The Rising Costs of Tenure

Good research from the American Council Of Trustees and Alumni on the rising costs of tenure: about $2,300 per student at public universities, $3,400 at private institutions!

The Graduation Rate Myth

Robert Weissburg, professor of Political Science at Cornell, gives a stunning indictment of student irresponsibility in this John W. Pope foundation article, and some of the reasons faculty put up with it.

What he doesn't analyze are the psychological effects of their previous twelve years of schooling. The flaws in lower education are rife; I can't go into them all. But I'd like to examine two which have devastating effects and are directly related to the kind of behavior Weissburg laments:

• False self-esteem-building practices
• Test-driven instruction

First, the mis-directed ideas of phony self-esteem dominant in the last 20-30 years has encouraged teachers and parents to praise children regardless of accomplishments or effort. This practice seems to be motivated by at least two beliefs:

1. Children's egos are so delicate they cannot withstand any negative feedback from others.
2. Children cannot develop self-esteem without continuous praise from others.

In fact, a large portion of solid self-esteem results from achieved competency as a result of hard work, and from the regular experience of failure.

Why?

Because failure will always be a normal part of life and if a child does not learn how to overcome failures and continue to strive for his or her goals, that child will have a very difficult time in adulthood.

A child who has a false sense of self-worth and efficacy, and little experience with overcoming failure, is extremely vulnerable to depression, drugs, and suicide when faced with the actual problems of life because he or she is, in fact, incompetent. No amount of praise will overshadow those facts.

Optimally, parents and teachers encourage students to work hard at their learning, while modeling and expecting serious achievement, and giving praise for actual accomplishments. Negative feedback should be factual and task-oriented - "Here's where the equation has an error" - not directed at the child - "You should know better than to write the equation like that; here, this is how it should be."

In a Montessori classroom, self-development and self-esteem are achieved by mastering the work. The materials through which learning is accomplished are designed to be just hard enough to be challenging, but not so hard as to be impossible to master. At the same time, they are just the kinds of things children find fascinating to do, given their level of development. All this results in flow experiences for children, making them highly motivated to work.

Here is a video that illustrates how young children (3-6 years old) develop their sense, motor, and observational skills through the materials:




 And here's a video illustrating the mathematics curriculum:


The older a child gets, the more advanced and complicated the materials, until he or she is competently working abstractly, but with a rock-solid foundation in reality through previous work with concrete materials. Here's a video about the elementary level: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBs73rff0n0&feature=share&list=PLFB81B46845AB1919 (embedding wasn't allowed).

and one about the arithmetic of fractions, usually the hardest and least-understood arithmetical operation: http://youtu.be/GKHM5unkza4

This kind of work develops happy, competent, self-directed individuals who want to learn.

And one of the other elements that makes this possible is the competency-driven curriculum that does NOT center on standardized testing.

Which leads back to Weissburg's complaints: the second major element motivating poor student behavior has been the inordinate emphasis on standardized tests these past 20 years.

Schools, teachers, and students have been rewarded on test scores alone - not actual learning or competent teaching. Students are talked at, not engaged in the learning. Teachers feed information (not understanding) and students learn that all they need to know is what's necessary to score well on tests.

So are we surprised that's all they're interested in? That they just want to "get through" the class and will find any way to do that efficiently and economically? That they don't respect their teachers - that they're not oriented to understanding the material? They have not been encouraged to be invested in learning or in achieving the actual competency of understanding.

I lament the situation with Weissburg, because of the enormous wasted time and potential - and worry whether they will be able to learn enough as adults to overcome these handicaps.

Crumbling Higher Education Structure

And here's another article that speaks to the creative destruction going on in higher ed from The New Republic, "The Higher Education Monopoly is Crumbling as We Speak."

As my colleague Shawn Klein said, " I think this article makes the same mistake that so many takes on the higher Ed bubble make. Education is not merely about job training or even academic achievement. It is about learning how to be an independent, critical learner. Information can, does, and will come from many different sources, but it will only really be fruitful for those who have learned how to rationally integrate and digest the information and thereby make it knowledge."


The $64,000 question is: what are the best ways for students to learn how to think and learn well?

Lecture Fail

A debate is raging in The Chronicles of Higher Education regarding lectures. There are many laudable points on both sides.

However, I'm chagrined at the faculty members who aren't asking: do we know the optimal way for students to learn? What are the principles? What do we know about human development, and how is that relevant to our problem? What skills do these students need to benefit from the way we're teaching?

What's most unrealistic to me is the faculty member's belief that what students need to do is concentrate for 90 minutes on her lecture, i.e. apply their will. That's the solution?

It seems as if faculty favor lectures for a variety of reasons. I won't visit the non-productive ones, such as the fact that it may be a lot less work for a professor. Let's just look at positive reasons. A lecture can skillfully condense the essentials the student needs to learn about a subject, and faculty are often concerned that students learn what's fundamental and essential.

It's also personally satisfying to many faculty members to demonstrate their superior knowledge. And faculty are often the kind of people who really enjoy sharing knowledge with others. But most students aren't necessarily motivated to do so, or to be the recipient of knowledge summarized and shared, rather than acquired by first-hand experience. In the latter types of experience the student can enjoy the feeling of gaining competence - "look what I did myself!"

What the Flow research highlights is the limits of attention. It takes huge amounts of mental energy to concentrate, i.e. to pay attention, to information that arrives in a form which is difficult to mentally ingest. Here are some of the reasons:

1. Abstract ideas generally take more energy to attend to because they don't engage the senses or body or, often, the listener's deepest motivation. Instead, on their own the listener has to come up with imaginary objects or instances to embody what the lecturer is saying. That's why aids such as visuals or demonstrations are good to use. And, unless the listener is naturally interested in the subject, he has to cheerlead himself into continuing to pay attention. In the case of most students and most lectures, I'm betting they must cheerlead with a stick ("I'll fail!") rather than a carrot ("This stuff is cool to know!").
   
2. Listening while sitting still in a seat is extremely difficult because it doesn't engage the senses or the body.
   
3. If the listener gets confused, or stops paying attention for a bit of time, he or she has no opportunity to ask questions or re-start the lecture; the rest of the presentation may be worthless or, at the least, less than optimal as a learning experience because it can't be followed well.
   
4. Optimal human attention span is about 20 minutes (in other words, the length of TED talks) - 90 is almost impossible unless it's a full-body-and-mind engaging activity, like a sport or watching a movie, in which the emotions are engaged. OR unless it's a Flow activity for that person. Lecturing can easily be a Flow activity, especially if the lecturer finds the material interesting.
   
5. A good listener has an internal dialogue with the lecturer, pondering the truth of comments, asking questions about what is said, and trying to find the data in memory to answer them. Some people do this naturally, but the vast majority have no natural skill: they need to be taught how to "actively listen." And they're not getting that in the lower grades - so no wonder they're abyssmal at it in college.
   
6. Neither are most students in lower education given the activities, materials, or opportunities to learn how to concentrate. And then they're expected to figure out how to do it on their own when they arrive at college? (Developing the ability to concentrate is something Montessori classroom do well, because the materials are designed to trigger Flow for students. )

See the summary, student comments, and faculty responses and videos here.

The Best Business Education

"The best way that business faculty (i.e,. academics who often have minimal business experience themselves) can utilize their intellectual capital is to have students read classic business writings (e.g., Smith, Keynes, and Friedman) and wrestle with difficult questions that cannot be answered with multiple-choice bubbles. For example, addressing the classic question, “Is the social responsibility of a business to earn a profit?” would give young adults practice in tackling future abstract challenges in the workplace. The real world has more than four answer choices, and there is no answer key. "

This is from John W. Pope Center's Jason Fertig lucid article about business education - and he harkens back to a 1959 book, Higher Education for Business by Robert Gordon and James Howell, a lengthy study sponsored by the Ford Foundation, in which they say:

"When ranking academic performance across disciplines, business students are near the bottom…Too many students seek a business degree for economic vis-à-vis educational gain…Classes in business schools are too vocational…Business students need a sound grounding in liberal arts, not training for their first job."

I couldn't agree more with both Fertig and Gordon and Howell. How ironic, that this was their concern in 1959 - and it's still a problem today.

Do you have to agree with your professor?

 "In response to the question, "On my campus, there are courses in which students feel they have to agree with the professor's views on the topic at hand in order to get a good grade,' 44.3 percent said yes. The answers, of course, don't prove that such agreement with a professor is in practice essential to being graded fairly, but the very fact of that perception should be of the most urgent concern to all faculty who care about critical thought and intellectual diversity...I hope that ACTA will keep the public informed of the response (or non-response) of colleges and universities in Illinois to that devastating finding."

That's Professor Alan Charles Kors, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, University of Pennsylvannia, quoted in the Association of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) journal in response to ACTA's report card on higher education in Illinois.

Rating the "Top" Colleges and Universities

Related to my previous post on forgotten history, take a look at the Association of College Trustees and Alumni - ACTA's - project to evaluate learning at the top-rated colleges and universities at the What Will They Learn website - it's not pretty.

For $38,361 tuition at my alma mater, Northwestern University, a student is not required to take any classes in economics, history, mathematics, science, or literature - only foreign language. University of Chicago requires courses in all but economics, history, and foreign language. The question is: what are they learning?

Another unhappy finding - the graduation rates at many of the institutions are abyssmal. Economically, these institutions are taking in millions in federal loans, yet their customers are not getting the full product. If a business did this, wouldn't everyone scream?

An Evaluation of Public Higher Ed in Illinois, Grade = F

Read the Association of Trustees and Alumni/Illinois Policy Institute's "A Report Card on Public Higher Education in Illinois" - and weep. What's going on in Illinois is a crime, literally.

"The Uneducated American"

Wonderful letter by Don Boudreaux in the New York Times about yet another article claiming the government doesn't spend enough on higher ed. As if!

"9 October 2009

Editor, The New York Times
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10018

To the Editor:

Ever-loyal to leftist dogma, Paul Krugman believes that there is no domestic
problem (be it fact or fantasy) whose solution does not require more
government spending. And so it is with the alleged poor shape of American
higher education ("The Uneducated American," Oct. 9).

But how is it that wide swathes of our lives work so well without such
spending? Grocery retailing, for example, receives no handouts from
government and yet serves customers with extraordinary efficiency and
creativity. Ditto for restaurants, hardware stores, the press,
language-learning software suppliers, and myriad other industries not
suckling at the state's tit.

Why, then, can education - a service that yields enormous benefits to those
who purchase it AND one, like churches (another successful industry!), that
is largely tax-exempt - thrive only as a charity case?

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030"

(Hat tip to Don Hauptman)

"Challenged at an Unprecedented Level"

When you read this report on our Great Connections seminar, you can get an idea of how students respond to education that is crafted to help them be independent.

A Liberating Seminar for Students

Announcing
The Great Connections:
Mastering the Intellectual Tools that Transform
a College Education into Lifetime Success



The First College of the United States Seminar
for High School and College Students

Saturday, July 25-Sunday, August 2, 2009
CHICAGO

The Collegiate Way

A fabulous resource for students, parents, and educators, The Collegiate Way is the brainchild of Dr. Robert J. O'Hara. It details the factors and the means that make residential college life a superior educational experience. 

Why ban the classics?

The British upper class kept the knowledge of the Classics from the lower classes, to control them.

American slave owners banned slave education, especially in reading, to control them.

Many contemporary professors, under the guise of modern, multi-culturalist and feminist ideology, keep the Classics out of university classrooms...to control their students? 

The End of the Humanities?

On March 1st, I commented on Stanley Fish's review of The Last Professor. In his review, Fish remarked that philosophy, literature, art and the other subjects of the humanities are not generally perceived as having practical use. Fish and others argue that they shouldn't.

But I think the view that study of the humanities is uplifting, but impractical, contains a false dichotomy between the spiritual and the practical.

Most students are not wealthy enough to go to college without a concern for a consequent career. This has been true in the U.S. since its inception. Before the G.I. bill and more recent, massive federal loans and grants, in the main, only the wealthy could afford to spend four adult years studying and not working.

Consequently, most college students need to learn knowledge and skills that will enable them to find lucrative work. They need to learn knowledge and skills that are immediately applicable in the workforce. 

But they also need to learn knowledge and skills (cognitive, emotional and social) that will enable them to make effective and excellent professional and personal decisions.

What those who push quick professionalization in college miss is the power of the humanities to affect professional life. 

Philosophy and art, to take two of the humanities, are of immense importance in human life -every life. Everyone lives with some kind of philosophy, whether they've identified it to themselves or not. And art, through literature, music, and the visual arts, embodies many different ways of approaching life. As such, art can be a powerful influence in shaping a person's approach. As Aristotle argued, music can teach the young the habit of how to feel.  The visual arts can embody ways of carrying oneself, and of looking at the world. Literature can show ways of living, and what men of different characters do.

An education including these studies makes the student more aware and knowledgeable about what choices and values are open to them. It provides a much higher level of consciousness about oneself, one's culture, and human possibilities.  It empowers the student to make better decisions in the long run. Better personal and professional decisions.

Thus, the spiritual and the practical integrate.

Bill Ayers in his own words

Jordan Zimmerman nails it on the head in his post-with-video-interview about '60's-terrorist-now-feted-professor-of-education Bill Ayers - Ayers' self-importance shines. This is the guy teaching our teachers at the University of Illinois at Chicago!

A New College for Bureaucrats

This New York Times article reports that former teacher Chris Asch is tapping Michelle Obama to build a new college for bureaucrats.

“The Public Service Academy can be Barack Obama’s Peace Corps,” Mr. Asch said. “He needs to take advantage of this moment when people are recognizing the importance of government and build institutions that will last.”

We're starting to sound more and more like France! (Hat tip to Don Hauptman.)

The Oddity of College Admissions

Imagine you're shopping for a car and you're considering a Toyota or a Ford SUV.

But most of the information you can get about them is:

1. What executives at other car companies think about these vehicles,
2. The average driving skills test score of those who bought them.

You decide on a Toyota, you fill out the paperwork to buy one - but then you have to HOPE that the Toyota company will let you!

Sounds nuts, doesn't it?

That's the apt way that Diane Auer Jones summed up the college admissions process for selective colleges during a speech at at the National Association of Scholars conference yesterday.

Enormous payouts to college executives

While politicians and the public cry with outrage at executives' huge compensation packages in private, for-profit corporations, executive pay at non-profit universities and colleges have been shooting up.

The Chronicle of Higher Education's report features Amy Gutman, president of the public University of Pennsylvannia (Ben Franklin's baby). She got a 40% pay increase over the previous year, to a total compensation package of $1,088,786 in 2006-7.

And she's not alone.

"Fifteen presidents of public research universities took home at least $700,000 in 2007-2008, up from eight in last year's survey, and nearly one-third now earn over $500,000, according to the annual Chronicle of Higher Education survey out Monday [November 17th]." says the Chicago Tribune .

Some people are outraged that the executives get such high pay while students can't get financing and non-tenured faculty work hard at low pay.

Below is the Chronicle's table, comparing public and private, non-profit and for-profit CEO pay. (I wonder about Illinois state politicians' official pay versus their "take home" in our corrupt state.) I notice that no private college CEO is listed.

"Chief Executive Pay in One State

Here we compare the annual compensation of Richard Herman, chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who makes close to the median compensation of $427,400 for a public research university president, with the compensation of other chief executives in the state.

Patricia A. Woertz, chairman and CEO, Archer Daniels Midland, Decatur, Ill.

$17.5-million

Richard Herman, chancellor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

$427,500

Neil J. Nicoll, CEO, YMCA of the USA, Chicago

$412,788

Walter Milton Jr., superintendent, Springfield (Ill.) Public Schools

$261,314

Rod R. Blagojevich, governor of Illinois

$177,412

Timothy E. McGuire, president, National Merit Scholarship Corp., Evanston, Ill.

$143,500

National Median Salaries

Accountant	$54,630
Architect	$64,150
Civil engineer	$68,600
Corporate lawyer	$128,610
Member, U.S. House of Representatives or U.S. Senate	$169,300
Chief Justice, U.S. Supreme Court	$217,400
Anesthesiologist	$321,686
Nonprofit CEO	$326,500
President, private research university	$434,369
Corporate CEO (large companies)	$1,030,000
SOURCES: The Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2008-9 edition; Securities and Exchange Commission proxy filings; the office of Illinois Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich; The Chronicle of Philanthropy; the federal judiciary; 2007 Equilar Survey of Corporate Chief Executives; Chronicle reporting"

What needs to be asked is: what is a public-university president producing to warrant such pay? Highly educated and productive graduates? Large-revenues from deals with private firms for university research?

I can't claim to know how such pay rates should be determined, but if this level of pay is what the market will bear for university presidents, I wonder if the scramble for the millions of government-financed college students these last 10 years has anything to do with it.