Things to come

At last week’s university convocation the charges for the year where laid out.  The priorities for the 2010-11 academic year are increasing graduation rates and grant support. On a similar vein the nation’s politicos are pushing to increase graduation rates based on the presumed increased need for people with college degrees over the next 10-15 years.  The logic appears to be that by the 2020s almost no one in the US will make anything or do any physical labor and we will all be in the knowledge business.

I am somewhat skeptical of this.  As a society, we don’t appear to have realized yet that knowledge is fungible.  Of course those working in the pharmaceutical industry recognize this already.  The flat out replacement to a vertically integrated economy with monocultural knowledge economy has the potential to do the same thing for this country as happens in ecological monocultures.  Assault by a single contagion can bring down an entire monoculture ecosystem.  The closer we get to a pure knowledge economy the greater the peril we put our future in.

Aside from the idea that we will all be knowledge workers in another decade I am also concerned that in all the talk about granting more degrees and increasing graduation rates no speaker mentions educational quality.  When the politicians and the university administration tell faculty that the two things they care most about are the graduation rate and external funding many faculty will listen to the demands of the student evaluation and let the grade float up to where all those paying the bills are happy.

When the knowledge bubble deflates, in part because the knowledge is not there, there will be tearing of hair and a search for someone to blame.  So, in another ten years when the congressional hearings begin, someone please point out that we dug the holes our leaders demanded we dig.

T.S. Hall

More Miscellany

In today’s installment of my pre-semester desk cleaning of articles that looked like blog prompts we find a couple of cases of post graduation evaluations.

The first is actually about sociologists, but could apply to any of us.  According to the article in Inside Higher Ed, among the 2005 graduates in sociology 70 percent were satisfied with their major, and by 2009 only 40 percent of the same group was were satisfied.  Such satisfaction loses can result from many factors including poor job prospects that make one question the value of the degree.  From my minimal experience, sociology collects its share of premed types, so they have something in common with us chemistry folks.  Not getting into medical school could account for some of the satisfaction gap.  Particularly when one recognizes that very many of these graduates were unsatisfied by the level of career advising and graduate school advising.  

Many of our own departments are guilty of not paying enough attention to student career development.  Many of our programs are not flexible enough to change with the needs of the graduate schools and employers of our products.  With increasing attention to outcomes and the value of degrees we would be well served to consider the value of career development within departments.

The second article is from the NY Times.  It is a story about public institutions of higher education in New York City giving detailed reports to the local schools of who needed remedial courses when they got to college.  At a time when nearly every high school graduate is being pushed to college it would be a useful service to provide such information to our feeder schools.  Linked to standardized test scores and performance evaluations, such post graduation performance review could help high schools get past memorizing the material for the test and don’t worry about long-term education.

As I have written before, our primary product is our graduates.  Preparing them for the next steps in their careers should be a priority.

T.S. Hall

Prompt Miscellany

The blog prompts are starting to pile up, so let's clear a few from the list.

The high school in Mount Olive, New Jersey has declared itself a D-free zone.  On the logic that a D is really a failure, the school will only give A’s, B’s C’s and F’s.  To this logic I quote from Matthew B. Crawford’s book, “Shop Class as Soulcraft.”

Pedagogically, you might want to impress on a student the miserable state of his mind.  You might want to improve the students by first crushing him, as then you can recruit his pride to the love of learning.  You might want to reveal to him the chasm separating his level of understanding from the thinkers of the ages.  You do this not out of malice, but because you sense rare possibilities in him, and take your task to be that of cultivating in the young man or woman a taste for the most difficult studies.  Such studies are likely to embolden him against timid conventionality, and humble him against the self-satisfaction of the age, which he wears on his face.  These are the pedagogical uses of the “D.”

What’s a dedicated slacker to do?  Well, if figuring out if it is worth going to class taxes your brain a new website -- The Should I Skip Class Today? Calculator offers the solution.   Of course if you need a website to figure out if you should go to class, you should probably just go.

Of course if you have been skipping class pretty often, Ultrinsic is the new off campus betting parlor for academia.  Students can bet on their grades in individual courses or the semester GPA.  They can even buy grade insurance against receiving a lower grade than they bet on.  Apparently, education is not it’s own reward, and it takes too long to reap the benefit.  Today’s students need the nearer-term payback of a cash payday for grades.  Of course if you get the insurance maybe you don’t need the grades.

I wonder how not having a D option would effect Ultrinsic's business model.

T.S. Hall

An the Emmy Goes To

Last year, I reviewed script for an episode of the television series "Understanding Chemistry in Our World".  I also portrayed a talking head in the episode.  Well, the show has won an Emmy for Best Instructional Series, and about ninety of us get recognized as part of the team.  The Emmy statuette will look nice on top of my pile of questionable student evaluations.

T.S. Hall

Two weeks to the new year

One of my research students, BP, just dumped 200mL of silicone oil into the sink thinking that it was "cloudy water".  He did not even notice that it floated on top of the water in the sink.  It was only when I asked him why the oil bath reaction setup was missing the oil that he even knew he did anything wrong.  Perhaps, I should rephrase that since the he indicated that he doesn't think he did anything wrong.  From the look on his face he is quite puzzled by my cursing, which I generally don't do in front of students.  This is a student who I can't trust to do anything without my standing over him.  Several times I concluded that I might as well do the work myself, for the sake of the equipment, the environment, my budget, and everyone's safety, but I have continued to try to teach him.  To make matters worse, this student wants to teach chemistry in a high school setting.

BP has offered to leave the group.  To which I thought, "Gee thanks BP, but do you think you could clean up the mess you made before you go."  But then my conscience got me, which is why I am writing this rather than wishing young BP good riddance.

I see my job as educating, and while I have expressed disdain for those "students" who don't want to an education, I feel an obligation to those who actually want to learn.  The problem here is that I am not sure if BP can.  Here he is ready to graduate, as soon as he get his research credit, and he can't balance equations, calculate limiting reagents, differentiate silicone oil from water, etc.  He has been failed by the system that has allowed him to get this far.  And when he graduates and starts teaching chemistry he will fail a new generation of students.  If I let BP go to another lab my laboratory life will be easier, and I will feel that I failed as an educator.

With two weeks until the new academic year begins I find myself wondering how I can face another class of students when my goal is to prepare them to become contributing members of society and the new purpose of higher education is to provide degrees to as many students as possible in six years or less.  At least that's what the public and the politicians are telling me.  My friends and colleagues have been telling me for years that I should just teach my classes and seek positive affirmation in those students who are successful and in my research.  For the vast majority of students who don't care my peers suggest not wasting energy on them.  I have never been able to do this.  All I know is that with two weeks until classes start, I should not be wondering if I really belong in modern higher education.

T.S. Hall

Leisure College

According to the new "Leisure College, USA" study by the American Enterprise Institute, college students today spend only about fourteen hours per week studying, as opposed to twenty-four hours fifty years ago.  In case you forgot, the recommended number of hours of studying is thirty hours per week.

Looking at the usual suspects for decreased study time, the authors are able to discount a higher percentage of students working, gender demographics, differences in types of institutions (although I did notice that MCU students study the least) and improvements in teaching and information technology.  In the end they express concern that the decreasing level of rigor of college education connected to pressures related to the change to a student as customer mentality are to blame.

One factor that was not mentioned was college as lifestyle.  Look at every movie and television show about college.  In them college is publicly and/or parentally funded time of parties and irresponsibility.  Learning is something that gets in the way of these activities.  Students vote with their choice of college and their course/faculty evaluations.  Faculty and colleges that try to fight the trend only hurt themselves.  As stated in the report;

We are hard-pressed to name any reliable, noninternal reward that instructors receive for maintaining high standards—and the penalties for doing so are clear.

I am not sure if there is a way to turn back the clock on this issue.  Students have told me that because it is grades that matter to them they must avoid faculty who maintain high standards.  One must wonder what an educator dedicated to the mission of higher education is to do.

T.S. Hall

Piling on For-Profits

In the slow news time of August we have been treated to a series of reports of increased attention to community colleges and for-profit higher education on the grounds that the public is being ripped off.  The main charges against the for-profits are of enticing the public to sign up for student loans for high priced degrees (higher than the underfunded public sector) that are never finished or if they are, the career pay is not commiserate with the degree costs.  Students default on loans, hurting both the graduate and the public who guarrenteed the loans.

It appears that a large part of the problem many in Congress and in the public have with for-profit education is that it is capitalist.  In my duties as Devil's Advocate I have to point out that it is a bit ridiculous of us to get outraged about for-profit publicly traded companies doing everything legally allowed to maximize profit for their shareholders.  That's what you wanted when you were demanding a business model and saying that the private sector could do it better.  In defunding public education we are going back to the days of first century of this nation when most education was private and we had a pretty clear class system.  

While I do have my doubts about the ethics of some of the business models I have witnessed, I can't stand with the tar-and-feather crowd in the current instance of lumping all for-profits together as scheming evil-doers out to bilk students and the public out of their hard earned dollars.  As the pendlum swings we start by deciding that some previously public activity is costing more than we would like to pay.  The public then complains about inefficiency and "waste, fraud, and abuse" by public employees.  Then we complain that the public entity should be run more like a business.  Then we start turning it over to private business, followed by the complaints of "waste, fraud, and abuse" in the private sector, particularly that someone is making profit from something we see as a fundamental right.  In the end we try to close excess profit loopholes.  Eventually we notice that the costs really don't change that much from when we started and the quality of work is about the same, so we move to the next thing of outrage.

I can't defend the most outrageous money making conduct of some for-profits, but I can't find fault with the majority trying to be for-profits.  The common cause of outrage appears to be anyone making a good living at something the public sees as a right.  (Right to health care: doctors and pharmaceutical companies make too much money.  Right to higher education: faculty are paid too much and have too generous benefits, textbooks cost too much, organic is too hard.)  If freedom isn't free, neither are our other rights.  Our leaders need to remind us of this, but our elected officials only give voice to our childish demands for something for nothing.  If you don't want to pay taxes for public education, you will pay for private non-profit and for-profit education, as least until the public stops supporting education at all.  This may well bring us full circle back to the class systems of the founders.

Be it defense contractors or education businesses we must remember, caveat emptor.  It's what capitalism is all about.

And let's not forget that nobody is really looking at the value of non-profit degrees.  Not the earning power but the ability to generate value for a business or the community that the degree holder gained with the degree.

T.S. Hall