Keynesian Community College

From Inside higher Ed: http://www.insidehighered.com//blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/keynesian-community-college


CONFESSIONS OF A COMMUNITY COLLEGE DEAN
Keynesian Community College
July 30, 2013 - 9:50pm
By
Matt Reed


We are all Keynesians now, for better or worse. At least in the community college world.

When the wheels came off the economy in 2009, enrollment at many community colleges -- including my own -- set records. Parents who had hoped to send Junior off to Valhalla U suddenly couldn’t afford to, and the local community college abruptly made a lot of sense. And others who might have preferred to work couldn’t find the opportunity, and going back to school made more sense than just doing nothing. Put differently, when the Great Recession was in full swing, the opportunity cost of college dropped precipitously.

At the exact same time, the state had to reduce its support of public higher ed in order to reflect lower tax revenues, so we faced double-digit percentage increases in enrollment at the exact same time that we faced double-digit cuts in support. For a few months, we were the darlings of the local news media, since we were basically the only “growth” story in town. The pressure showed up even in small ways; campus work-study jobs that had been hard to fill in normal years were never more popular, mostly because they were the only available jobs in town.

As the recession slowly, slowly, slowly recedes, and the private sector starts to show signs of life, community colleges are seeing enrollments level off or slide. (This piece from Illinois is pretty representative.) State support is starting to return, too, though not at levels of, say, five years ago.  

You’d think this would be a good thing. And in certain ways, it is.  In some states, including my own, increased state support has made it possible to freeze tuition and fees for the coming year. After the rapid increases of the last few years, that’s great news.  

But it comes with an asterisk. Since state support is a much smaller percentage of the budget than it was even six or seven years ago, even a healthy-looking percentage increase isn’t enough to help the college get ahead and invest in improvements when enrollments slip.  

Being the countercyclical balance wheel means veering from one direction to another. It’s hard to plan for, and maintain, the kind of healthy, steady growth that allows for sustained innovation when the two major sources of revenue keep cancelling each other out. Just when you start to get good news on one front, the other one disappoints.

It could be worse. For-profits are much more subject to booms and busts, precisely because they have only a single revenue source.  When enrollments boom, life is good. When they shrink, there’s no buffer.  That’s why some of them are closing abruptly, leaving students in the lurch.  But the fact that someone else has it worse doesn’t make this better.

In my perfect world, the news that enrollments are off from their peak would be a relief. We’d be able to move from all-hands-on-deck to more experimentation and targeted improvement. It would be a chance for us to address some longstanding issues, and to move forward in areas in which quality improvements require investment.  Grants enable some of that, which is terrific, but they’re sporadic and time-limited.  Philanthropy is helpful, too.  And efficiencies that can be gained internally can free up resources, but most community colleges are already running pretty lean at this point.  This is not where you find climbing walls, palatial dorms, or highly paid football coaches.  This is where you find cinderblock construction and crowded tutoring centers.

Keynesianism -- the idea of the public sector investing countercyclically -- has much to be said for it on a macro level.  But it’s hard to appreciate its wisdom on the ground when your momentum keeps getting interrupted by shifts in direction. 


Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/keynesian-community-college#ixzz2aeU66tOc 
Inside Higher Ed 

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Khan Redux

AACC, Khan Academy discuss developmental math

By Matthew Dembicki, Published July 19, 2013

​AACC President Walter Bumphus and Patricia Altmaier of the Khan Academy lead a discussion on using data to better serve students in developmental education.

More photos from the meeting

Photo: Matthew Dembicki

​Leaders from the American Association of Community Collegesand several member colleges met Friday with officials from the Khan Academy to explore potential collaborations, particularly in serving students in developmental math.

The meeting was a follow up to a chatin April at the AACC annual convention between AACC President and CEO Walter Bumphus and Khan Academy Founder and Executive Director Sal Khan, who expressed an interest in working more closely with community colleges. Friday’s meeting was for both organizations to get to know each other better, with discussions touching broad areas, such as improving developmental education, to specific programs geared toward boosting student success, such as Achieving the Dream.

Patricia Altmaier, head of education partnerships at the Kahn Academy, briefly described tools available on the popular free education website, particularly how they are used to help students in developmental math—an area of particular interest for community colleges. She noted how such tools could help two-year colleges reach certain goals outlined in AACC's 21st-Century Initiative report​.

Khan Academy founder likes what he sees in community colleges

Although the Khan Academy is best known for its educational YouTube instructions, Altmaier emphasized that the company’s website includes interactive activities that are “effective” in helping students understand concepts. For example, the site presents a math problem and allows students to work through it, offering hints when a student requests help. Coaches—whether teachers, tutors, parents or the participating students themselves—can then access online tools to see which concepts they’ve mastered and which areas they are struggling with.

“You can have a very targeted intervention,” Altmaier said. “The data really is the catalyst for doing things differently.”

Welcome to the Khan Academy: 3.5 million served each month

At the meeting, officials from the New England Board of Higher Educationhighlighted a demonstration project it is leading for 15 community colleges in New England, including state systems in Connecticut and New Hampshire. The participating colleges will use Khan Academy tools to help students in developmental math.

“We’ll have a lot more to say this coming fall,” said Stafford Peat, a senior consultant on the project, which is funded through a three-year grant from Lumina Foundation.

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Counterpoint - Students Might Not Be 'Academically Adrift' After All, Study Finds

Thanks to Erika Hackman for providing a counterpoint link to "The Sorry State of US Higher Education".

May 20, 2013

Students Might Not Be 'Academically Adrift' After All, Study Finds

By Dan Berrett

Washington

[Updated (5/20/2013, 6:14 a.m.) with comment from Professor Arum.]

Students show substantial gains in learning during college, as measured by a standardized test of critical thinking, according to two studies conducted by the creator of the test.

While perhaps not a direct rebuke to Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the blockbuster 2011 book that documented what its authors argued was meager learning on campuses, the studies, by the Council for Aid to Education, do offer a sunnier counternarrative.

"It's probably a more nuanced story," said Roger Benjamin, the council's president, in an interview on Friday. The results described in reports on the studies, "Does College Matter? Measuring Critical-Thinking Outcomes Using the CLA" and "Three Principle Questions About Critical-Thinking Tests," were presented in an off-the-record session here at the American Enterprise Institute.

In "Does College Matter?," the council found that, at a typical college, students' scores on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or CLA, rose 108 points, on a scale that ranges from about 400 to 1600, between freshman and senior years.

The difference was quantified as a 0.78 "effect size," a metric that describes the difference between the average scores of freshmen and seniors divided by the span in scores one would find within each of those groups. An effect size of 0.78 is conventionally thought to represent a "medium" to "large" impact of a program—in this case, an undergraduate education.

"That's a solid effect in social science," said Mr. Benjamin. "College does have significant effects from freshman to graduating-senior levels."

Lost in Translation

In Academically Adrift, Richard Arum, a professor of sociology and education at New York University, and Josipa Roksa, an associate professor of sociology and education at the University of Virginia, documented much smaller growth in learning over a typical undergraduate career, as measured by the test. They found average score increases on the CLA were 86 points. Their effect size was 0.47 over four years, far smaller than the 0.78 the council found.

There were, however, differences between the council's studies and Mr. Arum and Ms. Roksa's that the council said may explain the differences they measured in growth. Mr. Arum and Ms. Roksa analyzed the CLA scores of about 2,300 freshmen at 24 institutions who entered college in 2005 and were retested at the end of their sophomore year, in 2007. Their longitudinal analysis spanned two years of growth among the same students.

In one of the council's studies, by contrast, freshmen's CLA scores in 2011-12 were measured against those of a group of seniors in the same year, at 158 colleges. In the other, the performance of about 10,000 students was analyzed from 2005 to 2012, yielding an effect size of 0.73, very similar to the council's first study.

The council also found distinctions in the performance of students at different types of institutions. Students at baccalaureate colleges demonstrated the highest average growth on the CLA, followed by those at master's-level colleges and universities. Students at doctoral and research universities showed the lowest average growth.

Mr. Arum said this weekend that other studies, using different data sets and tests, had produced similar results. He agreed that much of the discrepancy between their study and the council's could be attributable to the differing methodologies.

Comparing the scores of a sample of freshmen with a different sample of seniors, for instance, could make gains appear larger than the ones that individual students actually experience, he said, because many students drop out before their senior year.

"Roksa and I strongly prefer identifying growth from observing individual gains using longitudinal data," he wrote in an e-mail from a conference in Italy.

Mr. Benjamin was careful to praise the work behind Academically Adrift as "very important."

But, he added, the authors' results "got translated by some people in politics to say, 'College doesn't matter.'"

"I think," he said, "that's an incorrect interpretation."

The Sorry State of US Higher Ed

Alarming Research Shows the Sorry State of US Higher Ed

Andrew McAfee | July 11, 2013

It's dismaying how easy it is to screw up college.I don't know exactly when, why, or how it happened, but important things are breaking down in the US higher education system. Whether or not this system is in danger of collapsing it feels like it's losing its way, and failing in its mission of developing the citizens and workers we need in the 21st century.

This mission clearly includes getting students to graduate, yet only a bit more than half of all US students enrolled in four-year colleges and universities complete their degrees within six years, and only 29% who start two year degrees finish them within three years.

America is last in graduation rate among 18 countries assessed in 2010 by the OECD. Things used to be better; in the late 1960s, nearly half of all college students got done in four years.Have graduates learned a lot? In too many cases, apparently not. One of the strongest bodies of evidence I've come across showing that students aren't acquiring many academic skills is work done by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa and summarized in their book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses and subsequent research.

Arum, Roksa, and their colleagues tracked more than 2300 students enrolled full time in four-year degree programs at a range of American colleges and universities. Their findings are alarming: 45% of students demonstrate no significant improvement on a written test of critical thinking called the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) after two years of college, and 36% improved not at all after four years. And the average improvement on the test after four years was quite small.

Consider a student who scored at the 50% percentile as a freshman. If he experienced average improvement over four years of college, then went back and took the test again with another group of incoming freshmen, he would score only in the 68th percentile. The CLA is so new that we don't know if these gains were bigger in the past, but previous research using other tests indicates that they were, and that only a few decades ago the average college student learned a great deal between freshman and senior years.These declines in learning and graduation rates come during a time of exploding costs. the Pew Research Center found that the price of a private college education tripled between 1980 and 2010, and that average student loan debt for bachelor's degree holders who had to borrow was more than $23,000 in 2011. This debt is not dischargeable even in bankruptcy, and is certainly not erased if you fail to graduate.

Smart students from affluent homes and elite colleges and universities continue to do really well, but the rest of higher ed is sliding backward. Why is this? As was the case with the sub-prime crisis and subsequent economic meltdown, there is plenty of blame to go around. Many non-elite colleges have seen their enrollments jump in recent decades without similar increases in budgets, so resources per student have declined.

It also seems, though, that colleges in general have stopped asking students to work as hard, and the students have been more than happy to take them up on that offer. Arum, Roksa, and their colleagues document that college students today spend only 9% of their time studying (compared to 51% on "socializing, recreating, and other"), much less than in previous decades, and that only 42% reported having taken a class the previous semester that required them to read at least 40 pages a week and write at least 20 pages total. They write that "The portrayal of higher education emerging from [this research] is one of an institution focused more on social than academic experiences.

Students spend very little time studying, and professors rarely demand much from them in terms of reading and writing."Here's my advice to recent high school grads (and their families): don't be part of this shameful and lazy bargain. Resolve to work hard, take tough classes, and graduate on time. Many changes are necessary in higher ed, most of which will take a great deal of time. But the most effective interventions can start the day you show up on campus. Crack the books, find good teachers, and take the education part of your education seriously.

Arum and Roksa found that at every college studied some students show great improvement on the CLA. In general, these are students who spent more time studying (especially studying alone), took courses with more required reading and writing, and had more demanding faculty. So the blueprint is here. Please take my advice and spend some time this summer thinking about how you'll put it into action.

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