This doesn't mean that no higher ed aspirants will reach their goal; I have bets on at least one particular person I know making it. It does mean, I think, that one is better off keeping one's aspirations to oneself early in the career. If you're already a provost - please, do let people know; that's how you get onto the radar of search committees. But if you're still in grad school? If you're on message boards with names like "futureuniprez" after a few years in fundraising work, trying to decide where to get an EdD? Maybe you're better off letting people know what you can offer in the next job you're ready for, which is assuredly not the presidency.

At that early point, after all, you're not just aiming for the statistically improbable. You're also making the career mistake of telling those who hire what you want to get, not what you can give. One of my mentors has said that leadership in academia is very much about being tapped rather than applying for it. When people talk about their presidential aspirations, they often fail to demonstrate they understand how to get there from here. That's cute in a second grader who wants to be president of the U.S., but not so cute in a 20-something scavenging for free food at the annual conference. If you want to be a college president, prepare yourself so you are ready to be chosen. Don't anoint yourself.

Of course, it's not like I have any credentials to give advice in this matter. All I'll lay claim here to is the basic math sense to understand the proportion of aspirants to openings.

And if you want to anoint yourself in your heart, go for it. Dream big. Just don't expect that when you tell your colleagues your dream, they're going to think, "Why, I never thought of X in that way before, but now I see he's destined for great things." They're going to think, "There's another one." And need I point out that it's never beneficial to be seen as just another commodity, a typical member of a set, a herd animal?

Satisficing

I crave everyone's indulgence as I spend the next few days thinking through some ideas out loud. If you're not interested, you may wish instead to check out photos from last weekend's trail building trip, here, here, and here. You get to see me square dancing, although that may not be any more enticing than reading about ...

Zero-base budgeting! The word "budgeting" just oozes with fun, right?

ZBB was a budgeting fad born in the late 1970s that was most popular in government. The idea was that instead of assuming that this year's budget for your organization would be pretty much like last year's, everything would be up for grabs. The ideological assumption was that would reduce inertia, producing lean, mean, efficient operations. The problem was, in reality everything can't be up for grabs. The biggest problem is transaction costs. It costs time and money to consider alternatives, and that effort may cost more than the efficient alternative would save. Should you replace Park Ranger Bob with a new employee? Someone else equally competent might be cheaper, but then maybe not. It would cost money and time to conduct searches for every employee on payroll, to evaluate replacing all your real estate, to consider entirely new organizational charts. You might as well stick with what you have until a problem pops up.

This is an example of satisficing. "Satisficing" means that most of the time, in most situations, we do not consider all available alternatives, even for very important decisions; we choose the best alternative (or the first minimally sufficient one) among some set of readily available alternatives. I'm not going to date every single man in the United States if I want to get married. I'm going to use some heuristics, or rough decision-making rules ("I am only interested in men who have not committed felonies") and convenience ("I will date men I happen to meet rather than questing in Nova Scotia"). But why do we satisfice? Because exhaustive searches have costs higher than benefits. If I consider every unmarried man in the U.S., I will spend the rest of my life reading resumes and die before I even go on one date. If your state government considers replacing every employee and facility, it will never get around to hiring anyone or buying any property. Heuristics and convenience will result in better cost-benefit ratios than exhaustive searches will unless the number of options are very few. Hence, satisficing is a way of reducing transaction costs. These are costs of taking action or making decisions that are not related to the inherent costs of the product. Paying a park ranger's salary is part of the inherent cost of running a park; transaction costs are the costs of trying to find someone to hire as a ranger. We are willing to pay some transaction costs, but we try not too pay too much.

So, we satisfice on a lot of decisions. Some questions I wonder about:

1. Why do we sometimes take the first minimally acceptable alternative (for example, looking for a parking space) and sometimes take the best from a pre-bounded set of choices (for example, choosing the most interesting classes that meet graduation and major requirements from among the courses offered next semester at the institution I am currently enrolled at)?
2. What do we not make decisions about at all, that is, simply accept the status quo on (not firing any professors with tenure)?
3. How do we set the conditions for a bounded search? For example, every university seems to be short on parking. Administrators faced with this issue will consider buying land or converting green space to parking; placing new lots close to campus or farther away but with shuttlebuses; and constructing garages or surface lots. They are unlikely to consider auctioning all campus parking spaces to the highest bidders or completely eliminating parking while subsidizing the city's bus system.
4. A lot of the times these bounds could be rationally explained, but in fact we don't go through a rational process to choose them. Registering for all my classes at the same institution is cheaper than simultaneously taking one class in Maine, one in California, and one in Florida. But I bet most students don't consciously think through the economics of being enrolled in geographically distant locales. (Um, that's not a question, I guess.)
5. What decisions do people in organizations not make that drive other decisions? We don't decide to have staff parking this year, or not to eliminate the website, or to once again admit a freshman class. Therefore, we have to decide how much to charge for parking, what to update on the website, and which applicants to admit.

AERA in sum

About the conference side of AERA - I didn't do as much conferencing as last year in Chicago. At this point, I have a pretty good idea of what I'm interested in, and there weren't a whole lot of sessions of interest to me. However, I did see some good stuff. Also, my presentation with Mr. Kindhearted went pretty well. Our discussant was someone who always has good criticisms to make. He never says, "Wow, this paper was even better than sliced bread," but any critical remarks are helpful and fair. And if he thought our paper was dreadful, he would have said so - and he didn't. So now we go into the Revising For Publication stage. As far as my roundtable with my advisor, let's just say that not a lot of people are there at Monday at noon!

Adjunctification

From the NYT, here's the increasing use of adjuncts in higher education.

Malcolm Getz, an economist who studies education, gave a talk in our department on Thursday. In passing he mentioned a student who transferred to Vanderbilt from Middle Tennessee State University and found he had some of the same adjuncts teaching his classes. (This doesn't mean the material or difficulty of the course was the same at both institutions, of course.)

One area my advisor and I work on is studying professions. Classically, the three professions are law, medicine, and theology. Other jobs have aspired to be considered professions, and so a body of work has built up to describe what exactly a profession is. The resulting list generally goes something like:

1. A profession has a body of knowledge that requires training of practitioners.
2. A profession produces outcomes that cannot be readily evaluated by the layperson.
3. Members of professions control entry into their field.
4. Members of professions have a relatively high degree of autonomy.

College professors are one of the most widely agreed-upon professions outside of the traditional three. Body of knowledge? The doctorate, which has only grown as a requirement in recent years. Outcomes that are hard to evaluate? Yup. Control of entry? Faculty train PhDs, so they must. Autonomy? That's tenure. Adjuncting, on the other hand, is not a profession, most specifically because adjuncts possess no autonomy at all.

Adjuncts, however, are an alternative to faculty for some of the work faculty do - the teaching component of research, teaching, and service. Some adjuncts are full-time professionals who simply teach one course for whatever reason, but when articles like the NYT's talk about adjuncts, they generally refer to folks who piece together a full work load from teaching courses at several schools. Many of these folks do have PhDs or are working on them.

So go back to the "controlling entry into a field" requirement for a moment. College faculty aren't doing that. They're producing more PhDs than there are faculty jobs. This reserve force of would-be faculty, then, is desperate for work and willing to take adjunct work. The sheer number of them allows institutions to further reduce the number of tenured positions, because the adjuncts aren't scarce enough to hold out for better. (Or organized enough.) You might blame administrators eager to increase their school's prestige by granting PhDs, but this can only be done with faculty complicity.

In fields like education, this isn't a big deal, as there is a demand for PhDs in administration, and this is true of a lot of practice-oriented fields and the sciences. But in the humanities and many social sciences, PhDs are being overproduced. You sometimes see blame placed on students going into them, who "ought to know" better. Ideally, sure, we would all conduct extensive research on our career choices. It's more fair to point to their undergrad profs who encourage them and the graduate schools that accept them. This is something the profession has some control over, and if it wants to remain a profession, it has to use that control.