“Access” has become a fraught buzzword in higher education circles. It touches on everything from diversity to financial aid to preparedness. That last one is the kicker, raising questions about where the positive good of expanding access to higher ed twists into the demonstrable bad of admitting students who are so unprepared that they cannot hope to succeed at college-level work. That’s where the ugliness sets in: Colleges see their dropout rates spiking, notice that the people who aren’t graduating are disproportionately made up of those who are beneficiaries of efforts to expand “access,” and have to strike an unholy balance between maintaining academic standards and compromising them in the name of making good on all that “access”: retention and remediation become terribly important; actual college-level learning becomes less so, though no one likes to say it.

At times, the balancing act becomes patently absurd. Consider the case of Tucson’s Pima Community College:

Pima Community College in Tucson will restrict admission to high school graduates or GED holders with at least seventh-grade proficiency in reading, writing and math, starting in 2012. The new admissions standards will encourage success, writes Roy Flores, the college president, the Arizona Star.

“Students who test below this level have little chance of succeeding in a college environment,” Flores writes. Only 5 percent of students in remedial classes advance to college-level work.

Pathways to Pima will replace PCC’s lowest-level developmental education classes with counseling, diagnostic testing and “self-paced, computer-based or face-to-face learning modules” that will prepare low-skilled students to meet the seventh-grade standard and start college. Students in Pathways programs will not earn college credit or be eligible for federal aid.

Of 35,000 students at PCC, about 2,300 students — 6.3 percent — test below the seventh-grade level.

The community college is trying to fulfill its mission of providing access to higher ed. It’s trying to ready marginal high school grads for the challenges of four-year college. But the area’s high schools aren’t doing their jobs (because the middle schools aren’t, and the grade schools aren’t), and are graduating students who lack the skills of a middle-schooler. These kids are too old to go back to the fifth, sixth, or seventh grade and start over — but they may also be too compromised to catch up academically, ever.

It’s a tremendous tragedy. Young adults are suffering the crippling consequences of failed, irresponsible public education where neither schools nor students are held accountable. We don’t want to write young people off–philosophically, many of us feel we can’t. But what we wind up doing instead is just sad. Too little, too late, too often, for too many.

Via Joanne Jacobs.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Faculty members assume that their students spend far less time preparing for class than students report doing, according to ESM Chaperone, a research firm that specializes in higher-education finance. A majority of faculty members, more than 60 percent, assume students spend less than 10 hours per week studying, but about one-third of students surveyed reported doing so. ESM relied on data from the National Survey of Student Engagement and the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement.

Assume your average student is carrying 4-5 courses per term. If said student studies as much as he or she reports, that’s about 2 hours of studying per course per week. That includes doing assigned reading, preparing for labs, studying for quizzes and tests, writing papers. Professors think they aren’t even doing that much–when “that much” is just this side of absolutely nothing.

You’d think the faculty are a bunch of bystanders. But it’s in their power to force a change. You want your students to work harder? Assign them more *and then hold them accountable.* Give pop quizzes on the reading–and make it clear that if you aren’t in class to take the quizz, you automatically fail. Call on students in class–and if they aren’t there to answer your question, they lose points. If they are there but can’t answer your question–or can’t make a good effort at it–they also lose points. Assign papers–and *really* grade them, as in, comment extensively on everything from grammar to argument to documentation, and give the crummy ones crummy grades. Give in-class tests that are actually challenging. Oh, I could go on. The ideas are flowing!

Bemusement of the sort suggested by this survey is not an option.

From Inside Higher Ed:

An erstwhile associate kinesiology professor at California State University at San Bernardino remains on the lam after police raided his home last week and found a pound of methamphetamine and a cache of guns. Police are charging that Stephen Kinzey, who had been on the San Bernardino faculty for a decade, was leading a double life: teaching and researching by day; directing the local chapter of an outlaw biker gang, and its drug business, by night.

Not long after the manhunt began, Albert Karnig, the university’s president, emphasized that no one on the Southern California campus saw this coming: “To our knowledge, this is the first notice that anyone on our campus has had regarding this situation,” Karnig said. “…If the allegations are indeed true, this is beyond disappointing.”

Local newspaper accounts described neighbors, students, and even Kinzey’s father as having little or no sense of the professor’s alleged outside activities. The Contra Costa Times quoted Kinzey’s father as saying that he knew that his son belonged to a motorcycle gang and was not “thrilled” about it (the father taught him to ride). But Hank Kinzey also described his son as “a good Catholic boy” and a Republican, and added: “Everybody’s always in denial when it’s something to do with their family, but this is really surreal,” he said.

I think there is a Showtime series somewhere in there.

AAUP president Cary Nelson wants nothing to do with the accountability movement in higher ed, and devotes a long column to the subject at the Chronicle of Higher Education. “I am opposed to this movement and to everything for which it stands. I offer the example of the humanities at their fiercest as a telling critique of the ideology of outcomes assessment and the mechanized, uniform philosophy it invokes,” he writes. “In ways both subtle and not so subtle, the movement is gradually undermining academic freedom.”

Nelson begins by arguing that teachers already assess outcomes–they give grades. Besides, he notes, you can’t really tell how much a student has learned until years have passed and the lessons have really sunk in–or not. That’s as true for the student as it is for the teacher, he argues. Also, he adds, some of best teaching moments are those in which a class grapples with questions for which there are no “definitive answers.” Plus there are some courses that demand a seminar format–that can’t be responsibly offered to large lecture courses filled with hundreds of students.

For Nelson, there is no “proper form of assessment” of students who take, say, his Holocaust seminar “beyond reflection, debate, and writing to judge how severely my students have been challenged culturally, psychologically, and intellectually by the seminar. I am interested in learning how their work and their lives have been changed, and I track that not only through continuing conversations and evaluating their final projects but also through long-term interaction.” To do more, to try, for example, to calibrate whether students’ reading skills improve by reading hundreds of Holocaust poems, would be “an obscenity.”

We get it. You can’t quantify the impact of humanities instruction, and in some cases you also can’t do it on a mass (read: “economically efficient”) level. Trying to do so will compromise the humanities into unrecognizability: “For what I teach and what I seek to do—and for the fierce humanities in general—the assessment, accountability, and quantifiable-outcomes movement is nothing less than a benighted Enlightenment fantasy of mastering the unmasterable, of quantifying what cannot be measured.”

Oh, it’s powerful stuff–especially if you are passionate about doing things as you have always done them, and not having to take stock of whether, horror of horrors, what you are doing has, perhaps, an itty-bitty down side for the students you are charged with teaching.

This is not to say that there is no truth to Nelson’s argument. Anyone who has ever taught a humanities course–or, for that matter, taken one–knows that much of the work done in them takes place on a qualitative level. Art, after all, is subjectively created and subjectively experienced. And so, to a great degree, is the representation of history, that border subject that some put in the humanities and some say is more a social science. Etc. etc., consider the obligatory tribute to Nelson’s points to be paid.

Now consider what Nelson ignores. By just about every measure, a great many college students aren’t learning much, if anything, while in college. Nearly half show no learning gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, or writing ability during the first two years of college. Nearly a third show none at the end of four years. Those deficits, in turn, are strongly correlated with professors dumbing down the curriculum–not requiring students to read much, not requiring them to write much, not assigning much of anything that challenges students and that is, as a result, time-consuming to grade. What happens to the students who float through college with easy A’s and few academic demands? They aren’t faring at all well on the job market. Many move back in with their parents; many carry enormous debt for a degree that did not ensure they got the skills they need to be able to pay it down.

Nelson ignores it all. How can such numbers trump his (manipulatively chosen) Holocaust seminar? I mean, it’s the Holocaust, people!

Nelson uses his omission to fashion the assessment issue as one of professors’ academic freedom to teach as they see fit. And in so doing, he ignores the fact that professors’ academic freedom–rather like the freedom to swing your fist around–does not cover the right to cause harm to others. Academic freedom is not the freedom to ignore what we know about college students’ stagnant learning curves on very basic skills, nor is it the freedom to fail to deliver kinds of education students need.

It would be nice if we could start having a reasonable discussion about this. It’s time for the ostriches to get their heads out of — I’ll be nice, and say “the sand.”

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has released it’s latest edition of What Will They Learn?, a clearing-house of information about what our colleges and universities want students to know–and what they think is expendable. At WhatWillTheyLearn.com, ACTA reviews the core curricula at over 1,000 schools, grading them according to how seriously they take their stated commitment (and they all have a stated commitment) to general education. Along the way, they record tuition and six-year graduation rates–so you can get a strong sense of value for money. Who gets an “A”? Not who you’d think. Who gets a “D” or an “F”? Also not who you’d think. Check it out–and don’t miss the hidden gems.

Several weeks ago, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni sent a letter to 10,000 college and university trustees. Urging governing boards to take a more active role in ensuring that students acquire the knowledge and skills they need to succeed after graduation, the letter featured the much-publicized and damning work of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, whose recent book, Academically Adrift, uncovers the sheer extent of non-learning on campuses nationwide (after two years of college, half the students haven’t learned anything; after four years of college, more than a third of show no learning gains at all). “Institutions that fail to set meaningful expectations, a rigorous curriculum and high standards for their students are actively contributing to the degradation of teaching and learning,” Dr. Arum wrote. “They are putting these students and our country’s future at risk.”

Fast forward a few weeks. And here’s Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau devoting a strip to a familiar subject. A college president sits in his cushy office, sipping a martini, lamenting the decline of his once great university. The dean brings him a study to read — and it’s Arum and Roksa’s. They discuss. Check it out.

What happens when higher ed opens it doors–and tears down the walls?

A free online course at Stanford University on artificial intelligence, to be taught this fall by two leading experts from Silicon Valley, has attracted more than 58,000 students around the globe — a class nearly four times the size of Stanford’s entire student body.

The course is one of three being offered experimentally by the Stanford computer science department to extend technology knowledge and skills beyond this elite campus to the entire world, the university is announcing on Tuesday.

The online students will not get Stanford grades or credit, but they will be ranked in comparison to the work of other online students and will receive a “statement of accomplishment.”

For the artificial intelligence course, students may need some higher math, like linear algebra and probability theory, but there are no restrictions to online participation. So far, the age range is from high school to retirees, and the course has attracted interest from more than 175 countries.

Is this the future? Brick and mortar colleges and universities aren’t making it. For-profit distance ed has its own problems. Is there an answer in here? The sheer viral excitement the course offering has produced is thrilling. Inspired by the YouTube-based Khan Academy, this is the uber-fulfillment of our lofty ideal of universal access, equal opportunity, etc. But can you really administer a course with 58,000 students? And can ventures like these be made economically sustainable? Soooo exciting.

Law schools have been in the spotlight for awhile for cooking their post-graduate employment statistics in order to lure ever more students in at jacked-up tuition rates. And the accountability folks have been shouting for awhile that law schools need to get their houses in order or it will be done for them. Now it’s happening.

For the last year, the Education Department and Congress have debated measures of “gainful employment” for graduates of for-profit vocational programs. And media outlets have competed for the best stories about unemployed liberal-arts graduates. But the question of whether higher education can be held responsible for failing to warn would-be students about the poor job prospects of graduates may really be taking off with regard to law schools.

On Wednesday, a New York City law firm filed class actions against two law schools — New York Law School and Thomas M. Cooley Law School — charging that the job placement information they released to potential students was sufficiently inaccurate as to constitute fraud. Those suits follow a similar one filed in May against Thomas Jefferson School of Law. All of the suits argue that students were essentially robbed of the ability to make good decisions about whether to pay tuition (and to take out student loans) by being forced to rely on incomplete and inaccurate job placement information. Specifically, the suits charge that the law schools in question (and many of their peers) mix together different kinds of employment (including jobs for which a J.D. is not needed) to inflate employment rates.

All three law schools deny the charges. And Cooley has already filed a defamation suit against the lawyers suing it. But the litigation comes amid a broader debate over whether the American Bar Association and others are doing enough to promote the release of accurate information, and whether there are too many law schools for the current job market.

When I read that–particularly the last sentence–I thought, “Zoinks! Grad school can’t be far behind.” The overproduction of PhDs, especially in the academic humanities, is an established fact. The lack of information available to prospective PhD students about individual programs’ graduation rates and job placement is also an established fact. New PhDs don’t tend to have the debt that new JDs do–but they have significantly worse job prospects when it comes to securing fulltime work in the field for which they have been trained. The article notes that more lawsuits are expected against law schools–but as this quick sketch should suggest, the implications are even bigger than that. Inside Higher Ed’s commenters appear to have experienced the same brain leap I did.

Here’s former GWU president Stephen Trachtenberg: “Can the Phd graduates be far behind? Will we have to get prospective students to sign a release before we admit them into a graduate school program in history or English?” Other commenters agree.

Can you subpoena a train wreck? Looks like you can.

This one won’t be anonymous for long:

Another unemployed lawyer blog probably wouldn’t attract much attention, but these “scam” bloggers have been abuzz about the latest arrival on their blogrolls: a blog sharing many of their points of view, but written by a tenured law professor.

“I can no longer ignore that, for a very large proportion of my students, law school has become something very much like a scam,” says the introductory post of the blog, Inside the Law School Scam. “Yet there is no such thing as a ‘law school’ that scams its students — law schools are abstract social institutions, not concrete moral agents. When people say ‘law school is a scam,’ what that really means, at the level of actual moral responsibility, is that law professors are scamming their students.”

The author teaches at a Tier One law school widely regarded as the best in his state. He makes $170K a year–a typical law prof salary that, he argues, ought to be far, far lower–and he has a lot to get off his chest. Inside Higher Ed verified his identity and he’s got the standing he claims to have. His anonymity won’t last, though. I hope he’s ready for the shitstorm he’s invited. Telling the truth rarely goes unpunished–and this is one instance where there will be a whole lot of professional and social punishment once his identity is revealed. Commenters at IHE are already hot on his trail.

I heart getting review copies of excellent books. Just received: Lola, California, by Edie Meidav, and recommended by a dear friend with excellent taste in fiction, and Don’t Know Much about History, by Kenneth C. Davis. Looking forward to reading both, just as soon as I finish Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March and Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch’s Declaration of Independents.