As a dean, I have to make hard decisions every day. Since I often articulate the reason for the decision (see rule no 4) I figured I could actually write them down. I have no idea if any of these make sense in the corporate world: I’ve never worked there. But this is what I think works in a university setting.

All of these are proceeded by “when in doubt” or “normally” or “in most circumstances.” I am not foolish enough to believe there is no gray—in fact, the hardest decisions are the really gray ones. But I still find that these bring clarity to my academic decision making process.

1. Be Humane
Yes, this is always first. One, you will sleep better at night and two, I believe that loyalty is repaid most of the time. (And if not you still sleep better.) When the organization is fundamentally just and fair, people will want to work there.

2. Be Strategic
Aligning even small decisions with strategic priorities helps me stay mission driven. Which choice will move the dial for the organization? Lots of things can make people happy in the short term, but they don’t add up to much, other than a temporary happiness blip. There can be a penalty for breaking rules, but the procedures are there to support the mission, not the other way around.

3. Extend Trust
When this fails, it can be spectacular, but lack of trust is an enormous drag on an institution in terms of time, morale and most importantly risk. Micro management is an equally huge drain on everyone’s time and loyalty. People take fewer risks when they do not feel trusted, and we can’t afford to make our institutions any more risk averse than they already are.

4. Be Transparent
There are obviously times when this won’t work, but notice that those are the times when people get suspicious. (Ironically, this is usually when you have the most clear evidence you can’t reveal!) The more you can share data, concerns, mission, proposals, and ideas, the less inclined faculty will be to imagine you have a hidden agenda. This is another version of extending trust and it is especially important in a university.

5. Be Accountable
Accountability is the flip side of trust. Watching what you promise is very hard: nobody likes a dean who always says no. Learning how to encourage without breaking the bank is a difficult balance to manage. But admitting your mistakes goes beyond trust. Values matter and the more obvious and consistent they are, the more likely they are to be imitated and become part of the culture of the institution.

There are certainly more things I could add: encourage risk, look for efficiencies, seek integration, focus on the students, and find more money are all useful things to do. Sadly, most of the decisions I make and many of my days are not filled with big ideas. A colleague once told me that a dean gets hired to make good decisions about the small things. These decisions, however, will only be good, if they are connected to the strategic priorities, big ideas, a motivated work force and a positive culture.

Three new studies raise important questions about merit scholarships. Are they really based on merit? Are they advancing the mission of our institutions? Are they doing any good and to whom?

First this week came the hardly surprising news from Stanford Professor Sean Reardon that as the rich get richer, the educational advantage of having rich parents has grown to 40% more than it was 30 years ago. (Reardon, 2013, and in press) Comparing children from the 10th percentile (family income of $15,000) and the 90th percentile (family income of $165,000), Reardon found a 125-point gap on EACH 800-point SAT type test. (That is up from 90 points in 1980.) The black-white gap is only 70 points, so family income is now a much better predictor of children’s success in school than race. (Reardon, 2013)

Schools are getting an enormously disproportionate share of the blame: most of the gap is already apparent in kindergarten. This is plenty of evidence that the diminished health care, nutrition, family stability and fewer educational opportunities of poverty produce substantial cognitive and behavioral by the start of school (Duncan and Brooks-Gunn 1997, Taylor, Dearing, and McCartney 2004). It is equally well documented (and even less surprising) that these early gaps have long-term social, medical, financial, and, of course, education consequences. (Dearing E, Berry D, Zaslow M. 2006, Rouse, Brooks-Gunn, and McLanahan 2005 , Smeeding, T., Erikson, R., Jantti, M., eds. 2011, Waldfogel, J., Washbrook, E., 2011). It even appears that the educational achievement gap NARROWS during the school year, but then widens in the summer months (Murnane, R. & Duncan, G. in press). Yes, Virginia, sending your children to Harvard summer camp does increase their readiness for college.

We see the results of this in college enrollment. Bailey and Dynarski (2011) discovered “growing gaps between children from high- and low-income families in college entry, persistence, and graduation. Rates of college completion increased by only four percentage points for low-income cohorts born around 1980 relative to cohorts born in the early 1960s, but by 18 percentage points for corresponding cohorts who grew up in high-income families.”  (They also discovered that while there was virtually no achievement gap between boys and girls 30 years ago, there is now a substantial gap in every demographic group, but “the female advantage in educational attainment is largest in the top quartile of the income distribution.”

All together now: it’s about poverty, stupid.

As college faculty, we often complain about how our students are not prepared for college work, but are scholarships part of the solution or the problem? Have we, perhaps in our scholarly quest to make our institutions better, contributed to this problem? (Admissions is a related problem and I’ve tried to outline a different model in my proposal for a University of Potential.

1. We have recently learned from Stanford Professor Caroline Hoxby and Harvard Professor Christopher Avery that even very high achieving students from low-income families, largely do not apply to our most selective institutions. (Hoxby, and Avery, 2013) 78% of high achieving students from the top quartile of income attend selective colleges, but only 38% of the equally high achievers from the lowest quartile of family income apply. When these students apply, they are admitted, they pay less and graduate at high rates, but sadly, they often instead attend resource-poor two-year schools or non-selective four-year schools with catastrophic outcomes for everyone.  We are wasting talent.

Faculty too have long complained that our selective colleges were disproportionately full of the privileged, but Hoxby and Turner (2013) found we could greatly increase applications from low-income students by sending them 75 pages of material in October about selective colleges, college cost and a no-paperwork application fee waiver for about $6 per student.  This simple targeted mailing of information increased the admission (not just the application) to college of high achieving but low-income to college from 30% to 54%.

2. And yesterday another new report found that the shift of resources toward “merit” aid is making it harder for needy students to attend college. Some of this is discounting; as we all search for more tuition revenue, we are looking for students who can pay. We are looking for the right price point where someone will pay. If a merit scholarship convinces your parents to pay the rest of the tuition bill, it is really no different from a $2 off pizza coupon. This is what any for-profit retailer does.

As a faculty member, it is easy to see the appeal of academically stronger students (which in most cases, really means students who were better at high school—see above!) Through recruitment season, I constantly get requests for “just a little more money for this really good student.” It sounds laudable. Aren’t we just supporting our academic meritocracy? But is giving money to wealthy students with better preparation really improving your institution?

So before you plead for that next merit scholarship, read the May 8, 2013 report from the New American Foundation: Undermining Pell: How Colleges Compete for Wealthy Students and Leave the Low-Income Behind.

“Nearly two-thirds of the private institutions analyzed charge students from the lowest-income families, those making $30,000 or less annually, a net price of over $15,000 a year.” Find your school here:

“Besides the very richest colleges and some exceptional schools, nearly all private nonprofit colleges provide generous amounts of merit aid, often to the detriment of the low-income students they enroll… other fairly wealthy schools use their aid as a competitive weapon to try to rise up the ranks and break into the top echelon of schools, as defined by publications such as U.S. News.”

Giving merit scholarships to wealthy students hurts your poorest students. This was certainly not our aim, but are we (as faculty) at all complicit?

According to the US News rankings, better students make our institution better. Most of us graduated from more prestigious institutions than the ones that employ us (Fink, 1984), but those comparisons often blind us to the implications of our “Carnegie climbing” or our “Harvard envy.”  We all applaud when our institutions want to “get better” (i.e. become like the “better” institutions we remember so fondly) but few colleges can afford the strategies that Harvard employs. As the report states, very few of our most elite (i.e. largest endowment) private schools have truly become low cost for low-income students. (According to the New American Foundation report, Harvard, Cal Tech and Wash U have the lowest net cost, with a huge shout out to Amherst who keeps their net cost at $448 but has a whopping 22% of Pell grant students.) We can be forgiven for wanting our institutions to be financially stable by discounting the price for wealthy students, but is the desire for prestige really the same as making your university better? And if this desire for prestige and better students is hurting our neediest students, is there a conflict of mission?

3. It gets worse. Most of the schools in this report are actually trying to do BOTH things at once. We are searching both for students with higher SAT scores and for students who can pay. Thanks to Prof. Reardon, we now know that these will increasingly be the same students: as we discount our tuition for those with the highest test scores (who least need the discount) we also increase our need for those wealthy students with lower test scores who can pay. The implications of these two studies together is that our selective colleges will become even more selective, but for wealth.

We knew this all along, but it was harder to see. Now when you compare an “average” SAT of 1000 (verbal+math) of a poor student to that of a more privileged student with 1250 remember that difference is, on average, merely the result of family income. At most schools, a gap that wide can easily be the difference between admissible and “no way José.” That 1000 student will probably do less well in your freshmen course, and might also need some additional help, but what, after all is your real mission?

As Hoxby and Turner (2013) have demonstrated, the pool of high-achieving/low income students is not smaller: it is just invisible to our best institutions. We need collectively, to reach out to them. But if the New American data is correct (Burd, 2013) that won’t be enough: with a current net cost of $15,000 for a poor student (even after all of the Pell Grant and need-based aid) those students will go somewhere cheaper.

It is not enough for faculty to say, we want to look at more than SAT scores. As long as we continue to be seduced by students who will bring us prestige (rather than focusing on how we can improve the students we receive) we are perpetuating a system that is, in fact, not a meritocracy. Increasing your ranking or your Carnegie classification, might be a tactic, but it is not a mission. (I’ve also argued for the need for more distinct missions.)

Talent, intelligence and potential are spread evenly through all classes and races. If your institution does not reflect that spread of diversity in your region, then you are not recruiting the students with the most talent, intelligence and potential. We must find better ways to recognize potential and create pathways and funding models so that the highest achieving students from all income levels can attend our best institutions. We can and must do better.

PS. So while most colleges are taxing the poor to create greater subsidies for the rich, Cooper Union is trying to be the Robin Hood of higher education. It may not be what “college ends free tuition” sounds like, but it is really a way to end a subsidy for the wealthy. By setting tuition higher than it needed to and distributing it unequally (only to those who can afford to pay), Cooper joins a very elite club  of private schools (listed above) that are allowing the rich to subsidize the poor.

References
Bailey, M. J., Dynarski, S. M., (2011), Gains and Gaps: Changing Inequality in U.S. College Entry and Completion. National Bureu of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper No. 17633 http://www.nber.org/papers/w17633; Population Studies Center Research Report 11-746 http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/pubs/pdf/rr11-746.pdf also published as “Inequality of Postsecondary Education” in Murnane, R., Duncan, G. eds. (2011),

Burd, S. (2013). Undermining Pell: How Colleges Compete for Wealthy Students and Leave the Low-Income Behind. New American Foundation: http://education.newamerica.net/publications/policy/undermining_pell

Dearing E, Berry D, Zaslow M. (2006), Poverty during early childhood. In: McCartney K, Phillips DA, editors. Blackwell handbook of early childhood development. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Duncan, G.J., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (1997). Income effects across the life span: Integration and interpretation. In G.J. Duncan & J. Brooks-Gunn (Eds.) Consequences of growing up poor (pp. 596-610). New York, NY: Russell Sage.

Fink, D. L. (1984), “The First Year of College Teaching” in New Directions for Teaching and Learning, Kenneth E. Eble ed. (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass)

Hoxby, C. M., Avery, C. (2013). “The Missing ‘One-Offs’: The Hidden Supply of High-Achieving, Low Income Students,” National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper 18586 http://www.nber.org/papers/w18586

Hoxby, C., Turner. S., (2013). Expanding College Opportunities for High-Achieving, Low Income Students, Stanford Institute for Eocnomic Policy Research (SIEPR) Discussion Paper 12-014. http://siepr.stanford.edu/publicationsprofile/2555

Murnane, R., Duncan, G. eds. (in press), Social and Inequality and Economic Disadvantage. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

Murnane, R., Duncan, G. eds. (2011), Whither opportunity?: rising inequality, schools, and children’s life chances. New York/Chicago: Russell Sage Foundation/Spencer Foundation.

Reardon, S. F. (2013), “No Rich Child Left Behind,” New York Times, (April 27, 2013. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/no-rich-child-left-behind/ (accessed on May 8, 2013)

Reardon, S.F. (in press). “The widening socioeconomic status achievement gap: new evidence and possible explanations.” In Richard Murnane & Greg Duncan (Eds.), Social and Inequality and Economic Disadvantage. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. http://www.iga.ucdavis.edu/Research/EJS/conferences/spring-conference-2011/reardon%20SIED%20chapter%20jan%2031%202011.pdf

Rouse, C., Brooks-Gunn, J., McLanahan, S., eds.(2005). The Future of Children: School Readiness: Closing Racial and Ethnic Gaps. 15(1). Washington, DC: Brookings Press. http://www.brookings.edu/about/centers/ccf/foc

Taylor, B., Dearing, E., McCartney, K., (2004), “Incomes and outcomes in early childhood.” Journal of Human Resources. 39:980–1007.

Waldfogel, J., Washbrook, E. (2011). “Income-Related Gaps in School Readiness in the United States and the United Kingdom” in Smeeding, T., Erikson, R., Jantti, M., eds. (2011), Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting: The Comparative Study of Intergenerational Mobility Chicago: Russell Sage Foundation, p. 175-208.

Universities are like doctors that only accept well patients or gyms that require fitness for admission. If you need to lose weight, you should pick a gym that helps people lose weight: the real measure of institutional success should be the difference between input and output.

We expect university graduates to be successful, but that is hardly a measure of how much students have learned or how much the university has improved them. High school grades and the SAT may predict success in college, but mostly they demonstrate the previous achievements of applicants. Universities start with the students who have already demonstrated they are good at school, and then take credit when they continue to be successful academically. We are so certain of this, that our ranking systems (like the US News and World Report) rely almost entirely on measuring the competition for entrance.

As Americans, this idealized meritocracy sounds convincing. We believe that success is a result of hard work and is usually deserved. We assume that overweight people are somehow weak or lacking in ordinary will power. But our colleges are overwhelmingly populated with students from upper class suburbia and successful high schools: many private high schools graduate and send 100% of their students to college. If you can afford private school or to move to better school district, you can dramatically increase your child’s chances of entering an elite university. (79% of students born into the top income quartile in the U.S. obtain bachelor’s degrees, while only 11% of students from bottom-quartile families do.) A more academic high school, private tutors and multiple attempts at the SAT, all improve the individual students chance of college admission, but none of them measure potential.

We know from genetics that talent and potential are equally distributed among, races, genders and economic classes, so our system is wasting high amounts of talent. A college degree typically adds about $20,000 a year to an individual’s earning potential, and that benefit might be even larger for disadvantaged students. Unless you assume that Hispanic or Black students are less intelligent or lazy, their underrepresentation in higher education means we are not getting as much talent or potential as we could into our universities. Imagine the gain to the country if we selected students for college based upon those would benefit the most. In other words, it is fine to reward students who have done well in high school, but we also need a university that is willing to take on the challenge of measuring itself not by a single admission or graduation standard, but by the gains made while at the institution.

The success of your graduates, by itself, is not a measure of the efficacy of your institution or how much students have learned from you. Fit people tend to go the gym, so picking a gym full of bulging muscles is useless. You want a gym or a doctor with a track record of improving the health of its patrons. It is the difference between in and out that matters.

This is not a plea for open admission. Some schools should be open admission, but we also need an admission process somewhere that selects for potential. Again, free libraries are good, but they tend to attract people who can already read. Making all gyms free would initially just attract poorer, but still fit people. It would not affect our obesity problem. We also need special programs and a different approach to those who have been failed by public schools.

Ranking all colleges by graduation rates without factoring in the different missions and populations, therefore, is completely misleading. Not everyone can or wants to play in the highest stakes game, some doctors want to be podiatrists, not oncologists. But we need some doctors who will treat sick patients and we need at least a few well-supported universities who want to catapult underachieving students.

It might make business sense for a single insurance company to deny patients with pre-existing conditions, but it is catastrophic for society if they all do. It is fine for some universities to cater to the academically healthy, but we also need higher education hospitals to unleash the creativity, talent and intelligence hidden by underperforming inner-city school systems. The lack of mission and diversity in higher education is a drag on the innovation, growth and health of our society and even a drain on our economy.

The University of Potential would admit students not on how much they knew, but on how much they could learn. It would measure itself by how far students’ progress during the time in the institution. It would not have, nor expect, the same success that Stanford enjoys. It would have lower graduation rates and lower average SAT scores, but it would offer a second change to those willing to take it. It would transform society and improve our economy. It would also be intensely democratic and could help remake America, the land of opportunity, invention and potential once more.

To read this blog with weblinks, go to http://teachingnaked.com/moocs-meet-your-match-the-mbc/

Educational psychologist, Marilla Svinicki has analyzed the potential learning in MOOCs in the National Teaching and Learning Forum (December 23, 2012 and reproduced in Tomorrow’s Professor Msg. #1229). She concludes (correctly in my view) that online learning is good at providing information but not (yet) quite as good at giving guided feedback. Compared side by side, this a cogent and reasonable comparison, but what Svinicki, and other MOOC critics miss, however, is that there are MASSIVE asymmetries here.

MOOCs are massively cheaper. Assume for a moment, you are buying a car and comparing the $25,000 Honda with the $250,000 Rolls Royce (“entry level model”). Even without a college degree, you can probably figure out there is a massive difference in price, so you reasonably ask “how different in the product?” or “what could possible be worth 10 times the price?” If the answer is, well there is a little more feedback that results in a little more learning, that is a very weak sales pitch. (Probably better to stick with “The Rolls Royce (or the elite college degree) will give you much more status and you will be better able to attract a mate.”)

But our classroom-based courses are not just 10x the price. MOOCS are FREE! So all of us teach at colleges are that massively more expensive. (Yes, for all the math geeks, we are ALL actually infinitely more expensive.) I am not sure we can be infinitely better, but we need at least to be MASSIVELY better. A little more feedback for massively more price, and we will still end up like Tower records and your local newspaper (who discovered that browsing was fun, but not MASSIVELY more fun and worth a small premium price.)

The only match for the MOOC is the MBC: the MASSIVELY BETTER CLASSROOM.

It is true that there is more feedback in college classrooms, but for many students, especially at large research universities (like the University of Texas where Prof Svinicki teaches), it is not massive amounts of feedback. Of course, there is (usually) more learning in a 12-person discussion or an active-learning based classroom vs trying to learn with 100,000 massively different people in a MOOC. But, the real question (for students, parents, governments, and hopefully universities) is whether it is worth the MASSIVE extra cost to sit in a lecture classroom with 300 fairly similar (mostly white American and upper class) students, and take 2 midterms and a final, with little other feedback.

Indeed, a problem with MOOCs is that the learning community is vastly different. That can be an advantage, but perhaps not yet when there are quite so many in the virtual classroom. Classroom teachers have an advantage here, but they often do not exploit this. (When you have changed universities did you spend the summer analyzing the differences in your students and reworking every syllabus before the fall?) If we want to take advantage of this asymmetry, teachers need to spend a lot more time on what Dee Fink calls “situational factors” and which, of course, is the first step in his approach to designing significant learning experiences.

Another asymmetry is the audience. Universities are doing MOOCs because they are a public good. For students who can’t afford or reach an elite American university, they are a massive opportunity. So again, the comparison should not be just an absolute question of where is there more learning. MOOCs won’t replace all college classrooms, but they were not designed for that. For a student without the access or means to afford an expensive American higher education, the MOOC is a massive new opportunity for learning.

MOOCs will get better quickly. There are important reasons for some universities to do this. Soon there may routinely be as much or more learning in MOOCs. The response, however, should not be for everyone to start offering MOOCs. Roll Royce’s expertise is not necessarily in building a $25,000 car. But MOOCs are indeed the new (and cheaper) competition and that can and should be good for us, but we need to work just as hard to get better quickly and make sure that can justify our massively higher cost with MASSIVELY BETTER CLASSROOMS. MOOCs, meet the MBC.

This blog with LINKS at : http://teachingnaked.com/the-first-thing-we-do-kill-all-the-grades/

Most successful organizations are careful to align key practices with the mission.
How do grades support our mission? If the goal of college is to open minds, facilitate change, explore new ideas and help students discover how to change their minds, then which bit of that is fostered by grades?

The arguments in support of grades are familiar, but perhaps their time has passed.

–Grades enforce standards. They might, but standards of what? If a grade signified how many times you had changed your mind during the semester, they might be more useful. The flip side of standards is that grades are a form of punishment: you FAIL. But grades are not a necessary evil: being a teacher does not mean you also have to be the enforcer.

–Grades help graduate schools or employers determine which students are most capable, know the most or worked hardest in college. Ick. If I wanted to be in the sorting business, I could work at the M&M factory. Sorting has indeed been an important part of school—we allow Ivy Leagues schools to sort the potential candidates for President of the United States, for example. (No other schools comes close to the 12 US Presidents who went to either Yale or Harvard. Only George W. Bush went to both!) Now that we’ve had a Black President, I’m waiting for the community college President.

–Grades reward the best work. Maybe, but they also punish innovation, experimentation, creativity, and mostly failure, which is where we all learn the most. In Teaching Naked I often suggest that grades need to be aligned with the learning goals, assignments, games and even discussion activities, but what if we just used the learning outcomes directly and measured what you had learned?

Even if grades are not bad, are they good? Do they HELP students learn and change?

But the best reason to eliminate grades comes from the amazing assessment guru Martin Sweidel, (really our Assoc Dean for Administration at the Meadows School at SMU ). If we eliminated grades, then building a culture of meaningful assessment would be easy.
–Our confusion about assessment would vanish: assessment is about what students are learning. We confuse that with grades, which is often only a way to sort students according to which work we like the best.
–We would have to articulate the real standards, and these could align with our mission.
–We could drastically reassess work-load. One of the main complains about assessment is that we don’t have the time, because we are too busy grading. Imagine what could happen if we had that time to focus on learning and assessment of that learning?!?

Without grades, we would be free to align our time, activities, and classrooms around our mission: creating situations that demonstrate and give students permission to change their minds.

Without grades, we would need to rethink everything else we do. In one step, we would be free to think about what we want to accomplish.

Apparently we have Yale to thank for “grades” (descriptive and first recorded in 1785). There were lots of systems through the 19th century, including a 100 point scale used at Harvard in 1877, and a letter system shortly thereafter, but the descriptive (excellent, good, fair etc.), the letter (A-E) and the numerical (95-100 = A) were combined and adopted at Mount Holyoke in 1897. But like the SAT, these systems of sorting were designed to replace other systems of sorting, that focused on class, race or religion. Eliot, C. W. (1923). Harvard Memories. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. I appreciate that the SAT was a part of admissions reform with the goal of making college admissions more of a meritocracy, but maybe the days of sorting can be left behind?

Eliminating grades does not mean we eliminate standards or assessment. It might, in fact, increase both of those things, because we could align our teaching with our goals and not arbitrary need for grades at the end of each class.

We need reform in higher education. At the very least we need to see some bio-diversity—lots of different institutions trying different things. We can’t all survive with the same model anymore. At least SOME of us need to try eliminating grades. Who is with me? To the barricades!

“When we consider the practically universal use in all educational institutions of a system of marks, whether numbers or letters, to indicate scholastic attainment of the pupils or students in these institutions, and when we remember how very great stress is laid by teachers and pupils alike upon these marks as real measures or indicators of attainment, we can but be astonished at the blind faith that has been felt in the reliability of the marking system. School administrators have been using with confidence an absolutely uncalibrated instrument.”
Finkelstein, I. E. (1913). The marking system in theory and practice. Educational Psychology Monographs 10.

The University of Wisconsin has announced the first Bachelor’s degree option to online students based on competency. College Degree, No Class Time Required
University of Wisconsin to Offer a Bachelor’s to Students Who Take Online Competency Tests About What They Know (WSJ, Jan 24, 2013) The UW ecampus has already has a robust eCampus, but the UW Flexibile Option is new.

The UW video on the Flex Option says it wants to decouple teaching, learning and assessment. Students would demonstrate they have fulfilled an area of the major by demonstrating competence –with or without taking the course associated with that skill. This, by itself, is not new. We’ve got lots of university curricula that include competency requirements. At SMU, for example, our new University Curriculum includes a second language requirement, that can be fulfilled just by arriving with a second language, taking two years of coursework, study abroad or completing some other sort of process and demonstrating you have attained the learning goals. This makes sense–a college degree should be about what you can do and how you think, not about how many classes you took.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (the very folks who invented the credit hour and helped get it adopted over 100 years ago) have announced plans to reconsider the credit-hour as a measure of … what exactly ?? and propose something new (surely some measure of learning?). There is also the AAC&U’s efforts with the Lumina Foundation to field test a new Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP) in 9 states and 20 institutions. The DQP will measure measure broad and integrative knowledge, deep knowledge in a particular subject area, high-level intellectual skills and demonstrated achievement in applied learning and in civic learning and engagement. I note that much of the rest of the world (since 1999) has already adopted a similar system of comparing students by skills or qualifications rather than degrees with the Bologna Declaration.

There is clearly a tidal wave coming, but what does it mean?

1. While the motivation behind the Wisconsin Flex Option isn’t public, my guess is that they are hoping that students will not simply sign up to take the assessments and collect their degree, but will need a few courses too. My guess is they will also charge for the assessments and the degree, so maybe they are ok either way, but if this drives students with a few missing credits (like their own Gov. Scott Walker) to enroll (and pay for) a few of their existing online courses, then there will be lots of new revenue streams.

2. I also assume that the degree will say “UW Flex Option Degree” to protect the main UW brand. While the goals is to get more “qualified” (i.e. credentialed) citizens for jobs, if employers continue to desire those with better credentials (degrees with better brands) then all will be well in the land of residential campuses. If, however, UW manages to keep the standards the same as they are on the residential campuses, then employers will eventually need to take a second look.

3. For students/consumers this is all great news. The flood gates for free transfers are about to open. Students can already transfer in much lower cost community college credits, but if a system for determining competencies becomes widely accepted, and MOOCs, YouTube or job experience learning can be converted into something that counts toward a degree, then prices for students will fall and universities are in trouble, quickly.

4. A few elite private or very large state schools will be able to survive by selling the networking, branding or the experience they offer. But for schools that can’t offer the benefits of rock-climbing walls, winning football teams or an elite jobs network, they had better (and quickly) come up with a plan to demonstrate that their students have better skills and not just more credits tied to seat time.

So in many ways, the move to demonstrate the competency, skills or qualifications of graduates should HELP liberal arts colleges that are doing a good job. One of the most interesting sessions I attended at the AAC&U Annual Conference last week, featured research by Charles Blaich and Kathleen Wise that compared data from the Delta Cost Project (on what colleges are spending per student) and the Wabash National Study (that measures student learning) and –surprise!–while more money in general is tied to increased learning, it is a VERY weak correlation and more importantly, there are school with terrific student learning that cost a fraction of the cost of schools with the same learning ($9000 vs $50,000/student). As the researchers noted, it is hard to imagine a college marketing person suggesting 90% of the learning at 20% of the cost as a slogan, but that is the calculation parents and students are starting to make.

VALUE is going to be the new holy grail for potential students. Where and how can I learn the most at a reasonable cost. As expensive campus-based schools, we can either cut costs, or demonstrate more learning. A move away from credit hours to competency will make all of this easy to see. The sooner we all ditch the credit-hour and find ways to better compare the differences in what our graduates can do and how they think, the better for everyone.

I’ve read two great books about college students recently. Ken Bain’s What the Best College Students Do (Harvard, 2012) deeply influenced my teaching this fall as he described ways to encourage the self awareness and self motivation of students who become happy and successful later in life (and often also do well in school, but more as a by-product). There are indeed too many things school and especially college do to poison the very characteristics that most lead to success later in life, and I’ve actually taken to talking about HAPPINESS in my classes this fall. But Bain is talking about the best students at the best colleges.

So yesterday I read about the rest of our student population. In The College Fear Factor: How Students and Professors Misunderstand One Another (Harvard 2009), Rebecca D. Cox reveals what she discovered sitting in English 1A classes for a semester at community colleges. She describes the enormous stakes for students who are both working and paying or using loans for college and how they think about the potential rewards and the daily real costs of college. These students are making a critical life decision and the anxiety they feel about the distance between themselves and he almighty professors are real. (Read the first 40 pages here.)

It is disturbing to realize that faculty are complicit in the grade anxiety that exists. What we think of as “having high standards” or “weeding out students who don’t really want to be here” is perceived as not caring if students fail. One student is quoted saying his high school AP teachers were like real college professors because “they didn’t really care about your grade…if you failed a test, that’s too bad.” (p. 68).

Another disconnect happens when professors try to motivate critical thinking in discussion, but students see this as something they did in high school and “stupid” or “I don’t feel like she is really teaching us anything.” (p. 92) This same student complains about assignments and wants to know “is the essay 300 or 500 words,” and “what’s going on with all these drafts and due dates?” (p. 93),

It is not a surprise that students see the traditional passive lecture approach as more valuable but also more “like college”, but it has made me rethink the importance of recognizing how their fears drive these desires.

I was also struck, however, by her short but biting analysis of why college writing courses are fundamentally flawed because “the skills required in different academic disciplines vary immensely” (p. 147) and that it is very hard for students to transfer skills from one class to another. We know that students don’t see the connections among courses easily, but it is also true that “A person does not simply write: a person writes something for some purpose. Accordingly, learning how to write according to the conventions of a particular academic discipline is best accomplished while a person is immersed in discipline-spcific activities.” She provides a long list of research to back up this claim.

We’ve got this problem in my own institution, and while we have just revisited the learning outcomes and titles for the first-year composition courses, I fear we will still have departments complaining that students are unprepared for the disciplinary writing faculty want to see in the sophomore year. I’ve thought of three possible solutions.

1. A common writing rubric for the entire 4-year would help a great deal. It would be hard (maybe impossible) to agree upon, but it would help students progress and would counter their anxiety that college is about figuring out what each professor wants and giving it to them. It seems to me these could be partially discipline specific.

2. At step further would be to have first-year writing courses taught in discipline-specific clusters, perhaps STEM, Humanities, Social Science, or Business? Students today and much more likely to arrive with a desired major in mind and departments could recommend one of these types of writing class. At the moment, we just let students pick a first-year English class based on topic: do you want vampires or Victorian novels?

3. Most radically, we might even allow departments to offer first-year writing courses (or suggest curricula) that provide the discipline-specific training they desire. The low-paid non-enure-track lecturers who teach the basic English courses are controlled by the English dept, so there is a political blood-bath there, but the University has the resources to diversity that body of faculty.

I would not want to lose the interdisciplinary mixing that occurs in these classes–and I think students start majors too soon–but I also know that complaints about writing are a persistent issue. If there is a way to improve student writing we should look at it. That still leaves the problem of student fear and our faculty insensitivity to it, but as with most things, seeing the problem is the first step.

Here is a challenge: engage your students with issues around the Presidential election this semester, change their minds about something, but leave them guessing about your political leaning and how you will vote. Asking you to swallow a toad might be easier, but it is vitally important for our country and our colleges that we try.

With recent accusations of indoctrination in the classroom, and the widening gap between more liberal professors and more conservative students, it would be easy for faculty to avoid politics, but consider some evidence. While faculty (especially in the social sciences and humanities) are much more liberal than the general population, college does not make students more liberal or less religious. (See, for example “The Indoctrination Myth” by Neil Gross, NYT, March 3, 2012.) Be sad or be happy (depending on your politics) but if you were trying, you’ve failed.

But we also know that college in general is not leading students to more open minds or a greater ability to think critically. There are plenty of other causes to blame for the increasing contention of our political system, but college is the best place to model what open and informed debate can and should look like. If we shy away from demonstrating to students in our classrooms what civil disagreement and real civic discourse looks like, what hope is there for future public debate?

I am not suggesting that we turn our music or biology classes into political forums, but rather that we not be afraid of political issues during this season. A fundamental principle of teaching is that faculty must engage students with questions that matter to them and start with an understanding of student assumptions. We need to understand what our students think, and that includes politics.

If college is failing to open minds it is because faculty forget that it is easy to learn facts without understanding concepts. Eric Mazur at Harvard discovered that even his “A” students in physics, had no idea about basic scientific concepts, so he changed his pedagogy.

More readings and longer papers won’t change minds, but class discussion and the willingness to investigate thoroughly assumptions might—what I call “teaching naked.” Starting with student beliefs is essential in every class. If a college degree is to mean an ability to think critically, then all of us need to probe and ask students to examine their assumptions. This is not indoctrination, it is learning to think. It also probably won’t endear you to all students, but it is our job. If we are not willing to try, who will?

So the next time your students tell you Mitt Romney is not a Christian or Barack Obama was not born in the United States, you know what to do. Democrat or Republican is much less important than thinking or not-thinking. It is our challenge to create a nation of thinkers.

Headlines this week a bout the software programs being just as accurate as human readers.http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/13/large-study-shows-little-difference-between-human-and-robot-essay-graders#ixzz1rwEWd9Y9  I’ve got two reactions to this.
First, I heard a fantastic TED talk yesterday from one of our computer science students (Christian Gecko) who presented us with a real life ethical problem: suppose you had been hired to check data as a job, but you knew how to code, so you wrote a computer program to do your same job, only it did with 10 times the accuracy in a fraction of the time? Well in this version, the guy finally feels guilty and tells his boss, who fires him. So he tells the bosses boss, who rehires him, fires the boss and put him in charge.

He also gave the example of tollboths at DFw airport where people are paid to sit in a booth and transcribe license plates from one computer screen to another. If you could write code to automate this, you could save the airport $258,000 a year.

These are menial jobs, but the point was that we can count on computers doing more in the future, and looking for a way to reduce the time you need to spend on basic tasks is just smart.

So i don’t think a robo reader is as good as a human reader in all things, but I do think it highlights the need for understanding the distinction. Which think can the robo reader do to free humans to do more critical tasks?

So to start, HAVE STUDENTS WRITE MORE!!! A limiting factor in almost all college courses is the amount of grading faculty have to do. Grading essays is time consuming, so we assign less writing to keep our sanity. Now, we don’t have to limit the writing based upon our grading time!!!

that does NOt mean that we should abandon human grading. But students who practice writing more, will become better writers. The NEW QUESTION is how should we structure courses so the human grading is most useful?

As it happens, grades are NOT the most useful part of learning to write. Assigning grades takes time though, and leaving that to a computer, could free up more time for the really useful feedback on multiple drafts that will really improve writing.