No frills? We grew up in the no frills industry: Pennsylvania's Proposal for a Stripped-down 4 year College

So PA's State Board of Education has suggested creating a "no-frills" four-year college - no dorms, no sports, gyms or other amenities. A no-brainer in a state where it's exceedingly expensive to earn a college degree (and student indebtedness is sky high, and post-baccalaureate salaries are proportionately low), or even in general for that matter and it appears the proposal has been well received. I applaud the model. I damn well should, what with my having been living and working it for the past three years at Peirce. I am amazed at the extent to which preliminary description resembles nothing so much as Peirce: accelerated, year-round, no-frills, low cost four-year programs. At around $1400 per 3-credit class at the time of writing, maybe Peirce fails to count as low cost in terms of cost to the student. (We surely are not competing with the ~$100 per credit hour community college territory.) But the cost from a fully loaded public finance perspective, given that Peirce receives essentially no public support beyond the financial aid its students receives and had what I believe is a very modest default rate, is a regular steal relative to the alternatives, I 'd wager to guess.

Why not just let community colleges offer four-year degrees like Florida does? Well, that may well have to do with the fact that community colleges have a pretty bad track record in terms of many relevant outcomes - persistence, retention, graduation, baccalaureate completion, etc. Seeing how a no-frills four year system is unlikely to be a bastion of the best and brightest, such a system seems likely to draw from more or less the same candidate pool as community colleges and to run up against the same struggles and disappointments as well. Maybe PAs community colleges are collectively sufficiently flawed as to be unfit to form the basis for a no-frill four-year system, I don't know. (They are insufficiently geographically diffuse to serve as well as we should expect, either in their current capacity or that proposed. That much is clear).

What is crystal clear is that this no-frills, four-year (or as I've come to call it, NiFFY, because it makes me think of the jackknife niffy that haunts the children's book classic The Ice Cream Cone Coot) spells increased competition for Peirce. The tuition point at which a state-supported NiFFY is likely to emerge is going to be tough to beat, but its likely to bring all the community college baggage, and while it'll be cheap to students, its full cost to all constituencies may not be such a bargain, frills or no.

"Withitness" and a Renewed Sense of Classroom Possibility

I spent some time in Max's kindergarten classroom this morning. Fun, inspiring and impressive stuff. I could feel it coming together for many of the kids as it happened: 7+7=14, 7+6=13, 7+5=12, the power of doubles. The sound of things clicking was all but audible.

Ms. Silver has mad skillz: eyes in the back of her head, ability to seamlessly redirect, iron-fist-in-a-velvet-glove command of the room. I really don't like Malcolm Gladwell (trite, I'd rather be interesting than right) and I especially didn't like his article in the New Yorker about teaching and quarterbacking, but watching Ms. Silver was like a live demonstration of the "withitness" he cites.

All the usual activities were in play too: group activity (doing their daily "survey" - very scientific [and cute]) precipitates individual work; representatives identified to share their individual solutions; representatives in turn get to sit on the big chair, show & discuss their solutions, and call on students who have questions about it (and there were questions from the audience, and they all raised their respective hands, and the share-ers all called on the students in a very teacher-like way ["yes, Rachel?"]). The rank enthusiasm and the undivided attention were jaw-dropping. My own sense of possibility for my classroom have been nicely recalibrated. Thanks for that, Ms. Silver!

I was useless as a volunteer but I had a ball. The low point of my visit: before we started some of the kids were giving me a guided tour of the self portraits they'd done that were recently hung in the classroom. Next to each was an inventory of attributes (eyes- brown, etc.) as well as a feature that "makes me special". Max noted (yikes!) that his "light skin makes him special". In his defense, he is pale as a ghost and it is noteworthy, but boy did I cringe when I read that.

Stanley Fish, the "Last Professor" and the Overprofessor

[www.toothpastefordinner.com]
Why would one argue that inutility is an essential feature of authentic education? After reading Stanley Fish's The Last Professor, which premises itself on just such an argument, I must confess that I still have no idea.

You'll pardon me if Stanley Fish's talk of the Last Professor gives me a chuckle by bringing to mind Nietzsche's Zarathustra. I for one welcome the rise of OverProfessor. ProfessorMan is something which ought to be overcome:

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome [professor]man? What is the ape to [professor]man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And [professor]man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment…

Fish maintains that true higher education is "distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world". To the extent that he uses this principle as the basis for railing against proselytizing from the podium (which he surely and rightly does) I'm all in favor, but on its face it surely seems difficult to be enthusiastic about educational inutility. If for Bateson information is the difference that makes a difference, Fish's higher ed is apparently the difference that makes none. Swell. Sign me up (Heck, I'm already on board against my will: I often feel my teaching is the difference that makes none anyway, in spite of my practical subject matter and best efforts to the contrary).

What Fish suggests is doing deontology one better. If education is consequence free, it must be awfully hard to do a bad job (or even to know that you've done so). OK, I'm sparring a straw man, I know. On to meatier matters.

Other Fish premises:

1. The Humanities face inevitable marginalization (can't even call it a crisis, as this implies the possibility of remedy)
   
2. Much of this marginalization has already transpired: "Except in a few private wealthy universities (functioning almost as museums), the splendid and supported irrelevance of humanist inquiry for its own sake is already a thing of the past.
3. The corporatization of higher ed is to blame

Regarding 1 & 2: Is Amherst's, Middlebury's, Swarthmore's stock really falling? Do we have reason to expect it will? (I don't know - I'm asking, but I'm also skeptical.)

Regarding 3: Is corporatization really changing the humanities' historical bastions or, rather, is it changing and broadening higher education largely at its margins? Again, asking, but also skeptical on the former.

I was surprised and delighted to see Fish (by way of Frank Donoghue) indict my own institution, little ol' Peirce College, as the locus of the beginning of the end:

How has this happened? According to Donoghue, it’s been happening for a long time, at least since 1891, when Andrew Carnegie congratulated the graduates of the Pierce (sic) College of Business for being “ fully occupied in obtaining a knowledge of shorthand and typewriting” rather than wasting time “upon dead languages.”

So yeah, shorthand and typewriting fail to inspire in 2K9, but what if we replace them with, say, computer networking and accounting?

I'll complain further about Fish's Last Professor, in particular his false dichotomies, in part 2.

My Teaching-related Screencasts

I Stand Before You Today to Apologize: Nauseatingly Excellent Kaplan Ad

Saw the following (during SNL I think) and just about
fell out of my chair:



Maybe I made my nightcap stiffer than usual but this ad quite made me want to leap up and enroll at Kaplan University. Of course it occurs now that the ad is not so much a compelling argument for Kaplan University (whatever the hell that is, although the Washington Post is now more Kaplan than it is Washington Post, I know) as it is a compelling potshot at higher education generally.

The system does fail far too many. In particular the traditional system almost unswervingly fails to help the marginal students appearing in growing numbers in its classrooms. I''m increasingly concerned that students who would in fact find surer, less costly paths to economic well being through, say, the trades are increasingly coming to see a bachelor's degree as the only legitimate means to success. And while we need now more than ever before anyone capable of getting a bachelor's degree and putting it to productive use to do so, we're setting both growing numbers of degree seekers and the system itself up for failure by taking all comers and by holding a bachelor's degree up as the one and only path to socioeconomic well being.

Some quotes of note:
"It's time to learn how you learn so we can teach you better." Hear hear, although if we've not yet learned how students learn, it's surely not for a lack of lots and lots of brilliant folks' tirelessness to that end, and it's surely no trivial matter to learn.

"It's time a university adapted to you rather than you adapting to it." This makes me a bit queasy. First, in my experience this is just as likely as anything to mean that Kaplan has lowered its expectation about preparedness down to where its students find themselves rather than expecting its students to exhibit any given level of preparation. Singling Kaplan out here is unfair - its happening all around. And the problem is not an absence of admissions standards (I'm all for open enrollment), it's the pressure that open enrollment, especially together with the profit motive, puts on the expectations of admitted students. I fear the Kaplans are not only taking on the unready/unwilling/unable, they and those they admit are oblivious to the fact.

Community colleges are in crisis because in keeping with their missions they take all comers, and they do an astonishingly poor job graduating their students. Kaplan and the rest of the for-profits are on the whole offering much better retention and graduation rates. My great fear and strong suspicion, though, is that for-profits like Kaplan are solving this problem by lowering their expectations of student accomplishment until most students can manage to graduate. Expecting less ==> graduating more. It needn't be willful.

This one is good too, although the pandering is more covert and cloying:



"What if you could get your degree -- to develop your talent -- no matter who you are or where you are." This just infuriates me. I know I've squandered some (all?) of my bleeding heart educator cred on this issue, but the college that gets you your degree no matter who you are or, implicitly, what measure of wherewithal you present, gets you nothing. Say it with me: ability matters; ability varies widely; ability is largely determined before birth. I'm no more pleased about it than you, but I'm certain that to made headway in education we must come to terms with this unjust reality.

Let's educate everyone who is capable of benefiting. Let's educate them whether they yet know they want to be educated or not. Let's educate them whether they can afford it, let's educate them whether they've used drugs or been in prison, irrespective of track records and errant pasts. And if some accident of their birth - where or to whom they were born, their lot in life - stands to inhibit then let's work tirelessly to overcome. But lets once and for all stop pretending, for our sakes and for those wronged in so doing, that everyone is capable of benefiting from a college education.