Why the AIR Nominees Should Join Twitter

I voted today in the officer elections for the Association for Institutional Research. AIR is the main professional organization in North America for the people who do reporting, business intelligence, and assessment for higher education—my professional colleagues. Like most such organizations it relies on its members to serve as officers, board members, and committee members to function. The slate of candidates seems quite capable. I don't know any of them personally, though I've connected with one virtually (more on that below). Certainly, I am grateful that they've volunteered their time to make a great organization work.

I have been a member of AIR for about a year, so I hardly know the players in institutional research. But as someone who is active in the AIR LinkedIn group and who follows a fair number of institutional researchers on Twitter, I expected to recognize at least some of the candidates. With the exception of Ellen Peters, who is also involved in the LinkedIn group, social media users are absent. So far as I can tell, none use Twitter. Not one of the candidate's statements mentioned AIR's social media use. And that's a problem.

How Many More Syrians?

The deaths of three journalists are little in the grand narrative of somewhere between 3,000 and 7,500 lives lost in the Syrian uprising. But I had followed Marie Colvin's reports from Homs, saw Remi Ochlik's photographs of Libya and stayed up at night watching Rami al-Sayed's live video of Bama Amr. They, and others as well who have had the courage to tell Syria's story, made the conflict human for me. And in doing so, it made them human as well. So today I feel their loss.

It feels so trivial to write a letter to my Congressmen about this. I was a Marine; I feel like I should join the fight somehow. But this simple act is what the people of Syria are dying for: the right to say to the government that it should change its course. It isn't trivial for them.

I sent the following to my Representative and Senators today:

The Real "Bill Gates" Rules

So I’ve grown tired of the endlessly circulating "Bill Gates' Rules for Life" graduation speech that never actually happened. Had any of the last generation of business, technology, or intellectual leaders followed them we would still be using paper ledgers to build Ford Pintos. These rules are about as far from what we should be teaching students as one can get.

Let's think about what the rules would really be in today's economy.

Rule 1: Life isn’t fair. The people who want you to get used to it usually benefit from it at your expense. Don’t get used to it; do something about it. 

Rule 2: The world doesn’t care about your self-esteem. But if you wait until you accomplish something to feel good about yourself, you’ll never accomplish anything. 

Rule 3: Whether you make $60,000 a year right out of college has a lot more to do with your parents’ social position than anything you did in college.

Inconveniently Untrue Inconvenient Truths (Part 2)

Last week, Richard Vedder managed to completely infuriate me with 12 supposedly inconvenient truths about American higher education, most of which turned out to be, shall we say, exceptionally problematic. I tackled the first four last Friday (and must certainly apologize for making you wait, with baited breath I'm sure, for the next installment). Resuming where we left off . . . .

Inconvenient Truth #5 Undergraduate Students Are Often Neglected

There's no question that this is probably true at top-shelf research institutions. In grad school I saw excellent (and well-funded) researchers who couldn't teach with anything resembling competence sail through the tenure process. But saying that this is a problem with American higher education generally is like saying excessive speed is characteristic of the Italian auto industry. That Bugatti Veryon may break 260 miles per hour, even with James May behind the wheel. But a total of 300 were ever made. The run-of-the mill Fiat? Not so much. Admit it: that Alfa Romeo sitting in the garage isn't even running.

And that's where American higher education finds itself as well. Undergraduates may be low priority at Ph.D.-oriented institutions. But according to the Carnegie Foundation's classifications, those make up only 15% of primarily 4-year institutions. If the remaining institutions are giving undergraduates short shrift, who are they paying attention to? It surely isn't research: in 2000, despite making up more than three-fourths of the institutions that received federal research grants, non-research/doctoral institutions received only 15% of grant money.

Inconveniently Untrue Inconvenient Truths (Part 1)

Richard Vedder, in a blog post at the Chronicle of Higher Education, suggested "12 Inconvenient Truths About American Higher Education" that he plans on expanding in a series of essays. These claims, if true, are inconvenient for defenders of traditional higher education; Vedder suggests that these claims "suggest cumulatively American universities have a lot of problems." The problem is that they are mostly not true, or at least can't support the conclusions that Vedder reaches from them. Which is inconvenient for him and those who think the free market can do better with higher education than it did with mortgage lending.

Inconvenient Truth #1: College Costs Are Rising Both for Students and Society

This one we can't stop hearing about. Vedder maintains not only that tuition is up but also that "higher education absorbs more than triple the share of the nation’s productive efforts than it did when John F. Kennedy was president." I tackled the increasing cost concerns back in November, and have since updated the analysis (and made it fancy and interactive!). Basically, and assuming that my university is representative, costs haven't increased at state universities; tuition has gone up only because state funding has been slashed.

The increasing share of (I assume; Vedder doesn't really define "productive efforts") GDP, that reflects not a problem with universities but their success in the major goal of post-World War II educational policy: increasing access. The percentage of 18 to 34-year-olds attending college rose from 10.8% in 1963 to 23.8% in 2010. In 2010, 2% of those 35 and over were enrolled in college; in 1963 the Census Bureau didn't bother including them in the data. That alone accounts for most of the rising share of GDP. We allow more people to go to college today than we did in the golden era of the "American Century" and are somehow shocked—shocked!—to find that we spend more of our resources on education.

Arne Duncan: Barking up the Wrong Tree

No one should be surprised by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's call for reducing higher education costs. It's a trendy issue at the moment, not least because of the attention brought to student loan burdens by Occupy Wall Street. But telling that to higher ed administrators, especially financial aid officers, isn't the right audience. At my institution, at least, the cost to students has been rising not because the cost of providing education is rising but because the cost burden has shifted dramatically from taxpayers to students.

Utah Valley University's commitment to transparency allows a close look at what's really going on at one, presumably representative, state university. We publish an annual Factbook that includes budget data for the past 20 years. That data doesn't paint a pretty picture.

UVU's inflation-adjusted costs per FTE have stayed flat since 1990.
State appropriations haven't, so neither has tuition.

Is Google's LMS a Blackboard Killer?

The Twitterverse is quite excited about the news that Pearson and Google have teamed up to produce a free Learning Management System (thanks for the tip, Mike Krywy). OpenClass has the potential, some say, of breaking the dominance of proprietary software such as Blackboard and—well, I guess all of the ones that Blackboard has bought in the past decade—in higher ed. But with support built in by Google, there seems to be the potential as well to overtake the proliferation of open source solutions such as Moodle and Canvas (which Utah recently adopted).

I haven't looked at the features of OpenClass yet. My first impression is that this isn't big as it sounds, at least on the immediately. But there is long-term potential to change the players in the field dramatically, depending on what Google and Pearson do here.