Sweet Briar College - The Long, Lingering Twilight

You have to applaud the folks who have worked so hard over the past year+ to keep Sweet Briar College alive. When a previous administration and board thought they saw the writing on the wall and tried to close the institution with some dignity, a group of alumni and other supporters banded together, raised $22 million, hired a new administration and a new board, and vowed to bring the honorable but ailing school back to life.

Now comes this news:

Sweet Briar Budgets $20M in Donations for 2017

Note that their budget for this next year calls for $20 million in donated money to help fund a $33 million budget. That's right - roughly 2/3 of the budget will have to be donated by outsiders.

This comes a year after the enthusiastic backers of the school pulled out all the stops to raise $22 million in donated funding. There is a finite pool of people who have a connection to Sweet Briar or who would otherwise be interested in helping it stay alive, and those people have a finite pool of resources. Looking for another $20 million from the same pool from which you pulled $22 million just a year before is a nearly impossible task.

And if they manage to pull off the impossible, what then? Do they raise yet another $20 million the following year, and the year after that? The college has yet to hit enrollment targets since it reopened, and its discount rate remains a staggering 64%. None of this is surprising - parents and students are understandably reluctant to commit time and resources to a place that could very well cease to exist within the next four years. That same concern is even stronger for donors, who have many requests for their philanthropy and who generally want to make a lasting difference in the world.

I understand and appreciate the emotion that drives efforts like this. For those most committed to the cause, it is a labor of love. But sometimes, love is not enough. Passion is not a business model. I'm afraid that in another year or two, Sweet Briar will see yet another closure - the next one less dignified and graceful than the first.

Back from the Brink: Sweet Briar and the Changed Conversation About College Finances

I blogged a while back about the announcement that Sweet Briar College would be closing its doors this summer. At the time that news sent shock waves through higher education. It was the first time in recent memory (ever?) that the Trustees of a respected institution with a good reputation, a beautiful campus, acclaimed programs, and $80 million in endowment still in the bank had decided to shut down for financial reasons. Despite these apparent advantages the Trustees were convinced that closure was inevitable, and they chose to try to wind things down with some order and dignity.

It turns out that Sweet Briar may have a few years left after all. A deal has been reached with the Virginia Attorney General's office to change the leadership of the institution (new president and a largely new Board) and keep the operation going. Alumnae, many of whom were distressed and outraged by the decision to close, have raised some $21 million in pledges to help the college continue to operate. The AG has also agreed to lift restrictions on some $16 million in the college's endowment, allowing that money to be spent for any purpose that will help keep the college running (rather than on whatever specific purposes the original donors had intended).

This is certainly a happy day for those alumnae who have fought to keep the institution open. Sweet Briar still faces massive challenges, not least seriously diminished student and faculty populations (many have already transferred elsewhere). The college has been doing essentially no recruiting during the peak of recruiting season, so the incoming class is likely to be small. Whatever operations start up again in the fall are likely to be a shadow of the former institution, which was not that large to begin with. Nevertheless, the college now has a second chance at life.

The larger issues that led the Trustees to decide to close the institution still remain. The $12.5 million that alumnae have pledged initially is roughly equal to the college's operating deficit last year. It's great that former students are willing to lay out that kind of money, but what about next year? The year after that? One would guess that the $21 million in pledges raised by the organization Saving Sweet Briar represents a substantial proportion - perhaps nearly the entirety - of the giving capacity of the alumnae base. When that is tapped out, what next? The college was already burning off its endowment at 10% per year - that $80 million will disappear pretty quickly even if the state AG agrees to lift all restrictions on it.

The question here isn't whether the college will stay open for next year. The question is, can Sweet Briar build and run a sustainable financial model? Given the competition for students, the challenges of finding families who can and will contribute significant sums to their kids' educations, and the weakened borrowing power of those same families, where is the money going to come from? There isn't a clear answer. But if the new Board and president don't come up with a solution within the next year or two, we'll be having this same conversation in two years' time. If they do, this will be one of the greatest success stories in higher education and could pave the way for a lot of new thinking at institutions across the country.

One thing I do want to applaud the outgoing Trustees for: they have changed the conversation by calling the question. For too long, people both inside and outside higher ed have assumed that "real" colleges and universities - those with good reputations, status, and name recognition - could never really close down. Faculty and administration have always assumed that "we'll find a way" - even when that way involves shell games or unsustainable financial practices, hoping that "it's just for a few years". Now we know that failure is an option.

That knowledge should cause all of us, especially administrators and faculty inside the walls of academe, to take these matters much more seriously. Universities are mission-driven institutions where decisions should never be made "just to make money". But the money constraint is very real, and if we can't find a way to fulfill our missions in a financially sustainable fashion we too will ultimately close our doors. The message to the rest of us in higher education is clear: don't wait until the wolves are at the door. We should all be thinking about sound financial practices and models now. Because if we don't do it now, someone else will surely do it for us later.

Why Does College Cost So Much? Beating the Same Dead Horses

Frankly, I almost hate to write this. I've written plenty of pieces before about the rising cost of higher education and the increase in administration within universities. There are too many to link them all here; try this one for starters, it points back to several of the others.

So why rehash this subject again? Because Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado, somehow managed to get an op-ed published in the New York Times - in the Sunday Review section, no less - that beats this dead horse one more time with a bizarre series of not-quite-comparable almost-statistics that sound vaguely like an argument. You can find lots of writing picking his article apart piece by piece, from his misuse of analogies to his simple misstatement of facts. I'll assume that ground has been crossed already and so won't go over it again here.

Unfortunately, the visibility of Campos' piece has given new life to an argument that ought to have been disposed of a long time ago - that the rising tuition cost of college if really a function of evil, greedy, grasping, ever-multiplying administrators. Perhaps Mr. Campos pictures us sitting around in our office twirling our mustaches and petting white fluffy cats. But because he got his nonsense published in the NYT, we have to go over this again.

Are there more "administrators" on campuses? Yes, absolutely - although the first challenge you confront when you try to verify that is defining the line is between "administrator" and "staff". A lot of the "administrators" that Mr. Campos points to as the source of the problem are people who do things. Many of these things, as I have pointed out many times before, were things that universities were not expected to do two generations ago (he seems fond of comparisons to 1960) but are today.

In many if not most instances, universities did not choose these things for themselves - both society and government have thrust a great many mandates onto universities and colleges in that intervening 55 years. Faculty can't both be faculty and also do all of these other things (Title IX compliance; online education authorizations; demonstrating a bewildering array of accreditation standards; outcomes assessment; workforce development; student success for a vastly more diverse student body; etc, etc, etc). One of the few things to get bipartisan agreement among some members of Congress recently is the assertion that regulation of higher education has gone a bit too far in many areas. On this point, Republicans have been standing on solid ground for years: regulation has costs. Mr. Campos apparently doesn't want to talk about that.

There's also a gratuitous reference in Mr. Campos' piece to "seven-figure salaries for high-ranking university administrators". I will freely concede the point that such salaries are ethically and economically indefensible. But to suggest, as he apparently wants to do, that these have any measurable impact on the cost of tuition is absurd. The vast majority of universities (my current employer included) have nobody earning anywhere near that amount. Schools with those salaries are mostly restricted to the handful of top-tier research & NCAA Div I/BCS institutions, and even at those places only a small handful of people are making a million dollars or more. Slashing their salaries in half would make only the tiniest dent in those institutions' budgets. I don't think football and basketball coaches should get $3 million a year either, but pointing to that as the cause of the tuition problem simply makes Mr. Campos look like he can't do math.

The reality, as always, is more complicated and would require a more complex conversation to really deal with. Mr. Campos' assertions aside, we DO invest less as a society in higher education than we used to. For a while (in particular, in the 1960s and 1970s) spending did rise as the number of students going to college rose as well. The cuts (measurable on a per-student basis, something Mr. Campos doesn't want to engage with) have come about in the last 20 or so years. It is also true during that time that tuition has gone up for a variety of reasons - some having to do with more student aid being available (a phenomenon which doesn't surprise economists, price inflation is a natural consequence of flooding a system with more money), some having to do with the increased cost of doing business for universities and the rising societal and governmental demands on those institutions, some having to do with cost-shifting based on a reimagining of higher education as a private good as opposed to a public good.

All of these things matter, and all of them have a hand in creating a problem that is in fact very real. As a parent of a college student who looked at both private and public university options, I agree that the affordability of tuition has gone wildly out of control just between my generation and my daughter's. I wonder sometimes how some of these smaller, less well-known private institutions manage to stay in business (the announced closing of Sweet Briar came as little surprise on that front). Even public institutions are less affordable than they once were.

So I agree with Mr. Campos on one point: we have a real college affordability problem. At a time when having a college degree is increasingly becoming THE path to a middle-class life, it is becoming harder and harder even for middle-class kids to get one. We should think seriously about this as a society, and together come up with changes that will help move us closer to the kind of country we want. But flogging dead horses and pinning everything on overly-simplistic, monocausal theories doesn't get us anywhere - even when you do it in the New York Times.

Trustee-Assisted Suicide: The Death of Sweet Briar College

The following news is likely to seriously shake a good bit of the higher education world for a while:

Sweet Briar College Will Shut Down

This is a shocking decision for a college that has a good reputation, full accreditation, and an intact endowment (in the $85-$90 million range). Colleges that go under usually do so after long and painful struggles, and are often forced over the edge by the weight of financial obligations they are no longer able to meet. That's not the case here - the patient, as it were, is still healthy today. But it's on a path, or so the leadership believes, to eventual destruction.

I tend to accept the trustees' argument that this is the most merciful decision. Down the road from me  is another small niche college, Wilberforce, which has been going through a most painful effort to keep itself alive for the past several years. If it ultimately goes under - and it may very well - a lot of time, effort, and pain will have been spent, and a lot of students will get hurt in the process, to no avail. What Sweet Briar is doing now is far preferable to a long, lingering death with frantic but unsuccessful efforts to revive the patient.

Colleges are not people, of course. If a college can return itself to sustainability its lifespan may be very long indeed. But too often we don't ask the question - is that really possible? In this case, I think the Sweet Briar trustees have hit on the key question to ask: is the writing on the wall for small, mid-tier, niche liberal arts colleges?

I used to work for one such institution (not quite so small as Sweet Briar but not very large either), and I wonder to this day how it survives. Having spent much of last year going through the college search process with my daughter (who was admitted to several much more prestigious and well-heeled liberal arts colleges), I confronted the same question of that category in general. How many people are there who can afford to spend $20k or $25k or $30k per year - after all the financial aid is awarded - on their kid's education? That is beyond the means of most families, even those earning in the very low six figures.

I don't know the answers, in part because every school is different. As the article linked above points out, other schools in similar circumstances are choosing different paths and maybe those will work out. But from the standpoint of a family with one kid in college (and two more coming up behind), the economics are nearly overwhelming, especially given that there are MUCH more affordable options elsewhere. And with the rapid growth of income inequality in the US, the number of households who can afford this kind of education is not expanding.

One thing is clear: these kinds of institutions need to take a long, hard-nosed, difficult look at their futures. Some of them may survive, but they will do so only by adapting to become somewhat different from what they are now - which is itself a painful process. Some of them probably will not. I hope that those that will not will choose graceful exits. At least now they have a model to follow.

Another Look at Administrative Bloat in Higher Ed

I've written various pieces before (see here, here, and here) about the real issues of cost in higher education, and how the public debates seem to miss the point in their desire to hawk one ideological view or another. A lot of things drive up the cost of higher ed. One of my favorite bogey men is the story of "administrative bloat".

Now, on its surface "administrative bloat" is real insofar as universities and colleges today employ a lot more non-instructional staff than they did in past years.  Some of this is technology driven - 50 years ago universities didn't have IT departments with groups of computer programmers. Faculty like to believe that administrative bloat is a fundamental product of administrative motivations - that administrations (assumed in subtext to be greedy and selfish) will grow and metastasize in much the same way that Thomas Piketty argues capitalism produces inequality. There are certainly cases of this kind of "frivolous bloat", although it is not as common as some of the faculty hawks believe.

Often unnoticed in these discussions is a third force driving administrative bloat: mandates from the outside world. Some of these mandates are from the marketplace - parents and students want universities with certain kinds of amenities and services (how many schools, for example, have done away with their Career Center in this job-focused age?) And some of those mandates come from the government.

It is into this category that a story in today's Chronicle titled "Why Colleges Are on the Hook for Sexual Assault" falls. The meaning and mandate of the Federal Title IX statute has been expanded significantly in the decades since it was founded, and recently especially in the realm of rape and sexual assault. Universities now find themselves essentially having to set up professional criminal justice systems, with top-quality capabilities to investigate, handle due process, and render verdicts which will stand up to both legal and public scrutiny. In other words, universities now need their own court systems.

This is a series of tasks which universities are ill-suited to do. Even a decent-sized institution like my employer only has a handful of people on campus who have anything resembling professional competence in these areas. To do this and do it right, the university would have to hire a number of people, some of them pretty highly-paid professionals with experience and credentials. In other words, more bloat.

The price of not doing this for any university is twofold. If a student has a bad experience and blames the institution for it, that school may find itself the subject of a Federal investigation - never a good thing. Moreover, the bad press generated will almost certainly drive students away, which in today's lean times can be catastrophic. So anybody not moving in this direction is gambling with the future of the university.

Most of us agree that sexual assault is a terrible thing and needs to be stamped out. I don't object in the slightest to building improved systems to treat victims better and, hopefully, reduce the incidence of rape and assault. But we have to understand that there is a cost to doing so, and that cost is being imposed on universities - which will mean, ultimately, higher tuition and all the rest of it. Somebody has to pay, and the broader public (through their state legislatures) has long since decided that it isn't going to be the taxpayers. So students are, in essence, being told to fund their own solution to the problem. And there will be a few more highly-paid administrators on every campus for faculty to complain about.

An Odd Corner of the Higher Education Industry

I saw this headline in today's Inside Higher Ed:

ConnectEDU Files for Bankruptcy Protection

This is a company that had sought to provide advising to students in navigating through high school and college and into careers. It got some press because of a fairly sizable grant it received from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which also strikes me as an odd choice.

It's not that guiding students successfully through secondary and post-secondary education into productive careers isn't a good thing to do. And it's not that there isn't some need for doing so that isn't being met now. But how you make enough money doing so, when the population most in need (the working class and poor) are those least able to pay (the working class and poor), is beyond me. Apparently it was beyond them, too. Hopefully Gates got some useful knowledge out of the experiment.

In the meantime, there are resources - more plentiful in some places than in others - in both high school and college to help students navigate these challenges. Most of those resources are free, which will continue to make them the preferred option, especially for those of limited means. Certainly universities need to do a better job in this area - but it appears the private sector isn't going to take the job away from us just yet.

Silly Blather About Master's Degrees

In today's Chronicle of Higher Education is one of the silliest articles I have seen in a while. I would ordinarily pass over stuff that's obviously wrong - if I wrote a blog piece every time I disagreed with someone's views on some internet-available publication, I would have little time for anything else include food and sleep. But this one in particular caught my eye, probably because of its provocative title. You can read it yourself here:

Those Master's-Degree Programs at Elite U.? They're For-Profit

Kevin Carey, Director of the education-policy program at the New America Foundation, is trying (in broad, sweeping brushstrokes) to equate master's programs at public universities with associates degree programs at the University of Phoenix and others - credentials of dubious worth that generate high debt rates and (he implies, though he has no data to this point) high student loan defaults. The argument is worth unpacking, if only to see where he's gone so horribly wrong.

First, though this tends towards ad hominem territory it is worth noting that Mr. Carey, though he is billed as "an expert" on "higher education issues", has never actually worked for a university as more than an adjunct instructor, nor is there any indication that he has ever run a master's program. The section of his official bio with regards to his career reads thus:

Prior to joining New America, Carey worked as the policy director of Education Sector, and as an analyst at the Education Trust and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Previously, he worked for the Indiana Senate Finance Committee and as Indiana's Assistant State Budget Director. He also teaches education policy at Johns Hopkins University.

Aside from some classroom work (at what level it doesn't say), it's not clear that Mr. Carey has ever worked in the industry he claims to be an expert in. I'm not sure I follow that logic, but what do I know.

Getting to the substance of his argument - Mr. Carey's main claim that public university master's programs are the same as worthless for-profit ventures rests on a number of observations about rising median debt levels among master's-seeking students. Three specific claims he makes:

According to the latest results, the median debt accrued by students completing master’s degrees in 2012 was $57,600, a 31-percent increase from just four years earlier, after adjusting for inflation.

The median debt for master’s degrees in education, for example, grew from $33,910 to $50,879 in four years.

Median debt for people in the broad fields that grant master-of-arts degrees grew from $43,247 to nearly $59,000.

The first red flag here is that I can't tell from these statements whether he is talking about debt accumulated while in graduate school or total debt accumulated by the student. If these numbers represent the latter, they could easily be the result of rising undergraduate debt loads, which we know have been increasing in recent years. Undergrads who go on to get master's degrees - as many have in recent years, trying to get an edge in a weak labor market - carry their debt with them. So Mr. Carey may well be blaming the problem on the wrong source. At the very least, he is guilty of not presenting his data clearly - and when I see an unclear presentation like this, it makes me wonder whether somebody is hiding something.

Moreover, Mr. Carey implies in his article that this debt is problematic because students getting master's degrees either aren't getting jobs, or aren't making enough in those jobs to pay the debt back - a problem that has been documented with respect to many for-profit degrees at lower levels. But in making this claim, Mr. Carey offers no data or information at all. The best he can muster is hyperbole and snark, to whit:

Do you know any recent M.A. graduates with lots of money to burn?

Similar numbers appear in the catch-all category of "other" master’s degrees. Many of these have—just like "office management"—weak ties to established professions.

A one-year master’s program in something like "government" is accountable to no one.

These assertions sound vaguely sinister, but they are at best anecdotal - and at worst, imaginary. They sound like the claims of someone who has not actually bothered to take the time to research the subject he's writing about, but has decided instead to shoot from the hip and hope that writing style and the general assent of his audience to his political leadings will earn him nods of approval. He is, in other words, just like Thomas Friedman and most other op-ed writers: opining on things he knows little about with sweeping generalizations and a touch of attitude.

I don't know the relevant data for graduate programs across the country. I do know much of this information for my own institution, at which I oversee over 60 master's programs. Here are a few relevant observations:

- Half of our graduate students do not borrow any money at all while in graduate school; of those that do, very few run up the kind of debt that Mr. Carey is indicating, and if they did it would be almost entirely in support of living expenses (money that does not go to the university), not tuition.

- Contrary to Mr. Carey's reference to "largely unaccountable terminal master's-degree programs that offer little or no financial aid", many of our master's degrees, especially in STEM fields, do carry significant financial aid support.  My office alone oversees $1.8 million in tuition scholarships for graduate students across all colleges every year, most of them pursuing master's degrees, and I know that other institutions in my state spend far more. And that's not counting institutional support for graduate assistants - we have about 550 of those every year, all of whom get full tuition waivers.

- Most of our graduate programs care deeply about the careers they are preparing their students for, and take the time to track placement rates either in getting jobs or in moving on to PhD programs. Just because these programs aren't accountable to somebody in Washington doesn't mean there's no accountability - poorly-performing programs face a host of sanctions, up to and including being shut down.

- Even in the one area where he might have a point - Master's of Education programs - our enrollment numbers have plummeted, suggesting that the market is working by discouraging students from chasing a degree that may not help them as much as it once did.

In short, Mr. Carey has painted a picture that looks wholly unlike the reality I work with on a daily basis. Perhaps my institution is not the kind of place he meant to pick on - if so, he should say so. But if he expects to be respected by those of us who work in the industry and read the Chronicle, he should take the time to do his homework before coming to class. Perhaps in my next blog post, I should make an argument for government regulation of op-ed authors...

How to Tell Your Industry Is In Trouble: Scare Tactics Disguised as "Research"

I've blogged before (here being the most recent) about the troubles of the for-profit, online education sector. The stories of closures, cutbacks, and retrenchments - not to mention investigations and legal woes - over the past year have been legion, and at some point I just stopped chronicling them. The evidence of an industry sector in crisis is pretty strong at this point.

So what does an industry in crisis do? Why, commission its own "research" and try to frighten states into backing off with their pesky investigations, that's what. We are now treated to just such a spectacle designed to "prove" how much states would have to spend if it weren't for those wonderfully civic-minded for-profits picking up the slack:

If For-Profits Vanished

One can only wonder what sort of hair-brained economic assumptions are baked into this "research" model. Given the radical decline of state support for higher education in recent years, I doubt very much that state legislatures would feel at all obligated to pony up $8.4 billion even if Phoenix and all of its ilk disappeared tomorrow. And given the marginal success rates of some institutions in the for-profit sector, it's likely that many of those 1.4 million students wouldn't go to college at all - which might not be a bad thing, especially if there are good alternatives in vocational schools and community colleges.

The fact that this "research" is funded by Phoenix's parent company and its founder's foundation, of course, rather gives the game away. No, funding does not always buy the results that you want. But given that the authors of this report seem to have gone out of their way to avoid bringing folks who might have a more objective (or even dissenting) view on board, it seems a pretty good bet that this was largely "made to order". I just hope that state legislators (including those in my own state) ignore this bit of nonsense.

Someone Else Sees the Online Education Bubble

I've been blogging for a while (here and here and here, among others) about the problems with the for-profit online higher education sector, and how it shows classic signs of a popping bubble. I remain firmly convinced that this is the case.

Now, apparently, after cheer-leading the "transformative" nature of online education for years, someone at Forbes has finally figured this out as well. I don't necessarily agree with all of his reasoning, but the basic notion - that college is about more than a narrowly-defined "education" in terms of mastering facts and skills, but is an experience - is sound. The money quote:

There’s no college-education ‘bubble’ forming simply because teens go to college with an eye on a fun four years, after which they hope the school they attend will open doors for a good job. Online education only offers learning that the markets don’t desire, and because it does, its presumed merits are greatly oversold. There’s your ‘bubble.’

I'll leave my readers (all three of you) to read the rest.

Higher Education, Public Support, and Inequality

It has become axiomatic that US society is experiencing levels of wealth inequality not seen since the early stages of the 20th century, before the Great Depression. This is worrying a lot of people, none of them apparently policymakers or politicians, whose interest in the subject seems near zero.

Education is often touted as the antidote to inequality, and well it should be. If there is any opportunity for folks from lower socioeconomic to raise their standard of living, it will be through education that enables better jobs, better opportunities, better wages - and better education for their kids. Education feeds on itself - the more education you have, the better your kids' prospects both in school and in life.

Yet at the level of higher education, things have been getting worse, not better. In the early 1970s, about 40% of the top quartile of US households (by wealth) had a college degree; only about 6% of those in the bottom quartile did. Today those figures are over 70% for the top quartile but only 10% of the bottom. The rich are indeed getting richer (and better educated), while we've hardly moved the needle on the bottom end that needs it the most.

Over some - but not all - of that time frame we've seen a drop in public support for higher education, a subject I've commented on before. And while it's been de rigueur to blame universities themselves for the rising cost of education - everything from rock-climbing walls to "posh" dorms to gourmet food has been singled out - the fact remains that, in public universities where the vast majority of Americans earn their college degrees, there has been a massive cost-shift going on. Universities are non-profits; they can't give money away to shareholders, they for the most part don't stockpile it away in rainy day funds, and for all that faculty like to complain about how much administrators are paid your average university VP or president makes a small fraction of what similar positions in industry make. Simply put, if there's less money coming in from one source universities have to find it in another - which generally means tuition.

Now we get confirmation of the effects this has on the inequality equation. One of the strategies that public universities use to try to boost tuition revenue is bringing in more out-of-state students (who generally pay higher tuition rates). But when they do this, evidence shows that minority and low-income enrollment go down. Universities' ability to play the role of socioeconomic equalizer is directly undermined by the strategy of seeking higher-paying, "off-shore" students (out of state or out of the country). And that strategy is brought on in large part by the continual drop in public funds.

The broader argument that the marketplace will provide its own opportunities for the poor has so far been little more than a pipe dream. The great experiment in for-profit universities is coming to a screeching halt (as I've noted here, here, and here among other places), brought down by a combination of bad debt, unscrupulous actors, and short-term profit-seeking. There is little hope (and no evidence) that the marketplace is going to solve this problem.

The first question, of course, is basic: what kind of society do we want to live in? If we want a society with substantial inequalities of wealth, and the problems that go with it (see Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s), we're on the right path. If, on the other hand, we want a more broadly prosperous society - not one that enforces Orwellian equality but one in which there are greater opportunities for everybody (think modern Switzerland, Norway, or Korea), we need to do things differently. And shifting some of the burden of higher education back onto the public ledger is likely to be a part of that. We need to figure out what we want, and then put our money where our values are.

When Foreign Policy Isn't Foreign Policy

Folks who study foreign and defense policy (like my colleague Steve Saideman, who's written a lot of good stuff on the F-35 program) know that much of the time, foreign policy is really domestic policy in disguise. This can cause serious problems for those who want to see defense posturing and arms buildups as Realist responses to perceived international threats, rather than what they are: domestic politics by another name.

The latest case of this phenomenon can be seen here:

Congress wants funds for Abrams tanks Army says doesn't need

If there's one weapons system that's become nearly obsolete in the American arsenal, it's the main battle tank. Developed originally during WWI (but put to limited use), perfected in doctrine by the Germans in WWII, and further refined during the long years of the Cold War when the Fulda Gap was considered the most significant potential battleground in the world, the battle tank is designed for large-scale mechanized warfare over large swaths of territory where defined front lines and control of territory matter. Its last hurrah may well have been the 1991 Desert Storm operation, a classic retake-territory campaign that was so stunningly successful it surprised nearly everyone.

What's clear from this story is that the Abrams isn't a response to an ongoing threat or a tool to meet significant security concerns in the 21st century. It's a government-funded jobs program, pure and simple. And for all the Tea Party talk about shrinking government and all the Ayn Rand/F.A. Hayek calls to get the government out of the economy and let the market do its work, jobs programs that produce weapons still enjoy widespread bipartisan support. Where is the anger and outrage from the so-called fiscal hawks within the Republican party over this? One can only imagine the hue and cry if this were a bill to fund $500,000,000 worth of public school teachers that districts said they didn't need...

It's a fool's errand, of course, to look for consistency on Capitol Hill or to ask politicians to hold logically coherent positions. We expect that from our elected officials. We just need to remember that the next time they come peddling some one-size-fits-all, solution-to-everything dogma. Look at their behavior; it's clear that they themselves don't believe it, so why should we?

Oops! We Take It Back!

One of the often-invoked rules from my childhood was "no backsies!" This was usually said by one child who had traded places with or otherwise given another child something, and didn't want it back. The basic social logic was clear: you took it, you're stuck with it.

The internet has reinforced this rule by providing a space in which stuff is recycled, recirculated, re-tweeted, and archived, such that very little ever actually dies. Because of that, the following attempt by a couple of groups to "take back" what they said probably isn't going to work very well:

Groups Retract Paper That Criticized Faculty Workloads

When this report was first released by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni in March, it caused quite a stir with its main contention that tenure-track faculty teach a lot less today than they did 20 or so years ago. That this argument was made publicly, by an organization representing one side (Trustees) of the classic higher education labor-management divide, immediately set off a round of angry recriminations and blaming. Anti-faculty forces (both within higher education and in the conservative public sphere) were quick to use the report to blame faculty for the skyrocketing cost of higher education. Pro-faculty groups fired back angry responses with varying heat/light ratios.

But then a funny thing happened. Some faculty, being researchers and scholars, dug into the data and the methods of the report. They discovered that the conclusions the authors drew are not in fact supported by the data or the methods. This, in itself, is not that surprising - stretching data to try to fit pre-existing conclusions is practically a literary genre of its own these days. But in this case, the stretch was a few bridges too far, and now the groups who wrote the piece are trying to retract it to save some semblance of credibility.

The damage, of course, has already been done. The next time either the Trustees' group or its partner, Education Sector, release a report on this subject people aren't going to take them very seriously. To his credit, the study's lead author (Andrew Gillen, Education Sector's Director of Research) takes personal responsibility. But most people won't read his statement; they'll see the headline and move on.

There's a cautionary tale here for both academics and those who want to enter into academic policy debates. There's not a lot of room for sloppiness in this arena. You need to bring your A game, or tread very cautiously, because the people looking over your work are very smart and they will find your mistakes. And maybe the next time someone decides to argue a pre-determined truth with a ginned-up study, they'll think twice. At least, we can hope.

Trouble at the University of Phoenix

Phoenix, the granddaddy of the for-profit higher education world, appears to be in trouble with their accrediting body. Given the troubles in the for-profit sector, this is not surprising - but it is a new twist.

Phoenix is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) of the North Central Association - the same accrediting body that oversees Ohio State, the University of Chicago, most of the midwest, and my employer. The fact that Phoenix is accredited by the same organization that accredits many of the nation's finest colleges and universities has long been a secret sore spot for a lot of "traditional" academics - they're forced to take Phoenix seriously even though they don't really want to.

To be clear, the article linked above does not say that Phoenix is about to lose their accreditation. But it does raise a very significant question about the business model of for-profit education and its uneasy relationship with higher education in America. The key section of the story is this:

“Specifically, the review team concluded that the University of Phoenix has insufficient autonomy relative to its parent corporation and sole shareholder, Apollo Group, Inc., to assure that its board of directors can manage the institution, assure the university’s integrity, exercise the board’s fiduciary responsibilities and make decisions necessary to achieve the institution’s mission and successful operation,”

The Apollo Group is essentially a holding company for the University of Phoenix; the university produces 90% of Apollo's revenue, so it is to a large extent a shell around the university operation. This is a common model in the business world, and there's nothing wrong with it in business terms. But by this warning the HLC seems to be suggesting that this model of ownership and control may not be structurally compatible with the standards of American higher education.

It's not hard to see why. Faculty at almost all colleges and universities worry about their administrations putting "the bottom line" above academic quality. But being non-profits run by boards of trustees who have no financial stake in the university, and having no shareholders to answer to, the real structural danger of this is low. Despite images of academic administration being "the dark side," most academic administrators were (and remain) faculty members, and they for the most part don't want to pursue revenue and profit at any cost. There is certainly no structural incentive to do so in traditional universities; presidents and provosts who increase the bottom line at the expense of the quality of the institution don't materially benefit from doing so.

On the other hand, an Apollo Group-like structure does have built-in incentives for this sort of behavior. Apollo (NASDAQ: APOL) is a publicly-traded corporation. When corporations that have to issue quarterly financial statements run into trouble, they will naturally turn to their revenue-producing units to, well, produce more revenue and/or cut costs. If they're like most corporations, the CEO and other top-level leadership have a direct and immediate financial stake in the company's fortunes, both through their compensation packages and through their stock holdings. Imagine a university at which the president's pay depended, every three months, on how the university's bottom line was doing.

This is a serious challenge to for-profit models of higher education. As long as Phoenix and its for-profit brethren were growing and exuded an aura of inevitability, people seemed content to leave well enough alone. Now that things aren't going so well (Phoenix and many of its kin are in the midst of a massive retrenchment), people are starting to look a little more closely. And the questions are proving to be uncomfortable.

Wall Street's answer, of course, would be to do away with the accreditation standards and "let the market decide". But American higher education didn't get to be the global gold standard by playing fast and loose. The accreditation system in place, as frustrating and sometimes hide-bound as it can be, has much to do with American dominance in university education. Scrapping it would indeed be killing the goose that lays golden eggs.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next year - whether Phoenix (the standard-bearer in the for-profit world) can figure out how to insulate its academic operations from its for-profit realities. If they can't square that circle, that may spell the end of the whole experiment. Even if they do manage to hang on, I suspect it will be under much more significant constraints than they have faced in recent years.

Using College as Punishment: What Problem Are We Trying to Solve?

People on both the left and the right (usually at different times) often accuse the federal government of trying to act like a parent, telling "children" (US citizens) what they can and can't do and what's good or not good for them. Terms like "paternalism" and "nanny state" get bandied around a lot, usually intended as insults when one doesn't like what the government is doing.

Sometimes, there is some truth to these accusations. This is particularly true in the realm of crime and punishment, in which there have been (broadly speaking) two warring philosophies for generations: a "reformist" argument and a "punishment/deterrence" argument. The former suggests that, if you want to cut down on crime, you need to reform the conditions in society that contribute to it and help individual criminals reform so they don't continue committing crimes. The latter argues that it is better to prevent crime through deterrence and fear, primarily the fear of punishment.

This argument plays itself out all the time, in all kinds of different contexts. Federal regulations on higher education and financial aid are no exception. Federal law bars the awarding of financial aid to any student convicted of a drug-related offense - presumably as an intended deterrent to students who might otherwise do or get involved with drugs.

The problem is that students who make the mistake of getting involved with drugs in high school can be delayed in going to college, or may not go at all, as a new study has found. Which means that young people who have started down the wrong road are being told, in effect, "we want you to stay away from drugs and crime and be a productive citizen. But we're going to close off one of the main avenues for you to get there. Good luck."

As a policy intended to cut down on drug use and drug-related crime, this is in the long run likely to make things worse, not better. People like to refer to drugs like marijuana as "gateway" drugs, and it's true that involvement with illegal drugs can be a gateway to more crime. But why "punish" people who have taken a step into that gateway by shutting down other options? Doesn't that make it more likely that they will move further into criminal activity? The Feds - who have a terrible track record of late on making rational decisions on higher education - need to rethink this, gather some serious data, and reconsider whether an effort to use federal aid to deter drug use is likely to help or to harm.

Higher Education Bubble Bursting

When the housing bubble burst a few years ago, a lot of folks starting to take a long, hard look at the higher education sector. Like housing, higher ed is mostly financed by borrowing, and the "cheap money" bubble that built up during the housing boom had, by some standards, also produced a "higher education boom". Various wags and talking heads wondered about how long it would be before state and private universities started to go bust, while college administrations have been quietly concerned about the same thing for the past several years.

It turns out that there was a bubble in higher education, and it is bursting - fairly impressively. It's just not where we thought it would be. Traditional universities, while things have been lean for a few years, are doing more or less OK. But the collapse in the for-profit university sector is both spectacular and ongoing. Consider this latest:

For-Profit Backlash: Campuses Close in Milwaukee

The case of Everest College is interesting for the spectacular nature of its failure. But notice how many others are retrenching: Kaplan, Sanford-Brown, and Phoenix, some of the biggest names in for-profit education. If this were the automobile sector, there would be a massive hullabaloo in Congress about "saving American jobs".

As it is, we shouldn't be surprised that the "frothy" part of the higher ed bubble landed in the for-profit arena. Bubbles are enabled by cheap money, but they are driven by people looking to use that cheap money to make a quick buck, usually in some market segment that's not being served. In this case, the for-profits picked on underprepared first-generation college students from poorer families - a market segment largely ignored by "traditional" universities, and one ripe for fleecing servicing.

The thing is, there's a reason why many of these young adults weren't going to college before: they weren't prepared, and they couldn't afford it. Fancy debt accounting doesn't make either of those problems go away - it's just a means of extracting some money from them before they fail, just as complex no-doc balloon loans were a way for banks to make money before people went bust in foreclosure.

In a few years we may look back on much of the current experimentation with for-profit higher education with the same eye that we currently view Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and stories of Wall Street vampire squids. Yes, some companies may actually figure out how to run a university sustainably and still turn a profit. But in the meantime, we'll continue to see implosions and investigations across the country as the for-profit higher-ed bubble continues to deflate.

Civics 101: Whose Debt Is It?

This is one of those blog posts that won't get read by the people who need to read it. But I'm going to write it anyway. Maybe I'll get lucky.

As the political debate around the "debt ceiling" heats up, party tribalists out in the trenches are ratcheting up their rhetoric. Hard-core Republicans are posting various messages about "Obama's debt", just as a few years ago hard-core Democrats were casting aspersions on "Bush's debt". Here's a typical example (taken from my FB feed today):

So let's go back and review our basic civics lessons, shall we?

As I've written before, we invest FAR too much important into the Office of the Presidency. Yes, the President is a powerful position with significant influence, and a bipartisan string of presidents (stretching back to Ronald Reagan at least) have been very effective in organizing and using that power.

That being said, it is Congress that produces and passes the US government budget. Only Congress can levy taxes. Only Congress can authorize the spending of money. Ask Ollie North, Robert McFarland, and their colleagues what happens when you spend government money against Congressional orders - it ain't pretty.

So the debt we have? It's been piling up for some time, under a series of Congresses most of which are largely the same as the one before. Re-election rates run over 80% in the Senate and 90% in the House, so with a few changes on the margin this has largely been the same group of 535 people over the last many years.

It's not "Obama's debt". It's not "Bush's debt". Yes, both Presidents (as well as Clinton and their predecessors) suggested things that have either lowered tax revenues or raised spending, or both. All of those things - the ones that have actually contributed to the debt - were voted on and approved by Congress. Many of them enjoyed widespread popular support. I can guarantee you that the people who "like" pictures like the one above almost certainly supported some of the measures that have contributed to the problem they are now complaining about.

This ongoing demonization of the President when he happens to be from the other party is childish and woefully misinformed. Those who engage in it, however cute they think they are being, only reveal (and reinforce) ignorance. Unfortunately, this dynamic has become a serious impediment to real action, or even real conversation about action.

Anybody who thinks they can "win" such an argument, on FB or in any other forum (Fox News, MSNBC, at a town hall meeting, in the local paper), is deluding themselves and feeding their own ego. If we want any kind of constructive discussion about solving problems - and the debt is a very real and significant problem, although we may differ about the nature of it - people plying these kinds of bumper-sticker zingers need to be summarily ignored. If you want to bolster your own ego and feel clever, knock yourself out. But don't expect either attention or respect from the rest of us.

As much as we love arguments as Americans, they're a lousy way to solve problems. If we really want to solve problems, we need to leave behind these "childish ways" and talk like grown-ups. And that starts by taking the President (of whatever party) off the pedestal of blame or credit we place him on, and dealing with the real world.

A Quick Note on Shared Governance & Cost in Higher Ed

This morning's Chronicle report will, I have no doubt, generate a lot of talk in higher ed circles for a while. The report centers around a working paper by a couple of economists who wanted to look at the impact of the ratio between administrators and faculty on the cost of running a university. Briefly, does having too many administrators drive up the cost of higher ed?

The short answer, according to the paper, is "yes". You can download the paper yourself here; I have, but I haven't read it yet, so I'll refrain from commenting on it until I've read it in detail. The headline claim of an optimal 3:1 (faculty:administrators) ratio is an interesting one, but I'll have to read the analysis to see if it makes sense.

One thing did strike me, however, especially in light of a conversation I had with a faculty colleague about staffing faculty committees. One of the standard conclusions that arguments like this draw is that universities need more "shared governance" - that is, more faculty say in priorities and how resources are spent. As a friend of mine put it, faculty don't hire administrators, administrators hire faculty - which is why we have too many administrators and not enough faculty.

I'm all for more shared governance. I think faculty should have a significant say in how universities are run and what they do with their resources - although in my experience many faculty, even when given the opportunity, decline to participate. Not for nothing is "Service" considered the least interesting part of the standard Teaching/Research/Service promotion & tenure triad - a great many faculty will avoid as much of it as they can.

But here's where things get interesting. If the answer is shared governance, what stands in the way of that? Some administrations certainly do resist sharing power, it's true - but not all. A colleague of mine pointed out that part of the problem may be faculty themselves - in particular, the politics within faculty of different ranks.

In the standard tenure-and-promotion system, assistant professors aspire to tenure & promotion while associates aspire to promotion to full. These processes invariably run through committees of other faculty of higher rank - meaning that faculty on the lower and middle rungs must be careful about what service they take on and how they perform it, lest they annoy or anger some higher-ranking colleague who may one day sit in judgment of their dossier. Only full professors really have the run of the place, because there's not much danger that any of their colleagues will derail their careers.

My colleague and I were discussing staffing committees for program review, but the logic holds for pretty much any committee of significant service. If it's dangerous to put junior and mid-level faculty on committees that might pass judgment on other programs, it is surely equally as dangerous to put them on committees that make decisions about budgets and resource allocations.

So herein lies the rub. We hear lots of cries of "more shared governance!" But if I am not yet a full professor, what is to guarantee that if I participate in that shared governance process I won't tick off some more senior faculty somewhere in ways that come back to bite me? As Sayre's Law reminds us, academic politics are bitter precisely because the stakes are so low.

I don't know that there's an easy solution to this. But I do know that the standard "blame the administration/stick it to the man" narrative that many faculty cling proudly to doesn't tell the whole story. The tenure and promotion system creates a lot of incentive for faculty to avoid precisely the kinds of difficult conversations that real shared governance demands. There aren't nearly enough full professors to carry the load by themselves. If you want better shared governance, therefore, look for ways to protect the faculty willing to give it a try - or else most of them will not.

How's That Revolution in Higher Education Going?

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the for-profit higher education company Kaplan and its decision to close 9 campuses. At the time I suggested that maybe some of the rhetoric we've seen about the for-profit, online education sector "fundamentally changing" higher education was a little overblown.

Now comes news that the Granddaddy of Them All, the University of Phoenix, is in trouble as well:

Apollo Group to Lay Off 800 Employees and Close 115 Locations

There are a couple of important lessons here:

• In this election season, with lots of sound-bite rhetoric floating around, it's important to note that the private sector doesn't always do a better job of producing something. In this case, Phoenix has been in this game for a while. If their product were really better and more efficient than the current system of universities they would be growing, not shrinking. Having to close 115 locations sounds a bit like overreach - certainly not the "efficient allocation of capital" we're supposed to get from for-profit institutions.

• When Phoenix first came out, there was a lot of hoopla about how online education was going to bury the "bricks and mortar" model of education - that it would be radically more cost effective. We have since learned that this was pure fantasy. Online education can be just as expensive as in-person education. Phoenix opened its doors in 1976 and went online in 1989. They've had lots of time (and capital) to make this work.

• This looks more and more like a sector-wide problem. You can explain one company's problems as indicative of issues at that company - bad management, poor decisions, etc. But this trend appears to be hitting the whole for-profit industry - Phoenix, Kaplan, Career Education Corp & others. That's a sign that the business model isn't right.

All of this is not to say that online education is necessarily a good or a bad thing, or that it can't be a useful tool for educating. It does suggest that the radical steps that Phoenix and its kin have taken - pressing on-line education, tacking hard to the 'guide on the side, not sage on the stage' model that gets away from instruction by established experts, emphasizing convenience über alles - have not played out as well as hoped (or feared) in the marketplace.

On this point, free-market pundits are correct: ultimately, the market (which is really just a way of saying "the behavior of a free public") determines outcomes. In this case, the public is speaking pretty clearly in favor of "old-style" education (how many established universities have closed recently?), even where that education is not motivated by profit and continues to enjoy some (if dwindling) level of public financial support.

The College Cost Debate: Stuck in a Rut

The cost of higher education in America has become a national issue - not on par with the debate over jobs or health care, but far more visible than at any time in the past few decades. When there's more discussion about higher education than national defense, you know you've made it to the A list of national policy issues.

Unfortunately, the debate has gotten mired in bifurcated, partisan politics. I'm not referring here to the divide between Democrats and Republicans - neither party has said much that's either coherent or detailed about higher education. The closest that debate has come to coherence was President Obama's sweeping (but largely detail-free) call for broader access to higher education, followed by a Republican charge that he was being "elitist". Don't expect real leadership from either party on this issue.

No, the battle over college costs is being waged inside higher education, between its two most powerful tribes: faculty and administrators. At a time when union representation is fading in industry, both sides seem determined to reinvent campuses along the lines of the battles between the UAW and the Big 3 - Labor and Management, forever at odds, always battling. We're turning back the clock to the 1970s.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the debate over the cost of college, in which each side blames the other. Recently, a commentary article in the Chronicle suggested that part of the problem with college costs was faculty profligacy, which needs to be curtailed. On the other side is this piece blaming administration for the whole mess. It is no surprise that the former article was written by an administrator, the latter by a faculty member.

I wrote on the former piece a few posts ago, suggesting that the administrative position was a little rosy about what faculty politics and faculty governance is likely to accomplish (or not). Today I want to take on the faculty perspective - particularly this nugget from the good professor's commentary:

Reason and data alike suggest that the largest part of the problem is that it is administrators and members of governing boards who have too much influence over how resources are used.

He goes on to argue that, although the "pursuit of self-interest by both faculty and administrators is at work here", "tenure-track faculty members' influence on campus priorities has declined steadily, while the number of nonacademic professional staff has proliferated." He cites statistics about the growth of administrative positions, implying (without evidence) that this growth is entirely a function of the "self-interest" of greedy or self-aggrandizing administrators. He concludes with this: "shared governance is the only natural constraint on the pursuit of self-interest."

The fact that administrative positions have expanded is unarguable. But as I've pointed out before (here,here, and here), there are a multitude of reasons for this expansion, some of which are outside the control of anybody at the university. So the simple "expansion is evidence of greed" model just doesn't hold water - this is a complex system, and attempts to treat it as a white hats/black hats story is both silly and counterproductive.

Then there is the assumption in the good professor's conclusion - that the solution lies in giving power back to the faculty. But faculty, too, have their own self-interests. I've been in that position, and I know well what faculty value - smaller classes, more opportunities to teach new things, more colleagues to broaden both one's own horizons and the opportunities of our students. There's nothing inherently wrong with these things - they are all good for students, which is frequently the justification used. They also tend to reduce the workload of the faculty, which is very much in their self-interest. And - a key point - they add to the cost of the institution.

Turn the budget over entirely to faculty, therefore, and I've no doubt that the number of administrative positions would go down. But if the number of faculty goes up and class size goes down, will this drive down costs? Probably not.

We've reached the point where the "point the finger at the other guy" nature of the debate is effectively blocking out real conversation on the issue. Many faculty do not trust administrators (sometimes with good reason), and many administrators don't value faculty input. In that environment - just as in the American auto industry in the 1970s - it's almost impossible to have a real conversation about how to boost quality and productivity and keep costs in check. That's a complex conversation that needs to be conducted by grown-ups, not tribalists with axes to grind. I hope we can get to that point, before we too start needing government bailouts.

Faculty Governance is Hard!

The question of rising costs in higher education is a perennial one. It's certainly interesting at the broadest level - how many other industries can raise their prices 5%-7% per year for decades and claim "rising costs" as the reason? There are lots of arguments about where those costs come from, some of which I've written about before.

So I read with interest this article in the Chronicle listing suggestions for how to bring those costs under control. Much of the discussion is well-reasoned, and there are a lot of good ideas in it. I want to comment on only one of the author's suggestions - because I think he's missing an important variable.

In his list of suggestions for reining in costs and controlling unchecked expansion, the author includes this:

Share curricular governance. Professors own the curricula and administrators share governance. That's how it is supposed to work. Too often, professors share the curricula—rubber-stamping new courses and degrees—and administrators overlook the governance.

Chairs of curriculum committees should publicize agendas and minutes so that all are aware of proposals and can contest duplicative courses. Better still, faculty senates can use technology so that everyone can view where a proposal stands (as well as arguments for and against it). This is a system that mirrors that of academic journals, informing authors online where an article stands in the review-and-publication process.

We know how to do this, folks.

As a committed democrat (small d) who believes in participation, I like his idea about making agendas, minutes, and curricular proposals public so as to get the broadest possible participation. However, there are a couple of reasons that doing so won't have the cost-saving and expansion-checking effect the author wants:

1) In circumstances of mutual accountability, it's very easy for a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" culture to develop. In an environment in which expansion and empire-building is in the individual's interest (from the faculty member who wants a new course in the field he really likes to the chair who wants to grow her resource base), everybody will at some time or another want approval for their new thing. That makes faculty reluctant to veto others' expansion plans, knowing that others may do the same to them tomorrow. I've seen this at all levels, from faculty committees to statewide governing boards between universities. It is a powerful dynamic, not to be ignored.

2) Using technology to get proposals out there assumes that faculty a) care and b) know enough about the broader curriculum and mission to be able to say something sensible. The latter is, as the author points out in other parts of the article, largely not true - faculty often don't understand the curriculum beyond their own small corner of it. Fixing that problem would require a massive public education campaign at any college or university. The author's blithe assertion that "we know how to do this, folks" isn't true for large swaths of faculty.

Even if the faculty can be brought up to speed, getting them to care enough to go read and comment on proposals is likely a Sisyphean task. In my experience, faculty governance tends to end up in the hands of a few faculty in large part because most faculty really aren't interested and can't bring themselves to pay attention to the minutiae necessary. If I say "they don't care", I'll get berated by faculty who insist, "of course we care!" But that "caring" doesn't translate into time or effort - other things (research, teaching, other forms of professional service) tend to take precedence. As the old saying goes, don't pay attention to what people say - look to what they do. Most faculty (beyond governance geeks like me) just don't want to get involved in this stuff.

I think the author's logic is sound - getting faculty on board the project of checking expansion and reigning in what a former provost of mine called "course inflation" is key. I'm just not that optimistic about the success of such an effort, and anybody who tries should at least know what the obstacles are.