Login
On online learning and alternative academic careers.
At the most recent edX/2U University Partner Advisory Council meeting, we had the privilege of spending time with Todd Nicolet. Todd is the vice provost for digital and lifelong learning at the University of North Carolina. In our conversations, we found Todd to be both incredibly collegial and massively knowledgeable about the shifting landscape of higher education. We asked Todd if he’d be willing to chat about his role and his career, and he graciously agreed.
Q: What does the role of vice provost for digital and lifelong learning entail? What is going on with online learning at UNC?
A: Digital and lifelong learning provides strategy, coordination and service for online and flexible learning of all types across UNC Chapel Hill, from short professional development experiences through full degree programs. Our units and service areas include credit programs, summer sessions, professional and community programs, online program services, a research hub, and a conference center. As vice provost, I lead the teams providing these campuswide programs and services and represent the university as needed in online, digital and flexible learning spaces.
At Carolina, flexible offerings make it possible for more amazing students to participate in our programs and online approaches, from hybrid to fully online, have been the dominant approach. We see growth across credit-bearing opportunities ranging from precollege through graduate programs, and we are excited, in particular, to be partnering even more closely with our Graduate School. We also see growth in professional programs that focus on competencies rather than credit and, like many, we are actively exploring pathways to help students build from such experiences into certificates and even degrees.
A key area of emphasis for digital and lifelong learning and for online learning at Carolina is collaboration. The coordination our unit provides across campus enables greater collaboration between schools and departments. And we regularly reach out across our system schools to collaborate, support and even offer programs together. I believe such strategic collaborations, both internal and external, will be critical for all types of institutions to navigate the many changes and pressures we are all facing.
Q: What was the career path that led you into your current role? And for other academics who might want to consider an alternative path to a traditional tenure-track faculty career, what advice can you share?
A: I started my career with the intention of being an English professor, but before finishing that Ph.D. program got pulled into working for a start-up company that supported online offerings for higher ed institutions across the country. This was the ’90s, so it looked a lot different than today, but those years were a fantastic way to learn about many different types of institutions and experience what students, faculty and administrators needed and wanted.
My work at UNC Chapel Hill began more than 20 years ago at the Gillings School of Global Public Health, supporting the CDC Responds webcast series and building online courses and programs. Over time, my roles on campus shifted across units and evolved to include a wide range of administrative experiences in school units, from finance and HR to research support and event management to even a library.
Although it was not always a primary part of my role, I kept being pulled back to online education, serving on institutional task forces, assessing support models and managing the launch and implementation of an online degree. In my current role, these many different experiences and viewpoints at Carolina and elsewhere have informed our strategy and helped us work with online and flexible programming across campus.
For those considering a career in academia, I encourage you to seek opportunities, but be flexible. I could not have charted the path I followed, and if I had tried, I could not have forced the opportunities that opened the doors I went through. When you see needs and opportunities at your institution, be part of the solution, even if it’s not in your immediate area. Be a collaborator that respects the authority of other decision-makers but offers ideas and partnership.
Higher education needs leaders who understand both mission and operations, and there are many ways to develop that combined skill set and build a career. Developing strong management skills is rewarding in its own right but will also set you apart as someone who can help make things happen. Finally, be respectfully persistent. I don’t want to count the times I’ve been a second choice, alternate or simply not selected at all. But so many of those “setbacks” enabled the next opportunity, creating a chance to make a connection for a different and better opportunity or providing the time needed before that particular door was ready to open. When I completed a Ph.D. more than a decade ago, I considered pursuing a traditional faculty role but couldn’t imagine leaving the path I was already on. Higher education includes many fulfilling and rewarding career paths and I encourage people think broadly about what working in higher ed might mean for them.
Q: The big topic of conversation these days in digital learning circles is the latest Department of Education guidance on third-party servicers and bundled services. What do you think of the guidance and how do you imagine this playing out?
A: Transparency, accountability and affordability are all critical in higher education. We saw the disastrous effects of for-profit institutions that focused on getting students into a first term rather than retention in high-quality educational experiences and ensuring nothing like that happens again is important work. We should all seek to develop and communicate a full understanding of how programs are supported.
Our online and flexible programs focus on quality educational experiences that support students through graduation and beyond. When we work with a vendor, we oversee their work with at least as much attention as we would if it were our own employee. And we will continue to maintain full control over admissions criteria and decisions, curriculum, tuition and more. What I’m describing is not unique to us and represents best practices we share across institutions. Higher education is incredibly challenging to do well and we need all the tools we can have to make the best choices for our students, faculty and institutions.
The reporting requirements for third-party servicers previously had been focused on direct work related to financial aid, so the expansion to include almost all areas connected to delivering education was alarming. Long-standing successful programs and practices in study abroad, internships, clinical placements, joint programs, precollege programs, learning technologies and more all suddenly have new administrative burdens. Some of these successful approaches may no longer even be possible, particularly with the limitations on international companies, a remarkable restriction in an increasingly global landscape.
Looking forward, my fear is that the updated guidance would make important educational experiences no longer possible and would increase our administrative costs significantly at a time when we are looking to decrease the cost of education for students and institutions. Bundling services through revenue sharing has enabled us to start programs we otherwise could not and provide high-quality programming more efficiently—losing that tool would limit the ways we can help students achieve their goals.
My hope is the extensive feedback provided by associations and institutions will help communicate the innovations these tools have enabled and demonstrate the care we take in managing our programs and services to meet student needs. At institutions across the country, we share a mutual goal of providing the best education possible for students in authentic and affordable ways that help them achieve their educational and career goals. This discussion could begin a call to action to work together toward the best ways to serve students today and into the future.
Seven ingredients for gathering well.
A higher education–centric theory of economic development.
On VPAL, online learning and career paths.
There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster—Who Profits and Who Pays the Price by Jessie Singer
Published in February 2022
In 1988, during my sophomore year of college, a student I knew was killed in a car accident. Those were pre-internet days, and I can’t find any reference on Google to his death. I think he was driving a convertible and his car flipped over near campus, but the details are hazy.
I’d not thought about this car accident and the death of a kid I went to college with for over 30 years. Reading Jessie Singer’s new book, There Are No Accidents, brought the memory back. Singer, a journalist, wrote her book in part to make sense of the death of her best friend, Eric, while cycling in Manhattan. Eric was hit by a drunk driver who drove onto a bike path.
In researching her best friend’s death, Singer discovered that other cars had routinely driven on the same bike path, as the city had failed to install barriers to protect cyclists and walkers. It was not until a man intentionally drove a pickup onto that bike path in 2017, killing eight, that the city installed solid barriers at the entrances of the bike path. In other words, if New York City had acted earlier, Singer’s friend Eric (and many others) would be alive today.
The point of There Are No Accidents is in the book’s title. The word “accidents” connotes an unavoidable outcome—the result of bad luck, chance events or malicious actions. Automobile deaths are blamed on the “nut behind the wheel.” Fatal plane crash causes are often assigned to “pilot error.” The factory worker failed to follow the safety protocols in the employee manual.
What is not typically discussed are the systemic causes of accidents. Singer points out that members of low-income and minority populations are significantly more likely to die in accidents than middle-income and nonminority individuals. Systemic racism and the outcomes of poverty are expressed as much in the mortality risk of accidents as in employment, housing and education.
Each year, over 220,000 Americans die due to an “unintentional injury.” Mostly, the social determinants of those deaths go unexplored. There is no systematic national effort to lower accidental mortality. Technologies that could reduce accidental death, such as automotive features like blind-spot warnings and lane keeping, remain expensive options as opposed to mandated safety features. Few cities or towns invest in creating protected bike lanes. Spending on safer forms of transpiration, such as trains and subways, is minuscule compared to federal and state outlays for roads and highways.
Reading There Are No Accidents got me wondering about the role of accidental death among college students. How big a deal are accidents for this population? The book points out that unintentional accidents are the leading cause of death for young adults, ahead of deaths by suicide, homicide, cancer and heart disease (in that order).
Getting data on the cause of death for college students to understand the absolute and relative risk of accidents is surprisingly difficult. From what I can tell, cause-of-death statistics across college students are not collected and published annually. (If you know how to find these data, please get in touch.)
The best I could find is a 2011 deck from research on Leading causes of mortality among American college students at four-year institutions. In that deck, the authors offer the following bullet points (slide 3):
The researchers estimate that the leading causes of death among college students are:
Search Google for “college student dies in accident,” and you will get over 56 million links. The top responses include the following:
Could it be that colleges and universities should be thinking of accidental death as a systemic problem, one that deserves institutional thinking and prevention?
Is anyone on our campuses thinking about the social determinants of accidental death within our higher education communities?
What are you reading?
How reading this book made me think of the death of a college classmate over 30 years ago and wonder if accidental student death should be thought of as a systemic issue.
Where Scott Galloway is correct (for a change) on his take in “More Babies.”
Where Scott Galloway is correct (for a change) on his take in “More Babies.”
Each week, I receive email messages from communications professionals asking if I’d be interested in including their clients in my “3 Questions” series. Ninety-nine out of 100 times, I’d say the answer is no.
In order to potentially generate some new Q&As and perhaps cut down on unproductive emails, I thought I’d share the criteria I use in deciding whom to interview.
Almost always, the conversations in the “3 Questions” series are with colleagues with whom I have some professional relationship. These are discussions with people in my network. They are extensions of conversations that started during in-person meetings, conferences, or through email or Twitter.
The postsecondary ecosystem is large, but the subgroups within higher education are small. In the world of online education and learning innovation, we all tend to know each other. The “3 Questions” series is a chance to bring the discussions that learning and innovation people are having to a broader audience.
In some instances, the “3 Questions” series provides an opportunity to broaden the conversation with colleagues outside my learning innovation network. An example is the series of Q&As I’ve been doing with academic library colleagues. All those interviews started as email exchanges and later morphed into Q&As.
The takeaway message is that the conversations in “3 Questions” are between existing colleagues. I almost always have to know you through some professional connection or activity if we are going to move forward with an interview.
The colleagues that I tend to want to interview are nontraditional academics. I am deliberately trying to use the platform that Inside Higher Ed affords to highlight the contributions of alternative academics, learning professionals and other nonfaculty educators.
Part of my motivation for interviewing nontraditional academics is curiosity. As someone who trained as a sociologist, I’m fascinated by how people navigate career and family life. Nonfaculty educators invent as much as they follow a career path. There is no map to follow, and we are making things up professionally as we go along.
How many of you are in academic jobs where you are the first person to fill the role? How many of you trained for the higher ed job you are doing today? It is those stories of colleagues navigating unclear and liminal academic career paths that I try to highlight.
Another area of intentional focus in the “3 Questions” series is to represent the diversity of the nontraditional educator population. We need to hear more about the experiences of early-career colleagues, as well as educators from populations that remain underrepresented in academic leadership roles.
An additional area of diversity in the “3 Questions” series is the inclusion of educators inside and outside universities. A reality often missed is the overlap in values between educators who work at schools and those who work at companies.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t be critical of the growth of nonprofit/for-profit partnerships in core areas of teaching and learning. Only that the way forward is through respectful dialogue, listening and transparency.
My hope is that the conversations with colleagues that I have through this “3 Questions” series will continue and expand, as these Q&As are some of the pieces that I most enjoy working on.
If you or your colleague meets the three criteria outlined above, I hope we can be in touch.
Understanding changes in academic library staffing.
A sleepless night with Keynes while preparing to lecture on the Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.
From university to ed tech.
On the future of learn-work innovation and how Kaplan is playing a key role in the learning ecosystem.
A conversation with University of Michigan colleague James DeVaney.
Continuing the conversation.
On library budgets, staffing and online conversations.
Elizabeth Dellavedova, associate library director at a community college, connected with me after reading my piece “How Do Academic Libraries Spend Their Money?” In her note, Elizabeth recommended connecting directly with an academic librarian to learn more about how academic library budgets work. I appreciated her note and asked if she’d be willing to share some of her critique of my piece and her own thinking in this space.
Q: Can you share your concerns about my blog post on academic library spending?
A: To be fair, I appreciated that the title suggested a genuine desire to understand a vital aspect of library operations—spending. My concern was the simplistic assumption you put forth that librarians themselves have some agency in shifting funding from material budget to salaries. This is not the case at the community college I work for, which also happens to be a public institution. Funding for the purchase of databases, books (both electronic and physical), as well as other resources are separate from salaries and benefits for library staff, or any staff member.
Q: From your perspective in your library leadership role and what you are seeing nationally, what are the big trends, issues and challenges that those of us outside academic libraries should understand?
A: From my position, I think the big trends, issues and challenges facing academic libraries are not new: book censorship, staffing and responding to technology changes. Many community college libraries work closely with the online models of their college in response to how we reach students and how students connect with us. This has only increased in scale during and after the pandemic.
Q: For those of us who wish to be an ally of academic librarians and libraries, what can we do to support our colleagues?
A: In 1952 B. Lamar Johnson, a noted community college educator and researcher, wrote an article about how community college libraries should be viewed as opportunities. This is still true today. If someone wants to be an ally of academic librarians and libraries, seek out the opportunities! Encouraging students to visit the library is not enough. Ask about library resources. Ask for assignment consultation with a librarian. Ask about ways to encourage reading. Ask about library participation in a new learning initiative. Ask library staff about the questions students are asking. Often students will be more confide in library staff about the difficulties they are experiencing inside or outside the classroom.
A conversation with Sarah R. Fitzgerald from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Sarah R. Fitzgerald, an assessment and planning librarian at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, reached out to me after reading my piece “How Do Academic Libraries Spend Their Money?”
In her email, Sarah shared some fantastic insights on trends in academic library spending. She also had some interesting things to say about the changing structure of academic library careers.
I asked Sarah if she’d be willing to share some of her insights with our Inside Higher Ed community, and she graciously agreed.
Q: How might one go about figuring out the story of academic library budgets? Are these public and published? Does the answer to the last question differ for private versus public institutions? Can you point us to any good resources to understand the story of academic library budgeting?
A: The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) collects statistics on academic library budgets annually. Statistics are available through a subscription to ACRL Benchmark. There is also an annual print publication, ACRL Academic Library Trends and Statistics. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) also collects statistics on research library budgets annually. ACRL includes all American college or research libraries that choose to participate, while ARL includes just North American research libraries (currently 127).
Q: Can you provide a budget sketch of the “typical” academic library? (If typical is helpful, I don’t know, given the diversity of the postsecondary ecosystem.) How do academic libraries spend their budgets? What are the big trends and debates in academic library spending? What is the relationship between academic library budgeting and librarian salaries and job security?
A: Doctoral-granting university libraries in ACRL spend about 37 percent of their budgets on salaries, 13 percent on fringe benefits, 40 percent on materials and 11 percent on operations. Operational costs include hardware, software, renovations and furniture.
In recent years, the staffing budget averages about 42 percent for librarian salaries, 22 percent for professional staff, 29 percent for support staff and 6 percent for student workers. The number of support staff has been declining for several decades, while the number of professional staff has increased as the work of libraries becomes increasingly technical.
These academic libraries spend about 80 percent of their materials budget on ongoing commitments to subscriptions (including databases, journals, ebook packages and streaming audiovisual packages). About 18 percent is spent on one-time purchases (including books and ebooks). The rest of the materials budget goes to collection support through interlibrary loans, copyright fees and external cataloging fees.
Libraries are buying less print and more electronic materials as print circulation declines. While cataloging used to be done mostly in-house, many libraries can no longer afford to employ dedicated librarians for non-English languages or special material types such as musical scores, so that type of cataloging is often purchased externally. One-time materials purchases such as special collections items are the most straightforward expenses to fund using donor support. Donors sometimes also make ongoing commitments to support collections.
As with other faculty, whether librarianship is a secure job depends on whether you have tenure track or a tenure-like protection at your institution. If you are an academic librarian without the protection of tenure or “continuing appointment” and your dean is willing to protect library jobs rather than the collections that serve research and learning, librarianship could be a more secure job than other non-tenure-track faculty members face.
Databases are usually renewed every two or three years, not every year, so in a budget crisis, not all of a library’s databases are available for cancellation. Library budgets have not kept pace with the escalation of database prices. For-profit scholarly publishing has one of the highest profit margins of any industry. Publishers are able to raise prices almost without limit because the demand for information is inelastic. Patrons do not change their demand based on price, because it is the library that bears the price of information, not the patron. Outside of the richest elite universities, academic libraries have cut back our holdings to mostly the largest, most expensive databases that patrons demand, because we cannot afford everything patrons need. This means the enormous for-profit vendors retain their contracts because they are too big to cancel and the small nonprofit publishers usually lose out. For most academic libraries, materials and personnel are already bare bones, so there is little to cut in a crisis if the library is to continue to function.
The volume of scholarly information which exists is constantly increasing, and the ratcheting up of research expectations from faculty accelerates the increase in the amount of information that libraries must provide. Coupled with profit-seeking practices from information vendors, this means that the money libraries could spend on all the information patrons want is increasing exponentially while our budgets are not. A solution libraries are advocating is the open-access movement. Libraries act as open-access publishers and are trying to negotiate deals with vendors in which we pay to support open-access publishing, which is available to everyone worldwide, not just the institution we serve. Collaboration across libraries is a way to put pressure on vendors and reduce prices for the information patrons need.
Q: How might those of us in higher ed who do not work in the library understand the broader context of library budgeting? Are there rules of thumb for what proportion of a school’s budget is spent on the library? Are there trends in institutional spending on academic libraries that can be shared?
A: Library budgets depend on the library dean’s talent for negotiation and the university administration’s disposition toward libraries. Library patrons and university administrators used to be able to see the functionality of librarians, when they had to come to the library to access materials. Now that the majority of library subscriptions are accessible online, patrons no longer understand the many expert specialized personnel it takes to negotiate escalating journal subscription prices, provide electronic connections through university authentication and create discovery systems and metadata to ensure that patrons can find the information they are looking for.
As the missions of academic institutions expand, the proportion of the budget spent on libraries has decreased. In 1985, library expenditures may have made up 4 percent of a research university’s budget. In 2015, they would make up only 2 percent. In that time, those university budgets have increased 750 percent, while library budgets have increased only 230 percent. The cost savings for universities on libraries have tended to come mostly from personnel expenditure savings. Library spending on materials increased about 360 percent between 1985 and 2015, while spending on salaries increased only 180 percent.
Academic libraries have not seen personnel increases to match the expanding number of patrons we serve. While student enrollments at ARL institutions increased 64 percent from 1985 to 2015, library personnel have decreased 3 percent. This means that librarians, professional staff and support staff who work in libraries are taking on increasing workloads. Subject librarians who teach and answer research questions are covering more departments even as those departments educate greater numbers of students.
Some library value is quantifiable. Spending on libraries saves university patrons money. For example, if a library has an average sized budget of $13,000,000 for a year and patrons use an average amount of 1,500,000 articles, which would otherwise cost an average of $50 each, then the library has saved patrons at least $62,000,000. This doesn’t take into account all of the books, videos, teaching and other services the library also offers for that $13,000,000 budget. Some library value is not quantifiable. How can we describe the value of students learning to interrogate and verify information they read or hear?
FreshRSS 