Tomorrow's Professor Blog

Folks:

The posting below is a review by David Hollowell of Honoring the Trust: Quality and Cost Containment in Higher Education, by William F. Massy. The review originally appeared in Planning for Higher Education 33(2): Copyright (c) 1998-2005 by Society for College and University Planning (www.scup.org). Reprinted with permission. Planning for Higher Education book reviews appear at: (www.scup.org/phe).

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu

UP NEXT: The Pedagogical Colloquium

Tomorrow’s Academy

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HONORING THE TRUST: QUALITY AND COST CONTAINMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Reviewed by David Hollowell

Honoring the Trust: Quality and Cost Containment in Higher Education responds to the premise that “the public trust in colleges and universities has eroded significantly in recent years and will continue to do so unless considerable reforms are undertaken” (p. viii). In this book, William Massy states that “the pursuit of true excellence in education, and especially undergraduate education, represents higher education’s key strategic agenda” (p. 338). Honoring the Trust makes the case for this agenda, suggests models for solving selective problems, and offers an action response. Intended readers range from academic leaders to concerned citizens who wish to understand and learn about these challenges facing higher education.

Massy is eminently qualified to write on this subject. He is currently the president of the Jackson Hole Higher Education Group and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He previously served in a number of administrative roles including as Stanford’s vice president for business and finance. In 1987, Massy founded the Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research where he currently directs the project on educational quality and productivity. He also was a member of the Pew Higher Education Roundtable, and he consults internationally. Massy has written many books and articles, individually and in collaboration with other higher education research leaders, in areas of cost containment and academic quality improvement.

The book is divided into two major parts. In the first Massy makes the case for change, and in the second he describes the methodology for evaluation and improvement. The first chapter begins with a quote from the Knight Higher Education Collaborative:

“Americans continue to enjoy the most envied, most copied system of post-secondary education in the world.” And yet, “American colleges and universities are openly troubled by a sense of diminished opportunities and lessened capabilities. Fundamental questions about quality, content, and cost of colleges and universities are rife, both within and without the academy” (p. 3).

Massy assumes that universities and colleges can be a great deal better than they are without massive infusion of funds. He states:

Close examination reveals the traditional university’s core competency to lie in knowledge creation and dissemination, not in educating students at the highest quality possible given available resources. Professors do research and scholarship and make knowledge available to their students, but most spend little time on the process of teaching and learning. They don’t focus sufficiently on student needs or the backgrounds and learning styles presented by would-be learners. They don’t think deeply enough about the assessment of learning outcomes. They don’t try regularly to substitute lower-cost for higher-cost processes while maintaining quality. A true core competency in education would include all of these things. (p. 6)

In making his case for change, Massy describes the classic university and how it has changed since World War II. In particular, the “massification” of higher education, the growth of research activity, and the ascendancy of market forces have significantly affected higher education. Massy considers various issues including the balance of research and teaching, cost escalation, and the concept of cross-subsidies as factors that have complicated the understanding of the higher education enterprise. He argues that full disclosure of these complex factors is essential in promoting understanding. He also discusses the interrelationship of research and teaching and the concept of the academic ratchet that has fostered academic specialization. Finally, Massy explores the current and potential impact of technology on both the learner and the faculty. He describes how technology can leverage traditional means of teaching and learning while noting that new incentives and rewards are n! ecessary to motivate faculty to invest the time to utilize technology in productive ways.

The last six chapters focus on improving practice. Massy discusses the academy’s difficulty in quantifying quality measures from within while those outside the academy are clamoring for better measures of quality and for accountability. He goes on to describe the quality process for higher education based on a series of core quality principles. These principles include the following:

* Define education quality in terms of student outcomes
* Focus on the process of teaching, learning, and student assessment
* Strive for coherence in curricula, educational processes, and assessment
* Work collaboratively to achieve mutual involvement and support
* Base decisions on facts wherever possible
* Identify and learn from best practice
* Make continuous academic improvement a top priority (p. 167)

Academic units that regularly apply these principles are said to demonstrate a “culture of quality,” and examples are presented to show how these principles are applied.

The eighth chapter focuses on one of the most controversial issues in higher education today: quality oversight. Government agencies, parents, donors, and others want to know that resources are being wisely utilized and that students are receiving a quality education. The basic fear is that if the academy does not develop understandable measures of quality and a regular process for academic quality improvement, then those outside that academy will mandate measures of their own. Massy describes an education quality process audit that is aimed at evaluating an institution’s educational quality process rather than quality itself; in other words, to evaluate the process that is in place to measure and improve quality within the institution.

The book also considers the issue of balancing cost and quality and the concepts of quality/activity-based cost analysis, course level costing, and performance-based resource allocation. These are tools that can be used to understand the cost of various activities and how resources might be reallocated without compromising quality. The concept of performance funding now employed by a number of states is also discussed.

Finally, Massy describes an action agenda for higher education. He provides a road map, based on seven steps, for academic leaders who wish to improve the core academic competency of the department, college, or institution. These steps are:

* Build awareness and commitment.
* Commission pilot projects.
* Create venues for ongoing discussion and development.
* Organize skill development and consultation services.
* Broaden the rewards, recognition, and incentives environment.
* Adopt performance-based resource allocation.
* Develop an internal oversight and review capacity. (p. 315)

Following these steps coupled with an ongoing evaluation process can lead to the kind of educational quality improvement envisioned by the author.

Honoring the Trust is an invaluable resource for those who are considering the difficult task of implementing plans for academic quality improvement and assessment.

Folks:

The posting below, a bit longer than most, Engaged and Engaging Science: A Component of a Good Liberal Education is by Judith A. Ramaley, visiting senior scientist at the National Academy of Science and professor of Biomedical Sciences; fellow of the Margaret Chase Smith Center for Public Policy at the University of Maine; and president-elect, Winona State University; and Rosemary R. Haggett, director, Division of Undergraduate Education, National Science Foundation. The article is from the Winter, 2005 issue of Peer Review, Volume 7, Number 2. Peer Review is a publication of the Association of American Colleges and Universities [www.aacu.org/peerreview] Copyright © 2005, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: The Development of Graduate Students as Teaching Scholars

Tomorrow’s Academy

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ENGAGED AND ENGAGING SCIENCE; A COMPONENT OF A GOOD LIBERAL EDUCATION

We live in a period of rapid and complex socioeconomic change. The forces driving this change are reshaping the educational landscape in ways that we are only beginning to understand. Many recent reports and books, including the 2002 report from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College, have explored the implications of these changes and have identified growing gaps between the intentions and assumptions of faculty, the actual experiences of students, and the demands of the workplace. The lack of clarity of purpose in undergraduate education is the outcome of a complex set of changes in higher education that need serious attention. Among these crucial elements are (a) changes in faculty career pathways as well as faculty roles and responsibilities; (b) changes in the demographics of the student body and patterns of enrollment and participation in postsecondary education; and (c)!
escalating demands created by changes in both the campus experience and the workplace that are driven by widespread use of technology and the emergence of high-technology industries and applications.

In light of these developments, we must reconsider who teaches, what they teach, who learns, how they learn, and what our graduates will do with what they learn. According to U.S. Department of Education statistics, nearly 60 percent of all students attend more than one institution as undergraduates, and they do so in a variety of ways over often prolonged periods of time. Increasingly, faculty must think about shared responsibility for improving the coherence and purposefulness of their expectations for their students, not only by working with colleagues in other disciplines at their own institution, but also by working across institutional boundaries. Faculty and administrators are beginning to address a set of common questions that must be answered in order for the academic community to articulate the broad outlines of a common set of goals for undergraduate science education. We must work together to attract a diverse and talented group of students to the study of scienc!
e while, at the same time, ensuring that all of our students enjoy a high-quality education in which science plays a meaningful role.

What Does It Mean to Be Educated?

The basic skills required for successful entry into the workforce and reasonable professional progress are more demanding than they were even a decade ago. In The New Division of Labor: How Computers are Creating the Next Job Market, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane (2004) argue that computers are better at deriving solutions than people when the problems can be described in a rules-based logic that provides a procedure for any imaginable contingency. What a rules-based system cannot do, however, is deal with new problems that come up, problems unanticipated by the program of rules. Most importantly, computers cannot capture the remarkable store of how-to or tacit knowledge that we all use daily but would have a lot of trouble articulating. As Levy and Murnane (2004) put it: “In the absence of predictability, the number of contingencies explodes as does the knowledge required to deal with them. The required rules are very hard to write.” One wonders, in fact, if the rules unde!
rlying creativity and innovation can be written at all.

Increasingly, capacities such as cognitive flexibility, creativity, knowledge transfers, and adaptability are becoming the new basic skills of an educated generation. The Business-Higher Education Forum, in its recent report Building a Nation of Learners (2003), explores the “widening ’skills gap’ between traditional training and the skills actually needed in today’s jobs and those of tomorrow” and urges higher education to adopt new approaches to learning that offer more engaging and relevant content and experiences targeted to individual learning styles and needs. In an earlier report, the Forum identified nine key attributes necessary for today’s workplace: leadership, teamwork, problem solving, time management, self-management, adaptability, analytical thinking, global consciousness, and strong communication skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing). Those attributes echo the vision sketched out in AAC&U’s Greater Expectations (2002). In combination, the messa!
ge is clear. It matters not only what we know but also how we know it, how we use what we know, how we work with others who have different expertise than our own, and how well we respond to unexpected challenges that we encounter.

What Role Does Science Play in the Undergraduate Curriculum?

Taught in an engaging and engaged way, science offers a wonderful vehicle for introducing and practicing the habits of mind, inclinations, and skills required in today’s society. Science as a subject matter, and as a way of making sense of the world, is important in its own right. Fostering a deeper understanding of how science is done, how knowledge is tested and advanced, and what science can and cannot offer us must be critical goals of a quality education in the twenty-first century. In addition, the study of science, when it is engaging and interactive, is an appropriate and necessary component of a good liberal education because it offers an opportunity to practice the advanced skills so important in today’s world–leadership, teamwork, problem solving, analytical thinking, and communication. We have also learned that changes that make science more attractive to nonmajors may also encourage students who might not otherwise have considered a career in science or enginee!
ring to major in a scientific field. So, from the perspective of the science faculty, improving science education is both a matter of service to the education of all students and self-serving, in the best sense of that term.

How Should Science Be Taught in the Twenty-first Century?

As in other aspects of the curriculum, the teaching of science and its place in the requirements for graduation have settled into familiar forms and patterns that must be reexamined and updated in order to bring the content in line with how science is advancing today and what we have learned about how people learn. They also need to be rethought in light of what we know about how studying science can contribute to the development of the qualities of an educated person and what we are learning about why students choose to pursue science or decline to do so. The award portfolio within the Division of Undergraduate Education in the Directorate of Education and Human Resources at the National Science Foundation (NSF) offers an excellent vantage point for examining the core assumptions that have shaped the science curriculum in the past and that are being held up and carefully examined in today’s scholarship of teaching and learning.

Enrollment in a class is not a proxy for real student engagement. Faculty cannot assume that their students are either engaged with the material or even really interested in it just because they have signed up for a class and are paying tuition. Faculty must engage students in the learning process and recognize the diversity of people in their courses who differ in interests, backgrounds, cultural experiences, expectations about their own education, and commitment to pursuing an education.

Science does not always have to be introduced in a hierarchical and sequential way. There is evidence that the careful step-by-step building of a base of knowledge that usually determines the sequence of science courses can leave students cold. Recent experiments with the use of interesting problems, questions, and case studies as “hooks” to intrigue and engage students suggest that it is important to build a case for why something is worth knowing before plowing into it. (For examples of investigative case-based learning see Waterman and Stanley 2000).

The nature of scientific inquiry is changing and will allow for changes in the way science is taught and learned. The nature of science and the ways in which scientific knowledge is advanced are changing in significant ways. As this happens, our approach to the curriculum must change to reflect the new capacities made possible by advances in science as well as by the capabilities in new instrumentation and infrastructure. A particularly interesting analysis of these issues can be found in BIO 2010 (National Research Council 2002). In the future, according to this report, the scientific disciplines will be shaped by the following assertions.

New educational tools will have profound effects on the nature of education and will enable new approaches to involving students in research, new strategies for introducing contemporary scientific ideas and theories into the curriculum, and new ways of thinking about public outreach and engagement. The revolution in science will affect our goals for learning, how we approach the curriculum, and how we shape the student experience, resulting in

* the convergence of the disciplines, with a blurring of disciplinary boundaries and the
emergence of integrative fields;
* the growth of multidisciplinary interest in the science of learning and the availability of
deeper understandings of how people learn;
* the capacity to model dynamic systems.

Taken together, these advances will allow those involved in education to model, investigate, and manipulate “continuous, dynamic, simultaneous, organic, interactive, conditional, heterogeneous, irregular, nonlinear, deep, multiple processes” that are difficult to understand and that are increasingly characteristic of world affairs. The result will be a revolution in science education.

There are many reasons to offer laboratory experiences, but there is very little agreement on what we seek to accomplish through hands-on work and how best to design experiences that lead to the outcomes we do identify. We need to learn more about when a lecture is a good idea and when it is not. We also need to examine when and how to mix didactic material and delivery with more significant student engagement with original material or data or simulations. What do students learn from each of these experiences? Do we want our students to learn how to do research, what research is all about, or to develop skills of inquiry? Do we simply want to illustrate important concepts and ideas that are hard to get across in a classroom? Do we want to stir the imagination and show students that science can help them to achieve their own goals? Are we simply hoping that getting students physically involved in doing something will also get them mentally involved?

There are a number of ways to engage students that do not involve actual laboratory experiences. Active learning can take many forms. It appears clear that creating active participation in lectures through peer instruction (Mazur 1997; Fagan, Couch, and Mazur 2002), studio-style classes where students work in groups (Beichner, forthcoming), and other active learning strategies can help students develop the habits of mind that are characteristic of scientists. Slowly, science faculty are becoming aware of advances in science teaching and learning and are becoming interested in applying the same standards of scholarship to their role as educators that they do to their own research programs. As new approaches are being developed to record, document, and make publicly available the results of the scholarship of teaching and learning, the ideas and commitments will spread more rapidly. Much of this work is now accessible on the Web (Handelsman et al. 2004). Now that the work is !
being made public, assessed and critiqued by colleagues, and built upon to create a shared body of experience and knowledge, this kind of scholarship can establish its legitimacy.

Linking the study of science to societal problems can prove especially helpful in attracting and retaining women and students of color. Engagement models also can facilitate the accommodation to different interests and learning preferences. Although there is no agreement on whether there really are different learning styles, most people have come to believe that there are multiple ways to stimulate the interests of students in a particular subject and that, as John Dewey argued, linking learning to life is an especially good way to engage most students. By the time students reach the postsecondary level, their interests and learning predilections are becoming clear. There may be, in fact, good reasons why some students seek to avoid the study of science or mathematics. They may, for example, find the objective model underlying scientific inquiry to be too “cold” and analytical. Or they may simply be intimidated by the mathematical reasoning required to understand many scient!
ific concepts. We need to understand those reasons and provide ways for students who do not wish to think like prototypical scientists to bring their own interests and capacities to the study of science. Is science more approachable and interesting for many students if it is blended with the study of other subjects or approached through the study of large societal questions that have a strong scientific component? Should scientific content be introduced through service-learning programs that link science to concrete community issues? Evidence suggests that women and underrepresented groups are more successful in learning settings that emphasize hands-on, contextual, and cooperative learning (Goodman Research Group 2002). Is a community setting a better laboratory for some students than a virtual laboratory in cyberspace or a campus science lab? What do students learn in these different settings? What about these environments fosters both motivation and learning?

A Growing Interest in the Science of Teaching and Learning

>From the perspective of the NSF, we can see a pattern of growing interest in teaching and learning, both within individual scientific disciplines and across disciplines, that extends back over a decade. This work is spreading through a combination of collaboration among investigators, incentives at the federal level to improve the quality of undergraduate education, commitments at campus levels to rethink faculty roles and responsibilities, and investments in campus infrastructure. Building from new knowledge about how people learn (Bransford et. al. 2000), faculty are gaining a better understanding of what happens in their classrooms and how to adapt the curriculum both to meet contemporary needs and to respond to changes in the students they serve. One result has been the use of new approaches such as Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) (Novak et al. 1999, Patterson and Novak 2003) and Peer-Led Team Learning (Gosser et al. 2001).

Although we are far from seeing the widespread adoption of a scholarly approach to the challenges of enhancing undergraduate education, this work is beginning to expand more quickly and we have hopes that soon it will be expected that full-time faculty carry responsibility for designing the curriculum, engaging students, and ensuring successful learning outcomes. This work may take several forms. For some, it will be an ongoing professional commitment and may be the core of their scholarly contributions. Some disciplines such as physics have already taken serious steps to incorporate research on learning in the discipline as legitimate work for tenure-track faculty. For instance, there are a growing number of doctoral programs in physics education. Other faculty members may simply open up their courses to study by colleagues. Some may shift their interests from “basic research” to aspects of educational scholarship in the course of their careers. At the very least, faculty a!
re becoming more aware of and informed by discipline-based educational research.

What is most encouraging about the growing interest in the scholarship of learning and teaching is that the work has become steadily more rigorous and convincing. The evidence is mounting that faculty at institutions of all types are growing more serious about their educational responsibilities and that they are approaching this work in a scholarly manner similar to the way they pursue an idea in their own disciplines.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the following program directors in the NSF Division of Undergraduate Education–Susan Hixon, John Haddock, Herb Levitan, David McArthur, Jeffrey Ryan, and Jeanne Small–for raising some significant issues in undergraduate education with us; that discussion catalyzed this paper. We also thank Dr. Paul Feltovich of the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition for his careful reading of our manuscript and for his thoughtful suggestions.

The opinions in this article are those of the authors and are not intended to represent the official position of the National Science Foundation.

References

Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). 2002. Greater expectations: A new vision for learning as a nation goes to college. Washington, DC: AAC&U.

Beichner, R. J. Forthcoming. Introduction to the SCALE-UP (Student-Centered Activities for Large Enrollment Undergraduate Programs) Project. In Proceedings of the invention and impact conference. Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Bransford, J. D., A. L. Brown, and R. R. Cocking. 2000. How people learn: Brain, mind, experiences and school. Expanded edition. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Online at www.nap/catalog/9853.html.

Business-Higher Education Forum. 2003. Building a nation of learners: The need for changes in teaching and learning to meet global challenges. Washington, DC: Business-Higher Education Forum.

Fagan, A. P., C. H. Crouch, and E. Mazur. 2002. Peer instruction: Result from a range of classrooms. Physics Teacher 40:206-9.

Goodman Research Group, Inc. 2002. Final report of the Women’s Experiences in College Engineering (WECE) project. Cambridge, MA: Goodman Research Group, Inc.

Gosser, D., V. Strozak, and M. Cracolice. 2001. Peer-led team learning: General chemistry. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Handelsman, J., D. Ebert-May, R. Beichner, P. Brus, A. Chang, R. DeHaan, J. Gentile, S. Lauffer, J. Steward, S. K. Tighman, and W. B. Wood. 2004. Scientific teaching. Science 304:521-22.

Levy, F., and R. J. Murnane. 2004. The new division of labor: How computers are creating the next job market. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Mazur, E. 1997. Peer instruction. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

National Research Council. 2002. BIO 2010: Transforming undergraduate education for future research biologists. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

Novak, G. M., E. T. Patterson, A. D. Gavrin, and W. Christian. 1999. Just-in-Time Teaching: Blending active learning with Web technology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Patterson, E., and G. Novak. 2003. A JiTT approach to authentic learning: Teaching process with content. American Association of Physics Teachers Announcer 33 (4): 123.

Waterman, M. A., and E. D. Stanley. 2000. Investigative cases and case-based learning in biology, ed. J. R. Jungck and V. Vaughan. Vol. 6 of BioQUEST Library. San Diego: Academic Press. CD-ROM.

Folks:

The posting below, by Katharine Lyall, president emerita of the University of Wisconsin System and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Foundation. looks changing models for higher education in the United States. It is #16 in the monthly series called Carnegie Foundation Perspectives. These short commentaries exploring various educational issues are produced by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching . The Foundation invites your response at: CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org. Reprinted with permission

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Engaged and Engaging Science: A Component of a Good Liberal Education

Tomorrow’s Academy

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A CALL FOR THE MIRACLE MODEL

By Katharine Lyall

America is rapidly privatizing its public colleges and universities, and that process is raising questions our society desperately needs to grapple with. Who should aspire to a higher education? To what extent are education’s benefits public and social in nature, and to what extent is higher learning a private good? What are the core values of higher education and what are we willing to pay to preserve them?

The move toward privatization is the result of a “perfect storm” of economic and political trends that are putting insurmountable fiscal pressures on the states. When Republican tax policy architect Grover Norquist said, “I simply want to reduce government to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub,” he articulated an increasingly popular view of government. Currently, this view is driving the federal government to shift costs and risks formerly borne at the national level to the states, and the states, in turn, to shift costs and risks to individuals. The idea of privatizing a portion of Social Security and the continuing press for reductions in tax bases and tax rates follow this line of thought. And public colleges and universities are swirling in the vortex of this ideological storm as institutions scramble to find new ways to fund the educational enterprise by diversifying revenue sources and addressing new constituents.

Public colleges and universities, which enroll 77 percent of all students in higher education, drew more than half of their operating support from taxpayer sources in the 1980s; today money from state coffers provides about 30 percent of funding. At some of the nation’s most prominent public universities, such as the University of Virginia and the University of Colorado, state funding contributes less than 10 percent of university operating support. This steady disinvestment in higher education by the states does not seem to reflect a clear public policy decision to reduce higher education opportunities. It indicates instead structural problems in state budgets and budgeting practices. Indeed, the criticism of higher education for “exorbitant” tuition increases demonstrates a continuing belief by legislators that access to higher education is more essential than ever, both for individuals and for the state’s economic future, and that somehow universities should find a !
way to maintain access despite the steady erosion of funding.

In response to criticism from state legislatures, and from the U.S. Congress as well, public universities have been extraordinarily diligent and creative in diversifying their revenue sources: today, no single revenue source dominates-as mentioned, state funds provide 30 percent, tuition supplies about 20 percent, and gifts, grants, and contracts (mostly for research) constitute 50 percent or more. In effect, state taxpayers have become minority shareholders in their public colleges and universities.

The move toward privatization of public colleges and universities poses both threats and opportunities. Many argue that universities, like other entities, can benefit from exposure to the competitive discipline of the market to make them more focused in mission and more efficient in operations. The market, they argue, will break the bonds of tradition and either free or force universities to serve students better. But others worry that privatization is forcing universities to sell out to corporations and donors, to deny access for low-income students, and to abandon their core public purposes, including the extension of intellectual and human assets to the larger community.

Whatever one’s view, the stark facts are:

* Public support (per student) for public universities has been falling for two decades or more-and with growing fiscal pressures on states, there is no relief in sight.

* Higher education leaders have encouraged growing access without considering how it can be paid for-we see the urgency of the need but have not anticipated the shifting fiscal and political circumstances in which it must be met.

* The 20th century “social compact” among states, families, and higher education has been abandoned de facto-neither elected officials nor educators want to admit this, but a realistic adjustment cannot be made until they do. Finger-pointing and accusations of bad faith, bad management, and bad priorities will not work.

As some state leaders begin to pay attention and realize that solutions are needed, they are creating interesting experiments in higher education funding. For example:

Charter universities are being created. The Virginia state legislature has just adopted legislation providing for three tiers of charter status that permit public universities to obtain greater operating autonomy in exchange for meeting specified state performance goals. This relationship more honestly recognizes the state’s minority stakeholder status and frees the university to obtain management efficiencies outside the contractual constraints of state government.

Hybrid universities like Cornell University and the University of Virginia operate with a mix of publicly supported and privately endowed units within the same university structure. This permits focusing scarce state funding on units and programs that state decision makers designate as of critical state interest, leaving the operation and funding of remaining units/programs to the university operating privately.

Full-cost pricing experiments, like Miami University in Ohio where tuition is set to cover full costs of operation, and financial aid set-asides from the tuition revenues are used to ensure access for low-income students.

Experiments like these are being closely followed and will help to answer the question of how much of higher education’s “core public purposes” can be sustained as public support wanes.

Promising experiments aside, we urgently need a public discussion of a new sustainable higher education policy, based on realistic financial and operating expectations, that outlines the commitments of federal, state, and higher education institutions. Without this public debate, privatization will continue to an inevitable end of fewer institutions, less access-especially for those of modest income-and erosion of our economic future.

My own view is that the higher education universe is converging towards a new model, the “public purpose university,” defined not by the old concepts of ownership and control (public vs. private) but by the particular public goals it has elected to serve. No longer can we expect Clark Kerr’s multiversity to be all things to all people. The core public purposes of higher education must be collectively achieved (if they can be sustained at all) through specialization and allocation of resources across all higher education institutions. In this new model, both research and teaching missions will become more focused, and more collaborative activity will occur between and among “public” and “private” institutions, coordinated by statewide university systems.

This view may hinge on a spirit of cooperation that will be difficult, if not impossible to achieve. But as Barack Obama has said: “The true genius of America [is] a faith in simple dreams, an insistence on small miracles.” Our public colleges and universities share that faith and work daily to bring about those small miracles.

…………………………………………………………………

Katharine Lyall is president emerita of the University of Wisconsin System and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Foundation. Katharine, who is an economist and public policy scholar, is completing a new book on the financing of public higher education.

Carnegie Perspectives is a series of commentaries that explore different ways to think about educational issues. These pieces are presented with the hope that they contribute to the conversation. You can respond directly to the author at CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org or you can join a public discussion at Carnegie Conversations.

Join the Carnegie Perspectives email list by sending an email to CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org with “Subscribe” as the subject line.

Folks:

The posting below looks at five criteria for excellence in first year undergraduate education. It is from Chapter One: On Being Named an Institution of Excellence in the First College Year – The Process and the Places, in Achieving and Sustaining Institutional Excellence for the First Year of College by Betsy O. Barefoot, John N. Gardner, Marc Cutright, Libby V. Morris, Charles C. Schroeder, Stephen W. Schwartz, Michael J. Siegel, and Randy L. Swing. Copyright © 2005 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Published by Jossey-Bass. A Wiley Imprint 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741 [www.josseybass.com] Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT:

Tomorrow’s Academy

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INSTITUTIONS WITH FIRST YEAR EXCELLENCE – FIVE CRITERIA

“Why can’t we get the faculty more involved in first-year initiatives?” This common question has many possible answers, but it is clear that first-year excellence cannot be achieved, much less sustained, without the involvement of an institution’s faculty. Faculty ownership, however, is not enough. Achievement of first-year excellence requires meaningful partnerships among various campus constituent groups-faculty, administrators, student affairs professionals, and students. The first year is also a focal point around which such partnerships can be created and sustained.

The institutional stories as provided in this book breathe life into these five criteria and provide multiple examples of the way institutions of varying sizes, types, and missions have achieved excellence according to this model.

Selection Criteria

An obvious prerequisite to implementing a recognition process of this type is the determination of criteria by which an institution’s approach to the first year might be evaluated. We began this project by drawing on available scholarly literature, in addition to the collective experiences of Policy Center staff, to determine a set of common criteria by which diverse approaches to the first year could be evaluated in a two-year and four-year, public and private, large and small campuses. Five criteria resulted from our lengthy deliberations and provided the yardstick by which an eighteen-member panel-Policy Center staff and thirteen external reviewers-measured the efforts of the 130 nominees:

CRITERION 1: Evidence of an international, comprehensive approach to improving the first year that is appropriate to an institution’s type and mission. Institutions of Excellence are characterized by an approach to the first year that spans the curriculum and co-curriculum. This approach is central and systemic rather than appended or patched on to the core institutional mission.

“Down with serendipity and up with intentionality!” This statement, often made in public settings by John Gardner, is at the heart of this first criterion. Throughout the history of higher education, Gardner would argue, we have relied too much on serendipity-those special chance meetings of students and faculty, or students and other students, that shape the educational experience. Through the years, we have found that serendipity is not sufficient; rather, being intentional about the way we engineer meaningful student-faculty and student-student interactions is a key to success. It is also important that campuses have a clear rationale for the first year-what the first year is intended to do that goes beyond a low-level functional purpose (for example, making money for the institution, weeding out undesirable students) to a first-year philosophy that serves as a platform for the achievement of institutional mission.

CRITERION 2: Evidence of assessment of the various initiatives that constitute this approach. Institutions of Excellence are committed to an assessment process that results in data-driven continuous improvement in the first year. They should be able to report what was studied, how assessment was conducted, and how results were used.

A bird’s-eye view of first-year assessment discovers some disturbing trends-first, an overwhelmingly focus on measuring retention and the absence of evaluation of higher-level cognitive and affective outcomes. Of course, retention is important; but we believe most educators would agree that the purpose of the first year is more than simply keeping students at the institution where they began their undergraduate journey. A 2002 national survey of the nation’s chief academic officers conducted by the Policy Center discovered a second troubling trend: 31 percent of two- and four-year institutions conduct no assessment of the first year using national or regional comparative data, and another 31 percent collect data but make no meaningful use of these data (http://www.brevard.edu/fyc/survey2002/findings.htm). Such data tend to languish unused-a waste of institutional energy and resources. An obvious key to achieving excellence is not only conducting assessment, but also usi!
ng assessment findings for institutional improvement.

CRITERION 3: Broad impact on significant numbers of first-year students, including, but not limited to, special student subpopulations. First-year initiatives are characterized by high expectations and essential support for all students at all levels of academic ability.

What is a reasonable level of student participation in first-year initiatives? 100 percent? Less than 100 percent? This question has no one-size-fits-all answer. Rather, we argue that institutions should determine how they can realize maximum impact through a variety of first-year efforts whether desired impact can be achieved if all students are not required to participate. We also maintain that a college or university’s design of the first year should take into account both the special needs of students who may be underprepared or at the honors level, and the needs of students in between-those who on many campuses are considered just too average to require special attention. Out collective experience argues that all students are potentially at risk in one way or another for failing to realize maximum benefit from the first college year.

CRITERION 4: Strong administrative support for first-year initiatives evidence of institutionalization, and durability over time. Institutions of Excellence have a demonstrable track record of support for first-year initiatives. First-year programs and policies enjoy high status and receive an equitable share of fiscal and personnel resources.

Among multiple competing institutional priorities, the achievement of high status is no small feat. And for many campuses, where attention to the first year is a peripheral responsibility managed by entry-level employees, a high-status first year is only a dream. But for others, the first year is supported in high places, has been institutionalized, and has become the centerpiece of campus marketing-the way the institution proudly presents itself to its various publics, including, but not limited to, incoming students. High status also implies a reasonable and equitable level of financial support for organizational structures that support the design of the first year.

CRITERION 5: Involvement of a wide range of faculty, student affairs professionals, academic administrators, and other constituent groups. Institutions of Excellence involve all campus constituent groups in the design, implementation, and maintenance of first-year initiatives. These institutions are characterized by partnerships in support of the first year across divisional lines.