The Huffington Post is asking us to keep our eyes on Toledo, Ohio where, we are told, we may be seeing the "future of higher education." An astonishing 60% of the city's 18-24 year old population is enrolled in higher education, and if a significant number of those students - especially the 50% of first generation, full-time students who are in danger of dropping out - can gain a college degree despite the severe budget cutbacks facing Ohio's higher education system, we may be witnessing a way in which our nation's colleges and universities can meet the growing economic demand for college graduates.
Ohio's public higher education system has been the recipient of a "productivity grant" from the Lumina Foundation designed to help colleges and universities boost productivity without funding increases or declines in educational quality. The grant has funded innovative cost-saving measures - streamlining academic pathways and making operations more efficient, among others - which, given how cash-strapped these institutions are, is very welcome news. It seems unclear, however, how these innovations alone will increase college graduation rates. Like the Underpants Gnomes from South Park, who sought to turn underpants into profit via an indeterminate middle step, the HuffPo article seems to be missing a key ingredient in translating record enrollments into better student outcomes.
This missing ingredient is, of course, faculty, and with increased enrollments, the demands on the professoriate are going to increase if we expect to improve retention and graduation rates. But the University of Toledo, the article points out, is in the midst of a hiring freeze. How is the institution meeting the increased demand while maintaining educational quality? The answer, I'm willing to bet, is another cost-saving measure - this one not so innovative: an increased reliance upon contingent faculty, who, experience and research has shown, receive a fraction of the pay and little to none of the professional support that their tenure-track colleagues receive.
Given the growing evidence of a link between the overuse of contingent faculty who lack strong ties to and support from their respective institutions and declining educational outcomes, it would seem that the state of the academic staffing structure on campus would be an integral part of any formula to improve student outcomes. While new ideas about how to cut down on costs while maintaining - or improving! - educational quality are important, any considerations of the "future of higher education" that don't include faculty will be missing the most essential component of a student's college education - those who do the teaching.
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Act Now to Protect The U.S. Department of Education proposed new rules to protect students and taxpayers from rip-off career education programs. But the rules need to be stronger. USA Today praised the Obama Administration for recognizing the problem, but called the proposal "feeble" and "too accommodating." The for-profit college industry and its highly paid lobbyists are fighting hard to weaken the proposed rules so exploitative schools can keep profiting off federal student aid. That's why the Obama Administration needs to hear from you!
Visit www.protectstudentsandtaxpayers.org to call for stronger rules, and please help spread the word! The time allowed for commenting is short, and early comments have the most impact, so please send in your comments today! |
At Harkin's request, the U.S. Government Accountability Office conducted an underground, "secret shopper" investigation and exposed instances of fraud at four institutions and deceptive practices at all 15 institutions it investigated. The GAO found that students are taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt to attend these schools, and that the promises the colleges to them are making are hollow.
As we've reported on this blog all summer, the for-profit college mission is not first and foremost about education, it's about generating profits for shareholders.
As a result of these profit-driven practices, the U.S. Department of Education has proposed new regulations to ensure that students are getting their money's worth when they borrow large amounts to pay for programs that are supposed to lead to "gainful employment."
Some AFT affiliates are having firsthand experience with the incursion of corporate for-profit colleges in their regions. Michael Rosen, president of Milwaukee Area Technical College's Local 212, the AFT faculty union at the college, has been sounding the alarm in his city about the rapid installation of Everest College, a for-profit that has moved in just blocks from MATC.
Everest is part of Corinthian Colleges Inc., which appears to have some serious issues with its students being able repay their student loans.
Rosen's work caught the attention of Harriet Callier, a medical billing and records instructor at a school called High-Tech Institute, now renamed Anthem College by its corporate owner. She contacted him to express concerns about what she saw happening to the students she teaches. The current issue of AFT On Campus tells Callier's story-and also provides insight into how state agencies are responding to the need to monitor this booming industry.
It's a changing terrain, notes Wisconsin Educational Approval Board (EAB) school administration consultant Patrick Sweeney. He pointed On Campus to some of the public record correspondence between the EAB and Callier's employer, High-Tech Institute. Sweeney describes a visit to the school by EAB representatives as "frustrating and disappointing" because it "revealed a multitude of institutional problems consistent with all of High-Tech's past problems, as documented in many student complaints to the EAB."
He also shared letters that illuminate the curriculum model used by the University of Phoenix and other for-profit chains, which is designed to keep new students enrolling and taking courses, but is significantly less concerned with student success. As Sweeney notes in his letter:
In the Phoenix business model few adults who start their programs will survive through graduation. ... But, it's okay. ... In [this] model, the large number of enrollment counselors with strictly measured metrics for calls per day, new enrollments, and retention into the second week of the second course secures a steady stream of new enrollees."
In short, it's a model that works well to keep federal financial aid dollars and private loans fueling the bottom line of the business, but not one that works so well for the faculty and students.
| Read the Wisconsin Educational Approval Board's letters to High Tech Institute and University of Phoenix: |
Shortly after the California State Senate passed ACR 138 last week, the State Assembly reaffirmed its earlier vote necessary for the bill's final passage. The resolution, which expresses the intent of the California Legislature that part-time faculty at California's community colleges are provided with equitable pay and benefits and that the state's community colleges have 75% of their faculty on the tenure track, was sent to the Secretary of State for distribution to the state's community college districts.
We want to congratulate all of the activists who were instrumental in making academic staffing a legislative priority in California, and we hope that this resolution will serve as a catalyst for community college administrators and faculty working together to implement a long-term strategy for implementing an equitable and sustainable staffing structure to serve the needs of California's students.
Ah, late August, where summer begins to fade into autumn and our minds turn to... the latest round of college rankings. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a special report this week on educational quality at institutions of higher education, and as part of it, they include this nifty interactive graphic that allows you to see what criteria six of the most well-known college ranking guides use as their rubric for evaluation.
Scanning through the 30 criteria that are listed, it's striking how little attention is paid to faculty and teaching as a factor. Only two of the ranking systems (USN&WR and Kiplinger) attempt to show the gradations within the faculty rank (and only factor in the number of faculty working "full-time," a measure which we've seen is suspect and doesn't fully capture the differences between tenure-line and NTT faculty). One (USN&WR) examines faculty compensation, again without reference to the differences in pay for adjuncts. And USN&WR is alone in including instructional spending per student.
Now, I suppose that picking apart the annual college ranking guides is like shooting fish in a barrel, but it seems odd to me that these ranking guides wouldn't focus on what undergraduates are expecting in college: high quality instruction from faculty. Given that more and more research is showing that faculty (be they tenure-line or adjunct) engagement with their institution is linked with better student outcomes, wouldn't it make sense to include the state of an institution's faculty in any assessment of a college?
Just a quick update to let you all know that a bit of good news has emerged today. California's community colleges have just decided to end their controversial deal with Kaplan University that would have allowed students who could not access introductory courses at their local community colleges to instead take Kaplan's courses for—get this—ten times the price.
Earlier this year, Kaplan swooped in to ink the deal with California when they realized that its 112 community college system was severely overcrowded thanks to the economic recession and years of disinvestment on the part of the state. Students who were not able to get into required intro courses necessary for completing their programs were now able to access the equivalent course at one of Kaplan's schools for $216 per credit hour—just a little pricier than the $26 per credit hour they were used to paying at the community college.
Thanks to the fact that transfer agreements between Kaplan and many of the community colleges never materialized and the bad press that for-profit education has gotten in the past several months, California made the decision to nix the deal. For-profit education has one less avenue through which to exploit the students who need the most.
