Larry Penley’s Access With Success

The Obama administration has strongly supported the need for growth in college degrees. The administration’s 2020 goal of the USA’s having the highest college completion rate is emblematic of that support. However, the Obama administration has taken actions that have had the unintended impact of restricting growth in college graduates, actions that are inimical to the very goals of the administration and this blog. Among those actions have been the continued attack on for-profit universities with the expected result of reducing student access – as was noted in this blog.

On Sunday, NPR highlighted the administration’s intentions with regard to traditional nonprofit colleges and universities. Those intentions, it observed, are to restrict increases in tuition, a seemingly laudable goal. Indeed, rising tuition has been the focus of this blog for the same reason that the President has addressed it; its rise without commensurate need-based aid restricts access to college by many working class families and working adults who cannot afford the rising tuition rates. What NPR highlighted was President Obama’s apparent plans to restrict growth in tuition in his related comments of a few weeks ago at the University of Michigan.

Just as the administration’s attacks on for-profit colleges had the unintended impact of limiting access to a college degree, so will plans to restrict tuition prices for traditional colleges and universities also restrict access. The reasons are numerous, but they begin with what we know of markets and price controls.

Price controls negatively impact market efficiency and may have the impact of restricting the availability of a targeted product or service, e.g., a college education. They also famously fail to actually restrict growth in prices as a result of human creativity in circumventing them through black markets. While the President has not stated that he will impose price controls, NPR has described the implications of his comments as a threat that there will be penalties on colleges and universities that raise prices beyond some unspecified limit.

The economic issues associated with price restrictions make them wrong-headed, and we already know how colleges behave when their revenue is restricted. Community colleges in California reduced available classes to students and cut services in the face of losses of revenue. What is needed is a means to increase access by working class families and non-traditional students such as working adults, a huge proportion of those seeking a college education.

Some Americans can afford to pay for college, but many others cannot. Increased tuition is not harmful to all in quite the same way. Pell grants are a good example of what works in making a college educational affordable for those with need. But the federal government is not the only solution. Colleges that do raise tuition have an opportunity as well to address the issue if access; they can make substantial amounts of that new revenue available in scholarships, thereby off-setting the price increases for those in need. Sadly, past evidence shows this has not occurred in traditional colleges and universities.

It is in this area of need-based access that we should see action – from the federal government, states and boards of trustees. Restricting price, however, is unfortunately almost always a bad idea.

Today is Digital Learning Day, and its occurrence just a week after President Obama’s State of the Union address and his comments on education is serendipitous.  Earlier this week, I wrote about the challenge presented by the President’s call for colleges and universities to decrease the cost of education and increase outcomes, including the number of graduates.  In that blog, I turned for a solution to the observations of the President of the Lumina Foundation.

Jamie P. Merisotis, Lumina’s President, observed that future demand for college-educated citizens and workers necessitates alternative educational paradigms if we are to decrease cost while also increasing accesss and success.  Those new paradigms mean that our understanding of “quality education” must change.  One very significant paradigm change is digital learning, made possible by substantial innovation to information technology.

There is a growing availability of digitial learning materials, online educational opportunities, and innovative approaches to blended learning with combinations of face-to-face teachers, digital learning materials and online educational experiences.  This blog has previously observed that the variety of these digital learning alternatives is increasing in all education sectors, including primary, secondary and tertiary education.

The recent announcement by Apple of its eText authoring and class-creation tools is likely to open up and spread digitial learning beyond what we have already seen in the digital learning materials of a wide variety of companies like Pearson, Adaptive Curriculum, etc.  The for-profit hgher education sector has seen very rapid growth in enrollment from non-traditional students, especially through online degrees of universities like the University of Phoenix and blended learning models from schools like Western International University.  Of course, Apple’s tools are directed at primary and secondary education as well as higher education.  Companies like K12 have already demonstrated the potential for and the value for online and blended learning models in the primary and secondary areas.

When I talk with parents of younger children, I find little hesitation to use an iPad in order to provide easy access to learning; the limitation these parents face is availability of software.  If we are, however, to realize the full advantage of the digital revolution to learning, we must change – with the digital revolution in information technology that is occuring around us.  Those changes include the following:

(1) We must alter regulation of education and recognize new metrics.   Seat-time is an outmoded way of evaluating the educational experience, and we must accept, endorse and expect learning mastery based on demonstrted outcomes as the new standard.  To the degree that a student can learn on her own and demonstrate mastery without the intervention of a teacher, then the whole traditional concept of education is turned upside down and teachers are no longer necessary – at least not in their current roles.

(2) We must embrace the capacity of information technology to advance further how we learn.  Intelligent learning systems that are truly adaptive to the knowledge and skills of an individual learner are now possible (note Apollo Group’s acquisition of Carnegie Learning), and research and development is already undway on intelligent systems that can substitute for humans’ coaching students.  Rather than moving from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side concept of the role of a teacher, we are at the advent of the development of a “guide” as an intelligent digital system.

(3) We must develop even more sophisticated systems for the assessment of learning. With the introduction of more digital learning mateials at all levels, more sophisticated assessment is essential.  Along with that assessment must come better integrated feedback loops that articluate with curriculum design in ways that lead to the continuous modification of curricula.

(4) We must accept new roles for the “teacher” and more rapidly modify teacher education as we incorporate more resources to support retraining of existing teachers and the incorporation of evaluations of teachers on new dimensions of “teaching.”  With ever more sophisticated digital learning, the “teacher” takes on roles of (a) super coach, (b) counselor and advisor who guides the student in a learning path, and (c) designer of curriculum and assessment.

Is digital learning perfect?  Of course not, but neither is the traditional model of teacher and students.  As Mr. Obama has stated, we must expect more of education if we are to compete in a global 21st century.  Paradigm shifts in education will be essential, and one of the most significant ones comes from digital learning, made pssoble by continued advances in information technology.

In his State of the Union address, the President called on colleges and universities to do two things that have proved nearly impoosible so far: (1) decrease the cost of education and (2) increase the number of graduates.  The latter, of course, has been one of the fundamentals of this blog, i.e. student success in the form of graduation in addition to mere enrollment.

Jamie P. Merisotis, the president of the Lumina Foundation, issued thoughtful comments on Mr. Obama’s. address.  Mr. Merisotis observed that the extent of the future demand for college-educated citizens and workers necessitates alternative educational paradigms.  There is little or no evidence that continuing to educate with traditional approaches, typical of our major research universities, will lead to either an increased supply of graduates or lower costs.

Mr. Obama is right to call on colleges and universities for change.  His widely sighted speech late last week at the University of Michigan added few details to his earlier call for change in higher education during his annual address. Expectations are for the Depament of Education to add detail.

Change in higher education also received much attention during the administration of Mr. Bush.  Then, calls for change came from the Commission established by Secretary of Education Spellings.  Traditional universities and their presidents responded by calling on the federal government for patience. The Deepartment was asked to allow colleges and universities to undertake voluntary efforts, and the Department was called on to undstand the considerable differences among traditional universities that limited any single Department of Education approach.  Patience has resulted in little fundamental change.

The new paradigms that Mr. Merisotis called for are little in evidence across much of traditional higher education.  There are many reasons for failure in bringing about change.  Amng them is our state-federal structure with responsibilitiy for public universities in the hands of state governors and legislators and the boards of trustees they appoint.  Moreover, the long, millenial history and past success of colleges and universities appears on the surface to provide little rationale for change.  Then, of course, there is the governance system of most traditional universities.  Finally,there is the budgetary issue that I have addressed before; in contrast to the for-profit sector, traditional universities lack working capital for investment in alternative paradigms.

We have seen over the last few years the efforts of the Obama administration to bring change to the for-profit sector of higher education.  As the administration turns its attention to the traditional sector, few of us should be surprised.  What would be surprising is real change.

Online K – 12 education is receiving considerable attention from established media, and much of that attention is negative.  Getting Smart published an opinion piece that I had written about the spate of media attention to online K – 12.  The opinion makes the case for the use of data and sound science for the evaluation of online education.  It questions the use of invective, unidentified “experts,” and veiled attacks on capitalism as a reasonable and fair foundation for its evaluation.

U. S. global competitiveness depends upon education, and an excellent foundation in K – 12 is essential.  Without that foundation, high school graduates are neither ready for the workplace nor college, an argument well-made by the work of Achieve.  Employers suffer from ill-prepared graduates with the requirement for additional training and poor performance, and colleges – that are able to offer remedial education – waste students’ and taxpayers’ money on readying ill-prepared students for real college-level work.

Online learning is increasingly accepted by many sectors of society for the value that it provides in flexibility for and adaptability to the needs of learners who are better able to respond to that environment.  The potential that online learning offers is probably still unrealized.  As we increase online learning’s adaptive capacity, it may well be able to individualize education in ways that raise substantially its potential to improve students’ learning.  That was the reason that Apollo acquired Carnegie Learning, admittedly an example from tertiary education rather than K -12.  But the point applies equally well to K – 12.

Let’s give online learning a chance, but we should hold it to high standards in terms of outcomes – the same high standards to which we should hold learning from traditional education.

The Center for Education Policy just issued its updated report on Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for 2010-2011.  AYP is a requirement of the No Child Left Behind Act, and the goal is 100% of students reaching proficiency by 2014.  The report shows that public schools and are struggling; indeed they appear to be falling further behind.  This report is instructive in light of recent criticism of online K-12 education.

There were several very important findings of the report:

• Approximately 48% of public schools did not make adequate yearly progress in 2011, an increase from the 39% which did not make AYP in 2010.
• The 48% failing to make AYP makes 2011 the worst year’s report since the No Child Left Behind Act took effect.
• States varied widely, e.g., Wisconsin with 11% failing to the State of Florida with 89% failing; in my own State of Arizona, 42% of schools did not demonstrate AYP.

The Center for Education Policy uses data from the Consolidated State Performance Reports that states submit to the U. S. Department of Education.  The Center does not separate out AYP for charter schools or online schools that contract with for-profit curriculum providers.  The online schools have been the object of a recent spate of critical newspaper articles, including ones from The New York Times and my local paper, the Arizona Republic with its series that began on December 10 2011.  Perhaps such criticism of novel approaches that depart from traditional education should not be surprising.  What is important is the carefully measured performance that comes from these novel approaches to education reform.

The New York Times quoted a forthcoming study from the National Education Policy Center, supported by the National Education Association, with estimates of only one-third of online schools having made AYP.  Whether the comparison of AYP between online schools and traditional schools is valid is hard to judge, especially in light of what we already know about AYP comparisons for public schools.

The movement of states toward non-national standards for AYP in the future will make comparisons even more difficult.  Already, the data make the concept of comparisons of AYP troublesome.  For example, states may fluctuate from year to year on the basis of changing measures of AYP, changing goals, etc.  Whether an online school is comparable to other schools within a given state is also problematic.  A research report, State Policy Differences Greatly Impact AYP Numbers, details the source of fluctuations in the national data.  This year, Massachusetts, long highlighted for its tough testing standards, reports that 81% of its schools did not made AYP, a rising trend from 41% in 2006.  Of course, the national trend is one that Massachusetts is tracking with a national rising percentage of schools that do not make AYP.

That AYP is important need not be stated.  Those who study public education are aware of the U. S. education shortfall relative to global standards.  What is needed now is not retrenchment and defensiveness but additional work to raise standards at our schools – traditional, online and charter.  What are also needed are careful, unbiased comparisons between different models for improving education.  As I observed in The Growth in Education Reform and its Benefits, we are beginning to see solutions that make a difference.  We only must have the will to adopt them in the face of pressure to continuing doing what we have always done.

In an earlier blog, I wrote about The Implications of UCLA’s College Completion Research for Coaching.  What I did not address was the underlying rationale for the success of coaching and related recruitment practices in raising persistence from freshman to sophomore year as well as a student’s success.   The foundation for the efficacy of such interventions in raising college persistence and graduation rates is likely the extent to which students have realistic expectations for their college experience.

In too many cases, the college experience is portrayed via websites, “view books,” and counselors’ advice in ways that are inconsistent with the reality, thereby leading to unrealistic student expectations.  One of the more common examples is the extensive use of a disproportionate number of non-white students in group photos, thereby giving the appearance of a far more diverse student experience than the reality.  Another example at many research universities is the portrayal of the opportunity to work directly with a faculty member on one’s own research project.  By contrast, the freshman experience is characterized for the most part by large, lecture classes at public, research universities.  The point here is not to dismiss the opportunity that students have to meet those who come from different backgrounds nor to argue that opportunity does not exist in the junior or senior year to work with a faculty member on one’s own research.  Rather, it is to make the case that the portrayal is unrealistic relative to expectations for the freshman experience.

As a behavioral scientist in the area of organizational psychology, I have always been intrigued by the work on what has been referred to as the realistic job preview (RJP).  More than 30 years ago, John P. Wanous drew attention to the topic of organizational entry from what was then a new perspective in organizational psychology – the perspective of the individual. In a ground-breaking publication in the Psychological Bulletin, Mr. Wanous contrasted the individual and organizational perspective.  Whereas an organization is concerned with the competence of a new entrant to perform, the individual is concerned with whether the organization will satisfy personal needs.

Although the work of Mr. Wanous has been widely applied to organizational recruitment with the introduction of the RJP into the process, it is not used very frequently by college and university recruiters to introduce a realistic college preview (RCP) for the individual student.   Coupled with the somewhat unrealistic portrayals that I have already described is the same organizational (university) concern with competence, i.e., ability to compete in the college classroom, rather than a concern with the prospective student’s needs.  Much of what Mr. Wanous argued about the value of the RJP in raising retention and satisfaction for new employees applies to the student recruit as well, and this similarity makes the RCP an ideal vehicle for raising persistence and graduation rates.

Mr. Wanous stated, “The quality of information possessed by outsiders is an important issue because all the theories of organizational choice rely on individual expectations.”   According to him, realistic information by the individual has three effects: (1) it increases organizational tenure, i.e., persistence from the freshman to sophomore year at a university; (2) it communicates honesty, increasing the individual’s commitment to the decision (in this case the decision to enroll); and (3) it lowers expectations such that they are more congruent with the organization (inoculating a student against the reality of large classes, increased competition, residence hall life, etc.).

Introducing the RCP will not be easy for many university and college administrators.  It is likely to be derided as inconsistent with the approach of the competition, and it may be feared as limiting the achievement of recruiting goals and thereby tuition revenue goals.  The theoretical foundation for its success, however, in raising persistence, graduation rates, and tuition revenue from returning students is evident from the work of Mr. Wanous and others.  Introducing a RCP will, however, necessitate altering college preview materials like websites, and it will require newly deployed expenditures on retraining staff and adopting alternative interventions like pre-admission and post-admission coaching by existing staff or by outsourcing this work to professional organizations like InsideTrack.  Nevertheless, the UCLA data are clear; there are pragmatic means to raising student persistence, and the theoretical foundation for these interventions can be found in the work of organizational psychologists.

UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute has just reported research associated with student completion of college.  For any traditional higher education institution, it has very clear implications for interventions with students in order to create a successful college experience that leads to graduation.  The challenge for colleges and universities in taking advantage of this research may be the will, the staff and the training of staff required to take advantage of the research results.  The challenge may also be a culture that accepts that the implications of the UCLA research are essentially for the need for student coaches and student coaching.

The research implies two major time frames in which a college can intervene – (1) the pre-enrollment period after application and (2) the actual student campus experience.  The first – the pre-enrollment period – may be the most challenging for intervention by traditional colleges and universities, as it will demand a change in behavior and redirection of resources.

Colleges already expend considerable resources during the pre-enrollment period, but those expenditures are not directed at the interventions implied by UCLA’s research.  Instead, they are primarily focused on persuasion via self-promotion and pre-enrollment processing.   Most colleges spend a great deal on very high quality, glossy brochures and recruitment staff whose task is to persuade high school students to attend the college.   They also put resources behind revision to university websites with the intent of promoting the college with positive stories about the faculty, students and campus experience.  But once a student is accepted, primary contact with the student consists mostly of email or physical mail associated with the details of matriculation with the possible exception of some colleges’ use of an alumni-hosted “send-off” party.

The UCLA research results point to a number of interventions for which universities could deploy resources. Most of these pre-enrollment interventions will demand that the university employ a “coaching” model in (a) encouraging a pre-campus visit, highly associated with graduation within four years; (b) building realistic expectations of what it is like to attend this university in this environment with its urban or rural characteristics, its heat (e.g., Arizona) or its snow (e.g., Colorado), etc.; and (c) promoting specific student goals for the educational experience as a means of encouraging the drive to achieve.

The second area in which UCLA’s research indicates the potential for successful intervention through coaching is the on-campus student experience.  While one of the strongest negative factors for graduation is living off-campus in the UCLA research, there are positive interventions that matter.  Most of those highly depend upon human interaction with the student in encouraging, coaching, if you will, positive student behaviors.  Among them are maintaining the student’s drive to achieve with advice and counsel that supports goal-setting.  They also include supporting the student in his/her engagement with clubs and on-campus activities like intramural sports, band, forensics, etc.

The surprise for many in the UCLA research is the extent to which coaching students seems to matter for their success.  Most of us have never thought that coaching was something that students necessarily needed.  Instead, they needed a sound preparation for college, a commitment to study, and the will to learn.  We don’t question an athlete’s need for a coach despite ability, commitment and will; why should we question the need for coaching for the non-student-athlete?  But we do.  Nevertheless, the results of UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute’s work makes clear the value that focused coaching can have on student success.  The challenge for colleges and universities is to commit to the change in approach, the redeployment of resources around the research’s implications and the staff training necessary to implement coaching – or to outsource coaching to a group that is professionally trained to do exactly what the UCLA research implies.

The release today of UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute report deserves the attention of educators for a variety of reasons.  Perhaps foremost among them is the attention it brings to the need for a felt responsibility by boards and administrators to improve retention and graduation rates of all students, Hispanic and African American as well as White and Asian.  But certainly a secondary reason, unexplored by the UCLA study, for attending to this report is its implications for for-profit colleges and universities which disproportionately enroll students with characteristics that this report identifies with failure to complete a degree.

All of us are aware of the challenge that the U.S. has in raising its percentage of adult college graduates; the percentage stands at little more than 27%.  Of particular concern should be the very low rate of college graduation of Hispanics; for those between 25 and 29, the report notes that the graduation rate is just 12%.  While the 19% rate for African Americans is higher, like the record for Hispanics, both are well below the 37% rate for Whites.  The growing number of Hispanics in the U.S. makes their very low graduation rate a particular source of concern for our prosperity.

The report’s fundamental purpose is to challenge higher education to, not just put into perspective the issues associated with raising the graduation rates of different demographic groups, e.g., Hispanic males, but to set goals based on the characteristics of the various demographic groups.  In order to do so, however, university boards must maintain consistent attention to a university’s retention and graduation rates by setting goals at the board level and holding university administrators responsible for those goals.  With so many complex issues being addressed by our universities, it is very tough for boards to maintain that focus with a felt responsibility at its level, but boards have that responsibility, and they should seize it with laser-focus consistency in light of this new research.

In addition to the attention that the UCLA report brings to retention and graduation, it has unexplored implications for the growing proportion of higher education represented  by the for-profit sector.  For-profit institutions have been castigated for their low rates of graduation, but the implication of the UCLA report is to consider the expected graduation rates for these institutions based on the characteristics of their students.  Those characteristics include several that the UCLA report identifies as producing lower graduation rates.

For-profit colleges and universities disproportionately enroll more African Americans, more students who have transferred from other colleges, more students whose education has been disrupted, etc.  All of these characteristics are associated with lower graduation rates.  That should not absolve for-profit institutions from their responsibility to raise graduation rates, but it should cause all of us to put into context the expectations we have for a sector of higher education that is serving some of the most challenging students from the perspective of expected graduation rate.

There are legitimate societal concerns in the apparent rising price of a college education.  Despite some recent questions about the value of a college education, global demand for higher education is widely considered positive for a country’s economic growth.  The apparent, rising price in the U. S. represents a potential damper on demand, impairing the long-term prosperity of the country.  It also obscures a central underlying issue of the inability of nearly all traditional colleges and universities to adopt and institutionalize fundamental changes to the teaching and learning process.

The recent publication of two reports on rising tuition drew attention to the concerns that many people have about the price of a college education and its potential impact.  One came from the College Board’s Advocacy and Policy Center and the other came from The Center for College Affordability and Productivity.  Choice of years of focus and dissimilar methods in the two studies resulted in different perspectives with the College Board’s study showing a far higher rise in tuition.  The Center for College Affordability made the case that net tuition after inclusion of financial aid rose only modestly.

The real issues here may have been missed, even if one attended to only one of these reports.  The real issues are two-fold – (1) that much of the decline in affordability comes from increases in the non-tuition costs and (2) tuition price volatility along with how price tuition decisions are made by traditional colleges obscure underlying, and long-term forces for tuition increase.

Relative to the first issue, the authors of the Center’s report stated, “. . . roughly two-thirds of the increase in total college costs originates from non-tuition sources.”  The non-tuition sources include the rapidly rising costs of textbook and the increases in the costs of off-campus housing.  The second issue is more complex to understand.  Colleges raise tuition when their boards and the politics permit increases.  When they are unable to raise prices for the same reasons, they defer capital expenditures and limit new hires and, where they do hire, they substitute lower wage labor in the form of temporary adjunct faculty and non-tenure track faculty of various classifications.  Colleges also take other temporary measures during severe recessions as we have seen with the widespread use of furloughs of faculty and staff, thereby decreasing budgets temporarily.

What we are not seeing is fundamental change.  Colleges which would not integrate more online learning during more prosperous times cannot afford the capital investment and retraining for faculty required for incorporating more online learning during recessionary times.  Reliance on traditional approaches to the use of physical books and costly and traditional brick and mortar classrooms continues.  Moreover, the leadership from presidents and provosts required to make fundamental change is sadly lacking at most institutions.

While The Center for College Affordability’s study may be accurate in its depiction of a limited net tuition increase, the forces for rising tuition remain in place.  They are fundamentally associated with how we teach and how students learn.  Therefore, the probability remains of our seeing either an impact on demand for college education and/or rising, long-term debt of graduates and non-graduate-attendees.  Rectifying the underlying forces will ultimately depend upon alternatives to traditional colleges and universities or the will of traditional colleges and universities to adopt and institutionalize fundamental changes to the teaching and learning process.

The National Assessment Governing Board presented the 2011 results of The Nation’s Report Card: Mathematics and Reading this morning, November 1, for grades 4 and 8.    Presenting the results was Jack Buckley, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics.

Although improvements were modest since 2009, the good news was that there were improvements.  Fourth graders’ scores in mathematics were higher in every percentile except the top tenth.  Except for Asians, non-whites continued to score well below whites with students of Asian backgrounds performing at the highest levels on 4^th grade mathematics.  Even in the area of demographic differences, there was some good news; the difference between the scores of whites and blacks and whites and Hispanics declined by a point, having gone from a difference of 27 points in 2000 to a difference of 23 points in 2003 and 20 points in 2011.  Finally students in 9 states, including Arizona, New Mexico, Georgia, and the District of Columbia, scored higher in 2011 with only the State of New York’s scores’ declining.

For 8^th graders, scores were slightly higher – a one point gain – in every percentile reported except for the top tenth percentile.  Hispanics narrowed the gap with whites, having gone from a difference of 26 points in 2009 to a difference of 23 points in 2011.  This is consistent with what I had reported earlier in the overall educational improvements among Hispanics in a blog, entitled, The Hispanic Face of Future College Students.  Thirteen states showed improvements in eighth grade mathematics scores.  Among others, they included New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Mississippi, West Virginia and the District of Columbia.

Looked at from another perspective, however, we still have a long way to go.  Among eighth graders, 27% of students were still below basic in their mathematics scores, and among fourth graders, 18% were below basic.  The really sad news from this preceding statement is the implication that the longer a child remains in school, the greater the likelihood that he or she will not meet even basic performance levels.  The report points to the importance of readying students for algebra in the eighth grade if we are to expect to see the differences in performance between ethnic groups diminish and if we are to expect to see the overall performance of students increase with grade level.  Whereas 36% of white students and 45% of Asian eighth graders were enrolled in algebra, only 24%, 28% and 33% of, respectively, American Indians, Blacks and Hispanics were enrolled in algebra at the eighth grade.  Another note of concern in the presentation was the lack of improvement in scores for the top decile of fourth and eighth graders’ scores.  This lack of improvement echoes the concerns about the gifted that I had mentioned in a blog, entitled, High Achieving Kids: What to Do?

The reasons for the improvements over the last decade have to be inferred, but the need for continued improvement is also evident.  There is little reason for us to relax our focus on educational improvement, especially in light of the rapid advancement of non-U.S. students.