TCCTA Blog

Board Examines Cost Efficiencies

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, during its quarterly meeting on July 29, conducted a major policy discussion on prospective cost efficiencies for higher education. The group heard primarily from a panel of four presenters, representing a larger committee charged with formulating a list of specific policy recommendations. A report is due November 1, leading up to the Regular Session of the Legislature, which convenes in January. Background information on the panel's responsibility is included at the conclusion of this post.

An obvious undercurrent of the discussion is the looming budget shortfall facing lawmakers, now estimated to be as high as $18 billion for the next biennium. The panelists focused on short-term and long-term alternatives.

Representing two-year colleges was Richard Rhodes, president of El Paso Community College, and chair of the Texas Association of Community Colleges.

Of particular interest to community college faculty members is the proposal to reward colleges for student advancement along stipulated "Momentum Points," such as successful completion of semester hour and developmental education thresholds, transfers to universities, and various degree and certification milestones. As reported here frequently, Commissioner of Higher Education Raymund Paredes and the Coordinating Board have proposed that ten percent of the funding for community colleges be determined by these Momentum Points.

Regarding such incentives, instructors are concerned about grade inflation and a potential threat to academic standards if colleges are rewarded financially for passing and graduating more students.

Dr. Rhodes expressed general support for financial incentives, but urged the board to move carefully on the Momentum Points approach. He said a number of "unintended consequences" could arise in such a plan if it is not considered with ample deliberation. Coordinating Board chair Fred Heldenfels agreed that many times the "devil is in the details," and lots of work remains on the concept. 

Another noteworthy subject arising out of the discussion is the possibility of entrance standards for Texas community colleges, particularly for "adult" students who could presumably be served better in a revised and enhanced Adult Basic Education environment. Many of these students do not possess the verbal and computational skills to advance through developmental education courses at two-year schools. "They need jobs," said Commissioner Paredes, who has suggested previously that these students should be in ABE. (These programs are funded through the Texas Education Agency, using a combination of state and federal funds, with local institutions providing additional resources, such as facilities. As a category, ABE students are not included in contact hour enrollment for community college funding purposes.)

Dr. Rhodes expressed concern that these individuals may not have anywhere else to go if turned away by their local community college, since ABE is not designed or funded adequately to handle those who need it. "If not community colleges," Dr. Rhodes asked, "then whom?" Commissioner Paredes responded that ABE would have to be modified in its role, funding, and scope.

Below is the background and official Coordinating Board summary of the duties of the committee charged with examining efficiencies in Texas higher education. 

In fall 2009, Governor Rick Perry issued Executive Order RP73, relating to a comprehensive review of higher education cost efficiencies. The Executive Order charges the Coordinating Board to work in cooperation with Texas institutions of higher education to undertake a broad and comprehensive review of system-wide opportunities for achieving cost efficiencies, including but not limited to reviewing state funding based in part on student course completion; considering ways of restructuring the state’s financial aid programs; consolidating academic programs and/or eliminating low-producing programs; and considering such aspects of higher education as faculty workload, transfer agreements between two- and four-year institutions, costs of textbooks, and alternatives to creating new campuses through such practices as distance learning. The Coordinating Board must have its final recommendations to the Governor and the Legislature by November 1, 2010.
As a result of the Governor’s Executive Order, the Coordinating Board arranged an Advisory Committee on Higher Education Cost Efficiencies, a 20-person policy committee comprised of 10 higher education leaders and 10 business leaders who have been meeting monthly since December 3, 2009. The committee has been reviewing information and reports, and considering preliminary recommendations according to the mandates included in the Executive Order. Committee meetings have been held at the Coordinating Board and have included presentations by experts on various topics of interest to the committee. Meetings have been open to the public and webcast. Meeting materials and presentations are available online at: http://www.thecb.state.tx.us/acce. Webcasts are available on the Coordinating Board’s “Events” website at: http://www.thecb.state.tx.us/apps/Events/.
Representatives of the Advisory Committee will provide information regarding preliminary recommendations and will be available to answer questions. Scheduled members are: Woody Hunt, Chairman, Texas Governor’s Business Council; Raymund Messer, President and Chairman, Walter Moore and Associates, Inc.; Richard Rhodes, President, El Paso Community College; and Jesse Rogers, President, Midwestern State University.

Alumni Award Nominations Open

Every year since 1982 American Association of Community Colleges has awarded the Outstanding Alumni Award to those individuals nominated by their community college who have excelled in their field and given back to their community.

The AACC Board of Directors invites member CEOs to nominate candidates for the 2011 award.

Nomination must be recieved at AACC by Sept. 3, 2010. Awards will be presented at Annual Convention, April 9-12, 2011, in New Orleans. More information and nomination forms are available at this site. The site also includes winners of the award in past years.

The AACC is the "primary advocacy organization for the nation's community colleges. The association represents almost 1,200 two-year, associate degree–granting institutions," according to its Web site.

A Conversation on Textbook Costs

New federal regulations aimed at textbook pricing practices went into effect this month, as reported in a previous post. Publishers must now "unbundle" college textbooks from accompanying materials such workbooks and CDs, allowing them to be purchased separately. The publishers' representatives must also tell faculty members how much a textbook costs when they make a sales pitch—a practice designed to make sure professors are aware of what students will have to pay if the book is adopted.

But why exactly are textbooks so expensive? The rate of increase has apparently been way above the annual inflation rate.

A number of diagnoses are available from a recent online "conversation" in the New York Times. For instance, one commentator ascribes the problem to student loans, which involves "easy" money and few complaints about rate hikes from students. Another thinks the whole problem is exaggerated, especially since students increasingly buy or rent their books online these days.

To gather information, many policy makers (who get bombarded with complaints) simply survey the cost of books in the college bookstore, which may not be the most accurate appraisal technique. Lawmakers also rely heavily on student testimony, which tends to be highly critical of textbook costs and the number of required texts.

According to some media reports, instructors in certain fields are using the Internet for all assignments, eliminating the need for buying any books at all.

The titles of the NYT contributions and the authors are:

• Little Incentive to Control Costs, Robert Applebaum, ForgiveStudentLoanDebt.com
• The Faux Value of E-Texts, Byron W. Brown, Economist, Michigan State University
• How Students Really Buy Books, Eric Weil, Student Monitor
• Get Rid of Print and Go Digital, Anya Kamenetz, author, DIY U
• A Small Expense, Overall, Bruce Hildebrand, Association of American Publishers
• Like the Pharmaceutical Market, James Koch, economics professor
• The $100 Biology Book, Charlotte Allen, writer

The online respondents to these comments often make the most interesting reading. You may also find some valuable insights in how to save your students some serious money. Here's the link.

Facebook as Course Management System

The undeniable popularity of Facebook has prompted many college instructors to use the social networking tool as a course management system. An obvious advantage is that students already know how to use it—unlike Blackboard, for instance, which requires at least some rudimentary training. Also, Facebook is free. Professors are making assignments, posting videos, recording grades, and chatting in online discussions with students. In other words, performing most of the functions that course management software typically provides. 

Recently, About 750 professors and administrators attended a conference on "Emerging Technologies for Online Learning," presented by the Sloan Consortium, a nonprofit group to support teaching with technology, and two other educational software and resource providers. A breakout session on Facebook reportedly drew an impressive crowd.

Many professors have expressed reluctance to use Facebook in their classes because of privacy concerns. The simple solution, according to one presenter at the conference, is to have two Facebook profiles, one for school and one for your private life.

Below is an excerpt from a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

A session on Facebook held Thursday morning attracted a standing-room-only crowd, with people packed into the room and huddled in the doorway. One benefit of the popular social network is that, unlike course-management systems such as Blackboard, students already know how to use it, said the presenter, Denise Knowles, a Web-application specialist at Los Medanos College in Pittsburg, Calif. She encouraged professors to use Facebook to send out announcements for their courses and to design assignments where students post responses using the service.

But she also recommended that professors set up two Facebook accounts—one for communicating with students and another for personal connections. That way, professors can clearly keep their professional identities walled off from other important aspects of their lives. "We need our privacy," she said. "I don't want people seeing pictures of my children, and I don't want people seeing pictures of my life."

Not everyone is so cautious, however. Tanya M. Joosten, a lecturer in the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee's department of communication, gave out her Facebook address during her session. She said she uses privacy settings in the service to control what various "friends" can see, and she suggested that professors set up a separate page on Facebook for a course, which allows students to connect to the page without seeing the personal information of the professor or others who have "liked" the page. Then professors can post updates to the course Facebook page, which are automatically pushed to the pages of students who follow it.

"It's coming right down to them in a medium that they're already using anyway," she said. A survey she did of her own students showed that 83 percent approved of professors pushing class updates via Facebook. "I've never seen ratings so high in any emerging technology project I've done," she said.

Career Colleges Examined

Depending upon one's perspective, they are called proprietary colleges, for-profit academies, or career colleges. Presently they operate in a universe of high unemployment, and spend millions in recruitment dollars, promising jobs to potential students—without having to mess with all those pesky developmental education and liberal arts courses in the Core Curriculum.

For the most part, these students enroll with the help of financial aid programs, especially federal student loans. One controversy making the rounds in Washington currently is whether the student loan program is starting to resemble the housing bubble of recent years. When defaults start to accumulate, it could spread to other sectors of the fragile economy, even though the feds recently eliminated private banks from the "no-risk" pool of lenders. Presumably, all will turn out okay, if students get good jobs upon graduation and manage to keep up their loan payments. If they don't, there is a problem.

Lurking under the surface of this subject is the simple fact that community college tuition represents a small fraction of what these schools charge their students (and ultimately U.S. taxpayers if the students default on their loans). As you might expect, some proprietary academies offer programs that are not available at a local two-year public college, but many wonder if students would be better off exploring the less expensive alternative. 

The Texas Tribune recently posted a great article by Reeve Hamilton on this subject, with a Lone Star twist that names names of the schools we've all seen advertised. 

Below is an excerpt, but please be sure to read the entire piece:

U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, leads federal hearings on the need to regulate for-profit recruitment practices and the warnings of hedge-fund manager Steven Eisman (who famously predicted the crash of the housing market) that the student loan market is the next bubble to burst. And one of Johnson’s most recent cases — Dallas-based students claiming they were misled into believing that their psychology doctoral program was in the process of being accredited by the American Psychological Association — landed a prime-time slot on PBS’s Frontline.

Bob Cohen, senior vice president of the Career College Association, a national coalition of proprietary schools, dismisses what he describes as self-interested detractors who tend to generalize isolated incidents for the sake of publicity. “A lot of what we’re seeing is the attempt by short-sellers on Wall Street or trial lawyers who have made a specialty practice to try to drum up this story,” he says. “But the basic fact remains that you have 2.8 million students in career schools, and they’re getting a good education.”

The pitch at these schools — ITT Technical Institute, Everest Institute and Kaplan College are some of the more pervasive names in Texas — is simple: Without the hassles of developmental courses and required liberal arts courses, students can get career-focused training and join the workforce in less time. Cohen says for-profit schools avoid what he dubs the “scavenger hunt” for courses that can occur at community colleges. “There, a lot of the onus was put on the student to get over that steeplechase and graduate,” he says. “At career colleges, we say, forget all that.” To the dismay of education traditionalists, that’s not a tough sell for an increasing number of Texans, even if the short-term cost of attendance is steeper than comparable public-sector options.

Former TCCTA President Testifies

Danita McAnally, dean of assessment and development at Amarillo College (and TCCTA president from 2006-07), was among the invited witnesses before the Senate Committee on Higher Education, on July 22, offering testimony on faculty workload from the perspective of community colleges. The subject is among the interim charges of the committee in anticipation of the 2011 Regular Session, which convenes in January. The panel also examined topics concerning accountability measures and ways to improve student advising practices.

The committee is chaired by Sen. Judith Zaffirini (D-Laredo).

The Senate directive on faculty workload, at least partially, reflects interest by lawmakers during recent sessions of the Legislature regarding the amount of time that college and university professors spend with students. Some of the questions raised previously focused upon the responsibilities of university professors, who are often released from teaching duties to conduct research.

Ms. McAnally assessed the situation at two-year colleges from her perspective, stating a preference for local flexibility rather than state control of faculty workload. She pointed out the unique role that community colleges play as today's "workhorse" of higher education, especially given the current surge in enrollment of under-prepared students. She added that funding shortages have exacerbated workload problems. Colleges that are strapped for funds rely upon more supplemental adjunct instruction, which often draws full time faculty away from teaching and advising so they can fulfill other institutional responsibilities, such as seeking grants.

Commenting on the most talented faculty members at AC, "We tap them over and over," Ms. McAnally stated, which makes their full attention to teaching and advising more problematic. She also informed the panel of the various ways colleges calculate faculty load, including contact hour tabulations, faculty-student ratios, and the number of courses or sections. Each has advantages and disadvantages. 

In response to a question from Sen. Zaffirini on the impact of "new populations" of students, who tend to come from homes in which parents have not attended college, Ms. McAnally said these individuals take much more time and effort to advise. Sometimes these students need special help in learning how to study or in navigating the college environment, in addition to scheduling classes and choosing a curriculum. This extra responsibility requires additional resources.

The committee's report is due on December 1.

Is Algebra the New Latin?

There is no getting around the fact that college algebra, the holy grail of many baccalaureate entry programs, presents a formidable challenge for today's students. If the success numbers are grim for reading and writing, they are even worse for math. This is especially the case with first-generation students, who all too often disappear before completing their developmental coursework, which carries no transferable credit anyway. Most don't make it to algebra, much less complete it.

Some mathematics educators and reformers have suggested that it's time to change the goal (but not lower the bar) from algebra to statistics.

The argument goes something like this: We are rarely required in our daily lives to find X, not to mention Y. But we use statistics all the time. At the most basic level, medians, means, ranges, proportions, deviations, margins of error, and correlations among variables are part of daily news reporting. In the medical field, for instance, we are bombarded with purported links between one set of behavior and another, with little background in how to interpret the underlying data.

As statistics instructors have pointed out for generations, if a rooster crows and the sun comes up consistently, an unschooled observer might infer a magic rooster. And, while we are at it, we might as well pay homage to the hoary observation of Mark Twain about "lies, damn lies, and statistics." At the very least, we should admit that most of us share a fundamental ignorance when it comes to how numbers function in the practical world.

Attention, math teachers: So far, proponents recommend no "dumbing down" of content to make the material less rigorous. As those who have wrestled with statistics can attest, plenty of rigor is available in the subject, properly taught. The idea is to present material and problems that are more applicable to our society—and then reinforced constantly in daily life, like English usage for those who master the basic rules of grammar. Algebra would presumably remain as the prime gateway to calculus if the appropriate curriculum requires it. At any rate, no one appears to be proposing touchy-feely math at this point in the discussion.

Algebra purists have a point when they observe that the subject has always been academic rather than practical, and yet students routinely tackled it anyway in years past. Also, solving an equation by finding an unknown does involve the use of logic, concentration, and discipline—useful traits, to put it mildly, in this age of distraction and trivia.

On the other hand, more than one commentator has noted that educated Americans once believed adamantly that a person could not possibly be well-trained intellectually without fluency in Greek and Latin. In a sense, these two subjects were replaced incrementally with computer science, psychology, chemistry, American literature, geology, and such. Today, it is likely that most college and university educators have never had a single college course in Greek or Latin—a doomsday scenario to some of our national founders, most likely (but perhaps not to figures such as Franklin, who experimented with a more efficient approach to English spelling, or Jefferson, who once composed an abridged, miracle-free version of the Gospels). When it comes to curricular change, developmental math students may be asking implicitly, "Ubi est mea?" Where's mine?

Any prospective controversy will likely be resolved within the mathematics community, as it should be. But the discussion has now advanced to include some heavyweights, such as the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Here's a brief passage from an article on developmental education in the July 21 edition of the San Antonio Express-News:

Many educators also are rethinking college algebra as the “gold standard” for degree programs in the arts and humanities, social sciences and business. Northwest Vista is part of a $14 million pilot program through the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to promote statistics as an alternative degree requirement.

“Whether we know it or not, we are using statistics just about every day,” said Bernadine Chuck Fong, a senior partner at the foundation. “If you are learning something that makes sense to you, and that you can benefit from, you will learn it better.”
Many of these ideas have been shown to work, but scaling up small experiments into a new way of doing business is a massive challenge.

With the statistics course, states likely would have to mandate that public universities accept the class as an alternative to algebra in order for students to transfer successfully.
Refresher classes and self-paced modules would suffer under Texas’ system of reimbursing colleges by course enrollment, so legislators would have to overhaul the funding formula to reward outside-the-box solutions.

The Decline of Studying

New research conducted by a pair of California economics professors attempts to show that, over the past 50 years, the amount of time the average college student studies each week has dropped steadily. According to surveys analyzed by professors Philip Babcock, at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks, at the University of California Riverside, the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. Today’s student hits the books for 14 hours, their report says. Undoubtedly many instructors will believe that current number is a stretch.

Apparently the downturn began in the 60s. It is tempting at first blush to ascribe the purported decline of studying to the "new" student (holding down a job, single parenting, on the edge financially, etc.), but it's not that simple, if the researchers are correct.

In fact, though the surveys did not include community colleges, the decline is apparent for students of all kinds, regardless of SAT scores or demographics, and also applies to all types of institutions—large and small, public and private, exclusive and not-so-much. While the scholars acknowledge that students are working more today and that schools currently enroll students who wouldn’t have attended college a generation ago, they argue that study times are dropping for everyone regardless of employment or personal characteristics. In other words, even rich kids with no jobs or responsibilities are studying a lot less than before.

The researchers also address the (at least logical) possibility that students are more efficient in their use of time these days, thanks to computers and such. In a word: no.

It's all in a major article published earlier this month in the Boston Globe, available here. 

Some choice passages from the piece:

One theory, offered by Babcock and Marks, suggests that the cause, or at least one of them, is a breakdown in the professor-student relationship. Instead of a dynamic where a professor sets standards and students try to meet them, the more common scenario these days, they suggest, is one in which both sides hope to do as little as possible.

“No one really has an incentive to make a demanding class,” Marks said. “To make a tough assignment, you have to write it, grade it. Kids come into office hours and want help on it. If you make it too hard, they complain. Other than the sheer love for knowledge and the desire to pass it on to the next generation, there is no incentive in the system to encourage effort.”

And:

In survey after survey since 2000, college and high school students are alarmingly candid that they are simply not studying very much at all. Some longtime professors have noted the trend, which rarely gets mentioned by college admissions officials when prospective students visit campus.

Facebook and GPA Unrelated

A controversy that has bounced around quite a bit in recent months involves whether Facebook and other social networking sites are harmful to the performance of students. The latest study seems to say no.

This may be an important question since Facebook has reportedly grown to 500 million users worldwide, and has become the cardinal means of communication for many people.

Researchers at Northwestern University found no apparent connection between time spent on social networking sites and academic performance. The study, the results of which appear in the latest issue of Information, Communication & Society, included responses from approximately 1,000 first-year students at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Sites such as Facebook and MySpace had no effect on grades, despite how often students used them or how many they used, the study indicated.

Researcher Eszter Hargittai, associate professor of communication studies and sociology at Northwestern, suggests that the benefits of social networking sites may cancel out any distractions.

“You could go on there and waste your time,” she said. “On the other hand, you can connect with your classmates, get information about homework assignments, get to know people better, and feel more comfortable engaging with them on academic matters.” It's all a matter of how the time is used. This would make social networking no worse than simply hanging out with friends.

A past study at Ohio State University (reported here earlier) had suggested that students on Facebook earn lower GPA's than nonusers. However, the scholar who conducted that research also stated that she lacked enough data to examine it further.

The above information was reported in an article by Kelly Truong, in the July 15 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Superiority of Online Instruction Questioned

Advocates of online instruction were boosted recently by a study published by the U.S. Department of Education. As reported here and in numerous media outlets, the DOE "meta-analysis" indicated that online instruction was superior to traditional face-to-face instruction, as measured by student success rates. 

However, a new analysis examined the data with more scrutiny and discovered that the purported edge for online pedagogy does not hold up for semester-length courses, which are the meat and potatoes of higher education enrollment. Even more significantly, online instruction does not succeed as well with poorly prepared and low-income students—a principal clientele of community colleges today. These two findings would would seem to represent important distinctions, and the latter validates anecdotal comments by faculty members who state frequently that online instruction works best with mature, well-prepared students.

As one teacher put it, "The last thing my students need is more distance."

The study is titled "Effectiveness of Fully Online Courses for College Students: Response to a Department of Education Meta-Analysis," by Shanna Smith Jaggars and Thomas Bailey. It was distributed by the highly respected Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University.

An important passage from the abstract:

Therefore, while advocates argue that online learning is a promising means to increase access to college and to improve student progression through higher education programs, the Department of Education report does not present evidence that fully online delivery produces superior learning outcomes for typical college courses, particularly among low-income and academically underprepared students. Indeed some evidence beyond the meta-analysis suggests that, without additional supports, online learning may even undercut progression among low-income and academically underprepared students.

Here's a link to the entire study, which includes a pdf version.