Special financial aid to start at a CC

Dean Dad wrote an interesting column today about a new program in Illinois that rewards a select group of students who choose to attend a community college by allowing them to carry forward the financial aid savings for use in their third and fourth years of college.

The program is described in detail here. It has a number of interesting features, one of which has the potential to be extremely effective. That feature is the tight linkage between groups of CCs and a specific university. [Note: Some CCs are linked to more than one university, but the one I looked at -- Shawnee CC -- is only linked to SIU-Carbondale.] This, along with the presence of an SIU academic advisor at Shawnee CC (as reported by the Chronicle in an illustration above the paywall) should help with one of the biggest obstacles to effective transfer.

Even at a CC where only a tiny fraction are in AS programs and where most students transfer to one of two universities that have a very strong and clear articulation agreement with us, advising is an ongoing challenge. Program requirements change, and those changes sometimes include courses that don't exist at our college. We are always the last to know, and proper articulation seems like it is usually a semester or two late. (I even know of one case where one course remains a mystery after decades. We have an articulated course, but they seem to want an additional one that is only taught at the junior level. Very annoying.) In principle, we should have two years notice because changes are supposed to affect only students who are freshmen when the change in a course catalog takes effect, but it also affects new (transfer) students immediately. In practice, the university knows about curricular changes when they are proposed, but the CC doesn't find out about them until after they go into effect.

In addition, articulation agreements don't spell out course sequencing, and what might be obvious to an historian might not be obvious to a chemist, and vice versa.

Both of these problems should be reduced by having an employee of the university assigned to the CC. There is nothing like having an expert insider nearby. I know, because I maintain irregular contact with former students who are now in engineering school -- and sometimes their faculty as well -- and this gives me insights that I would never get from the paper record.

Interesting pluses and minuses

The program in Illinois is quite limited. A student has to be admitted to a 4-year university and then choose to attend a (specific, linked) CC to be eligible. You don't qualify if you have to start at the CC for academic reasons, or if your home-town CC is not linked to the out-of-town university you want to attend.

If you have to go to an out-of-town CC, the economics shown in their example are not quite as favorable. Your tuition as an out-of-district student is higher, and the allowance for room and board might not be adequate. However, you will still do better in the long run, just not as well as that example shows.

One might be tempted to assume that students who were admitted to a university will be guaranteed to succeed at a CC, but I would warn against that assumption. The risks of partying or Facebooking your way to an F are still there. They might be higher if the student thinks they are stepping down to a glorified high school. Orientation becomes even more important, as are professors and fellow students who notice who is in class each day. Professors might find new problems to deal with. I know that I have had to make adjustments to deal with kids who come in thinking that an AP class was taught at a college level and pace.

IMHO, setting a professional tone on the first day of class is always important in helping students transition from being childish learners to adult learners.

Cost to the CC?

Dean Dad argues that a program that gives needy (Pell-Grant) students almost a full ride [*] at the CC will "squeeze quality" because it directs the money to "students instead of institutions". The problem, he says, results because "community colleges charge students far less than what it costs to educate them". I couldn't disagree more, and I base this on experience at my CC as well as the even more favorable situation at Shawnee CC in Illinois.

I already made some terse comments about this on his blog, so I will give the promised details here.

First, my experience is that a policy that slightly increases some state scholarships if they are used at a CC (where they go much further) has made us much more attractive to students at the margin -- ones who could get into nearby Wannabe Flagship (or a similarly ranked university in the state) but would be in the bottom half of the incoming class. They follow the money, but find the small classes to be an unexpected bonus and that word seems to slowly leak back into the high schools. (Many don't appreciate what they had until after they transfer. Advertising sometimes has to help make that point.) Similarly, the faculty find that having a broader mix of students, in terms of entering SAT scores, helps everyone in the class. There aren't enough great students to improve success rates all by themselves, but the pool of student tutors gets deeper when you have sophomores who have finished calc 3, and those students learn and help others learn at the same time.

Second, our economics are similar to those in Illinois even if our pay rates for adjuncts and faculty are somewhat higher. Adding students is a net plus at the margin. Shawnee tuition is $92 per credit hour (apparently with no additional fees). Note that there is an extra fee for "out of district" students because local property taxes help support the college.

The state of Illinois maintains a central portal where you can find the FY10 salary report (pdf) for all of the state's community colleges. Detailed tables toward the end show that adjuncts earn $450 per credit hour and regular faculty on overload earn $600 per credit hour (Table 5) for individual classes at Shawnee CC. Those define part of the marginal cost of adding a class, with the rest coming from incremental printing costs (exams and quizzes). You might double the salary cost to get a conservative estimate of the total, based on the rough fraction of our total budget that goes to faculty salaries. However, some major budgeted costs are fixed (we heat and cool classrooms whether they are in use or not) and we have to grow a lot before we need to hire more permanent office staff.

On this basis, a 25 or 30 student class staffed by an adjunct or as a faculty overload will turn a "profit" of well over $1000. More if they use an adjunct. Even more if the students are "out of district", which I consider to be more likely under this financial aid scenario.

Long term is a different issue, because it depends on whether the larger student population is going to stay that way. What if Shawnee has to add another full time professor? Table 2 suggests their starting salary is around $42,000 (lowest) to $47,000 (25th percentile) for the regular 2-semester year that teaches 15 credit hours per semester. According to Table 20, their fringe benefits were under $6,000 (compared to a state average of $11,600 in Table 18). CHEAP! So the regular load of a new full-time professor works out to be about (45k + 6k)/30 = $1700 per credit hour. With only $2300 to $2760 coming in from a class of 25 to 30 students, this does not break even when other staffing costs are included ... but you might be able to cut it close for five lean years.

However, once you are talking about long-term budgets, other intangibles come into play. For example, our state funding formula takes enrollment into account. If we grow relative to other CCs, our base budget will grow. Or, I should say, it will grow if the depression ends.

Other costs:

Dean Dad also referred to this article on financial aid regulations as an example of unfunded mandates. However, as I read the Illinois description, it looks like the state system will keep track of what is owed to the student. I think the new GI Bill and other things are a bigger deal for our college than the basic tracking of student credit hours for a state scholarship, and eligibility is determined by a state office, not us.


Side remark

I've always, both as a HS student and a professor, been around a CC where most students are interested in transfer rather than career programs. I gather from DD's comments that this is rare in the community college world. Perhaps the anomaly is because both places have (or had) a significant vocational program run within the public school system, although there are some other similarities that play a role. Nonetheless, my views here about transfer reflect a situation where the vast majority of our graduates get an AA degree and transfer to a university.

[*] Full ride comment

The example student appears to be one whose FAFSA form leads to a particular maximum state grant along with a Pell Grant. Under the assumption that the student is living at home when at a community college (often a poor assumption), the room and board number is realistic and the remaining $600 can be earned doing work study or with limited work hours that will allow plenty of time for studying. Not quite a full ride scholarship, but close.

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Unacceptable humor?

Comments complaining about Rudbeckia Hirta's snark about psychology and biology at her university sound like they also don't appreciate where she is on the "Purity" continuum! (And it appears that Psychology and Sociology are reversed at her university.)

They also reminded me of the kerfuffle created by the Top Gear guys being their usual selves. Complaints that their remarks were "offensive, xenophobic and humiliating" led me to say "and this is news?". Ever notice what they think of the US, particularly the southern parts of the US, and our giant cars designed to hold our giant bellies? Or what they think of France?

But back to the academic question of easy majors that drew the ire of RH's commentariot: You don't have to do much advising at my CC before you encounter students who wish there was a tool to help them select a major at Wannabe Flagship based entirely on a list of classes they don't want to take. Each time you click on the radio button next to a class, the possible majors would change. The opposite of the way we usually do advising, which is to pull up the major and tell them what they need to take next.

Their exclusion list usually starts with any math above about what I characterize as the 9th grade level (basic algebra with some inequalities, the occasional exponent but no exponential or trig functions,a few fractions, and the rules of probability), but can also include "too much reading" or "science".

The people who teach the HS-level science classes perceived as the easier choices among those that meet our liberal arts requirement have my greatest sympathy. Imagine students complaining about exponents being used to give the size or age of the universe, because there isn't supposed to be any math in the class, and you get the general idea.

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Forcing the horse to drink

You can lead a horse to water ... but you can't make hir drink.

Did you know I was talking about "Academically Adrift"? (IHE articles here and here point to the main story lines.) That's right, I'm talking about the folks who don't realize that you can send a kid to school ... but you can't make hir learn.

I've commented about this book twice, and was ready to comment again when I decided it was time to put those comments here in my blog.

Just for background, it first came to my attention in a January 18 comment on Dean Dad's blog that pointed to a column by someone from “The Hechinger Report” in the Sacramento Bee. That led to the following observation:

That article about Critical Thinking was interesting until we got to the inevitable “decline of civilization” comments from various experts. How can you compare the results of an Unprecedented One-of-the-First Study with guesses about college life 30 or 50 years ago? You can’t. I’m pretty sure we spent 50% of our time socializing in the dorms back in the good old days.

I’m impressed that almost two thirds !! of the study group made significant gains in critical thinking, even if the journalist chose to emphasize the negative side of the same results.

And I was stunned to learn that students in “business, education, social work and communications” showed the least gains, not to mention that “students learned more when asked to do more”. Who would ever have imagined such a result.

When Sherman Dorn questioned the reliability of the assessment tool used to generate data for the book (and later decried the over generalized conclusions drawn from it, I ventured the opinion (on the former article, slightly rewritten here) that:

Commentary based on perceiving a single data point as if it were a century long time series does not show any critical thinking on the part of the commentator.

I would also add that I think I would not have shown any significant improvement in my critical thinking skills after 4 years of college because I entered college with spectacularly good ones due to my high school experiences. I’m sure I improved, but not within the uncertainties of an instrument like they used.

The best article, however, is the one Chad wrote in Friday's Uncertain Principles. What makes it the best is, of course, is that he agrees with me that it is no surprise that 1/3 of all students in college are coasting. Well, that and he links to reports on the actual study the book is based on.

I'll add to his comments that the headline findings are based on an evaluation instrument that Sherman Dorn, a professor of the history of education and an expert on assessment in K-12, thinks is not suitable as an accountability measure.

Further, I'd guess that his students at Union and his fellow students at Williams are and were, like me, likely to have scored pretty high on the "critical thinking" essay they were given and thus less likely to improve. You have to push such students REALLY hard if you want them to improve their already high-level skills.

And I'll also add that I use a very good textbook (Wolfson's "Essentials" for calc-based physics) that runs about 22 pages of reading per week for the first semester (Mechanics and Thermodynamics) and 18 pages for the second semester (Electricity and Magnetism and Optics) -- a total that includes the textbook problems. Yet few students in any random sample at any university would trade that (not to mention homework assignments that are thick with critical thinking challenges) for 40 pages of a history book.

The worst article, however, is the NYTimes interview with one of the authors. There we discover that he actually thinks surveys and a single essay test -- likely taken without any academic (grade) or monetary (continued employment) motivation -- actually measures learning, for example, marketable engineering skills. What a load of narrow minded crap. As if the only job in the world is writing a sociology book.

And I take any claim that grades have been inflated to a Gentleman's B in my classes as a personal insult. My students know better.

But I will agree with the conclusion that challenging students makes them better. What bothers me is that someone who is a professor Emeritus at NYU thinks this is news. This has been known for centuries and obvious to me since elementary school.

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Productivity

My blog friend Dean Dad has a couple of bees under his bonnet that rival those of much older, semi-senile faculty. One of them is his obsession with the Credit Hour, even when (at other times) he worries about articulation and the transfer of course "credit" from one institution to another. He reminds me of one college that got rid of grades to foster creative risk taking, only to discover that no one wanted to hire their students because it took too much effort to evaluate the individual portfolios. That college no longer exists.

His latest version of the argument, in a blog last month, is to blame it for a lack of productivity in academia:

Third, we've defined what we do in a way that defeats productivity improvements. We measure learning in units of time. Until we stop doing that, no amount of efficiency-tinkering will make enough of a difference. A three-credit class required forty-five hours of seat time thirty years ago; it still does.

Actually, it doesn't. We only require 42 or 43 hours of seat time (plus final exams) at our college. They have to learn the same physics content in 28 weeks of class time that they once had 30 weeks to learn. You see, we measure learning in units of chapters in physics books, and engineering schools expect the same prerequisite knowledge they always did. AFAICT, everyone deals with this by cutting back somewhat on topics that students never learned anyway, but that does not help the overall learning cycle for the core material in the course.

Side comment: Somehow the same has not happened in math. Calculus takes longer now than it did when I first encountered teaching it, although that change might be making up for the lost weeks I mentioned above.

Besides, this is all a red herring. Productivity is not what one student learns, it is the cost of producing that learning. Productivity is about the difference between one professor running a tutorial for a single student and having an 80 student lecture/discussion class. And there, I know my productivity has increased significantly in just the past decade because my annual enrollment has grown by more than 50%. That means a lot more money is paying for my time, which is all that matters for the college's bottom line.

Side comment: An assistant chairman in my distant past also argued that failing students was a way to increase productivity in the department. It enabled them to squeeze twice as much money for the same amount of learning. This doesn't always work, of course, because repeats can displace other students who might be more likely to learn the material and pass the class.

And my productivity has increased because, in the days of smaller enrollment, I was also teaching labs. That is three hours of my time that only generates one credits worth of income from a small number of students rather than three credits worth for twice as many students -- a factor of SIX in income for my time! Using an adjunct instead of a tenured professor has lowered our cost there while freeing me to generate more income for the college.

One complaint I don't understand is

Fourth, unlike almost every other sector except health care, we have to invest in technology even when it doesn’t improve our own productivity.

No, you don't. That is a cop out. Managers like yourself did not have to replace blackboards in every classroom with SmartBoards and projectors without doing any study to see if they improved learning. (By the way, that is not a one-time capital expense. Projector bulbs are expensive and projectors wear out. There is also more security required because of a significant theft problem.) Indeed, they didn't even do a study to see if increased use of Powerpoint might reduce learning!

He also blames tenure, although he is actually blaming a seniority-based pay system rather than tenure. You can have tenure without automatic pay increases and you might need step pay increases without tenure, to keep your best people. Besides, as I alluded to above, one way every college has increased productivity is the use of contingent faculty, particularly at universities where the benefits are the greatest. I say this because the fraction of classes taught by adjuncts at my college has been stable for a long time at about 50%. (I am counting classes rather than people for a good reason: we have a significant number of adjuncts who only want to teach one or two classes.) I think this is possible because the salary disparity is not as great as at universities.

And productivity gets harder to define when you shift from a Community College environment (where he and I work on the teaching side) to a Research University environment (where I used to work on the research side). Is a professor's time better spent in the classroom generating credit hours or in the lab generating grants with overhead and jobs for students that help support enrollment? I think we all know that the answer to the last question is "yes" at an R1 institution, where it even includes the creation of non-teaching faculty positions that exist solely to bring in additional contract dollars.

And that last detail is why I think, in another article from last month, Dean Dad completely misses the point made by Historiann. Historiann is at a Wannabe Major University, just the sort of place where managers do profit (pay increases and job jumps up the ladder) by shifting resources to areas where they are more likely to get more research grants that generate more "overhead" (indirect cost recovery) and more administrative positions. There isn't much (make that ANY) value to the university if Historiann publishes another book. There is a lot of value in the 40% that gets siphoned off of a grant, and even more if the professor's salary and benefits and all other expenses (office, light, heat, staff support) can get charged to the grant while an adjunct with no benefits and few of those expenses teaches hir class that semester.

I have little doubt that what I just wrote is "far removed from any reality I [Dean Dad] can recognize", but it is a reality I am very familiar with.

But I would not put all of the blame on the managers who made it happen. Many faculty are complicit in the expansion of the university research enterprise because their lives are devoted to research and graduate and post-doctoral education. It is an unfortunate reality that history cannot compete with biochemistry at this game, and tight budgets will push money to where it creates the most return for the people managing the university.

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Assessment

Not sure if I have much to say about this particular story, but it definitely deserves mention here because of my "promise" to engage in questions about the A word in response to an excellent article by Dr. Crazy last month.

An article today in IHE asks the musical question Why are we assessing? (I know why we are -- our accreditor insists on it -- but that only begs the question.)

Sorry, nothing to see here for the moment. Well, not nothing. This particular observation

We now have a number of intriguing published instruments although, for many, evidence of their quality and value remains a work in progress.

from the article definitely deserves flagging. Are they really saying there is no "there" there? That no one knows if there is any value in the institutional effort we have started? Sure sounds like it.

Fortunately, we have a functioning system at our college so faculty have been given the lead to design assessments that make sense in each general area (composition, math, science, history, etc) and for different courses within that area. Agreeing on what is Really Important has been an interesting exercise, as has been the process of comparing how each of us might assess a particular item in our own courses. We don't often talk about tests, and different ways of testing or grading, so that has led to an interesting conversation that will continue for years.

I think what we are doing will have value to each of us, even if it proves worthless on a cross-institutional level to the ed bureaucrats.

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Three Un-related Topics

All below the jump ... thoughts about perceived quality of faculty at a CC, the Gates Foundation and education, and keeping happy as a professor -- all triggered by recent items in IHE.


Faculty quality at the CC Level

Hat tip to an IHE Quick Take, pointing to this article in the Detroit News. Michigan is apparently facing the question of whether community colleges should be allowed to offer 4-year degrees in selected fields. They probably got the idea from other states where CCs now offer BS degrees in nursing or education.

Michael Boulus, executive director of the Presidents Council of State Universities of Michigan, said:

"Community colleges do not have the base of professional educators needed to provide accredited bachelor's degrees."

to which I say "BS". Reminds me of nearby Wannabe Flagship, where they try to claim that our organic chem class (30 students) is worse than theirs (300 students) when our professor used to teach ... THEIR class as an adjunct!

I'll use nursing as an example, since it is an area where there remains some prejudice against licensed RNs who earned an AS rather than a BS degree. (Yes, I know that you cannot move up into surgery or anesthesiology without the BSN degree, but I am talking about entry level positions.) It is convenient because I can look at the requirements for the degree at Wannabe Flagship and see clearly that (a) they do require important non-nursing courses that are not in our AS program, and (b) our CC teaches every one of those non-nursing courses at a level that they accept for transfer students, and (c) that many of their classes are taught by adjuncts and typical adjuncts and full-time faculty have an MSN as their top degree. There are some doctorates (including an EdD or two), but those are only needed for the MS and Doctoral programs, not the undergrad BSN degree program, which explains why there are so few of them.

Our faculty are just as educated, experienced, and licensed as theirs are and could teach the same upper-division classes that theirs teach. Our program is accredited for the RN license by the same national organization that theirs is, and ours has the same high pass rate that theirs does ... and higher than some other programs in the state. Yes, we do need to hire more faculty, but that is just for our growing AS degree program. You see, Wannabe Flagship has very limited admissions and does not offer any program that can be taken by non-traditional students, so we turn away many qualified students. And there is no shortage of demand, even in today's economy.

The propagandist for the state universities in Michigan is either a liar or ignorant.


Education Research

A Friday Viewpoint at IHE posed a challenge to the Gates Foundation to fund more research, but I have in mind some nonsense embedded in the article.

The author says:

There were some 65,000 doctorates in education granted over the last 10 years for which we have data (1999-2008). During the same period, there were about 21,000 doctorates awarded in chemistry. Which do you think has had the greatest consequences, knowledge-wise?

I know that comparing education and chemistry in this way is unreasonable; for one thing, many of the education degrees were awarded to practitioners, rather than to researchers.

BZZZZT, but thank you for playing. Those persons with a chemistry PhD are all, every last one of them, practitioners. And that identifies the main problem with education degree programs. Few of them have faculty whose research is based on actually doing (say, teaching elementary school) what they teach. In contrast, that chemistry PhD actually does chemistry, including the ones who are teaching chemistry at a university. In my opinion, that is why education research has not made as much of a dent in our national K-12 problem as, say, chemistry research has improved batteries and many other important products.

I might add more (like references to what others said about Gates and accountability for outcomes from those projects), but time to move on.


Enjoying the job

Also from Friday, we have this ad dressed up as Career Advice from IHE. There are some good things in there worth thinking about, but I'll start by observing that if you get migraines as a stress reaction to the research demands of your 1-1 teaching job at an R1, you really should think about moving to a teaching intensive college or do what the author did: Join a leadership program to learn how to manage research (rather than do research) and start the move up into Provost world.

The real lesson in there, which does not require buying the book, is that you need to identify your "soulful values" and set your goals around them. Since regular goal setting is part of what every professor at my college does each year (as a way to encourage us to stay "fresh"), that is a useful way to think about how to choose among many things that one can do to improve teaching.

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It's a miracle!

The VERY long-awaited assessment of research doctoral programs by the National Research Council is, so they say, going to be released on September 28.

I think that makes this update of the 1982 and 1995 reports about two years late.

Why? Could the fact that they will release a revised version of the Methodology guide, updating the 2009 update of the 2003 report that proposed a methodology for this new set of rankings have anything to do with it?

It sure sounds like they kept tweaking the methodology until they got what they wanted. Will there be a hue and cry? We will see. The biggest problem is that the data it uses are so old that they will probably have to start the next study before ink is dry on this one.

However ...

I can't wait to see if that means "traditional" top schools remain above one physics program that I thought should have been marked with a bullet (record rating lingo) based on some of the raw data from 1995. Those data suggested that one program in particular had higher cites and other objective measures of research quality than the schools between it and #1.

For the record, that program was #10 UC Santa Barbara. Their Pubs per faculty number was second only to #1 Harvard, and their cites per faculty (178) exceeded Harvard (170) as well as #2 Princeton (110) and #3 MIT (121). Notice that gap? I sure did.

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Lazy American Students?

There is an interesting "quick take" in IHE today asking the rhetorical question Do American Students Bring Down the Curve? based on an opinion column in The Boston Globe that answers it in the affirmative.

First, it is important to realize that this is the opinion of one instructor, and even she does not claim that all low grades go to Americans (which make up 80% of the undergrad population at her private business college) or that none of the A grades go to Americans. But, from where I teach (at a CC), I think she has it all wrong. She has a problem with Snowflakes, not Americans. Let us start with where she teaches, then look at what she might not be doing where she teaches.

The college:

She teaches at Babson College. Yeah, I had to look it up, although I suspect Bostonians would be aware of it. This is a small (the entire freshman class of 471 would fit easily in one half of the dorm I lived in at Enormous State University, with space enough for half to have private rooms) expensive private college ($37,824 for tuition plus $12,500 for room and board) that is basically devoted to business majors. [Aside: that room and board rate is almost twice what it is at Enormous State, so they probably do all have private rooms.]

They look selective (471 enroll out of 4100 applications), but their middle-50 on the SAT (1830 to 2070, meaning 610 to 690 on each part) puts about a quarter of their freshman class below the "aptitude" of most of my 2nd year CC students and in a range where we would likely be requiring remedial math or english classes. A bit over 20% are international students.

(These details are from their official facts page. Purely by accident, I saw an article in a November "Business Week" that ranked them highly for custom executive business education programs.)

Definitely "snowflake" territory. Many of the American students are probably Wannabe Trumps with well off (if not wealthy) parents and got by with minimal effort in suburban schools where you get a bonus point toward your GPA just for taking what is called an honors class. [Schools where a 4.0 is the new 3.0 average.] In that environment, the mere fact that the college gives out C, D, and F grades in a freshman composition or history class is probably a shock. I'll admit that I am shocked that grades like that are tolerated by a student-centered retention program where one mid-year drop out costs the college $25,000!

To continue my generalization, they have probably never had to work for a living, and might never have held a job. They know they want to be business men or women, but don't know what skills are used on the job.

I can definitely see how one tail of the distribution in her class might be made up of the 25% who combine mediocre skills from high school with poor motivation.

The teaching:

My thoughts here are driven by an observation I posted just the other day on FSP's blog in a discussion about why tenured professors should care about what is in student evaluations of teaching. My comment concerned a favorite student observation of decades past: An engineering major stated that ze hated physics and couldn't understand why ze had to take it. What did I learn? That one thing I need to teach real early in the course is why it is required for engineering majors! Turns out lots of them don't know why because they don't know what engineers actually do. This student probably would believe that something taught in an engineering class was relevant to a career, but didn't get the concept of prerequisites so everything else was just a speed bump that got in the way of what they thought they needed to study.

I'd be willing to guess that the problem is even bigger with rhetoric classes. Now Babson College knows it is relevant, but do the students?

Here is a key remark from Babson's About page that might put this in perspective:

The undergraduate curriculum integrates core competencies, key business disciplines, and the liberal arts into foundation, intermediate, and advanced-level courses. The competencies are rhetoric; quantitative and information analysis; entrepreneurial and creative thinking; ethics and social responsibility; global and multicultural perspectives; and leadership and teamwork; and critical and integrative thinking.

Notice that reference to "rhetoric", the subject taught by the author of this opinion piece?

[Side comment: I like the word FOUNDATION as a synonym for prerequisite, although I'll stick with BASIC for some of my applications. It sends the right message for engineering, in particular.]

I would hope something this basic to the learning goals of the college was part of their orientation. Of course, if those kids were busy updating Facebook (which might rival drinking as a reason for failing out of college) during orientation, they might have missed it so it needs to be said in every class, and not just on the first day. "Today we are working on the foundation for the report-writing skills refined in Business 301, skills that will get you that first big promotion." And I would hope that the teachers in their freshman business class refer to the importance of rhetoric just as I point to specific math skills they will learn later on and apply (along with physics) in more advanced engineering classes.

We all have to signal the importance of the whole of what they are learning if we expect them to retain the parts that really matter.

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Now something for Sherman Dorn ...

Time to post something amusing about educational outcomes and testing.

The british are complaining that math exams are getting easier while a separate article looked at how science exams were being dumbed down. The latter is particularly interesting because they slipped some 50 year old questions in among contemporary ones on a chemistry exam. This classic bit of exam norming was a real wakeup call.

But the best part?

Both articles contain links to old exam questions!

One of the conclusions in the article was not too surprising to me. "Experts who have been looking at the results concluded that students today are required to do fewer complex calculations." Less critical thinking has been the norm, but I think that statement is true even for my exams today compared to some I still have from the past. I am more likely to ask easily graded pieces of a problem rather than a complex problem where a class of 50 students might come up with 35 different answers resulting from 20 different mistakes. However, my exams today are getting harder as I find ways to challenge them while still being able to grade the problems in a reasonable time.

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Breaking Even

Two recent articles got me wondering about college economics when facing tight budget years, a news story in IHE about San Joaquin Delta College, pointed to by Dean Dad, and an off-hand comment by Dean Dad claiming "My cc loses money on every student."

This, and much of the discussion about Delta, made no sense to me at first.

How can you lose money by enrolling more students?

Then I discovered that Delta College only gets $26 per credit hour in tuition (in a semester system)! Mind bogglingly low. Almost free! Based on that, I could begin to believe statements like the one Dean Dad made. Nonetheless, that funding system is so alien to me that it is no wonder that people can make blanket comments that look like total nonsense to educators in one state while seeming quite reasonable to those in another state or region. At my CC, we profit from extra students and take a serious private-college-like approach to attracting and retaining those extra students.

Why the difference between Dean Dad's school and ours?

Well, I don't actually know if there is a difference - because Dean Dad has never produced even a crude outline of his college's income structure within something like the normalized college budget I suggested and then modeled with a sample budget for my CC. However, I do know what is going on at Delta College:

Out of every 10.0 million dollars in the budget, they get 5.9 million from the state, 2.7 from local property taxes, 0.5 from tuition, and the other 0.9 from a variety of sources that includes 0.5 from the federal government. Compare that to our budget: 5.9 from the state, 3.9 from tuition, and 0.2 from other sources.

That explains quite a lot!

I won't give our specific tuition level, but suffice it to say that it is more than twice what Delta students pay. Based on what I can discern from obscure collective bargaining documents, their full-time faculty are paid quite a bit more than ours are (but not enough to make up for the housing differences) while their adjuncts make somewhat more (but not much more) than ours do. The faculty salaries explain the very high classroom body counts, but those are sunk costs that are (like ours) covered by state funds. They don't impact the cost of adding an extra 100 students to the college's enrollment.

What does matter is the ratio between adjunct pay and tuition. If we have to add a section, our tuition appears to more than pay for the adjunct's salary once we get 12 to 15 students enrolled. (I don't know what other per-class costs, such as copying exams and the like, add up to. I do know that FICA and Medicare adds almost 10% to it, however.) My guess is that Delta needs more than 32, getting close to their normal load of 39, to break even on salary for a typical adjunct. But that is just salary! Add in FICA and other direct costs, and they lose money even with a full class. Working on the margin, when you might open a class with only 20 students during the last week of registration, they lose money and we profit.

Worse, their state income is set by enrollment but capped at a fixed value. That means they can get less but can never get more. Our state funds are based on a far more predictable formula.

PS -
If you are interested in some data related to the rising cost of tuition vis-a-vis state funding, you might look at this old article based on actual data for an R1 university. It is only one story of many, but it shows that very little of the growth in tuition (only $1500 of the $7000 increase) is due to reduced state funding (in constant current dollars).

Read Entire Article......

Reason for a Liberal Arts Education

The news yesterday contained a horrifying story about how the US military leveled part of the ancient Babylon archaeological site. They apparently bulldozed mounds that were what remained of parts of guest palace of King Nebuchadnezzar's, damaged pottery that had cuneiform writing on it along with other items that date back over 2500 years, and carried on activities that damaged the reproduction of the Ishtar Gate at that site.

I am embarrassed that they did not know better, as one would expect from any decent humanities course or bible study in church school, but there is a precedent from World War II:

Kyoto.

Every time I happen to hear a story about Kyoto that mentions how it managed to survive the war, I wish they would tell the whole story. The people planning the bombing of Japan had no idea of its religious or historic significance, let alone the beauty of the temples that fill the city. The only reason it was not firebombed was that it had been put at the TOP of the list of places to use the first atom bomb! Hiroshima was number 2.

You see, in order to be sure we could see the effects of the bomb, we wanted to use the A bomb on a pristine city. The people in Hiroshima and several other cities were sure they had said a special prayer to have been spared the bombings, whereas the reality was they were in the cross hairs of something far worse than about 400 planes carrying explosives and incendiaries sufficient to burn tens of square miles.

But it happened that Secretary of War Stimson knew Kyoto well, and fought hard to get it off the list and to keep Gen. Lemay from bombing it with conventional weapons during the rest of the war. You can read the details in "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. Either Groves and others were ignorant of its cultural value to the world, or they wanted to destroy it for that very reason.

One would have hoped that today's generals would know something about Babylon's history and the nature of archaeological sites, if only because this city had an important role in the Bible, but apparently not. I'd hope that humanities teachers everywhere can draw on this as a teachable moment in their classes.

Read Entire Article......

Value of a 2-year degree?

An article about improving graduation rates in IHE contains the following statement:

“Today, a two-year or four-year college degree or certificate is a prerequisite for economic success,” Hilary Pennington, director of education, postsecondary success and special initiatives for the Gates Foundation, said to an audience of higher education professionals gathered at the Library of Congress here. Yet while tangible economic incentives to finish college are evident, she said, completion rates have been stagnant since the 1970s.

Emphasis added.

First, if you take even a cursory glance at the graph I constructed showing 4-year grads, you can see that the completion rates have soared since the 1970s - for women. It is only the rate for men that has stagnated.

Further, the relation between a two-year degree and economic success is not supported by the census data I used in that previous study. It shows (table A-3 towards the bottom of the page) only a modest premium for anything less than a 4-year degree.

They don't break out an associates degree from "some college", but the raw numbers from 2007 don't support that claim:

	Income
HS degree	31,286
Some college	35,138
College degree	57,181

A bit more than 10% might not make up for the opportunity cost or the loan debt some students get as the price of a failed attempt to go to college. A college dropout like Bill Gates is the exception.

By the way, those college-grad numbers really show why so many of my students see things like the recent announcement of federal support for "job training" at CCs as rather pointless. What they need is an extension of existing federal financial aid programs so they will pay for the extra year of classes they need to take before transferring into an engineering program. Students who aren't ready to start out in calculus as a freshman (ours often need a year or more of math before calculus) and also need a ton of science classes beyond the gen-ed requirements are ignored by the rules we currently operate under.

But high school completion, also mentioned in the article, is a BIG deal:

	Income
HS dropout	21,484
HS degree	31,286

Getting out of HS opens up lots of opportunities in the "skilled trades". I have no idea how a HS dropout can manage in our society, yet the census data say that about 14% never graduate.


BTW, I realize I forgot to work up the derivative data for college grad rates. I made a go of it, but the data are really noisy and I need to come up with a good smoothing algorithm that does not hide all of the fluctuations.

Read Entire Article......

Gender of College Students vs Time

What an interesting coincidence.

On Thursday, Dean Dad blogged about a claim concerning the "rapid increase" in college grads producing a drop in wages, leading to a discussion where Dictyranger posted a link to census data on educational attainment including tables on education levels and income broken down by many relevant categories. I'll be looking specifically at Table A-2.

On Sunday, the BBC News reported on a study in the UK documenting that women are ahead of men in almost every measure of academic achievement. (Aspects of this are also relevant to a separate discussion of The Gender Knot at Zuska's place because the one area where women remain far behind is in math, physics, and engineering.) One intriguing comment from that article is quoted at the bottom of my post, but my emphasis here is on numbers relevant to the discussion at Dean Dad's.

The following graph, showing data that can be interpreted as indicating a running average of the college graduation rate of a 5-year cohort of young adults, has been constructed from Table A-2 of the census data:

Totally sexist colors have been used to code the gender data.

The fact that the data go from 1940 to 2008, including the GI Bill students as well as the children and grandchildren of the 'Greatest Generation', makes these data really interesting for a variety of reasons. Note that data for a given year (such as the jump in 1995) reflect the graduation rate of "normal age" students about five years earlier (circa 1990).

Here I will start by pointing out that there is no evidence of a "rapid increase" in college graduation rates other than a 5% step jump circa 1995. If they were smoothed a bit more, as one sees in the graph below, one could argue that the college graduation rate for MEN has not changed at all in over thirty years. I spent too much time figuring out a weird feature of the file to construct a graph of the derivative, but you can see that the most rapid increase was from about 1965 to 1976 (for both men and women, but men started from a higher point) and that the recent increase (for the Echo generation) is due to a continuing steady increase of female graduates. Men are, indeed, lagging significantly behind.

If there is a correlation such as the author claims, it should show up in salary data for the GI Bill group (where the growth of graduates was spectacular, doubling in just a few years) and for the Baby Boom cohort to a greater extent than at present. After all, the rate at which men are graduating college today is not high enough to replace the men who are retiring. I wouldn't be surprised to see such a correlation, by the way. There was a major recession in 1975, one that heavily impacted the glut of Baby Boomers entering the work force out of college. That drop for men after 1975 no doubt reflects the oversupply of college grads along with the end of the Vietnam draft (and the need for a college deferment).

The grad rates for women caught up with men around 1985 (that is, for students graduating around 1980) and the rates for men and women tracked together from 1985 to just after the 1995 jump (that is, for students graduating circa 1980 to 1990). At that point, the rate for men settled in at around 26% while that for women continued to rise above 33% with a huge jump in the last few years.

So ... are the data talked about by David Frum due to a glut of college grads, or are they a result of women being paid less than men for entry-level positions? Since Frum did not comment on the fact that the rapid increase is mostly among women, perhaps it is relevant that he is a "conservative" commentator. (That also shows up in his failure to include CCs in his discussion of cost, and his comments about HS exit exams. He seems unaware that the reason many jobs require Some College is precisely because CCs provide that benchmark with our "prep" classes.)

There are wage data in those census tables, but they need to be corrected for inflation to have any relevance here. But, combined with the tables available at Oregon State for the CPI going back into pre-history (literally, in some cases), the data do exist to look at some of those questions as well.

A broader view is shown in this graph, which shows the fraction of the entire working-age (and retired-age) population, again from Table A-2:

I should have put some straight lines on there to show the average slope, but I trust you can see that the fraction of the entire population with a college degree has grown pretty steadily over the years. That for women has increased at pretty much the same rate since 1970, while that for men (and hence the total) is growing more slowly in the last 20 years than it did in the 60s.

What is striking about this graph is that it shows that we are, RIGHT NOW, at the point where the fraction of men and women with a college degree is about the same. Jobs that require at least four years of college should (other things, like child care and area of specialization, being equal) have similar numbers of men and women in them. To someone who started work when that was definitely not the case, this helps explain why I have the distinct impression that a 'phase transition' has taken place. One has taken place. And when you include the disproportionate number of men in some (but not all) technical fields, that also explains why other areas are now majority female.

Technical Note

It took me several tries before I figured out why Excel was refusing to make sense out of the "year" column in the tables. The rocket scientist who created them entered the year information as ..1980 with the dots made white so they were invisible in the table. Trimming them seemed to make the years disappear completely because then the year inherited that color and became white - but the years were still there and could be made visible by changing the font color to black. At that point I could tell it to treat the year as a "date" and get the kind of graph I wanted.

Postscript

This is raw Uncle Al bait if there ever was any. From the BBC article:

A science test taken by 11 and 12-year-olds in the mid-1970s had been successfully passed by 54% of boys and 27% of girls.

When the same test was taken in 2003, the scores for both boys and girls had fallen to 17% - a much more rapid decline for boys.

What an absurd way to achieve equity, by making the entire system worse rather than parts of it better! (Yes, I know that the UK is not the only place that might have taken this approach.)

Read Entire Article......

Effective Transfer

There was an interesting article in IHE Friday about the importance of that most mundane of topics, "articulation" between a CC and a nearby University to ensure that transfer students succeed. The focus was on Texas, with a number of examples coming from UTEP. The specific success of a very tight articulation between the UTEP engineering college and its neighboring CC (towards the end of the article) was particularly interesting to me. I need to look into what they did and how they documented the comparable skill level of their AA grads after they got a BS.

Having read a number of comments about the Texas system (or lack of one) from a commenter in (IIRC) Dean Dad's blog, I found the short discussion of "high policy" and "low policy" states lacking in depth. From what I can gather, Texas is in the middle with a defined "core" but no structure that ensures that an "Associates" degree meets that core. It was definitely weird to read about needing to design a computer search to find students who have the credits to earn an AA degree, but don't know it yet.

Ditto to read about "reverse transfers" who drop out of a university, come to a CC, and immediately (without even taking classes, it seems) earning an AA. Instant transcript laundering, it would seem. Do they just ditch all of the credits earned beyond two years, along with F grades and whatever, and start over as juniors at a new university? But I do agree that it would be a great way to build your "completion" rate - if it was true. The author of the article must not know that "reverse transfer" students are never counted in any of the federal statistics. Only the cohort that actually starts at a college (or university) is counted when figuring success rates.

We could have a 100% success rate at shaping up dropouts from nearby Wannabe Flagship, with every last one of them getting an AA and going on to complete a 4-year degree after they left our CC, and none of it would count in our favor.

So, now that you know this factoid, you have to wonder how the guy at North Texas can conclude that there is no difference in success of transfer students in states with a defined transfer curriculum (strong state-wide articulation) and those without (where students might have to re-take half of the classes they took at the CC after they transfer). What data are being used? Besides, I think success after transfer is more a matter of the relative rigor of the CC and Uni curricula (which affects the odds of failing classes) than it is of the number of classes that actually transfer with gen-ed credit (saving money and time).

Rigor cannot be enforced by state policy, or even a common course numbering system. Heck, you can't even guarantee that different sections of the same course at a particular college have the same rigor. I can see dramatic differences between some of the math sections at our college. Some get the concept of "prerequisite", others don't.

Thoughts?

What makes for a truly effective transfer program?

Read Entire Article......

RBoC - mostly education related

I don't have a theme here, just some quasi-random articles that caught my attention over the last few months, none of which rate a full-blown blog. I'll just toss them out here and see what sticks.

• Dr. Crazy on "Changing Higher Education"

This actually does deserve an entire blog response, but I don't have the energy left to engage with it. This has been quite the year for me - not all of it bloggable. What I will say here is that I really like her commentary, particularly the way she starts off by recognizing that we should not change simply for the sake of change. There is a lot that is not broken, and that part needs to stay unbroken! I probably share this view because there is a lot right at places, like my CC and her 4-year regional comprehensive, that serve a wide range of students who might not otherwise be in college. Also a lot that needs work.

I really like her suggestion that we "increase the chances for students - across university types, across backgrounds - to have their minds blown." I've never articulated that, but I can tell when my students really appreciate that they just got EDUCATED in a way they never thought possible.

• Does Recess Help?

Now that I am teaching some 75 to 80 minute classes, I suspect that even college students need recess once in a while! That really is the limit. My version of recess is to schedule a Cool Demo (tm) near the middle of class, to change the pace. But this is also a serious issue. Our schools have no recess, and schedule what PE they do have at the end of the day. A friend is convinced this is why his very bright son struggled with attention in school. He didn't need drugs. He needed to get out and run around! Count me in that same group.

• Electrical Grid, Cars, Internet

Somewhere on the boundary between futurism and engineering is the question about how to remake this country as we move beyond our previous three revolutionary developments: railroads, interstate highways, and the internet. BTW, I love that map, mainly because I've driven on way too many of those blue and red lines.

• Too Many Girls in Science?

Isis provides a world-class rant here. The leaky pipeline photo is worth the price of admission. I know one thing: the complaint that got her started sure didn't come from the physics or engineering side of the academic universe. And in chemistry, where there are a lot more women, the pipeline tends to have tap that sends a disproportionate number of female faculty away from universities and over to places like our CC. (The story probably comes from biology. The poor boys might even have trouble getting into med school. I'm not going to complain, because my internist is a woman and a very good doctor.) Along that same line ...

• Guide for d00dly commenters

A hat tip to Zuska and her outreach project for this one. I've got to reassess my time (and access to my wife's Kindle) and see if I can read that book in time for her planned discussion. Since the last serious reading I did on this subject would be when I read Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (back when it came out), it could be time to get caught up on the gender culture wars.

• IHE article on Grade Inflation

Personally, I don't buy that grades are still being inflated. There isn't any room for them to grow! (Well, we could have "weighted averages" like our local high schools, where you get an extra point just for taking a hard class that you should be taking anyway if you plan to go to college.) I've got this in here mainly so I might remember to dig out the data I have from a previous lifetime that shows the grade inflation at Ye Olde Alma Mater. Most of it took place during the Vietnam War, but it does continue. I have some data (well after that time period) showing that the only college that really failed anyone at all was the one that taught science and math classes. No surprise there.

These days, as those data show, CCs seem to be the only place where students are failed for not having the relevant skills ... and even that seems to be too little from where I sit at the end of the math line, trying to teach physics to kids who still have trouble moving symbols around to solve equations. One of the comments pointed to an essay saying that our education system needs more F's (coming out of the K-12 area).

• IHE article on "What does a degree cost"

There is a lot of information in this article for a data geek like me. There mere fact that the "catalog cost" (what it costs just to take the classes required by the curriculum in the college catalog) is about 30% more for mechanical engineering than elementary education is a real eye opener. When you look at the "transcript cost" (which includes repeats, courses like pre-calculus that a student might need, and courses taken when a student wanders off the beaten path), the premium for engineering jumps another 30% or so. Not surprising, since I know my pre-engineering students are usually in the CC for an extra year, and I also know that they have 2.5 years of engineering classes to take after they transfer.

I wasn't surprised by the 260 k$ price for an MD, except that I thought it seemed LOW. I looked at university budgets some time ago, and one thing that jumped out at me was the massive costs of running a medical school. I suspect that some costs have been put into the research area that are really part of the cost of any graduate program. I don't quite buy the "full cost" analysis, where you spread the cost of failing students over the ones who pass, but I can see it from the point of view of a legislator. And it also makes sense based on the "more F's" argument above: the quality of the person who graduates is partly a result of the selectivity of the process that produces that graduate. You don't want engineers who design bridges that fall down.

• IHE article about tracking HS students into college

I find this interesting for many reasons. Two of them are the article that follows (accreditation) and my own college's attempt to reach into some really bad local high schools, but also the fact that much of the attrition at our CC is by students who have no idea how weak their HS education actually is. (See my old article on orientation and advising.) A college class could engage them in a way that HS does not. The fact that you don't need an ed degree to teach that college class, pointed out in one of the comments on that article, can only add fat to the fire of some other discussions. But what really interests me is that I think the best way to assess the "outcomes" of a school is to look at what happens next. Are HS graduates ready for a job or for college? Clearly not, as our placement tests prove every fall. Are our CC grads ready for the university? Not always. And we need to look at that. I am told (all in the form of anecdotes) that mine are, but I'm not satisfied by that kind of "data". Time to make the trek to Wannabe Flagship and see what I can learn.

• IHE article about "More meaningful accreditation"

I have to include this, and I have to bury it at the end of the list. Why? Because I have been through the "Quality Improvement" plans and know that "Outcomes and Assessment" will be the fashion the next time around ... and I have serious doubts whether most of this is only for show. Paper to file and boxes to check off. Our plan looks great on paper (really great, actually) but we have heard nothing at all about how we have progressed on it. I can guess that ideas X and Y have not worked at all, because they have been de-emphasized ... but results have not been reported and they have not actually been eliminated. I think the people behind them have too much invested to admit they did not work, so they just move on and jiggle the key, hoping it will start. See also what Dr. Crazy wrote, in the article linked up at the top, about keeping the focus on students.

Read Entire Article......

Graduation Speeches

I lucked into having the right channel on last night when Obama's grad speech at ASU came on live. It was outstanding. His riff on the theme "you haven't done enough to deserve a degree from us" led to a series of challenges to the new graduates.

Check out the text from the Huffington Post and video (Part 1 of 3) from CNN and YouTube. There are plenty of good ideas in there to steal if you need to give your own graduation speech some day, particularly if you are looking for a turn on the usual riff on "commencement" marking a beginning rather than an ending.

If you need other ideas ... check out what Dean Dad had to offer in his letter to graduates, and this make believe speech "given" at the make believe U of All People.

Obama is definitely a master of using self-deprecating humor to deflect his critics, not to mention a master of any crowd. I particularly liked the way he called out various majors (education, nursing, engineering) and, after they cheered hearing their name said by the President, challenging each of them to do something for the country. Definitely an "ask not" moment, but directed specifically at young people entering far more challenging times than we faced in 1960 and, in a way, directed specifically at each individual student in that group.

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Age Distribution at ICC

Apropos a discussion over at Dean Dad's blog, here is an approximate, randomly normalized histogram of the age distribution of students at Ishkabibble Community College at some point in the not too distant past.


Details below the fold.

It actually does look a bit like the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, as I mentioned in a comment over at DD's blog, but it could just as well be a Lorentzian, or any of several other shapes with a long tail.

Lacking any better information (these are from some of the data our institution is required to make publicly available so they are easily obtained), I put everyone in the "under 18" category in a bin at 17 years old, and spread the population in large age bins uniformly across those ranges. You probably can't see that there is an actual thin line above age 55.

You can see that the peak (mode) is at 19. The average (mean) is around 24, and the median (half above, half below) is around 20. Most (if not all) of the students in the 17 year old bin are probably dual-enrolled high school students.

As I said in my comment at DD's, we are primarily a transfer institution where a large fraction of our students come to us directly out of high school. If you take the AACS Fast Facts, the subject of DD's blog, at face value, we are far below the national mean age of 29 and also below the likely value of the national median age, 22.

An important detail:
This data set is only for classes taken for credit and excludes a large number of students who are taking various non-credit "workforce" classes that we offer. They make up about 15% of our total student body and probably have a very different age distribution. If those were included, and they could be included in the AACC stats, our average age would likely increase.

Read Entire Article......

Math with Manipulatives

Another hat tip to Sherman Dorn for his comments about the "Springboard" math (and language arts, aka English) curriculum in his county school system based on an article in the local paper about it.

[By the way, when did they invent "language arts" anyway? Do they read poetry in the original Russian or plays in the original Greek? Aren't all of the classes based on English translations when they deal with foreign authors? It's English, folks, and your students need to be able to read and write it so they can deal with my lab class and know enough about literature to survive college classes in composition and the humanities.]

Based solely on the article, which spent most of its column inches criticizing the content of the HS literature courses (when it wasn't shocking me with the huge difference between their curriculum and mine as noted in a footnote), I think I came away with a misleading view of what they are doing on the math side. I find the example Sherman ridiculed to be potentially very effective in the hands of a competent teacher because its purpose was not what the journalist thought it was. Details are below the fold.

The article introduced the math content as follows

In math classes, just four SpringBoard lessons are required each year. Among them is an Algebra I SpringBoard lesson that starts with students arranging baby marshmallows and spaghetti on blue paper to discover different ways to multiply binomials.

Seventh- and eighth-graders in Jennifer Apgar's Algebra I honors class at Ferrell Middle Magnet School in Tampa couldn't wait to dig into their bags of marshmallows in January and were relieved to find extras for eating.

The marshmallows represent office computers; spaghetti separates sections of the office.

"I'm kinesthetic – I like to use my hands," said Giana Moore, 12. She said she prefers such hands-on activities to doing math problems on the computer. The seven computers lining one wall in her class are rarely used, she said.

Well, at least I know where the student mentioned in my previous article picked up on that Learning Style terminology! In Middle School? (Little does this girl know that this is actually a visual learning tool. Your hands are only used to arrange them. Kinesthetic learning would be actually connecting computers into a network, getting your muscles to learn how to pull cable and plug in the connectors.)

This description from the newspaper article sounded a lot like the "discovery" (aka look-say or guessing) way of not teaching math that has been used in some elementary math curricula. The sort of curriculum that produces students who cannot divide or work with fractions when they get to college. What changed my mind was seeing a video showing what it really is, in action, albeit in the hands of an experienced and clearly skilled teacher. That video is part of an article from a Tampa Bay Online story from February 2009 that turned up high on a Google search for the term. The video probably resulted from the same dog-and-pony show, since it featured the same teacher at the same middle school in Tampa (clearly filmed on January 15). It just took another month to get the print version of the story out.

Several things were immediately clear.

The marshmallows were not being used to discover equivalent ways of multiplying binomials, they were being used to represent computers in a cube farm that was described in a rather long and detailed story problem (correction, they are now called Word Problems because story problems are even scarier than nuclear power) that you can see on the screen at the start of the video. [Side comment: I love how up-to-date the problem is, dealing with physically networking computers. The simplest answer to this problem is to go wireless!] That problem would be way over the heads of most college students I encounter, who act as if they had never had to analyze a word problem. My colleagues at Wannabe Flagship say the same thing, and my guess is this results from it not being on the local HS exit exam. From what I can see, the trend in "college" algebra has also been to avoid word problems as much as possible unless they fall in a very narrow class so only one 'type' shows up on an exam and can be solved out of habit rather than by analysis. (They spend the time gained from dropping this topic to teach students how to graph functions on their calculator.)

Anyway, back to the main point:
The video makes it immediately clear to me that the marshmallows are not being used for what the reporter says, but rather to help visualize the geometrical situation that has been described in words in the problem. Even better, the developers of this module recognize that there might be a vocabulary issue with the word problem and make that part of the analysis explicit. As the teacher puts it, "A lot of good practices are in Springboard". Looks that way to me. The 'manipulative' (which has the advantage of being edible) is there to illustrate why the equations work out the way they do. I really like the emphasis on collaborative learning, which is a great way for students to work on problem solving by articulating their strategies.

I see this as the math equivalent of theory and experiment in physics. We set up a problem, we solve the problem, and then we see what happens when we measure the unknown in an experiment. Incorrect approaches are exposed by the harsh light of reality. You see an example of that in the comment of one student in the video story. I can see why the math faculty have had little trouble adopting this system. In addition to changing only a fraction of their curriculum because they added selected modules to supplement their existing approach (no doubt tailored to their HS exit exam), it does what experienced teachers already do. The upside is that it helps inexperienced teachers by giving them an entire exercise with printed worksheets to guide students through this process.

The unanswered question is whether they can transfer this skill to wholly new problems. If it is just one exercise with no reinforcement, it will be lost quickly. Experienced problem solving requires more time and additional coaching. (Do they still do "coin problems"? Those can be tested with play money.) Can they use everyday objects like marshmallows to model some other problem? To identify the marshmallow with a variable like "x"? That would be great. But unlikely except in the best classes.


* Long Footnote:
I really was shocked to see the huge difference between what they described as the "national" curriculum and the college prep curriculum I experienced decades ago. Bro, if you read this, please comment on the sequence your kids followed in HS. We had a 7-9 and 10-12 system that only changed to the middle-school scheme when my 2000 capacity HS went from overcrowded with 3 classes to capacious with 4, so I don't have a clear memory of what we did in 9th grade. I can still remember the trailer where I studied 10th grade American Lit, which was followed by a year called "world" lit that started with Greek plays and ended with British literature, so we got a good mix of plays and poetry that year. Senior year was devoted to a capstone composition class that featured (in my case) a wide range of fairly contemporary short novels and short stories with an existentialist bent, with major focus on learning how to research and write a 10+ page term paper. We read Conrad, Hesse, "Clockwork Orange", etc. No movies, no "iTunes", the modern books-on-tape, but (unlike one class mentioned in the article) we could all read at the 9th grade level or above. Even one kid notable for his lack of intellectual curiosity got connected in this class.

The curriculum described in this article lacks a senior composition class and puts world lit before American lit so they have limited exposure to advanced American English before taking their "high stakes" exit test. If this is a national curriculum, it is no wonder so few students can even write a decent lab report. I think they also struggle with reading problems because they appear to have never heard of the critical reading exercise of writing a pre'cis (a short summary of a text that contains only facts, no opinions) that was common in our curriculum.

The comments on this article were also interesting. The usual suspects show up attacking "government" schools, but I have seen little evidence in our area of a major difference between non-selective private schools and the public schools. They also place into 5th grade math. The public doesn't know how they measure up because they don't have to take the state exit exam to graduate from HS, so everyone assumes they are doing a good job.

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Rate Your Student's Parent

Oh, this is classic stuff.

Rate Your Students posted a letter from a parent complaining about how some mean professor made her kid go to class on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, followed up by a collection of a dozen rants from various professors responding to this parent. Go read them yourself. They are worth every minute.

UPDATE: There are even more replies in a final ? collection.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Milo takes on the student as customer argument. About the only thing he left out was a concern for the OTHER customers in the classroom. I can never figure out why they don't get mentioned.

They really make my day because it reminds me of how well off I am. I had 80% attendance* in my WEDNESDAY afternoon class ... the class day after I gave an exam! I actually have students in my classes who want to learn! No attendance policy, no attendance grade, no extra credit, just physics. Even my "C" students make me proud to have them in my class. Gotta remember to tell them that on Monday. Anyway, back to our little College Drama.

The Parent is "mighty pissed" that Offspring's professor will penalize students for skipping class, and can't imagine why Out of State University wouldn't want to keep the Parental $$$$ Source happy ... by not educating the Student?

Actually, my guess is that the professor either (a) has an attendance penalty every day and Student can't afford to incur any more of them at this point in the semester or (b) is actually offering extra credit for showing up, extra credit that Student desperately needs to have a tiny chance of passing the class, but Student is not about to tell Checkbook Parent the real reason even if there are hints that Parent suspects Offspring is not like my students.

But go read it for yourself, then come back for my answers to the Parent's Meme:

• Do you ever think about the folks who essentially pay your salaries?

I think all the time about the citizens of my state, doing my best to avoid graduating any 'students' who would make incompetent engineers whose bridges would fall down. (One way of looking at the economics of a state-funded CC is to say that the state appropriation pays the full-time tenured faculty whose salaries are a recurring cost, while tuition pays for the part-time faculty and other staff that would be eliminated if our enrollment were to fall suddenly. However, our state appropriation also depends on enrollment, so it is not that simple.) As for the students who pay their way, or their parents, I certainly want them to get their money's worth from my class. To me, that happens to mean teaching a great class the day before Thanksgiving rather than shortchanging them by cutting class myself. (And it was a great class. I think I set just the right tone for the key material we get to in the last week of class. We'll see on Monday, but I expect to see them ready to rock when they get back.)

• Do you have any feelings for your "employers" and their offspring (besides contempt ?)

You Betcha! I've gladly posed for graduation pictures with former students, and enjoy hearing from them after they transfer to Engineering school. I rarely complain about the ones who come to class. I even feel sorry for those Parents whose slacker Snowflakes sign up for my class and never bother to attend.

• I mean, do you like being a College Professor ? (I admit it, I read just some of the blog...)

I can see why you might get the wrong impression from "Rate Your Students" or other stories you see on some of my favorite blogs. Those faculty are venting their displeasure with the small (and, sometimes, not so small) group of students that enroll in classes but are not Students. Fooled by an 89 average in HS, because they don't know that an 89 is actually below average among their fellow HS grads planning to go to college, they think showing up will guarantee a B, or at least a C. They never hear my orientation warning to new students. We genuinely like most of our students, although we can do without their Helicopter Parents. You can also see what I really think of my students at many places in my blog, but particularly in this old article. I will agree that some faculty, particularly untenured professors at a research university, think undergrad students just get in the way of doing their main job, which is winning research grants and publishing papers. But you can hardly blame them, since they get paid to do that, not teach.

• Can you honestly tell me that we are getting our money's worth, or do you teach to support your_______________ habit ?

I work for my Health Insurance habit. But seriously, I can honestly tell you that some Parents are not getting their money's worth. I see their Offspring show up in a basket on my classroom doorstep after they drink and party their way out of Wannabe Flagship, only to cut my class and fail to learn either physics or the lesson they should have learned the first time they flunked out. But it's not my fault their Offspring don't want to learn. It's their kid's fault. I can't make them attend class, nor can you, which means you are not getting your money's worth out of your kid.

Parent closed with "Here's hoping you get that well deserved rest you need over the Thanksgiving break...", to which I reply that I will still be grading exams and lab reports, just like I do on most weekends. My work really starts when my student's work ends.


* Percentage measured relative to the number of students who took the exam during the previous class meeting, not the number originally enrolled. My retention is pretty good this year, not that good!

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Generation Then and Now

First, a must-read from the the "on-line only" New Yorker:

• An interview with Bill Ayers

on election day. Just for reference, Ayers is 63 and is not a "baby boomer". He was born in 1944, and is part of a generation often confused with Boomers because they were so active in the 1960s. He offers a pretty amusing insight into the vortex that was one part this year's Presidential campaign.

Second, the "Generation WE" video that Mrs. Pion pointed out to me:

Comments below the fold.

Where to begin.

Probably with the hypocrisy of complaining about federal deficits and closing with a call for a multi-billion dollar government handout to fund innovative solutions to our over-depenence on fossil fuels. Most entertaining. Why not Just Do It, like some entrepreneurs have done when it was time to create cell phones or hybrid cars? (Yes, I know why not, and I support that goal and that mechanism. What I reject is the sales pitch that does not expose the hard choices to be made.)

Along that same line, maybe I should start with the throw-away line in the video about health care for all. If you are ignorant of what it costs now, and ignorant of how it is funded now, you will never survive the battle to replace hidden taxes with public ones, or hidden socialism (via surcharges on insurance-paid care) for open socialism, and might even buy into the fantasy that a $5000 deduction will allow every American to get full health insurance coverage.

Or with the line about 1/3 getting diabetes, as if it is an unavoidable health risk rather than a result of a diet full of sugar -- from soft drinks to "energy drinks". Kid, if you are too fat to fit comfortably in a regular school desk (an increasing problem at my college), you are putting your own health at risk. Don't pretend that a reduced life expectancy is your parent's fault for taking you to the fast-food restaurant you begged to visit as a child.

Or maybe with those silly remarks about polluted water and an environmental disaster. Kids, wake up and smell the Cuyahoga. You can't? That is because it got cleaned up by those self-absorbed Boomers and their parents (after we nagged them into paying for it). You kids have no idea what polluted water looks like. Rivers rarely catch fire any more. And Pittsburgh? The buildings are white again, now that coal-burning plants only emit CO2 rather than soot and CO2.

Or maybe with links to a pair of articles in the Chronicle, on stupidity: part 1 and, in particular, part 2 that addresses teaching the "digital natives". The assumption that this particular generation is better informed and more tech savvy is brought into question by someone else who shares my criticism of a consumer culture on campus that has not considered it important to prepare this allegedly prepared generation for the digital world. Guess what, kids? We can find Wikipedia too, but we know enough that we can tell when what is there is crap. Our faculty know better than to interrupt class to send a text message, but apparently the kids paying to learn something have yet to learn to profit from what they are paying for.

I do agree with them about education. That generation did get screwed out of an education as good as the one I had, but it's not really the Boomer's fault that people weren't willing to pay a professional's wages for a teacher. A fair fraction of young Boomer women still saw teaching as a worthwhile profession, but many more found a wide range of professions open up to women as a result of the Women's Lib movement. The people who tolerated a massive decline in teacher quality were from the Greatest Generation. (At my alma mater, by the late 70s, teachers were drawn from the bottom of the entering freshman class. I have the data to prove it. I really need to blog about them, but put it off while trying to get a newer set of similar data.) It was the Greatest Generation that came up with the New Math and Look Say, producing poorly educated students who would end up being your teachers and parents. (No one seems to notice that the noted "terrorist pal" is a Professor of Education at a quality university.) Parents who put up with it when their kids went to school only made it worse, but how were they to know? And what could they do about it? Well, they could teach their kids the way mine did. I learned more at home than in school until some time about the middle of high school.

Yet nowhere in that video did I see a call for the top half of the graduating class to go into K-12 education. Or a call for discipline and structure in schools rather than acceptance of any and all behaviors. Nope, just the usual enabler nonsense that shifts the responsibility for learning away from the learner. Look kids, Obama didn't get where he is today by waiting for something to happen, by waiting for someone to teach him how to become President. Stop blaming older people the way my generation did for decades, and do something about improving yourselves. It is possible to learn things on your own. They are called books. You can even get them elecronically, via Kindle. (Mrs Pion loves her new Kindle.)

Or maybe with claims about political involvement. Yes, reports are that young voters turned out in record numbers (from a student newspaper), but only by increasing turnout from awful (48% in 2004) to merely bad (between 49 and 54%). The national average was about 61 to 64%, right up there with 1960 and 1964, but probably above 1968. Sorry, kids, but the older folks still beat you to the polls. We'll have to wait a few months for real demographic details, but not exactly the "unprecedented numbers" they push at the end of the video.

Or how about starting with the assertions about how bad the economy is. Worst ever? Try my parent's generation, from the trailing edge of the so-called Greatest Generation, born just a bit too late to fight in all but the last days of WW II, they were born just in time for the Great Depression. Just in time that they became teenagers at a time when you couldn't even buy tires for your car (seriously) and grease was recycled to be made into explosives. (There was a time when throwing away grease was practically an act of treason.)

Environmentalists? Drive by a college apartment complex after the Thursday to Monday weekend and tell me how much recycling you see. The dumpsters are overflowing. The families in my neighborhood recycle. The college kids usually don't, unless the garbage can gets too full.

Worried about war? Sorry kids, but none of you was ever at risk of getting drafted, and you were never asked to sacrifice anything (not even taxes) for either the war in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan. Worried about debt? The federal deficit during WW II was something like half of the GDP. They printed money, gave it to war workers and soldiers, then borrowed it back from them (because they had nothing to buy) and printed even more money. Ever hear about War Bonds?

Really worried about the Federal Deficit or tax increases for the wealthy? Use this here internet thingy to read some of the blog articles on CNBC. One guy argues, quite convincingly, that deficits are really good for people under 30 (because growth opens up new jobs in new industries, while recessions are bad for recent graduates, as I can also tell you from experience), and that higher taxes on top income brackets are good for young workers too (since those taxes might encourage highly paid Boomer employees to retire early, opening up lines of promotion for younger staff). Lest you doubt the author's (Wall) street cred, he writes for Jim Cramer. I suppose he could even add that his generation can always pass the debt on to their kids, just as the Greatest Generation (Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and Bush I) passed it on to us, where a Boomer tried to pay it off (Clinton) only to have another one (Bush II) build it back up to pass on to an inter-generational President (Obama was born in 1961, at the end of the Boom, which ran from 1946 to 1964). Passing on the national debt is part of our traditional American Family Values.

Or maybe with the hubris of "control our nation". No, let's end there. Let's end with the fantasy of taking control just the way Boomers did between 1968 (when this video could have been made if anything cheaper than an AMPEX deck with 2" tape had existed) and 1992. Or the common cause shown by the politics of Bill Clinton and George W, or the world view shared by W and Gore. The reality is that there are just about as many right wing young voters as there are progressives. The big difference is that this generation is tolerant of some things that their parents rejected, such as racial integration, but that does not narrow the wide range of opinions about guns or gays or drilling within view of Spring Break at Panama City Beach. (I wonder if there will be a battle in 25 years between a candidate who enlisted in 2001 and served in Iraq and one who had "other priorities". Probably, unless the attack politics of 2000 and 2004 really did get killed off in 2008. Time will tell.) In the meantime, real change will only take place if the progressives of "Generation WE" join forces with the progressives of every other generation, as many of them did with the Boomer named Obama, and make that change happen.

Why not work together? If you are in Generation WE, that means you are, after all, a child of the Baby Boom generation. All you need to do is get your parents to work with you the same way we got our parents to do something about pollution and, eventually, Vietnam. Effective politics is about coalitions, not confrontations. Remember, Vietnam went on longer than it needed to because confrontations within the Democratic Party (in which Bill Ayers played an important role) put Nixon in power. Or didn't they (we) teach you that in school?

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