Trigger Warnings on College Campuses

The Atlantic has published an article that correctly laments the rising use of "trigger warnings" by colleges, but which focuses on an unsupported thesis that there is something materially different about "kids these days" rather than examining why college administrators are sensitive to demands for those warnings. Don't get me wrong -- there are differences between generations, and in some ways today's college students are a lot more sensitive about wrongs than were past generations. For example, today's college students appear to be much more sensitive to and much less tolerant of racism, as compared to past generations.

A couple of decades ago, when I was in law school, my criminal law professor used sexual assault in order to illustrate some of the complexities of the law. A law professor can pose a hypothetical example of a sexual assault in which the victim sincerely believes that a sexual assault occurred, while the accused (reasonably or unreasonably) sincerely believes that everything that occurred was consensual. Such a hypothetical case allows you to examine questions of the degree to which intent should factor into criminal prosecutions, charging decisions and sentencing. Should two equivalent acts receive the same punishment, even though one offender was acting deliberately and the other was clueless? To what degree does deterring the future acts of others justify prosecuting an offender who may not have realized that he was committing a crime? Hypotheticals can also extend into cases in which consent is obtained through fraud or deception, or by a mistake of perception.

Some of the students in my section made strenuous objection to the use of sexual assault -- not to any specific example, but to its being mentioned at all -- within the classroom. The objections did not change the manner in which the class was taught, but did inspire school administrators to meet with the students who raised the objections to try to explain what the professor was hoping to accomplish and to resolve their concerns. At that time I was told by another professor that the atmosphere for discussing sexual assault cases had changed significantly, and that some professors had already stopped using sexual assault hypotheticals in the classroom despite the difficulty of formulating hypotheticals that would as clearly illustrate the legal principles they were trying to teach. The Atlantic article opens with the example of "law students asking... professors at Harvard not to teach rape law", as if it is a new development. It is not.

When I hear of demands for "trigger warnings", my response is not that students are somehow different from back when I was in college. It may be that there has been some shift in the number of students raising objections -- something that I have not seen documented -- but the primary difference appears to be that school administrators have changed how they respond to student objections. Forty years ago, the response probably would have amounted to, "It's college, and you're going to be uncomfortable at times. Get over it." When I was a student the response was more gentle, but with a similar outcome. Today, college administrators do seem much more likely to ask that a professor add "trigger warnings" or change something about a course in order to avoid making the objecting students uncomfortable.

Why would administrators change their approach?

I think the answer lies not with the modern generation of students, but with the modern approach to the funding of college education. When college education was more affordable, and colleges were less dependent upon squeezing every last tuition dollar out of a student, colleges could more easily treat their students as students. As states have chosen to reduce their support for public colleges, colleges have increasingly had to fight for every dollar. Part of that process has involved making life a lot easier, and a lot more comfortable, for students. Part of that process involves catering to a vocal minority that, if not appeased, is likely to create negative publicity for a college or take its tuition dollars elsewhere.

The authors write,

The press has typically described these developments as a resurgence of political correctness. That’s partly right, although there are important differences between what’s happening now and what happened in the 1980s and ’90s. That movement sought to restrict speech (specifically hate speech aimed at marginalized groups), but it also challenged the literary, philosophical, and historical canon, seeking to widen it by including more-diverse perspectives. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being.

I think, here, that the authors are looking at two different forms of response by college administrators. There was no ambiguity in the classroom instruction -- sexual assault was presented as a bad thing, empathy was extended to the victim even when the hypothetical posited an offender who did not realize that he had committed a crime, and nobody questioned why "'No' means 'no'" was sensible policy. The students who objected to any reference to sexual assault in our criminal law class were not interested in widening the discussion or including additional viewpoints. Had our professor been less sensitive, perhaps an administrator would have advised him as to how to introduce the subject in a more sensitive manner, but the key difference seems to be that the administrators were not receptive to demands that material be removed from classroom instruction on the basis that it created discomfort for some of the students.

While the authors of the article describe the efforts in our society to make life more safe for children, I think that they overstate their conclusions. They write, "children born after 1980 — the Millennials — got a consistent message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well." I disagree that the underlying message is "Life is dangerous" but, more than that, it's difficult to see that as a distinction from prior generations. Doe the authors believe that in the past generations, parents were teaching kids that "life is safe", even when that was patently untrue? Did the generation that grew up a century ago, spending their early childhood in an age before polio vaccination and where infant mortality was common, who experienced the Great Depression, who were born around the time of World War I and saw the country go through World War II (perhaps fighting in that war) under the impression that life was safe? I somehow doubt it.

Perhaps the difference is that parents of past generations of kids told them, "Life is dangerous, but you're on your own, kid -- you can't count on me to keep you safe"? No, that doesn't seem plausible, either.

I think the authors stray off of the rails when they suggest that political partisanship may be a significant contributing factor, based on "survey data going back to the 1970s". The authors are certainly aware that past generations have also experienced times of fierce political partisanship. Our country even once had a civil war. I also have little sense that students arriving on campus are more politically aware than those of past generations. So when the authors suggest that "students arriving on campus today might be more desirous of protection and more hostile toward ideological opponents than in generations past", it seems fair to point out that they're engaged in conjecture, and that they haven't adequately supported a theory that even they phrase as conjecture. Similarly, when describing the advent of social media, the authors write,

These first true “social-media natives” may be different from members of previous generations in how they go about sharing their moral judgments and supporting one another in moral campaigns and conflicts.

Or... they may not be any different.

The authors note that faculty members may be concerned about being attacked on social media, something that might explain why faculty members and administrators are perhaps hypersensitive to certain student complaints, but that's not an observation about the students.

The authors state,

We do not mean to imply simple causation, but rates of mental illness in young adults have been rising, both on campus and off, in recent decades. Some portion of the increase is surely due to better diagnosis and greater willingness to seek help, but most experts seem to agree that some portion of the trend is real.

If they're not suggesting "simple causation", what form of causation do they in fact intend to imply? What changes in diagnosis rates has occurred, and for what mental illnesses? Which mental illnesses are now more frequently diagnosed, and what portion of the increase for any given mental illness do the authors believe might be associated with calls for "trigger warnings"? When they speak of "experts", what are the qualifications of the experts whose views they have examined and deemed relevant? What does it mean to "seem to agree", as opposed to expressing actual agreement? It's really easy to make a nebulous, speculative assertion in support of an argument, but if you want it to carry weight you have to provide some amount of substance.

The authors suggest that changes in the interpretation of federal civil rights law that occurred in 2013 might play a role in the changes, but that argument seems weak on a number of fronts. First, the trends they are describing started long before 2013. Second, the average student is completely unaware of those changes. Third, to the extent that administrators are responding by being hypersensitive not only to situations implicated by the actual changes, but to situations well beyond their scope, that suggests a problem with the administrators and not the students. To the extent that interpretations of the law by federal agencies are making it more difficult to teach effectively on campus, those organizations should reconsider or clarify their interpretations, but it's not the fault of either students or federal agencies if college administrators impose policies that extend far beyond what the law requires.

The article continues into what I see as some rather odd armchair psychology, such as the suggestion that triggering material could benefit sensitive students by desensitizing them to a trauma. Even if we assume that the people demanding trigger warnings are doing so because of their own sensitivities, as opposed to those of others, there is a difference between a sensitivity and a phobia -- and no psychologist in his right mind is going to conflate random encounters with material that triggers a phobic reaction or PTSD is a proper alternative for a professionally conducted process intended to desensitize and individual. In fact, you're apt to learn that such an approach could worsen the phobia.

They share a couple of example of "catastrophizing" that are about college administrators:

Catastrophizing rhetoric about physical danger is employed by campus administrators more commonly than you might think—sometimes, it seems, with cynical ends in mind. For instance, last year administrators at Bergen Community College, in New Jersey, suspended Francis Schmidt, a professor, after he posted a picture of his daughter on his Google+ account. The photo showed her in a yoga pose, wearing a T-shirt that read I will take what is mine with fire & blood, a quote from the HBO show Game of Thrones. Schmidt had filed a grievance against the school about two months earlier after being passed over for a sabbatical. The quote was interpreted as a threat by a campus administrator, who received a notification after Schmidt posted the picture; it had been sent, automatically, to a whole group of contacts. According to Schmidt, a Bergen security official present at a subsequent meeting between administrators and Schmidt thought the word fire could refer to AK-47s.

Then there is the eight-year legal saga at Valdosta State University, in Georgia, where a student was expelled for protesting the construction of a parking garage by posting an allegedly “threatening” collage on Facebook. The coll[e]ge described the proposed structure as a “memorial” parking garage—a joke referring to a claim by the university president that the garage would be part of his legacy. The president interpreted the collage as a threat against his life.

I don't think that the dean who complained about Francis Schmidt was identified, but I doubt that the dean was a 'Millennial'. The president of Valdosta State University appears to have been in his late sixties at the time of the incident, so it's safe to say that he's not a millennial. Those actions may not represent the best of what we hope to impart to college students, but they appear to support for the argument that the primary source of the problem lies with college administrators as opposed to students.

The article also references an incident in which an instructor's joke was misinterpreted by a student and reported as a threat, resulting in the instructor's suspension. It is no surprise that college administrators are sensitive to potential violence on campus, and does not appear to be in question that the response in that case was an overreaction. It's difficult to see how the incident has anything to do with students being too sensitive, as opposed to there being an understandable concern (even if magnified by the spotlight effect) about violence on campus.

My preferred approach would not be seen as very sensitive to those who are concerned about potential triggering, or who are inclined to reinvent innocuous statements as "microaggressions": I would like to see colleges instruct incoming freshmen that the can expect their ideas to be challenged as they come into contact with other students, professors, and materials that reflect opinions and perspectives different from their own, and that the risk of being at times upset or offended is inherent to the learning process. I would trust professors who were planning to use particularly disturbing or potentially offensive materials to warn their students; for the most part it's difficult to think of scenarios where the nature of the material that will be presented in a course is not foreshadowed by the subject matter. Students who are hypersensitive would be free to explore their options within that framework, or to consider other colleges. The small but influential population of students who want to protect not only themselves, but to protect others from any form of actual or or potential offense would be on notice that the administration will focus on incidents of actual bias and discrimination, but won't be tying itself in knots trying to ensure that nobody is ever offended.

Will that happen? Perhaps at a college that is not dependent upon accepting most or all of the students who apply. But as long as colleges are in the position of having to treat students like customers, I don't expect that this sort of trend will reverse itself -- and I find myself in full agreement with the authors' underlying position that this trend isn't good for anybody

In Your Face, Tomasky

While commenting on Paul Krugman's academic salary, which is lower than one might expect, Michael Tomasky uses the salaries at the University of Michigan Law School to make a point about Krugman's compensation:

While researching something else, I took a glance at the salaries given to faculty at the University of Michigan Law School. Nearly three-dozen faculty members there make more than Krugman’s $225,000. Fourteen are north of $500,000. Well, that’s law school, you might argue, they have to pay more. Maybe. But I can promise you you’ve never heard of them (except maybe Catharine MacKinnon, at $297,000).

I've actually heard of quite a few of them. (Is it cheating that, a couple of decades ago, I attended UM Law School?)

The funny thing is, the lesson I draw from the UM salary figures is that both salary bloat and the Peter Principle are alive and well. For some of the names on the list, compensation figures seem low -- but, like Krugman, the professors who seem underpaid have other, often substantial income streams from their publications and consulting work. Some of the numbers seem... wrong. As much as I respect the man, by way of example, I find it very difficult to believe that Judge Timothy Connors pulls in over $600K per year as an adjunct lecturer. David Lat publishes a different set of figures here, the top paid UM professors from 2012 to 2013, and although lecturers aren't technically professors... I just don't see it. If anybody can shed light on the peculiar figures (e.g., Judge Rhodes, a brilliant bankruptcy jurist, listed as receiving a salary of $566,666.68 as a "LEO Intermittent Lecturer") I would love to hear the explanation -- and to get tips on how to get that sort of compensation while moonlighting as a lecturer.

I have personal experience with some of the professors who are unquestionably paid a greater salary than Krugman. One is a brilliant man who, regrettably, could make a fortune if only he could bottle his lectures and sell them as an insomnia cure. Two are among the worst professors I've ever endured, one having demonstrated little interest in preparing for class and making casual, absurd statements during her lectures, and another being both intellectually lazy, and prone to narcissistic outbursts when corrected in class. (The lesson is: Don't correct him. You will pay.) One is among the hardest working, exacting people I've ever encountered in any sphere of my life. Another is brilliant within his field, with an encyclopedic grasp of his subject and an amazing ability to make it accessible to his students. One is probably the nicest people I've encountered in academia, with a dedication to teaching that seems too often absent from the classrooms of an elite law school. One, who I know only by reputation, was remarkable in her ability to draw her students into her philosophy of law. There are a few others who I know by reputation.

I know a few of the names of people who earn less than Krugman, as well. It's interesting to see how the compensation for certain clinical professors has risen -- I expect that comes from the increased emphasis on clinical law programs over the past twenty years, with an associated increase in demand for professors skilled enough to lead an effective, attractive law clinic. Some of the clinical professors date back to when I was at UM, and I worked with a couple of others when I was at ICLE. One of them graduated from UM a year before me, and I also remember him from classes (where he was obviously brilliant). A person from what is sort of my law school class (being a "summer starter", I fall between two years of regular graduates) is doing quite well as an administrator. A couple of others, I can count on meeting at my child's school events, as they're the parents of one of her classmates.

At the end of my review of those names and numbers, I was left with the feeling that the salaries of law school faculty reflect less of a meritocracy than would likely be achieved on a more open market. Part of that results from the absurd increases in law school tuition, funding lavish facilities (and boy, has UM Law upgraded its facilities from back in my day, when they already seemed pretty darn nice) and increased salaries. But for the better members of the faculty, I don't begrudge them their salaries. They are people who could earn as much or more (and sometimes already do earn as much or more) outside of academia. Where I find myself a bit annoyed is with the number of professors who I doubt have any greater interest in teaching than when I suffered through their lectures, and who I know haven't gotten any smarter, who seem to have floated through the years with ever-increasing salaries, praise be to tenure.

I suppose for those unfamiliar with Krugman, save for by reputation as a left-wing bogeyman, there might be a similar feeling. They might not be expressing, "That's too much money", in the sense of it's being too much to pay a high profile economist to teach at an elite university, but in the sense of, "I don't like Krugman, so he shouldn't make that type of money." As I understand it, Krugman's ability as a columnist parallels his ability as a professor, and he's capable of communicating difficult, abstract, complex topics in a way that his audiences (be they the readers of his columns or those who sit through his lectures) can understand. I think UM would do well to trade a few of its highly-paid but dubious talents to Princeton or CUNY, in exchange for Krugman as a professor for its law and business schools. But then, if Krugman were primarily focused on chasing the dollar in his academic career, it's difficult to believe he hasn't had offers on the table significantly in excess of his starting salary at CUNY.

Really, College Isn't For Everyone

Via Joanne Jacobs I came across the article, "5 Myths of Remedial Ed", a suggestion that colleges should provide remedial education programs to students they don't believe are qualified to enroll in regular classes. I agree to a point, as I do think that students who are capable of getting up to speed but who were left underprepared by their high schools, weren't particularly motivated in high school, or have been out of school for long enough that some of their basic skills are rusty, should be able to get back on track for a degree or certification program. I become more skeptical of remedial programs at four year colleges, as it seems to me that students who aren't ready for the academic rigors of a four year degree would likely be better served by enrolling in a community college and determining if they truly want to complete a four year program. Given how few remedial students actually complete a degree or certification program, that approach should also save a lot of students a considerable amount of money.

The first myth offered is that "Remedial Education is K-12’s problem". The author's complaint is that, as there's no uniform standard for admission into a college, there's no uniform standard that high schools could set in order to guarantee that a student would not need remedial classes.

Because colleges have not clearly articulated the skills that students must possess to be college-ready, students are blindsided when they are placed into remedial courses, and high schools don’t have a clear benchmark for preparing students for success. Higher education can no longer kick the can down the road to K-12. The two must share accountability for student results.

I disagree. What it takes to be qualified for college is no big mystery. Nor is it a big mystery that some colleges are more rigorous, and thus more restrictive of which students they will admit and the academic backgrounds of those students, than others. A high school student who wants to enroll in a specific college or program should be able to get a pretty good idea of their qualification by talking to a counselor at their high school. Further, unless somebody has invented a time machine, when a college says "You're not prepared for the program in which you want to enroll," it's not "kick[ing] the can down the road to K-12" - that's what happens when the K-12 school says, "You should be able to admit that student, get him up to speed, and have him complete any program you offer without regard to what we did when he was enrolled here", which is what the author appears to advocate.

By the same token, if a student entering a college is surprised to learn that she lacks basic math or writing skills and thus must take a remedial course, that cannot be said to be the fault of the college. The author makes it sound like we're talking about calculus, when in fact we're talking about the basics. You can go to pretty much any college in the nation and pick up a first year text for composition and algebra, and you'll see similar content and expectation for what a student will be able to do. A commenter notes that "that the National Council of Teachers of English has published two volumes entitled What Is College-Level Writing". The expectations for what it means to perform at college level are anything but a secret.

The second myth described is that "Remedial Education is a Short-Term Problem", apparently based upon the notion that "new common core high school standards will" end the need for remedial programs. I have not heard anybody suggest that to be a likely outcome of reforms, so this seems like something of a hollow man. The author seems to be proposing that remedial education be expanded to provide additional support and alternative means of completing classes throughout college, rather than being designed to bring students up to speed then have them participate in regular classes:

Institutions should provide a wide range of options for students based on their competency, recognizing that many don’t have time for semesterlong courses. Self-study options that use courseware, low-cost refresher sessions, tailored curriculum and simply mainstreaming students who are just below the cut score into college-level courses are just a few of the options that will work well with the full range of students in remedial education.

I would support colleges bringing such flexibility and support to all students, but to the extent that the idea is to create a two-track system where we hand-hold unqualified students through the process until they obtain a degree, without regard to how their educational attainment compares to other graduates, we're not solving a problem - we're repeating the problem that has kids graduating from high school and expecting to attend college without basic skills.

The third myth, "Colleges Effectively Determine College Readiness", is interesting. The author criticizes placement tests as being a "general predictor of success in college-level courses" as opposed to "identify[ing] which skills students are lacking". The author suggests that this could result in a student being placed in a remedial class that "may or may not be addressing their specific skill deficiencies", and that some students placed in remedial classes "are perfectly capable of succeeding in college-level work without remediation". The author proposes considering the student's high school GPA along with placement tests, with GPA serving as "a good proxy for student motivation and academic skills." But doesn't that take us back to the first "myth"? The reason you need to have students with high GPA's take placement tests in the first place is because you don't trust that their high schools gave grades that reasonably assessed their performance. A student who received an "A" in algebra should not have to take remedial math. To the extent that he does, his GPA is not an indicator of his academic skills in the subject of math. That also raises the question of what it means to be motivated. There is something to be said for students being motivated to perform at a particular level - "A" students tend to put in the work necessary to achieve A's, and will tend to step up their effort for a more difficult class. But you can also create an atmosphere of entitlement and coasting when you hand out A's to students who attend classes and turn in assignments, but who don't achieve mastery of even the basics.

It's also not the case that every student who enrolls in college takes a battery of tests to determine whether or not they can perform at the freshman level. If a student is required to take placement tests and performs at a level that has the college assigning her to remedial classes, but has a level of motivation and actual academic achievement that should make remedial classes unnecessary, perhaps there's a mismatch between the student and her college. Frankly, if a student is placed in a remedial class but has ample skill to complete regular coursework, that should be obvious within days.

The fourth myth, "Remedial Education is Bankrupting the System", is also interesting, in that the author comes close to suggesting that remedial education is a profit center.

Remedial education is actually inexpensive for the colleges – because institutions don’t use regular faculty for the courses, and the technology required is cheap.

This raises the question, if remedial education is so cheap and easy why are we "kicking the can down the road" to colleges, rather than assuring that college-bound high school graduates have the basic skill set that will satisfy 99% of the nation's colleges. Again, while colleges do have different admissions standards, the basic skills we're discussing are no mystery. Also, this seems like a good reason to keep remedial classes in colleges that can serve students at the lowest cost to the student. When you pay four-year college tuition, you should expect to get a calibre of class and instruction commensurate with the tuition you're paying. To the extent that colleges are able to churn remedial students through their cheapest courses, watching few succeed, that's something I would rather see them end than expand. Although the author suggests the same, she proposes that we "remove incentives for institutions to use [remediation] as a cash cow, and fund institutions both on the number of students needing remediation and their rates of success" - but provides no description of how that might be accomplished.

The last myth is no myth: "Maybe Some Students are Just Not College Material". For better or worse, some students aren't college material. Some lack the aptitude, some lack the motivation, some could complete a degree program but would be far better served by being encouraged to pursue other areas of aptitude. The actual myth is the one advanced by the author: That all students are "college material", can perform at the college level and would be well-served by being encouraged to pursue a college degree or certification. The author turns reality on its head:

After all, as this myth goes, students who are not college-ready may not possess the motivation, interest and wherewithal to succeed. These students should just learn a trade and move on. This ignores the reality that some postsecondary education is the ticket to the middle class, and that many students go to college to get the knowledge and skills needed to move into a trade. They need to have the basic skills in reading, math and writing to do that, even if they don’t want to go on to get a four-year degree.

Note the false dichotomy (the only alternative to pursuing a college degree is learning a trade) and the continued effort to shift responsibility for teaching basic skills from high schools onto colleges. Yes, our society is sufficiently complex that you're not likely to do well without at least basic skills in reading, writing and math, but it's difficult to see how encouraging students to enroll in college, take some remedial classes then drop out to pursue their trades, is the best or most cost-effective means of developing basic skills. There's also no small amount of elitism in the implicit notion that you're somehow not living up to your potential if you forego college in favor of learning a trade. If a high school graduate learns a trade and excels, the student has no need for a college degree. If a high school graduate learns a trade and struggles, she may find a greater incentive to identify and work hard in a certification or degree program that could provide for a more secure future.

The author suggests that college makes students more valuable as employees:

Moreover, new research... shows that college has benefits for employers who hire people like cashiers and construction workers, plumbers and police officers. These workers make more money than their non-college educated peers, and contribute more to their organizations by innovating and solving problems. So the benefit goes to the organization and to the individual.

We should not be surprised that, on the whole, students who have the aptitude to complete a college education will be better at innovating and problem solving than those who do not. If a police department has sufficient funding to require that its recruits possess a college degree, they are apt to attract a significantly different candidate pool than a department that offers lower pay and does not require a degree. Given the study and testing that is often associated with promotion within a police department, it should also be no surprise that police officers who have completed college end up earning more money. It is no surprise that workers in various fields of skilled labor will fare better, gaining better earning specialized skills, supervisory authority or ultimately starting their own businesses, if they have the aptitude to complete college. But let's not confuse cause and effect. Although there are benefits to a college degree, if you have worked in a field such as food service you will find that some employees innovate and solve problems even while enrolled in high school, and many others who are years out of high school lack similar aptitude. It's more likely that the former group aspires to go to college, or includes college students who are working part-time. So the question is, does completing a college degree make these workers significantly better at innovation and problem-solving, or is it that people who are innovative and good at problem solving are both more apt to enroll in college and to complete their degree programs?

When I talk to college instructors and professors I hear a number of complaints about the current generation of students, notably including that the "culture of dumb" has crept up from high schools into college classes - it's not "cool" to look too smart, so some students sit on their hands in class rather than participating in discussions or activity that would reveal their intelligence - and that students expect to work less than in the past but also have an increased expectation that they should get good grades. Recent studies suggest that college students study significantly less than they did a decade or two ago. Colleges are concerned about their budgets, which plays a role in grade inflation - many colleges don't want students to "flunk out" because then they won't be paying tuition. The net effect of this has not been lost on employers. Two generations ago you could start a promising career path based upon a college degree, even one that was arguably irrelevant to your chosen profession. A generation ago you could apply for jobs within your field of study and have a good shot of finding an employer willing to hire you. Today you are much more likely, even at the entry level, to have to go through a series of interviews for any job you wish to obtain, and are much more likely to be tested (be it an actual test or through carefully designed interview questions) as part of that process. The notion that a college degree is an automatic ticket to the middle class is not aging well. To an extent the problem is driven by a larger pool of qualified candidates - you can impose higher academic expectations in order to narrow the candidate pool while still having ample candidates to consider for pretty much any job. But it's also driven by the fact that as you diminish what it means to complete a degree program, employers must apply other measures to assess whether a candidate possesses knowledge and skills that might once have been presumed.

Meanwhile the most significant job growth is in lower-paying fields that do not require college degrees. The author is advancing another myth, that good jobs are waiting for most or all college graduates, even those near the bottom of their classes. I wish that were the case, but it is not. What does the author propose for the students she would like to see hand-held all the way through an undergraduate program, if they cannot find jobs when they finish? Graduate school?

In sorting through the comments to the article, I find some well-meaning souls, but... from a professor who has taught remedial classes:

I have developed a remidiation [sic] program in English that Rigoress [sic], Relevent [sic] and Relational 4 years ago.

I'm reminded of a story an English professor shared with me, about how a student had complained to him that she had received A's in high school, had received A's on all of her compositions while in community college, but was struggling to pass her English classes at his college and couldn't understand why. He asked that she bring in some of her work from community college and found that, although they were poorly composed and full of errors, not one had been marked with anything but the grade (consistently an "A") - no comments or corrections. His inference was that the community college instructor hadn't even bothered to read the papers before assigning the grades. But perhaps at some colleges even the instructors lack basic skills.

At the end of this, it seems reasonable to question the four year degree in and of itself. Is an undergraduate degree itself becoming an anachronism. With the evolution of student bodies and the rise of distance learning, should we still be looking at a four year residential degree as the gold standard? Even when the decreasing number of students who live on campus are apt to take at least one Internet-based course each semester from their dorm rooms? Perhaps the solution is less one trying to hammer square pegs through round holes, and more of trying to find ways to make meaningful, affordable, and suitable educational opportunities available to those who want to advance their knowledge and skills, even if that means moving away from the four-year model or away from the traditional concept of a college campus.

Colleges Are Not Equal

In the Washington Post's latest unsurprising effort to keep taxpayer money rolling into Kaplan (okay... maybe they truly believe it's for the good of the country, not just the company), they offer another defense of the high student loan default rate at private... no, let's use the word "career" colleges.

Although isn't "private" far more accurate, given that they're not including community colleges within that new conceit? And for many of the "careers" at issue, there's no degree requirement for entry to the field? And community college classes to get a certification or to build an equivalent body of knowledge come at a significantly lower price? And many graduates don't in fact find the degree earned helpful when starting a career? But I digress.

Minority students attend career colleges in much higher proportions than do other students, and these are the only schools targeted by the proposal.

I've addressed this before:

[I]f privatizing education is supposed to be a miracle cure for K-12 education, why is "our students are harder to teach" supposed to be an acceptable excuse for the performance of for-profit institutions of higher education? Their students want to go to school and, either with cash or student loan money, are paying for the privilege - you can assume some degree of motivation. Why is it only appropriate to blame schools and teachers for poor outcomes, and insist that the composition of the student body should be irrelevant, when they're part of the public sector?

Also, as previously suggested, the alternative to full-time enrollment at a "career college" that doesn't provide a career - hence the high default rate - is community college. Why is part-time enrollment at a significantly lower cost per credit, or even full-time enrollment if an equivalent community college program is available, a bad thing?

Many career colleges receive their accreditations through the same agencies as the nation's top private and nonprofit universities, which would be spared from the effects of the rule (though 93 percent of historically black colleges would fail the rule's repayment rate test if it were applied to them).

You only need a rudimentary knowledge of the difference between four year colleges and private "career colleges" to understand why you can't compare apples to oranges. And frankly, if a four year college is performing so badly that it can be fairly compared to a "career college" diploma mill, the solution is to apply the new rule to that college as well, not to keep throwing away public money to subsidize private "career colleges" that offer useless degrees.

Career colleges are different only in that they are the schools of choice for many at-risk students, including minorities, parents and full-time workers who believe these schools offer them the best shot at a good job in a field they will enjoy.

If we assume that true, shouldn't the solution be to better educate them such that they recognize that many "career colleges" are a waste of time and money? Believe it or not, if you end up with $40K or more in debt for a "career college" degree that turns out to be worthless in the job market, and you also incur two years of opportunity loss association with your time off of the job market while attending the program or working part-time, you're not better off for the experience. And if you can't make enough money to pay back your government-backed student loans, that's horrible for you - you are stuck with debts that will hound you for decades - and for the taxpayers who pick up the tab. When students default, the only people making out like bandits are the proprietors of the colleges. Talk about moral hazard....

I personally believe we would be better off taking a look at student loans across the board, and putting more responsibility on all colleges to ensure that the loans they convince their students to take are ultimately paid back. Such as by insuring student loans rather than guaranteeing them. That would create a nice, equal playing field for "career colleges" - but I can already hear the squawking.

The Difficulty of Education Reform

I missed this editorial from a few days ago, in which Robert Samuelson takes on the current conceptions of school reform. His statistical arguments are a bit misleading, but I'll cut him a break and skip to his substantive criticism of reforms:¹

"Reforms" have disappointed for two reasons. First, no one has yet discovered transformative changes in curriculum or pedagogy, especially for inner-city schools, that are (in business lingo) "scalable" -- easily transferable to other schools, where they would predictably produce achievement gains. Efforts in New York and the District to raise educational standards involve contentious and precarious school-by-school campaigns to purge "ineffective" teachers and principals. Charter schools might break this pattern, though there are grounds for skepticism. In 2009, the 4,700 charter schools enrolled about 3 percent of students and did not uniformly show achievement gains.

I've mentioned before that what Samuelson describes is one of my biggest disappointments from the charter school movement. With few exceptions, the schools follow the same educational model as traditional public schools, perhaps modified by "more is better" - longer school days and more hours of instruction. That latter idea has some common sense promise, but comes at a price - you either overwork your teachers for the same pay they can get elsewhere, overwork your teachers for more pay to try to reduce attrition, or hire more teachers. That is, it's more expensive while offering nothing by way of innovation. It's not just that nobody has yet discovered transformative changes - it's that few are even looking.

The larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation. Students, after all, have to do the work. If they aren't motivated, even capable teachers may fail.

There is some discussion of student motivation, and the role of parents and community, in this recent thread and its comments. I don't want to get into the conceit of "We had it tough in my childhood; kids these days are soft, spoiled and selfish", as that has been pretty much a constant criticism of "kids these days" from the dawn of civilization. But I have heard the lament from many educators that parental expectations have shifted (it's the school's problem, not theirs, if their kids misbehave or don't perform well), and that the culture of "It's cool to be stupid" has crept from high school into college classrooms. To the extent that problems arise outside of the classroom, the current generation of reformers make things more difficult for the classroom teacher by in essence saying "So what? It is your problem, and yours alone, if your students don't flourish." Samuelson's impressions aren't much different from mine in that regard:

Motivation comes from many sources: curiosity and ambition; parental expectations; the desire to get into a "good" college; inspiring or intimidating teachers; peer pressure. The unstated assumption of much school "reform" is that if students aren't motivated, it's mainly the fault of schools and teachers. The reality is that, as high schools have become more inclusive (in 1950, 40 percent of 17-year-olds had dropped out, compared with about 25 percent today) and adolescent culture has strengthened,² the authority of teachers and schools has eroded. That applies more to high schools than to elementary schools, helping explain why early achievement gains evaporate.

Samuelson also reports that students "don't like school, don't work hard and [consequently] don't do well", which, it's fair to say, is simply a reflection of human nature. If you don't see value or reward in your work, it's an unpleasant chore to be avoided. How can a teacher, alone, overcome a community's general indifference to education?

Proponents of school reform are aware that there are kids and parents in failing school districts who desperately want a better educational environment for their children. There's some validity to the concept that better order in the halls and classrooms, and better maintenance of school buildings, will help to a degree. But if your goal is to markedly improve educational performance within a school, that degree is small.

Although to read the New York Times and Washington Post, school reform is a tiny footnote in relation to D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty's recent loss - that the real problem was his style of management. I'm more convinced by those who perceive his loss as a referendum on his school reform initiatives. That is, parents most affected by those initiatives turned up in large numbers to declare, "We're tired of having you rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic and call it 'reform'. Where are the results? Why does my child still have to play the lottery to get a chance to be in a decent school?" It might not be unreasonable for him to respond that reforms take time, that his actions (including his mistakes) are well-intentioned. But how long are parents supposed to wait?

I'm not the only one who sees the centrality of school reform in Fenty's loss. Consider, for exmaple, Tim Pawlenty's whine,

“Mayor Fenty lost after the teachers' unions led a campaign against him and Michelle Rhee. Fenty's loss is further evidence that despite all their rhetoric about 'the children,' what the teachers’ unions really care about is getting more money for jobs they can't lose at schools that produce students who are not prepared to compete,” Pawlenty said in a statement.

D.C. parents didn't turn out to vote because the teacher's union told them that D.C. school reform wasn't living up to its promise - Pawlenty is offering them a version of, "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes". Is Pawlenty as contemptuous of the voters of his own state as he is of those in D.C.? (Perhaps so.)

Update: Worth mentioning, the possibility that Rhee and Fenty "hurt their cause by overstating their success" and by "pushing forward some reforms that make no sense". I suspect that Rhee's venom, directed toward those who voted against Fenty, is a microcosm of why she's unpopular with parents who want reform - whatever her intentions, they want results, not complaints about how hard her work is or by implication that they're too lazy to support reform.

Update II: Eugene Robinson comments on Rhee's self-absorbed reaction to Fenty's loss. And some similar thoughts from Valerie Strauss,

[Rhee's comment was] the equivalent of saying that there is no use for anybody to hope that she and presumptive mayor Vincent Gray can come to some compromise to keep her here. The only question is when she’ll leave.

The problem is that she said it to an audience who watched a one-sided film that adores public charter schools and demonizes traditional public schools, (which still and always will educate the vast majority of the country’s kids).

The audience was packed with people who affect millions of kids and teachers and parents by passing laws, advising the president, shaping public opinion. And those people gave her an ovation.

Ignored was the fact that there is no scientific basis for her reforms, and some evidence to suggest that some of her key initiatives, such as tying teacher pay to standardized test scores, is counterproductive.

Forget the fact that the film’s assault on teachers unions is unfair; even Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a true believer in Rhee, has noted that it is silly to blame unions, pointing out that the problems exist in states without teachers unions

(I'll note, however, that union job protections likely do make it harder to address the issue of underperforming teachers, as compared to whatever job protections are offered in non-union states and districts.)
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1. I do want to mention that a reasonable measure of student-teacher ratios should focus on the ratio of students and classroom teachers; when you include staff members who have no classroom role you distort the figure. And that suggesting that two teacher households are wealthy because they would be a six figure household doesn't address the issue of attracting and retaining teachers who have other professional job prospects.

2. I'm not sure what Samuelson is trying to get at with this bare claim.

Liberals On Campus

I know you're all crying about Times Select preventing you from reading John Tierney... that is, the little you can't glean from the headline for his column and his first sentence....

He recently wrote a rather incredible piece entitled "Where Cronies Dwell", which whines that it isn't fair that people accuse Bush of hiring cronies while not objecting to the faculty search process at law schools and journalism schools. Apparently he read a David Horowitz screed about the ratios of registered Democrats to Republicans at a handful of elite schools, accepted Horowitz's notion that "Democrat = Liberal" and "Republican = Conservative", ignored any faculty who did not register for either of the major parties (or did not register at all), and concocted "liberal to conservative" ratios based upon that childish analysis. Yes, folks, when Zell Miller taught at the University of Georgia, Tierney and Horowitz would have us believe that the faculty became more liberal.

Needless to say, neither Horowitz nor Tierney paid any heed to the fact that if Bush followed a search process similar to a typical faculty search, he would not have been able to hire the parade of fools he has appointed to important positions, let alone hit the 100% mark in preferred party affiliation. The Bush Administration is unabashed in pressing for Republican-only hiring policies on K Street, and from what I hear even within the lower levels of civil service (where party affiliation is not supposed to be considered). Although in some fields, or with some applicants, ideology may well be suggested by past published works, in many fields of law or journalism there won't be anything obvious about a prospective faculty member's publications which suggests a party affiliation - and the search committee can't ask. Tierney really thinks that there is a parallel?

For some reason - and one can hardly guess why - Tierney and Horowitz also present no estimates of the ratio of "liberals" to "conservatives" at top engineering schools or business schools. (They also don't complain about a lack of conservative professors at top schools of social work... I can only imagine how may hardcore conservatives are clamoring to get faculty appointments, and how many novitiate social workers are traumatized by the left-wing bent of their faculties.) You know what? Different academic fields attract different types of people, often offering them significantly less money than they could otherwise earn, and rewards specific types of thinking and analysis. If you are surprised that certain fields attract disproportionate numbers of "liberals" and others attract disproportionate numbers of "conservatives", you haven't been thinking very hard.

And despite the experience of crybabies like Ann Coulter, I don't recall that the even the most stauch conservatives in my law school class feared retalation, and many were very outspoken in class. I looked up what a couple of them, the most obvious and outspoken of the conservatives in my section, are doing today... One is a partner with a large law firm, and another is a VP and general counsel with a Fortune 30 company. Oh, how they suffer. As for Tierney's suggestion that "more than 80 percent" of the nation's press corp is Democratic, that does not appear to be even close to true:

Another highly regarded study, the 2002 American Journalist Survey, found that 37 percent of journalists called themselves Democrats (just a few points above the proportion of Democrats in the general population), 18.6 percent said they were Republicans, and 33.5 percent were independents.

Does this mean that in TierneyWorld, if you're not a Republican you must be a Democrat? He seems to have lost his center.

Today, Tierney's follow-up offers the teaser: "Liberals on campus have become so used to hearing their opinions reinforced that they have a hard time imagining there are intelligent people with different views." Oh, I doubt that. But if Tierney's logic is supposed to pass for an example of what Liberals fail to find persuasive... that's nobody's fault but his own.

Tierney whines that the number of "liberal" faculty members, presumably based upon the child-like analysis he cribbed from Horowitz, is increasing. Well, you know what? The ratio of conservatives on the nations courts, particularly the federal courts, seems to be increasing faster. Although Tierney has yet to identify a single qualified conservative who was unable to obtain an appointment to an elite law school or journalism school, he is offended by the concept that such discrimination might occur. (Tierney instead resorts to the standard evasion, "many conservatives do want to become scholars, but they can't find work on campus" - many? How many? How qualified are they? How many faculty jobs have they attempted to obtain? How did they compare to the people who got the jobs? While I would not contend that "Righties Can't Teach", it is somewhat amusing to note that in asking "Why Righties Can't Teach" Tierney fails to distinguish opportunity from ability.) The real world? I guess Tierney is trying to impress us that he, himself, truly is an "academic" by observing the caricature that academics are stuck in the ivory tower, and are oblivious to the real world.

George Will Silliness

(George Williness?)

I'm not going to dismiss concerns about political diversity on campus, but it is pretty obvious that certain personality types are drawn to careers in higher education - and the low salaries that go with most professorships. Actually, Will more or less sneers at that notion:

But George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at Berkeley, denies that academic institutions are biased against conservatives. The disparity in hiring, he explains, occurs because conservatives are not as interested as liberals in academic careers. Why does he think liberals are like that? "Unlike conservatives, they believe in working for the public good and social justice." That clears that up.

Will seems to think he's insightful when he writes,

that the "first protocol" of academic society is the "common assumption" -- that, at professional gatherings, all the strangers in the room are liberals.

I wonder if he would write a similarly insipid and whiny column about the overrepresentation of political conservatives at professional gatherings of business executives.

College Sports

When I read stuff like this, my sympathies grow for the argument that we should stop pretending, simply let colleges pay their athletes, and complete the transformation of college sports from a recreational to a commercial endeavor.

Compare the best academic scholarship package to the average sports "scholarship" package at any given university, both in terms of value and in terms of the number of scholarships issued, and....