BigEd

Sign of the Times

2012-02-17T15:15:00.000-08:00

Student-loan debt now tops credit-card debt:

http://www.nacba.org/Legislative/StudentLoanDebt.aspx

William E. Brewer, Jr., president, National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, said: "Take it from those of us on the frontline of economic distress in America: This could very well be the
next debt bomb for the U.S. economy. The amount of student borrowing crossed the $100 billion threshold for the first time in 2010 and total outstanding loans exceeded $1 trillion for the first time last year. The reason: Students and workers seeking retraining are borrowing extraordinary amounts of money through federal and private loan programs to help cover the rising cost of college and training. In many cases, parents responsible for the student loans are in or near retirement years and facing repayment demands."

Now Put Your Hands Up

2012-02-16T08:06:00.000-08:00

Why have I not been following these women?

http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/

You don't have to agree with everything they say; I don't. But the only way education as we know it changes, grows and (pleasepleaseplease) gets better is if we're discussing what education could be, and what it needs to be.

In the News

2012-01-30T14:47:00.000-08:00

The changing demographic in homeschoolers in Newsweek.

Are You Ready for Some Football?

2012-01-22T05:16:00.000-08:00

“Big-time sports,” Dr. Clotfelter said, “have a real effect on the way people in universities behave.”

A very interesting article in the New York Times about the effect of sports upon colleges and universities. No surprises here, but corroboration of what many of us suspect; sports programs as they currently exist corrupt higher education.

People Used to Dream About the Future

2012-01-19T14:22:00.000-08:00

Article in Forbes magazine about the changing face of university education. My favorite quote is from William Gibson, "The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed." I tell you, it's a fun time to have education-watching as your hobby.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/billfischer/2012/01/19/disruption-coming-soon-to-a-university-near-you/

Waiting on the World to Change

2012-01-16T13:46:00.000-08:00

So I'm walking this morning, listening to a podcast, and Cathy Davidson says something in her interview which is so profound I pretty much came to a stop in the middle of the walk-path. My first thought was "I will transcribe this and put it on Big Ed!" and my second thought was "If I don't get back to walking, these actor-types jogging behind me will mow me down in their pursuit of skinny-jeans." I finished walking. And then I wrote. I recommend the whole interview, but here's the part which I think sums up some of the questions we need to be asking about education. And for those people asking about college tuition, my source is back in town and I'm no longer up to my hips in book, so it's coming.

Basically from the 1890s onward, we’ve been taught that teaching is about how to learn something from somebody else and how to get a good grade on a standardized test. If Newton or Galileo or Leonardo Da Vinci had heard that the pinnacle of intelligence for people in the 21^st century was how well you filled in bubble-tests on a timed test, and that’s what would get you into law school or medical school or graduate school, they would think the lemmings had gone off the cliff. That’s a very enforced way of measuring and actually teaching a subject; typically, you teach in the model of an apprentice, where someone has a skill and someone is learning it, and they learn about it by reading it and doing it. And then they get corrected, and they do it a little bit different, it’s a very interactive process, it’s very different than the lecture model.

Also, when I talk to corporations—I’ve been on this book tour, and about half the people I talk to are educators and half are in the business world—they always tell me, in this job market, they can hire the very, very, very best students. And it takes them about one to two years to get the very best students to realize, “There’s no teacher giving me an A, there’s no timed test, there’s no one answer. I have to have some initiative in the workplace. If I don’t know something, I can’t fake it; I have to find someone who does know it and work together to solve a problem.” That’s a really different way of thinking about the workplace, but that’s the workplace of the present. We’re doing a great job of educating our students for the 20^th century; the workplace has changed far more radically than our educational institutions. And that, to me is a tragedy. We’re not doing a good job of preparing our students for their future; we’re doing a good job preparing them for our past.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

2011-11-23T10:34:00.000-08:00

Still waiting on my university insider, not to mention the time to write.

I'm humbled that anyone offered to publish a book of mine but book rewrites are vile. Vile, I tell you.

But in the meanwhile, here's a link to a story in the New York Times about the dwindling power of a college degree:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/magazine/changing-rules-for-success.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all?src=tp

Mark my words; post-secondary education is about ready to shift. And it's going to be interesting to watch.

Free-Fallin'

2011-10-28T21:57:00.000-07:00

Still waiting to talk to my college insider, but here's something to note on the post-secondary front...

Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T12:23:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs gave the commencement speech at Stanford University on June 12, 2005. The entire speech is worth reading, and rereading, but because this is a blog dedicated to thinking about what education should ultimately provide, I've chosen to excerpt.

Thank you for everything, Mr. Jobs.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Money, Get Back

2011-09-30T16:12:00.000-07:00

I don’t want to brag but I’m pretty adept at online research. If the information exists out there, through a combination of guile, mulishness and lack of anything better to do, I will track it down. It was in this spirit of confidence that I set off to answer the question “Why does it cost so damn much to create a college education?” It seemed a reasonable question. How hard would this be? Someone certainly knows the answer to this. It must have been someone’s PhD dissertation. Perhaps there would be a pie-chart.

I like pie-charts.

I read, and I read, and I read some more. I sauntered, strolled, trudged, limped and skated through several hundred pages of websites and reference links. Let me save you some wear and tear on the old mental footwear; the answer exists, but not really. Oh, there are tantalizing hints (All of the following are thanks to Higher Education? By Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus):

1. Between 1976 and 2007, the ratio of college students to administrators has basically doubled. And administrators are not faculty, nor are they support staff like plumbers and groundskeepers. Administrators are admissions officers and assistant deans. People like that.

2. In constant-value dollars, the salaries of most of the college presidents examined by Hacker and Dreifus more than doubled from 1992 to 2008. A dozen presidents were paid more than a million dollars in 2008.

3. The average pay for full professors in 2008-9 was $108,749. As a comparison, salaried lawyers averaged $91,052.

4. Eric Dexheimer of the Austin-American Statesman calculated that varsity sports at all colleges together run a deficit of $3.6 billion. Of the 618 colleges and universities with football teams, only about forty earn more than they spend. Where do the other five-hundred-plus athletic departments get their operating funds?

But are impressive salaries and really expensive sports programs where all this money is going? And if so, what percentage is going where? I’ll spoil the surprise; I spent hours searching every conceivable variation of Why does tuition cost as much as it does? All the searches led me to web pages written by people outside of the university world, who were fruitlessly wondering the same thing.

This is probably not an oversight. If a school reveals exactly how it spends its money, people might think the school’s administrators want their opinion about how to spend its money. This is especially true if you’re a parent and part of that money used to be your money. After my first blog, one person wrote in to suggest she found nothing wrong with investing funds toward improving squalid dorms. And I agree with her. But someone else reading this might disagree. And someone else might have an objection to installing a climbing wall in the gym or building a new science lab or hiring an Assistant Dean for Quality of Life. The next thing you know, the university is spending all its time defending how they spend their money, at which point they consider hiring a Mediator of Financial Options at $300K a year.

The more I looked for simple answers about spending ratios and other financial concerns, the less clear things became. Apparently, from the perspective of a post-secondary administrator, a little fog improves the view.

I did, however, find an intriguing white paper sent out by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, noting the first issue for most people thinking about college was cost. They noted

Most believe that the cost of college has been rising and continues to rise, and that the rate of increase is outpacing that of other costs.

I would posit they believe this because it is true.

The paper goes on to say that parents complain most when “...understanding is low, when suspicion (of unnecessary expenditures) is high, and they become resigned to limited college options and that the quality level of education they want for their children may be out of reach.”

It’s like they were at the last dinner party I attended. I can practically taste the tapenade.

And what is the NAICU’s response to this? They advocate for a system of transparency which will... “Provide assurance and evidence that tuition and other college costs are being spent predominantly on providing a quality education and on ensuring student success after graduation. This will increase understanding and reduce suspicion.”

Excellent. Anything else? They also promoted a demonstration of value, because “...Parents and students most prominently (but not exclusively) want to understand the relationship between the education received and preparation for a successful career and life. This should provide more reasons to accept the need for a college education in a positive way, and in a manner that demonstrates the special value offered by independent colleges and universities.”

Perhaps they could create brand loyalty to their particular variety of education by explaining why it is they need over $160,000 to create a graduate in Communications, who then feels very lucky to get a job making $31,000 a year.

But let’s commend the NAICU on publishing a white-paper which is almost coherent, possibly a first. Yes, the word methodology is bandied about and they have a worrisome habit of putting quotation marks around words which should just be able to stand on their own, like “Elitism,” “Transparency” and “Therefore,” but let’s just chalk that up to an excess of group input. This paper was published three years and one month ago. Since then, armed with the encouragement of their PAC and the cheers of focus groups in four major American cities, many independent colleges and universities entered an age of clarity and lucidity, and now we all know why we pay so much damn money for college!

Well, if they have, they’re keeping their lucidity under a rock. Hours after I started, I finally stumbled on the phrase which opens the door to how universities spend their money:

Budgeted tuition and student charges.

Of course. I feel so foolish not trying that first. I suspect this phrase serves the double purpose of the information being technically available to any parent who wades deeply enough into the website while also being nearly impossible to find unless you already know what to look for. It’s like Rumplestiltskin with a second mortgage. And after staring at a few of these budgeting pages, I’m here to tell you that you can tell somebody a whole bunch of stuff and still arrange to tell them nothing at all.

And I have yet to find a pie-chart.

Next time, I read a spread sheet. Spontaneous bleeding might ensue. And I talk to Dr. Throat, an insider who might actually know what I’m talking about.

You're An Education in Yourself

2011-09-26T12:50:00.000-07:00

If you haven't seen this before and have about ten minutes, you might want to watch it. And then you might want to ask yourself, "When do we start taking the same critical look at post-secondary education?"

School's Out Forever

2011-09-20T12:30:00.000-07:00

Anyone who reads my stuff knows I’m more of a word-person than a numbers person. Having said that, let’s look at a few statistics:

In 2003, the annual tuition at Northwestern University was $28,000. That year, $28,000 represented 53% of the median US family income. Today, one year’s tuition at Northwestern is $40,223 and the estimated “cost of attendance” is north of $56,000. Today's median family income is $48,250 or about 83 % of the annual tuition cost. That’s just tuition. If you actually want your student to eat and sleep as well as attend classes, you’ll need about 15% more than the median disposable income. At the current rate, Northwestern’s tuition will cost nearly double the median family income by 2048. In other words, it will take two years’ employment to pay for one year of school. Again, that’s just tuition. If you figure the total cost of education, we’ll cross over the two-times mark in the 2020’s. (Thank you, Andrew Ferguson and Crazy U).
Retirement savings have lost approximately of two trillion dollars since 2007.
The University of California Board of Regents is currently debating a budget which would increase the tuition by 16% for the 2015-16 year.
The average student loan debt upon graduation was $24,000 in 2009, up 6% from the previous year. The total student loan debt in January 2009 was about 11 billion dollars. In March of 2010 it reached 36 billion. That’s a jump of three times the debt load in fifteen months. (Source: Student Loan Corporation).
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates ages 20-24 was 10.7% in August, more than double the rate for those 25 and older who have a bachelor’s degree.

Enough numbers. We get the point. The current post-secondary educational model in the

United States

may not be completely insane but it’s certainly not wearing its cheese fully on the old cracker. Many parents pay breathtaking amounts of money to help put their children through college; the rest of the education is paid for by the students through jobs or loans. Upon graduation, their loan-shackled children enter a job market where there aren’t enough jobs because, among other reasons, the people currently in those jobs cannot move up to create a vacancy, because the people in the generations above them are still working because they can’t afford to retire because their retirement fund was decimated and they’ve got to put their kids through college and probably provide a place for them to live when they graduate.

Well sure, someone just thought, college graduates may be going through a difficult time now but the economy will turn around and when it does we won’t quibble over all that lovely money the universities demanded of us, to educate our children, right? Because it costs over a hundred thousand dollars to create a really smart college graduate, right? Money equals success, right? By that logic, since we’ve never spent more on our students, we should be creating the finest college students ever. Right?

Um...

A few more statistics:

Only 40% of full-time college students graduate in four years.
Over the past fifty years, self-reported weekly studying time has dropped by nearly 50%.
In 2010, about 44 percent of all letter grades issued were A’s compared to about 15% in 1960 when the most common grade, at 35%, was a C. That’s a three-fold increase in As over Cs. Where did all these A’s come from? Have we gotten three times smarter, or are these grades skewed?

Take a look at this interesting chart. If you’re not into charts, I’ll tell you what caught my attention: Since 1970, the total number of Ds and Fs has hovered at around 10% during which time the third-ranked grade, A, shot past B and C to be the most prevalent grade issued by 2000. And As continue to climb in popularity. Some people might argue that the inflation of A’s over C’s might be a function of the baby-boomers taking over higher education. Others might suggest that the high expectations placed upon college graduates encouraged them to work harder. My sense is that the “gentleman’s C” has been replaced by the “whiners’ A” and that, increasingly, grades are as meaningless as shoe size when it comes to measuring true qualifications.

Hey, I’m not against a college education. Far from it. What I am against is the college machine or as I will hereafter refer to it, Big Ed. But I do understand how things got out of hand. A university is a business, even if they don’t like to think of themselves that way. In the early eighties, when the boomers were finished getting their college educations, the schools saw a drop in demand -- demographics and all -- so they started to rebrand themselves to appeal to this new smaller population, to Generation X. “We’re the university with the new...science buildings! Dorms! Stadium! Sky boxes for everyone!” And the market approved. And it was good.

Then the Boomer’s children started arriving and they were very beloved of their parents. People who are beloved come to expect things to be nice. People who were doted on in childhood, driven a mile to Cross-Country practice, aren’t going to accept spending four years someplace where they aren’t comfortable and emotionally supported. We began to see a Vice-President of Student Success, a Residential Communications Coordinator, a Coordinator of Learning Immersion Experiences, a Director of Intramural Athletics. And a sushi chef. The next thing you know, it takes two hundred thousand dollars to have a proper college experience. But hey, cheer up. At least you know they’ll graduate with an A average.

A friend’s daughter is an outgoing girl and an indifferent student. Because she is sufficiently athletic and plays a sought-after position on her team, she got into the school of her choice, which was mostly her choice because she likes their athletics program and wanted to be able to root for them. Her grades are fine. Then again, everyone’s grades are now fine. See above. She’s certainly not studying. Last year, she got through Physics by buying the notes and tests from a student from a previous year. Her logic is that she’ll never need Physics again, so why should anybody care? Her goal is to work in PR for a sports/fashion company and spend the rest of her life saying “Rah!” for a living. Since her family has taken out federally-backed loans for her education, I feel as if I have a cent or two invested in her education and I’m here to say this is a waste of my money. I don’t begrudge the girl an education. I do begrudge her a 160 thousand dollar apartment. At my most cynical, I start to think for some people, college is just a place to park for several years so they’re not pestering us for a job just yet. It’s become day-care with a dorm key, a stadium and a Coordinator of Learning Immersion Experiences. And, yes, a sushi chef.

After almost two years of looking at elementary and secondary education for my book, I’d gotten used to the idea that everyone is thinking about how to make teaching -- and learning -- smarter. We might not agree on what “smarter” means, but we’re arguing about standardized testing, smaller versus larger classes, sex-segregation for math classes, combined-grade classes, home-schooling, and so much more. Everything is open for debate. And then we see them graduate from high school and our options become:

· Pay a lot of money to a full-time college

· Two years in community college (if you can get your classes)

· Do something else

Why aren’t we talking about smaller, more nimble schools? Why was it only the skeevy and borderline-criminal for-profit colleges who tapped in to the idea that people aren’t always available during the day, eager to start a class but only in September or January? Why are there so few programs for students who might be ready to start some college classes after middle school? Does the fact that only 40% finish in four years mean that a four-year college no longer makes sense? Does any of what is accepted in upper-education make sense? Why is there an assumption that education has to modify and expand in reaction to this seismically-shifting economy, but only through the twelfth grade? For the first time last week, I heard someone talk about apprenticeship as a possible solution to the skills gap in the

and I nearly cheered out loud.

I can only speak for myself, but I’m interested in educating my child to view learning as something which happens every time she looks around, as something which will need to be created, and re-created, and could come from anyone at any time. With any luck, with that kind of schooling, she’ll be able to pay for her own sushi chef.

Next time, where your college tuition goes in 2011.