<crickets chirping>

A year later we heard that the journal had gone through a couple of “changes” and wanted to know if we wanted our paper back or were willing to wait*.  We said we’d wait.

<more crickets>

Friday we FINALLY got the paper back – revise and resubmit.

The number one comment by both reviewers?  The literature review was out of date.

^&(*^%$%$#^&^&()()%$&*)*&&^%#@&*(

Well, DUH!  Of course it’s out of date.  YOU PEOPLE SAT ON IT FOR YEARS!!!

*sigh*

So now, instead of working on my literature review, I’m working on the lit review for this paper instead.

It is always better to have published papers in the field, so I know that this is worth the effort in the long run, but if this takes too long I may never graduate.  Again.

* A while back I did a paper with someone in the law school and discovered that they basically shop their papers around to everywhere, all at once, and take “the best” [read: prestigious] offer.  I am so jealous of that system.

All too many people are looking at this from a one-dimensional perspective; for-profit = bad.  To this group there is some kind of ethical issue with making money on education; these are the same people who have been tarring and feathering charter schools for the past decade. The corollary is that making money principally from money provided by the government is worse.  (Why this doesn’t apply to defense contracts and such is beyond me.)  The picture is much more complex.

We are caught in an explosion of credential-ism, whereby the administrative assistant who used to need a High School diploma now needs an Associates in Business and a promotion to manager needs an MBA.  Do these jobs really require what is taught in these programs?  Probably not.  But the degree is a short-cut; it indicates purpose on the part of the person, discipline to complete something and some assumed level of knowledge.  (Note that at the same time employers routinely complain that students don’t learn what they need them to learn in school, but that’s another post entirely.)  Regardless, most people can’t stop working long enough to get the credential, making the “traditional” college experience an unachievable goal.

At the same time we live in a society where the message for the past few decades has been that degree = success = money = middle class.  My father died in 1993, when I was in my late 20s.  I had dropped out of college after the first semester of my sophomore year and not yet gone back.  On his death-bed he informed me that I was going to be a bag lady because I hadn’t finished school.  At the time I was making $50k working as a tech support manager in silicon valley.  To him that didn’t matter, and we continue to deliver that message today.  We tell kids and adults that they HAVE to go to college, and we talk about increasing the number of graduates, all the while watching the benefits of that degree shrink.

These competing pressures are driving more and more non-traditional students back to school.  (Traditional students are full-time, 18-21 year olds usually living on campus and working maybe 10 hours per week.)

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, about half of today’s students are financially independent; 49% are enrolled part-time; 38% work full-time; 27% have dependents of their own. Almost half — 12 million — attend two-year community colleges rather than four-year schools.

And most students who start college don’t finish. Only 56% of students at four-year colleges complete a degree within six years, and just 20% of first-time students at public community colleges get a degree or certificate within three years. — USA today citing NCES

We have a system in place that is made to support a small fraction of what today’s college student is actually like at a time when public funding for education is being drastically cut, limiting innovation in the public sector.  Is it any wonder why for-profit firms have stepped in to fill the gap?

For-profit colleges work with a disproportionate number of

1. working adults
2. minorities
3. first time college students
4. first college student in the family

This is not a chosen strategy; every school would rather have the easy students who all complete their programs, know how to deal with the system and make the school look great by going on to great accomplishments.  For-profits work with this audience because that is the one that exists and is being drastically underserved by other higher education organizations.

On the one hand, many people see these groups as disadvantaged and therefore in need of protection from the “big bad corporate wolf”.  But on the other, most non-profit colleges aren’t interested in supporting these students or don’t have the resources to help them navigate the process.  For example, only 58 percent of community college students eligible for Pell Grants applied.

The study, conducted in collaboration with the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), identified several reasons that community college students are reluctant apply for aid. These reasons include:

a lack sufficient human and technology resources at financial aid offices to provide students with information and one-on-one assistance

financial aid needs of students may not receive adequate priority or attention because public funding is scarce for many community colleges.

students not having a basic understanding of financial planning for a college education

Say what you want about for-profits, but they provide students the information and resources to apply.

Are there crooked for-profits out there seeking only to game the system?  Of course.  There are also crooked churches, crooked social service organizations and crooked businesses.  This doesn’t make them ALL crooked.  Are there bad apples at every school doing the wrong things?  Yup; if I could take the enrollment counselors who were recruiting from homeless shelters out and paddle their bottoms I would.

But just as there are bad for-profits, there are bad non-profits as well.  Segregating the system based on incorporation status doesn’t provide any benefit to the discussion.  Bad apples in both barrels need to be dealt with, students need to be educated on smart college borrowing, and schools that provide sub-standard education need to be weeded out regardless of whether they put their money into shareholder dividends or new buildings and endowments.

The higher education system has some really big issues right now, and picking on the new kid isn’t going to solve them.  The most sensible voices in the current discussion realize that.  The rest need to come down off their high horses, stop throwing the baby (innovation and superior service) out with the bath water (predatory recruiting practices and uninformed lending) and focus on supporting the students we HAVE, not the ones we wish we had.

Is a for-profit always the best alternative for a given student?  No.  Neither is Harvard, or StateU or Local Community College.  However singling out the for-profit sector isn’t reasonable; there are lots of people flipping burgers with degrees from third-rate universities who struggle just as much with their loans, and many with non-vocationally oriented degrees from top universities who are drowning in debt.  The problem is systemic and needs to be addressed as such.  Access, funding, and the desired outcomes are all in need of some serious re-imagining, and removing the most imaginative group from the discussion (even if you don’t like what motivates their imagination) isn’t going to help anyone.

Another article came out today about how for-profit colleges and trade schools (lumped into one big indistinguishable mass) are using deceptive practices to convince students to sign up for expensive degree programs, then encouraging the students to take out massive student loans that they won’t be able to pay off when they graduate due to low starting salaries or no jobs.  It would be foolish not to acknowledge that some for-profit organizations do this, but it would be just as foolish to suggest that no not-for-profit ones do.

Tuitions are going up everywhere.  State support of public institutions is going the way of the dodo, with the most recent announcement being double digit tuition increases for the universities in Arizona.  In some cases, the for-profits may become the only place with the capacity to take students as budgets such as California’s cause even community colleges to turn students away.  The for-profits may still be more expensive the those public institutions with space, but the gap is closing quickly.

For instance, a full (no transfer credit) Bachelors in Education from the University of Phoenix runs about $43,000 (either online or in a regular albeit evening classroom format).  That sounds huge; how will a teacher ever repay that?  Of course, they could also go to ASU for around $33,000.  Assuming they lived in Phoenix already and that they could take the time off from their current job to get to the scheduled classes and that they could arrange transportation and child care (if necessary).  (The for-profits have few traditional students; most are working adults going back for a career change or enhanced qualifications.)

An Arizona teacher has a starting salary on average $31,000, which comes with the threat of layoff due to the state or a district being short on funds.  A back of the envelope payment calculation comes up with $497 per month for University of Phoenix vs. $382 per month for ASU.  With a take home of under $1955 per month averaged out over 12 months (assuming 18% of gross for taxes and benefits, which is probably low), student loan payments would eat up 25 and 20% of take home respectively. (I’m not even going to talk about private not-for-profits; even the middle-of-the-road ones often charge upwards of $18,000 per year AFTER financial aid.  For example, here is the small liberal arts school I went to for undergrad.  $25k per year for tuition alone is not uncommon.)  Even with the new Income Based Repayment (which would limit the amount to 15% of 1.5*povery rate, or $184 per month) this is still a heavy burden with really slow progress.

A new proposal takes this a step further, calling for schools to be required to keep debt (average debt per student) at or below 8% of the Bureau of Labor Statistics 25th percentile salary.  But there’s a catch; this only applies to proprietary (read: for-profit) schools and trade programs.  That’s where the hypocrisy comes in.

A new teacher from ASU is nearly as finacially underwater as a new teacher from University of Phoenix, yet the proposal is essentially a price cap on the latter but not the former.  I can’t think of a single justification for that beyond the irrational hatred many in education feel for for-profit firms trying to make it in their industry.

Obviously these firms fill some niche that the standard public colleges don’t.  It might be convenience, timing, far superior customer service (as long as you are enrolling for more classes, the for-profits will bend over backwards to help you get what you need), a lack of requirements for classes that appear unrelated to your career, or any number of other possible things.  From a purely dollar-based comparison they may look like a bad deal, but students don’t choose a school based strictly on dollars.  These other factors weigh in, and sometimes the convenience alone can be worth the price.

My point is that if we as a society believe these kinds of limits are valuable then they should apply across the board.  Firms who are deceptive in their recruitment techniques should be sued over it, regardless of their tax status.  The public education system is slow and resistant to learning from the for-profit sector despite seeing how successful that sector is, and that’s too bad.  As state funding drys up, public institutions are going to find even more pressure to drive up enrollment for additional tuition dollars and cut costs (including financial aid) to make ends meet.

At first, this is a massively tempting idea.  I have certainly spent the summer bringing myself up to speed for a new course I’m teaching by listening to podcasts of classes from Berkeley and MIT, and consider these types of resources invaluable for an adult who wants to fill out their knowledge on a topic or learn something new.  Yet we get a great deal more from college than just topic knowledge. 

I see a few problems with this model that the article fails to address:

•  We produce an awful lot of ill-prepared high school graduates in this country.  Almost 42 percent of  freshmen enrolled in public 2-year colleges and 20 percent of those enrolled in public 4 year colleges were enrolled in at least one developmental course (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2004).  These students will be unable to read and learn from this type of material without a person to go to, and may not be able to complete the work at all without being pushed to complete the developmental coursework.
• Many of these same struggling students are first generation college students who lack the cultural capital to understand the process.  For better or worse, the structure of a traditional school helps ensure that those students find their way through the process.  Even though there are holes in how the system works now, leaving students to find their own way will only make that worse.
• Students get a lot more from college than just topic knowledge.  Even if we treat it as some form of white-collar trade school, students learn teamwork and presentation skills, make contacts within their field, and build valuable social skills in the college process.  I have serious doubts about how well an online school can teach those things.    
• Colleges serve many purposes outside of teaching undergraduates.  Some are extraneous, while others are irreplaceable.  Where will basic research be done?  The kind of stuff for which there isn’t a market yet, but which the engineers and scientists will need to know to build the next generation of technology?  How and where will we train future PhD’s, either to do research or to teach?  Why would someone WANT to go down that path when their work has been devalued.  (Note: I have a real problem with the ancient apprentice / indentured servant model of doctoral education we have now, but I don’t see an improvement here; more like extinction.)
• One of the things that colleges do is force students to think about other perspectives.  This in part comes from the fact that many academics have perspectives that bare little resemblance to those held by the general public, and can be abused the way some push ideology, but is none the less an important part of school.  The same goes for taking subjects that may not appear immediately interesting.  No one would take my statistics class if they weren’t required to, yet many tell me later that it is one of the most broadly useful classes they have taken. 
• The past 50 years has seen credential creep; where you used to be able to support a family with a high school diploma, you now need a bachelor’s degree to get in the door and a master’s to get promoted.  Will this be the antidote, showing that knowledge and credentials are only loosely correlated?  Or will this make it worse by further devaluing degrees until the checker at Walmart needs a degree in Finance to get the job?
• Moreover how do we differentiate the person who listened to the Berkeley podcasts from the person who went to class, wrote the papers and took the tests?  I suppose one could ask if we need to, but few employers are willing to “take your word for it” rather than call your references.  A degree serves a similar function; it is an external stamp that you stuck it out, did the work adequately (although adequate changes from school to school), have at least some knowledge of the topic, can follow rules and can deal with the culture of a bureaucratic organization.

I agree with the article that something needs to change about how we do higher education, but this model seems primarily suited to turn it into a white-collar trade school, focused at the (albeit much larger) undergraduate level and suited principally to self-motivated students with sufficient cultural capital to navigate the process in a meaningful way.  That may be good for some students, but is unlikely to work for all, and genuinely harmful to some.

• Working full time at day job, who has laid off half the company in the last 3 months so I need to perform adequately
• Teaching 1 section on Intro to Statistics and the associated Lab
• AERA presentation to write, to be uploaded by March 23rd
• Reading prep toward comps this summer and dissertation after that.  I know 1 comp question so far (local and national environment of high stakes testing with regard to its relationship to college performance)
• Data may start coming in that will be used for dissertation, in which case I will have to start turning disjointed files into a longitudinal database; that’s going to be a blast.

All of which means I need to get back to being reasonably organized.

• WORK: Luckily my day job is relatively self-contained.  I organize myself within that bucket and it rarely crosses over outside the occasional blackberry message. 
• TEACHING:  For the teaching, I have finished lecture notes for 7 out of 15
  chapters and 2 of the 4 exams.  I’m not quite up through spring break,
  but getting there.  
• Today I need to go through the piles of papers on my desk and organize what goes to class and what doesn’t.
• Tonight I need to go through my ancillary materials and add to my notes pages for the 4 chapters I just finished, then print the notes pages for myself.
• Tomorrow I need to call the Blackboard Administrator and get my class turned on so that I can use it for distributing copies of the Presentations to the students, as well as ancillary materials.
• Tomorrow night is the first class; I need to be well rested, fed, and my most sparkling self (ugh)
• Next weekend, in addition to grading the first homework, I would like to go through and complete the two chapters to get me through spring break.
• AERA: Dang that thing sneaks up on me every single year.  I need to review my proposal and the comments made by the reviewers and my adviser, then start writing.  I have most of the materials, but this is a slightly different way of organizing the material and I need to not underestimate how long that can take.
• Next weekend I need to re-read the proposal, my advisers comments and those of the reviewers, then begin free-writing around the topic. 
• COMPS: This is the one I have the most fudge on, so I will probably let this slide until after the AERA paper is done.  The exception is if adviser decides to have any kind of regular meeting (doubtful) between now and when the data is all here.
• DATA: Waiting game – the good news is that its not here yet, so I have nothing to do.  The bad news is that I don’t know when it WILL be here…..

Last time I taught I found my entire weekends being occupied with things related to teaching.  That can’t happen again.  More importantly, I need to align how I use the weekends for the entire semester to meet my broader goals.  So here are a few goals:

1. Weeknights are mine.  Either I am teaching until 8pm or I am trying to get to the gym, but one way or the other I need the downtime to relax and am too often braindead anyway from a day of work.  The most I will ever ask of myself on a weeknight is grading homework in front of the TV.
2. One day out of every weekend is devoted to AERA writing and Comps;  At first it should be mostly AERA, later in the term it will refocus to mostly comps, but the goal is not to let the class take up both days and to do both from the very beginning.
3. I need to get the remaining lecture notes between now and spring break (2 chapters) completed next weekend.  I can then complete the remainder of these notes after the AERA paper is done.

Unlike so much of life, most of the non-class related tasks are not things that can easily be broken down and put on a list.  I’ve tried to turn the project “Write AERA paper” into a series of next actions and failed.  They are either too vague, or specific but rapidly become irrelevant or incorrect.  Therefore I need to focus on those types of lists for what I CAN create lists for (grade homework, review lecture notes, answer emails from class) and allot time in chunks for those that I cannot.

Here is to the internal hope that arises every semester that somehow, this one can be different. 

First I went to a history of ed conference in Newark that was awesome.  I practically got giggly when I saw some of the big names in the field sitting across the lunch table from me. 

I really needed that conference; I’ve been losing faith in both my ability and desire to finish this.  Working full time in a career that is, in some ways, still very interesting (even if it isn’t the life-style I want long-term) with a major project deadline was sapping my enthusiasm for my academic work.  However the project is done, so that will help going forward.  I hope.  And the conference reinvigorated me toward my work.

Then, like every other education scholar, I have been rushing to prepare conference proposals to the “big” conference in the field (AERA) that were due yesterday.  Tomorrow I have a paper due for one of my classes, so I won’t get caught up until after that.

I can say that I am very pleased with my submissions to AERA.  I sent in one proposal to a SIG that essentially is what I want to do for my dissertation, so I forwarded it off to my adviser as well.  My writing group read it and only one had any real substantive comments; the rest were just grammar (I still mix up that/which for example) and clarifying of wording.  Everyone thought it was well written.  We’ll see if the sig agrees.  It is definitely a unique perspective.

What interested me about that proposal is that the angle came to me on a drive and, when I got home, I wrote the whole thing up in under 4 hours.  It really just flowed.  I thought when I sent it off to my readers that they would say it sucked or was scattered, but apparently it was more along the inspired lines.  Ah the power of a conference to get one motivated, followed by amazing cinnamon swirl french toast for energy.

I also sent in a pre-conference professional development proposal having to do with presentation skills for academic conferences.  Last week I was at a really interesting international conference and was reminded again of just how few academics seem to know how to:

• Summarize their paper into a 15-20 minute talk (ie edit the content reasonably)
• Distill in information into slides that help, not hinder, their presentation
• Deliver said presentation within the timelimit
• “Read the room” to determine whether pacing is working, explainations are clear, etc.

So my presentation (called “Making your Brilliance Known”) focuses on taking what is certainly a fabulous paper and distilling it down, making slides that help, how NOT to read your own slides but deliver in an engaging way and use the feedback from the room to modify your delivery.  I’ve blogged on parts of this topic before, but this will give me a chance to pull it all together.

Who knows if that one will get accepted; I think it is needed, but some people might find it offensive.  (“What does some chick with an MBA know about presenting at an academic conference?  Shouldn’t she at least finish her dissertation before she starts trying to tell us what to do?”)  I just don’t get why people don’t realize the skills are VERY different.

I have decided that I need about 3 conferences per year to stay motivated.  That means this international one during the summer, the american history of ed conference in the fall (already have a paper accepted for this) and the big conference in the spring.  I am committing to myself to submit to each one, which shouldn’t be hard.  I’m finding that if anything I have too many ideas after each conference.  This is going to cost money, but as long as I am working full time it is a managable expense if it keeps my enthusiasm level up for the work.  Once I am a full time academic, I can back that off.  (Anyway, the international conference next year is in the Netherlands – I’ve never been!!!)

Anyway, now I have a historiography paper due this week and an academic
book review due next week that I need to write.  Sometimes it feels
like it never ends, bit a little enthusiasm helps.

I’d love any comments/criticisms of my thinking here, before I put this into a paper and make a fool of myself…

Today’s mail included the paper copy of the journal in which my first published paper is actually printed. 

(I’m 3rd author, of three, but still….)  This is kind of exciting!!!!

(If you have any interest in school choice, email me at protoscholar [ at ] gmail [ dot ] com and I’ll be happy to forward the citation.)

“I will tell you that the answers are not simple and will not arrive
quickly. Change starts with the children. However, it also has to do
with changing elements in society that have existed since the
beginning.”

This is a commonly heard perspective, and an argument for the schools taking an active role in changing society by the way they teach. 

I question whether the schools can or should be the agents of change, but I also recognize that schools may be the only place where a different idea of what the world can do is ever presented to some children. 

If the schools don’t do it, who will?  How can parents who are themselves trapped in the cycle ever realistically teach their children anything other than what they know?  How can the children learn anything other than what they see around them, in their friends and family.

Yet the schools are beholden to the government, which many would say has a vested interest in things NOT changing. If we say that the schools must educate for change, than what should they teach?  I have a department full of neo-marxists who have their ideas.  Should that be what is taught?  Or, as with KIPP and others like them, should the focus be on teaching the students the skill necessary to excel in the world as it is assuming that if they make it in this world they have a better chance of changing the world for their children? 

But if we do that, aren’t they just going to want to perpetuate the privilege they have gained for their children in this system?  Part of why the great revolution has never happened is because people are more afraid of the devil they don’t know than the devil they do.  I may think it’s unfair that Bill Gates makes orders of magnitude more than the person who cleans the bathroom near his office, but that person may be satisfied that they aren’t making what the migrant farm worker makes, and that person may be glad that they aren’t turning tricks.

I don’t know the answers to these questions.  What I do know is that it is more complicated than most people realize.  My father would have said that poor people don’t work hard enough, and even as a child I knew that wasn’t true.  But I worry about the idea of any type of governmentally funded organization, even one as generally benevolently intended as schools and teachers, trying to educate for change.  At best it will be change within limited parameters and at worst it will just be a different form of indoctrination.

George Will wrote an excellent op-ed today regarding No Child Left Behind (NCL.  I’m sure there are people at the Fordham Foundation ranting in the halls about his use of their Proficiency Illusion paper to bolster an argument about getting the federal government OUT of education (as opposed to their preferred solution of national standards).  However it got me thinking yet again about the conflict in my mind over local control.

I have some seriously libertarian political leanings.  I think the government tries to do too much, sticks its nose into way too many things it has no business in and does most of what it does badly.  So I have long felt that any government intervention in education, an area specifically excluded from federal control, is a bad idea.  NCLB is just the latest and worst of those interventions; in K-12 they date back to the Elementary and Secondary Schools act in 1965.  Educational needs have always been best assessed by those closest; the parents and the community.

I’ve been questioning that for the last couple of years however.  Mobility is a key aspect of modern society.  Cheap air fares, cheap long-distance/cell service and web cams have made it far easier to pack up and live anywhere.  My mother lived within 100 miles of where she was born until she was in her 60s, when she moved to Florida to retire near all the people she had grown up with.  I, on the other hand, have lived on both coasts and many places in between.  I have needed to be competitive in markets from upstate NY to San Francisco at the height of the tech boom. 

Now, I was lucky.  I went to a suburban middle class school with good scores, a strong program and parents who believed in the need to go to college in order to make it in the world, even if you didn’t move away.  The curriculum set out by my community was strong and full enough to make me competitive.  But I realize that not everyone has that type of background.

Then again, not everyone moves either.  My brother still lives within 10 miles of where we grew up and will never leave.  The 1980 census found 63.9% of people living in the state of their birth.  In 1990 it was 61.8%.  By 2000 that was down to 60%.  Certainly a downward trend, but still not a majority.

To me the only good argument for national standards and anything OTHER than local control of education stems from this mobility idea; that we are no longer functioning as a confederation of states and have truly evolved to be a single entity more than anything else, where our citizens will need to function in an economic and political  environment that requires consistent knowledge and skills.

But those numbers above say something different.  In 2000 60% of the country lived within the state of its birth.  These people could have moved the day before the census or 20 years before.  So are we right to get the federal government, an inefficient behemoth of an institution, involved in something that at most benefits  40% of the population (and as I am proof, probably quite a bit less)?

For that matter, if we DID take the feds out of the picture, would it result in some states making their standards even LOWER or would we see competition between states to provide a better education for their students…. 

I have to agree overall with Will; Nothing good comes from federal involvement in education and a LOT of bad comes from it.