Some welcome good news.

The Office of the Secretary of Higher Education for New Jersey made public its most recent report on the state of transfer in the state. Some of it is a bit inside baseball, but it contained a few observations that struck me as worthy of wider notice. In other words, I read it so you don’t have to. The short version is that it makes a nice rebuttal to some of the doom-and-gloom pieces gaining currency of late.

Some highlights:

• Ninety-one percent of the students who graduated with an A.A. or A.S. degree and then transferred to a senior public college or university in the state had all of their credits accepted.
• The remaining 9 percent included students who changed their majors upon transfer.
• “Transfer students graduate at a higher rate overall within 6 years of entry to their institution than their first-time student counterparts.” For students who transferred from a community college in-state, the bachelor’s degree graduation rate within 6 years was 76 percent. For those who completed the associate’s degree and then transferred, it was 78 percent.
• Unlike the sensational stories, the report notes correctly that the headline IPEDS graduation rate counts students who transfer early as dropouts, even if they subsequently complete the higher degree on time. Even allowing for that, though, graduation rates around the state continue to climb for both “native” and transfer students.

Some data points that might have been useful weren’t included, such as the rate of successful transfer of dual enrollment credits. That can be addressed in future reports. It’s also difficult to assess the success rate of transfer credits out of state, particularly to private institutions. But even allowing for those, the news is largely positive.

It’s also consistent with national findings that roughly half of all bachelor’s degree recipients have community college credits. They may or may not have bothered to pick up associate degrees, but they earned community college credits and used them. That could happen through dual enrollment, January classes, summer classes and/or transfer prior to graduation. The Boy even took a couple of classes at Brookdale on his way to his UVA degree. Inexpensive credits earned over breaks made some semesters more bearable.

There’s no shortage of ways to interpret statistics, of course. But seeing that students who graduate with an A.A. or A.S. and then transfer actually finish bachelor’s degrees at higher rates than students who started natively at four-year schools makes it hard to argue that the teaching at community college is below standard.

The overarching piece of bad news is that the number of transfer students has been dropping. That’s to be expected, given that the number of students in community colleges has been dropping. And I hope to see a closer examination of the fate of dual enrollment transfer credits in a subsequent report.

(Earlier this week I ran a poll on Twitter asking my tweeps if it’s okay to start a sentence with “And.” 86 percent said yes. I respect the result.)

Still, kudos to OSHE for compiling and sharing the data and kudos to all of the students who keep giving the lie to the community college stigma. That’s a story that deserves a larger audience.

Reckoning with a reckoning.

An idea worth stealing.

I read last week about the Association of Community College Trustees and Head Start teaming up to place more Head Start locations on community college campuses.

It’s a fantastic idea. Yes, yes, yes.

Students who have children have a much harder time focusing on their studies. That’s particularly true if their childcare arrangements are unsatisfactory and/or precarious. Knowing that your child is safe and secure in a nurturing setting while you’re in class can free up mental bandwidth to focus on the class itself.

As a bonus, Head Start locations can make excellent placement opportunities for students who are studying early childhood education.

Early childhood is one of those “moral dilemma” fields of study, along with social work. It’s honest work and desperately needed; I’d bet that much of the “labor shortage” of the last couple of years stems from people not being able to find reliable childcare. It’s needed, but it pays badly. If students want to study it, I strongly encourage them to choose a community college as the place to do it. Don’t pay premium tuition for a profession that doesn’t pay much.

Professionalizing early childhood education—which necessarily involves public subsidies—can help. Here’s hoping that the alliance gets traction.

—

“Dad jokes” are good for children’s development, says science.

Reader, I feel vindicated.

As a kid, I used to endure my dad’s groan-inducing puns and jokes and wonder why he kept adding to the repertoire. As a parent, I get it. I’ve carried on the tradition, though my jokes tend to be shorter. His typically required a two-paragraph setup, with a punchline that was essentially a compound pun. I prefer the proverbial rim shot; when the joke doesn’t land, at least you haven’t lost as much time.

“Dad jokes”—they aren’t limited to men, but the term sticks—walk a fine line. They have to be structured along the lines of a classic joke, pun or shaggy dog story. They have to be relatively simple, so that a child can understand them. They can’t be topical. They have to be clean, or cleanish. They usually involve a brief pause as the listener comes to the sickening realization that a terrible joke has just landed. (“I couldn’t figure out why the ball was getting bigger. Then it hit me.”) My proudest ones have been spontaneous, like when The Girl was considering a particular gift for her cousin: “The box says 8 to 12 years. Is that OK?” I replied, “It shouldn’t take nearly that long.”

The look on her face was worth it.

The scientists claim that experiencing dad jokes in childhood teaches kids how to handle awkwardness. I like to think that having humor as a routine part of daily life brightens the day and forms the basis for a later appreciation of irony. The ability to appreciate absurdity goes a long way in many jobs. Best to start early.

When I forwarded her the article, my wife responded dryly, “Thank you for your service.” I’ll take it.

—

The Boy graduates from UVA in May, and he has a job lined up! He wants to take some time to work and make money before heading to med school, and he has found a terrific opportunity to work in medical research in a very respected facility.

As parents, we’re doing the end-zone dance.

That first full-time job is always the toughest to get. This job may help with medical school applications, or it may help him move in another direction if that’s what he decides to do. Whichever way he goes, though, we’re proud of him.

It was mostly him, but maybe the jokes helped.

Good news for student parents; good news for purveyors of “dad jokes”; good news from The Boy.

If you hate doing something, you probably won’t be great at it.

The student mental health crisis as a sign of something larger.

Timothy Burke posted a terrific piece last week offering context for the student mental health crisis.  Drawing in part on Mary Gaitskill’s observations and in part on his own, he suggested that we can usefully look at the student mental health crisis – and the larger phenomenon of ‘deaths of despair’ – as signs of a larger sense of helplessness.  It rang true to me.

Burke noted that so many of the threats to daily life that we all know go largely unnoticed in public discourse, or, to the extent that they are noticed, are discussed in unhelpful ways.  The cost of a middle-class life has grown far faster than reliable incomes; college is no longer the guarantee of a great job that it once was; we keep getting involved in wars that don’t have obvious endpoints; pandemics rage while people fight over whether to fight the diseases.  In the face of a society that refuses to deal seriously with its issues, a certain anxiety is understandable.  Some people deal with that by seeking the easy comforts of simple anger, channeled through whichever demagogue is up that week.  Some tune out entirely.  Some decide instead to focus on things they can control, like which pronouns to use or whether their veggies are organic.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with those, but when they’re asked to allay much larger frustrations, they aren’t up to the job.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the piece for several days.  There’s something to it.

You don’t get carsick when you’re driving; for most of us, a sense of control – even if illusory – can help us feel better.  What could offer a sense of control?

I’ll steal a line from Hegel: freedom is the insight into necessity.  When you understand what’s actually happening, you can make meaningful choices.  When you don’t, you’re largely at the mercy of outside forces.  When those forces act in unappealing ways, a certain hopelessness makes emotional sense.  Better to act than to be acted upon.

In higher education, on the whole, we’ve separated subject matter from life navigation.  I suspect that dates back to times when higher education was mostly available to those who already had significant social capital.  If you knew you were going to work for Dad’s company, then you didn’t need much in the way of career development courses.  That doesn’t describe most students now, but many of the old boundaries are still in place.  

From a curricular perspective, I don’t know why we generally relegate career advice either to the sidelines or to the end of a course of study.  It should come at the beginning, with regular check-ins over time.  Help students connect the dots between where they want to be and what they’re doing in class.  Even better, some ‘life navigation’ points make excellent fodder for academic analysis.  In my poli sci classes, I struggled with explaining local government until I started framing it around why so many towns go out of their way to avoid schoolchildren.  Suddenly, I could knit together the cost of housing, the disappearance of starter houses, the notion of “good” school districts, sprawl, and property taxes in ways that helped students understand why it was so hard to buy a home and start a family.  They were hungry for that information.  It helped them make sense of their world, and to understand that the difficulty they faced in matching what their parents had been able to do wasn’t their fault.  There was a logic behind it, and that logic could be challenged if a political movement decided to make a point of it.

Politics is supposed to be the lever through which people exert control at scale.  To the extent that democracy gets circumscribed, a felt loss of control is pretty accurate.  

It isn’t higher education’s job to tell people how to vote.  But it is our job to help them make sense of the world.  If that means rethinking some of our longstanding habits, well, then that’s what it means.  The students are telling us that they feel acted upon.  They have a point.  We can’t do everything, but if we can start connecting some dots and helping students make sense of their world, that may help them recover some sense of control.  The rest is up to them.

“Free” speech is exactly that; responding to readers; a program note.

An easier solution is at hand.

“Free” speech is exactly that; responding to readers; a program note.

Anyone remember the Stamp Act? In 1765, the British passed a law making it illegal to publish anything on paper that lacked a stamp from the government; naturally, the stamp had to be bought. It was meant to raise revenue and tamp down on those pesky pamphleteers who kept making trouble. It did not end well.

I was reminded of that in reading about a new bill proposed in Florida that would require bloggers to register with the state and pay a monthly fee if they ever mention the governor, lieutenant governor, any cabinet officials or any members of the Legislature in a post. Subsequent mentions require more payments. Failure to register or pay in a timely manner will result in fines in the thousands of dollars per offense.

In other words, bloggers would have to buy a virtual stamp anytime they’d like to write about a government official.

Oddly, the law distinguishes “bloggers” from people writing in “newspapers or similar publications,” whatever that means. If I’m writing a blog for Inside Higher Ed, does calling it a column instead give it immunity? Is Inside Higher Ed more like a newspaper or a blog? According to what criteria?

On the merits, it’s cartoonishly absurd. Political speech has long been given the highest degree of deference in First Amendment law; banning any mention of public officials would hollow out the category of political speech pretty fast. “Free” speech is supposed to be exactly that. The entire concept of a “public figure” rests on the fact that they’re commonly discussed.

As trolling, it’s pretty amateurish. Surely Ron DeSantis knows that blogs written by people in other states are accessible to Floridians, and that they aren’t subject to Florida’s jurisdiction. If he or State Senator Jason Brodeur, the bill’s sponsor, want to go after writers in other states, they’ll quickly discover that they have no jurisdiction.

As a serious proposal, it’s quackery. But as a view into a mind-set, it’s terrifying. I hope my Floridian counterparts aren’t cowed into silence. Instead, I hope that anyone who cares about freedom of speech takes notice and acts accordingly.

—

Readers had some fascinating feedback this week both on assessment and on student loans.

I was struck by how many readers responded to my summary of the point of outcomes assessment by calling it “naïve” or “idealistic.” They referred to assessment using terms like “exercise in box-checking.” (Some terms were a bit saltier, but you get the idea.)

To the extent that’s accurate—and I don’t doubt that many believe that—it points to a much larger problem.

My own sense is that assessment works best when it’s relatively simple. Get too detailed, and it starts to fall prey to false precision. Yes, I have worked with people who believe that if a 10-question rubric is good, a 30-question rubric is better. It isn’t. When the form gets so long and complicated that people start filling it out fictitiously just to get it done—what I’ve seen called “malicious compliance”—then the point is lost. Sometimes less is more.

It’s worth getting right because the theory behind assessment—gradual improvement over time by noting what is and isn’t working—makes sense. If methods have overwhelmed the purpose, then it’s time to rethink the methods. The purpose is worthy.

On the proposal to cancel the interest on student loans, a few folks wrote in to object that a zero-interest loan is, in fact, effectively subsidized after inflation. That’s true, but it’s a feature, not a bug. Abrupt forgiveness offends many people’s moral sensibilities in a way that a gradual after-inflation cut doesn’t. It’s likely to be more sustainable politically. It’s not free, but that’s sort of the point; it’s a way to help borrowers without creating a political quagmire.

My thanks to everyone who wrote in. Nobody has to, but many take the time. It means a lot.

—

Next week is one of the busiest in a long time, so the blog (column?) will take a one-week spring break, returning for Monday the 13th.

An easier solution is at hand.

Some of my earliest lessons in ethical behavior, as a child, came in the form of a question: “How would you feel if someone did that to you?” It was reasonably effective because it was simple. I could guess how I would feel, and I didn’t want to make anyone else feel that way. Although I couldn’t have spelled the word at the time, the theory underlying that lesson was reciprocity.

Reciprocity relies on an underlying sense of relevant equality. You and I may be different people in any number of ways, but we’re both fully human, and that entails some basic respect. There’s an implicit politics within the ethical norm of reciprocity, too. I’m no better than anyone else, but I’m no worse, either. Taken seriously, that ethical position tends to lead to a rough egalitarianism. There may be hierarchical roles for various reasons, but the people occupying those roles are just people. They have the same human flaws as everybody else. And the power they’re granted is both a grant—that is, removable—and for a limited purpose. It is not license. Nobody is entitled to abuse anyone else, and nobody deserves abuse.

Reciprocity isn’t a perfect ideal, of course. It can fail through a lack of self-awareness; if my prediction of how I would feel if someone did that to me is wildly wrong, I could draw the wrong lessons. It can also blind people to genuinely different preferences in others. Encountering someone grounded in a religion or culture that isn’t my own, or with a very different personality, may lead to a mismatch between what I would have expected them to want and what they actually want. Reciprocity can also become transactional, or a mechanism with which to attempt control. Without the requisite humility and curiosity, it can become a form of narcissism.

Granting its flaws, though, it has always struck me as a good default position for how to treat others. When in doubt, it’s usually safe to go with “treat others as you’d want to be treated.” Sometimes it’s possible to do better than that, as when you have deep knowledge of the other person. But for daily interactions with strangers, it’s a pretty good starting point. What we call “manners” in the broad sense are how we enact basic respect for other people.

In politics, reciprocity tends to restrain arbitrary power. If my party is in charge right now, I might be tempted to look the other way when it decides to break some eggs in the name of making the proverbial omelet. But if I know that my party could lose power soon, and the other party might step in and see me as an egg that needs breaking, then suddenly constraints on arbitrary authority start to make sense. Basic ground rules that limit what people in power can do to people who aren’t in power at any given time make it possible for a group to accept defeat when it happens. We’ll get ’em next time. If we accept that we’re all just people, none really better than any others, then basing some ground rules on basic reciprocity makes sense.

All of this is by way of explaining just how deeply disturbing the movement behind Governor DeSantis’s recent proposals is. One bill would treat any accusation of bias as defamatory per se, with significant monetary damages awarded; strikingly, truth is not a defense. Another would grant political appointees the power to rescind tenure for any individual at any time, even without cause. The attacks on New College are even more brazen. But parsing each one is a bit like arguing over which rock did the most damage in the avalanche. The avalanche is the point. And the catalyst of the avalanche is a fundamental rejection of reciprocity.

The animating idea behind all of these attacks is that some people are just better than others. The better ones, in this story, are tired of tolerating the annoying habits of their inferiors, so it’s time to restore order and take the inferiors down a notch or two. In this story, “better” is not a result of behavior; it’s an innate status. The betters are licensed to engage in behavior that would be considered contemptible if the roles were reversed. That’s because they reject the idea that the roles could be reversed. They see the roles as natural, even preordained. Some are destined to be eggs, and some to make omelets. Interfering with that can only lead to confusion and failure.

If that’s your view, then the legalisms based on reciprocity look like just so many technicalities to be swept aside. Best to “deregulate,” to liberate the strong to treat the weak any way they see fit.

In looking at the various abuses of power already enacted and others proposed, I’m struck not only by how awful each one is, but by the apparent confidence that it will never be the other side’s turn again. That’s how deep the rejection of reciprocity goes. Over time, of course, hubris doesn’t usually turn out well. But until it collapses, it can do catastrophic damage.

As academics, we have a luxury and a job. We have the luxury of being able to take a long view, and we have the job of clarifying what’s going on so others who are preoccupied with other matters can understand. At the end of the day, this isn’t about one state, one governor or one election. It’s about whether some people are just innately better than others, or whether we’re all just people. I’m proud to be on Team Reciprocity, and I welcome as many teammates as I can get.

A number of terrific tidbits have come in over the last week or so, most of which are directly relevant to student success. Rather than waiting for Friday, it seemed reasonable to share them now.

First, the idea of eight-week semesters (as opposed to 15 or 16 weeks) continues to prove itself. I’ve known about the successes at Odessa College, Amarillo College, the College of Southern Maryland and Grayson College, but now we can add Kilgore College (Tex.) to the list. When she saw the improvements in success rates, the president of the college, Brenda Kays, reported that “it took my breath away.” Among other measures, the graduation rate for Black students nearly tripled. There aren’t many low-cost interventions as effective as that.

Longtime readers know that I’m a fan of short semesters. Shorter courses make it easier for students with complicated lives to focus. They also make it less costly for a student who has to walk away in, say, November or April because life happened. The academic calendar is one of the few variables that’s entirely under a college’s direct control. Yes, there’s an adjustment period, but that happens once and it’s done. And colleges have long taught shorter courses in the summer and January terms, so the idea that the 15-week semester was handed down from the mountaintop simply doesn’t hold.

Kudos to the schools that see the big picture. I hope many more do soon.

—

This one came to me late, and indirectly, but it’s still worth sharing. Morgan State University, an HBCU in Maryland, has built an entire school within itself dedicated to bringing back working adults with some college but no degree.

Other schools have done something similar, but I was struck by the mix of forward-looking practices—prior learning assessment, online courses, personal advising—with a classic liberal arts degree program.

Often the conversations around returning adult students assume that they’re only interested in degrees or credentials tightly coupled to specific occupations. That can certainly be true, but Morgan State has found that liberal arts degrees can hold real appeal, too.

Although we often prefer not to think in these terms, many employers and/or occupations require that a candidate can check the box indicating a degree, even if they don’t particularly care what field the degree represents. For students who may have credits from a decade or two ago, but who have tremendous amounts of work experience already, a program expansive enough to absorb a wide range of credits may be more appealing that starting fresh in a field in which they have no experience.

And there’s also the sense of personal accomplishment in going from “college dropout” to “college graduate.” That still means something.

Kudos to Morgan State for finding a way to serve students that nobody else was serving. The rest of us can learn from it.

—

Finally, yesterday’s post about a potential required American government class brought some thoughtful responses.

One mentioned a “town hall” structure, in which the (short!) semester culminates in an open public meeting with local elected officials. The idea is that students focus on a given problem, learning the usual institutional stuff in the context of a problem they’re trying to solve. Then they present their solution to elected officials and community members and field questions on them.

It’s a great idea, and I could imagine students eating it up. I’m not sure about scalability, though; elected officials’ time is finite, and I could envision attendance starting to drop after the first couple of rounds. Still, it’s the kind of idea that can be built on and honed over time.

Liz Norell, from Chattanooga State, wrote in with her “choose your own adventure” style of American government class. (She specifically mentioned that it’s “open” for folks to see.) It’s a short (!) class in which students have to make choices about what to focus on. The line on the syllabus page that won me over is “chase your curiosity.” Yes, yes, yes.

The final semester project includes a requirement to “move closer,” meaning, to speak at length with someone whose perspective is markedly different from your own. It’s hard to dehumanize someone who’s right in front of you.

The class looks amazing. If I were a student, I’d want to take it. It gives me hope.

We can do better. People already are.

Short semesters, an adult liberal arts degree and some wonderful classes.

Hint: it should draw on composition and public speaking.

If you haven’t seen the story about the all-campus condolence email sent by Vanderbilt University after the Michigan State mass shooting—the email that ended with “Paraphrase from Open AI’s ChatGPT”—it’s worth a quick read.

I cringed when I read it, both for the obvious reasons and because I could sort of see how it could have happened.

Many administrative communications are what usually gets called boilerplate. They’re functional, rather than emotionally expressive, and they don’t vary much over time. In practice, it’s not unusual for messages like those to get recycled from year to year. Job ads, for instance, often include a paragraph or two describing the college and the surrounding area; those descriptions aren’t written fresh for each new ad, assuming the college’s location hasn’t changed.

Boilerplate prose saves time and minimizes certain kinds of mistakes. Once the wordsmithing around the annual parking memo has reached a certain level, there’s not much point in continuing to play with it. And it’s easy to make mistakes when dashing off quick messages. Years ago, at a previous college, I made the mistake of including the phrase “welcome back” in the memo inviting folks to fall convocation; the staff who worked 12 months a year let me know, quickly, that they had never left. They were right, of course. It’s the sort of unforced error that makes previous copy that has stood the test of time hold real appeal. Why risk giving offense when some perfectly serviceable prose already exists?

Boilerplate prose gets a free pass on charges of plagiarism because it’s understood as purely institutional. Requiring every “don’t forget the deadline is next week!” email to be bespoke would constitute a waste of time and energy. In practice, it’s not unusual for canned prose to be written originally by assistants, and then sent out under a senior person’s name. The idea is to save time.

For a senior leader with shaky prose skills and a tight schedule, I could imagine making the mental leap from “I’ll have my assistant write it” to “I’ll have ChatGPT write it.” They’re both versions of delegating.

In this case, clearly, that was an egregious miscalculation. Mass shootings are not paperwork deadlines. I do not want to live in a world in which mass shootings are common enough to make community messages of consolation as banal as parking notices. The pastoral side of the job cannot be automated. The medium so thoroughly undermined the message that its recipients were rightly offended. For the message to carry any value at all, it needs to reflect the human side of an identifiable author.

I don’t usually do predictions, but I predict we’ll see more mistakes like these over time. Many senior leaders aren’t terrific writers, and incidents can happen at any moment.

My own bias, of course, is that leaders should be capable writers themselves. That should reduce the temptation to expand the category of boilerplate beyond what’s appropriate. But when that’s just not an option, for whatever reason, they’d better have somebody capable on staff to craft messages when the unthinkable happens. Because it will.

This almost certainly will happen again.