Jay A. Halfond of Boston University and Peter Stokes of Northeastern University recently conducted a non-scientific "pulse" survey of presidents at smaller ...]]>

The global economic recession has caused students, parents and policymakers to reevaluate personal and societal investments in higher education—and has prompted the realization that traditional higher ed “business models” may be unsustainable.

Jay A. Halfond of Boston University and Peter Stokes of Northeastern University recently conducted a non-scientific "pulse" survey of presidents at smaller New England institutions about their views of new models. The presidents generally agreed that to become more sustainable, colleges need to change their financial model, lower discount rates, reach new audiences through online learning and strengthen their institution's competitive differentiation.

Too many institutions each year raise tuition beyond the rate of inflation and look to get more students, despite demographic forecasts promising fewer traditional college-age students.

Predicting a shakeout, most of the presidents expressed confidence for their own school’s ability to adapt, but only 57% agreed that, "the small New England college will remain an important fixture within the academic landscape for many years to come." (It's a bit like Americans voicing disdain for Congress as they reelect their own representatives.) As one respondent put it: "If your institution does not have a well-defined market niche ... that is robust, be that market in or out of New England, it is toast."

Meanwhile, innovators and entrepreneurs are using multiple technologies to make available freely or cheaply, the things for which universities charge significant money. “MOOCs,” free online courses, lecture podcasts, low-cost off-the-shelf general education courses, online tutorials and digital collections of open-learning resources are disrupting higher education’s hold on knowledge, expertise, instruction and credentialing.

Business model vocab

In a sense, everything NEJHE has ever covered over the decades—from classroom teaching to university research to town-gown relations—has been about higher ed business models. Yet the business model concept itself was largely unarticulated in academia until people—mostly business people—started telling higher education to act more like a business (ironically, around the time business meltdowns were fueling the recession).

Even today, elements of business models, including differences in institutional control, segment and mission, are not widely appreciated in higher ed. But there's a perceived need for a common vocabulary and analytical framework to support dialog among diverse stakeholders including students, faculty, staff, administrators and trustees.

Still, “institutional diversity” is a hallmark of American higher education—with institutions ranging from community colleges to global research universities, religious and secular, public and private, nonprofit and, increasingly, for-profit, online, bricks-and-mortar or hybrids. And big differences in institution kind must inform any business model discussion. As Catalogue for Philanthropy founder George McCully noted in a recent NEJHE forum: "The business model is a major challenge for higher ed. At the same time, major institutions which have very large endowments are in a positive feedback loop that is intrinsically inefficient. Harvard earns more from the yield on its endowment in a single year than its development officers can raise in five years."

Among questions that arise:

• What is the future sustainability of higher education institutions (HEIs) in a world where higher learning is free and widely available beyond the academy’s walls?
• How does the issue of “quality” figure in the equation?
• How about social and cultural aspects of college life?
• Do these factors alter what people expect from college and are willing to pay for it?
• Will the accelerating profusion of open-learning opportunities, innovations and new providers displace traditional HEIs?
• Will such forces cause HEIs to reconsider their fundamental business models?
  

Genesis of NEBHE-Davis work

Recently, NEBHE was awarded funding by the Davis Educational Foundation to jointly convene higher education leaders for a frank and compelling conversation about costs and the higher ed business model. An October 2013 Summit on Cost in Higher Education will convene higher ed leaders to discuss costs and, by extension, business models.

One catalyst for this investigation was the Davis Educational Foundation’s November 2012 report, An Inquiry into the Rising Cost of Higher Education. As one New England college president noted in the report: “I think all of us who work in higher education understand that the financial model for most universities and colleges in our region is no longer feasible.”

NEBHE aims to build upon the insights and concerns expressed by HEI presidents in that report and pursue additional research before and after the October summit. Among other things, a multimedia “whitepaper” will synthesize key findings from a literature analysis, survey and interviews with summit participants, Davis grantees and regional and national collaborators.

Costs and prices

There are two main angles to any inquiry about higher ed costs. One is cost-containment by institutions. The other is price affordability for students and families.

The institutional cost angle encompasses everything from the sensationalist stories about spending for luxury dorms and overpaid administrators on the one hand to the eternal fact that intellectual talent (traditionally professors and instructors) costs a lot of money to hire and retain.

In NEJHE, a feature by higher ed policy guru Jane Wellman described ways to increase college attainment by restructuring costs and increasing productivity despite an academic culture that views these strategies as code for budget-cutting.

The student and family angle is told by stories of rising tuition prices, stagnant aid and student loan debt now staggering to the point where graduates are delaying buying homes, cars and other big items and are steered by salary pressures into occupations that help them pay back their loans.

As higher education democratizes, future students are likely to have less means. The Pell Grant program, meanwhile, is unlikely to get richer, and tax credits may disappear in the interest of budget balancing. So how will we make sure students have access to all the newly freed-up content?

The traditional system of students who can afford to pay for college subsidizing those who cannot is thrown off kilter by various forays into merit-based over need-based aid. Institutions know that offering some merit-based aid to students who would probably go to college anyway, leads to more revenue for the institution than offering a full boat to someone who couldn’t pay. As Phil Wick, former financial aid chief at Williams College, wrote in NEJHE (Connection): “Institutions use ‘merit’ scholarships to boost tuition revenue. For example, a college that charges $20,000 in tuition knows that it can realizes $60,000 in additional revenue simply by replacing one $20,000 scholarship, which is need-based, with $5,000 merit awards to four students who could afford the full cost” and will pay what net price remains.

Some money-saving strategies may force students to do things they may not want to, such as trimming unneeded credits. Others would include reverse transfer, in which students en route to bachelor’s degrees get an associate degree on the way, or prior learning assessment, in which college credit is awarded for college-level learning from work and life experience.

One business model phenomenon that colors both institutional cost containment and student price savings is online learning. It's new and improved since the days of being  disparaged as somehow not as real as learning from an in-the-flesh prof lecturing in a bricks-and-morter classroom. In "Rethinking Higher Education Business Models," University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign director of research Robert Sheets, George Washington University professor Stephen Crawford and Center for American Progress senior fellow Louis Soares argue that "information technology’s potential to dramatically improve the performance of higher education will be realized only when new business models arise to harness it." The piece published in 2012 by the Center for American Progress and EDUCAUSE states: "Clearly, the great challenge facing higher education today is to contain costs while at the same time improving outcomes—in short, to increase productivity."

In "University Business Models and Online Practices: A Third Way," Beth Rubin of DePaul University argues: "In the world of higher education, the third way lies between the efficiency-oriented market perspective aimed at adults, as taken by proprietary universities, and the traditional approach that focuses on research and teaching young students."

Containing costs for institutions

Profs to adjuncts

The proposed solutions to making higher ed sustainable sometimes involve dissing professors, taking specific aim at tenure and sabbaticals. And indeed, there has been a move from tenured professors to adjuncts, who are usually paid by the course and don't get benefits. Non-tenure-track faculty account for almost two-thirds of teachers in higher education Their average hourly wage is $8.90 an hour, with 80% of them earning less than $20,000 annually, according to the Adjunct Project. For the institutions, the adjuncts not only save money, but also appeal to career-minded students and families because they are tethered to the "real world" of work, rather than theory.

Competencies not credits

Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) President Paul LeBlanc is the closest thing to a rock star in the arena of higher education business model innovation. SNHU became the first university eligible to receive federal aid for a program not based on the “credit hour,” the time-based unit that underlies courses and degrees. As the Chronicle of Higher Education summarized it, “The low-cost, self-paced education lacks courses and traditional professors. Instead, students progress by showing mastery of 120 ‘competencies,’ such as ‘can use logic, reasoning, and analysis to address a business problem.’" SNHU had already pioneered a cheaper, more flexible "no-frills" option for students who get access to the same SNHU faculty but don't want to pay for amenities nor take time away from their jobs.

Resource-sharing

In interpreting their survey of presidents, Halfond and Stokes called for more "practical opportunities for collaboration, alliances, resource-sharing and outsourcing.” NEBHE's flagship program, Tuition Break (the Regional Student Program) allows New England states to share costs of many academic programs not offered in neighboring states in the region. More recently, NEBHE began offering New England campuses a comprehensive property insurance program tailored specifically to higher education at costs that have consistently been below industry trends. Established in 1994 by the Midwestern Higher Education Compact, this Master Property Program is based on a no-brainer: use your numbers to drive down prices and get a better deal.

Various consortia have also fought for economies of scale in areas ranging from academics to cell phone services. These groups include: the Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges; Hartford Consortium for Higher Education; AICUM; Boston Consortium for Higher Education; Colleges of the Fenway; Colleges of Worcester Consortium; CONNECT-Southeastern Massachusetts Higher Education Partnership; the Council of Presidents of the Massachusetts State Universities; Five Colleges Consortium; the New England Higher Education Recruitment Consortium; Massachusetts Higher Education Consortium; the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Rhode Island; the Association of Vermont Independent Colleges; and the Cooperating Colleges of Greater Springfield.

MOOCs

In some ways, MOOCs (massive open online courses) are like consortia on steroids. In the past two years, they became everybody’s darling—based at prestigious universities but attracting partnerships with community colleges, rooted in hard sciences but spreading to humanities, originally culminating in certifications but increasingly offering credit toward degrees.

Still, the MOOC idea has felt some growing pains. “It’s time to push the pause button … on MOOC mania generally,” wrote David L. Kirp, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, in "Tech Mania Goes to College." Kirp's piece published in The Nation warned: “While modified MOOCs like the flipped classroom hold great promise, the pure MOOC model looks like a failure. New technologies have indeed made it possible to reach more students—MIT’s OpenCourseWare materials, free to all, have been visited by 125 million people the world over—and, sensibly used, can improve teaching as well. But there’s no cheap solution to higher education’s woes, no alternative to making a serious public investment, no substitute for the professor who provokes students into confronting their most cherished beliefs, changing their lives in the process.”

Other cost drivers

Though they seem hardly to be dignified as “business models,” a variety of different drivers also enter into the high cost of higher education. These include insurance, electricity, broadband, buildings and grounds maintenance, even paperclips. Plus, sports. At some colleges, appealing to students and donors involves building brand-new stadiums and paying head coaches more than top administrators and faculty. At others, the momentum is to eliminate some sports as Boston University did with its football team in 1997.

Ideally, all these cost containment steps could pass savings on to students in lower tuition and fee prices. But there are other strategies aimed more directly at reducing tuition and fee burdens.

Free tuition

The federal government already spends enough on student aid initiatives and tax breaks to cover the tuition of every U.S. public college student—or almost. Consider “How Washington Could Make College Tuition Free (Without Spending a Penny More on Education),” advanced in The Atlantic magazine by Jordan Weissmann and in “From Master Plan to No Plan: The Slow Death of Public Higher Education” in Dissent magazine by Aaron Bady and Mike Konczal.

Pay it forward

A more recent proposal in Oregon would allow students to pay tuition after they graduate based on income. Under the so-called "Pay It Forward" idea, students would pay tuition only as a share of their salaries after graduation. But critics say the idea would give public colleges an incentive to build up programs likely to attract students who will earn the most money after graduation.

New models are being assembled right now. NEBHE’s exploration of these issues will continue to ask key questions: What is higher education's current business model? What new models will bring access and success to more students. Keep them curious. Employable. And out of debt.

The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Carnegie Foundation ...]]>

In April, NEJHE launched its New Directions for Higher Education series to examine emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices.

The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Carnegie Foundation President Anthony Bryk about the future of the credit hour; the second featured DiSalvio's interview with Fastweb.com and FinAid.org Publisher Mark Kantrowitz about student debt; the third, DiSalvio’s interview with Lumina Foundation President and CEO Jamie P. Merisotis about Lumina’s commitment to enrolling and graduating more students from college; and most recently, his interview with American Council on Education (ACE) President Molly Corbett Broad about the efforts ACE is making to raise educational attainment in the U.S. and around the world.

In this installment of the series, DiSalvio speaks with Richard Arum, co-author (with Josipa Roksa) of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Arum and Roksa pose fundamental questions about whether undergraduates are really learning anything during their undergraduate experience. For a large proportion of students, Arum and Roksa's answer to that question is a definitive "no."

The context

Drawing upon survey responses, transcript data, and the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) of more than 2,300 undergraduates at 24 institutions, Arum and Roksa deliver a stark message about the nature of undergraduate learning in the U.S.

Their analysis suggests that more than a third of American college seniors are no better at crucial types of writing and reasoning tasks than they were in their first semester of college. Furthermore, 45% of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college.

Other findings show that, on average, students devote only slightly more than 12 hours per week to studying. Based on students' self-reports, Arum and Roksa suggest that such meager investments in studying might reflect meager demands placed on students in their courses in terms of reading and writing. Another finding of their work points to persistent racial and ethnic gaps in CLA scores—and those gaps widen, in the case of African-American students—over the course of four years of college

Some see their research results as a damning indictment of the American higher-education system. Conversely, their work has drawn its share of critics, who say their analysis falls short in its assessments of certain teaching and learning methods.

Nevertheless, the suggestion that four years of undergraduate classes make little difference in a student’s ability to synthesize knowledge and to put complex ideas on paper has serious implications for academic leaders and policymakers. Arum and Roksa may be delivering a wake-up call for those institutions failing to make undergraduate education a priority and falling short of properly preparing their undergraduates for 21st-century challenges.

The interview

DiSalvio: In your book Academically Adrift, Limited Learning on College Campuses, you conclude that a significant percentage of undergraduates are failing to develop the broad-based skills and knowledge they should be expected to master. How did you come to that conclusion?

Arum: The CLA, which we used to identify scores before and after a performance test, did not move up in a significant way for many students. The analysis showed that if the test was scaled from 0-100, 36% of the students didn’t go up even one point after four years.

What’s important to emphasize is that our conclusions do not rest solely on that instrument. We also surveyed students and asked them what they were doing in their course work and in their undergraduate education. It was those responses that we found even more powerful and troubling than the lack of growth demonstrated by the large numbers of students on the assessment.

Specifically, we asked them how many hours per week they studied and prepared for class. We found that on average, full-time college students in the U.S. studied only 12 to 13 hours per week and a third of that time was spent with their friends. Studying with their friends didn’t track at all with growth. In fact, it led to negative performance. Traditional studying alone is down today. Our analysis showed that 36% of these students studied alone five or fewer hours per week—less than one hour a day.

We also asked them about their reading and writing requirements in their class. Half of the students reported that in a typical semester, they did not have any class that asked them to write more than 20 pages over the course of the semester, and 32% said that they did not have a single class where they were asked to read on an average more than 40 pages per week.

This does not apply to all students, however. We found that some students grew on this indicator and that some were studying long hours. Some were taking rigorous and demanding courses. But what we identified in our data very clearly is that large numbers of students in U.S. higher education today are able to navigate through this system with very little demanded of them, and very little effort and very little learning, as measured by this CLA assessment.

It might be useful to say a bit about what the CLA performance test assesses. The CLA assesses critical thinking, complex reasoning and the ability to communicate in writing. These are general skills most individuals think all college graduates should develop. These skills are also what employers increasingly see as the core of what college graduates need to be successful in the workforce. These competencies are assessed by the CLA not through a standardized multiple-choice test, but rather students are given a task that might be asked of them by an employer in the future. Students are given a set of documents. They are asked to think critically about the documents. The reliability and validity of the information in the documents varies so they have to think critically about the usefulness of the data. They need to synthesize information across these various sources—a complex reasoning task. They then have to write a logical argument based on these documents using that information to provide evidence to support their points. This is, again, not a simple task but exactly the kind of task you’d expect college students to improve upon the longer they were in school. Unless of course, these students were either not studying at all nor being asked to study, and were not reading or writing. A pattern emerges where one might conclude that there is limited learning for all too many of these students.

DiSalvio: While not a direct rebuke to Academically Adrift, studies by the Council for Aid to Education offer a sunnier counter-narrative to your assertions about meager learning. Their studies suggest that college does have significant effects from freshman to graduating seniors. How do you account for that discrepancy between your research and the council’s research?

Arum:  In terms of the narrow measurement issues, our study followed several-thousand students from when they entered college to when they left college. They were given a test at two points in time, so that we could measure the actual growth that occurred. So our work, in a sense, is a descriptive report of what actually exists.

The Council for Aid to Education study that came out measures freshmen out of college and measures seniors out of college at the same point in time. That study tries to infer growth statistically through manipulation of the data. They need to statistically adjust their data because freshmen and seniors at a college or university look very different. Large numbers of students drop out of college. In many institutions, it’s 50% or more. So comparing a freshman class to the senior class is comparing apples and oranges.

Inferring growth by statistically adjusting for SAT is just coming up with an estimate based on these techniques. We’re not doing statistics at all on the descriptive findings I just noted. We simply said that this is where they started and this is where they finished. In fact, their statistical adjustments are inadequate and do not fully account for the attrition going on in colleges and universities. So they overestimate growth. That’s technically the difference.

Our work is often misinterpreted and misreported to say that students aren’t benefiting from college, that nothing is being learned and that college has no value. We have never said that. We have said that too many students are not applying themselves and not learning and moving up on this important indicator. This is not the only purpose that colleges and universities serve. And they have many functions outside this. Colleges and universities teach subject specific skills and contribute to larger socio-emotional development.

Yet our work is often mischaracterized as a condemnation of all college and all undergraduate education. In page after page, we highlight the important variation we see in the data and where some students are actually applying themselves and learning at quite reasonable rates. So again, some of the problems between our two studies are around this measurement issue.

There are significant numbers of students who grow from the undergraduate experience. We hope that no one misunderstands our work and thinks that we feel college is not a useful, critical, important thing for a young adult to embark upon. Even at the high cost of U.S. higher education, where students often go into significant debt to finance their education, we feel it is still a very sound investment for the vast majority of these students.

I think what happens often is when things become as public as the book has become, people take from it pieces that they like and use it for their own ends. The larger point we are making, is that colleges and universities should do a better job at dealing with these large numbers of students that clearly can be applying themselves and developing themselves more.

DiSalvio: You observed that the existing organizational cultures and practices of contemporary colleges and universities often fail to put a high priority on undergraduate learning. What do you think are the factors that contribute to that failure?

Arum:  There are multiple factors. One of the complications of identifying those factors, of course, is that U.S. higher education is quite diverse. Institutions such as UMass Boston may face a whole different set of issues around organizational culture than Boston College. Again, we have to be careful not to generalize, but at the same time we might be able to put forward some observations that may not apply everywhere but could apply to many schools.

A good place to start to address the question of factors is to observe how U.S. higher education has moved in the direction of a consumer-client satisfaction model. Higher education institutions have increasingly come to compete over individual students—to get them to apply and attend their colleges and universities—and then to keep them happy and satisfied while they are there.

In some ways, that’s a good thing. Organizations should be responsive to the clients that they’re servicing, but it has also led to all sorts of behaviors that are less than ideal. I have visited over 100 college and university campuses over the last few years and at almost every campus I visited, they would point out the new gym, the new student center and often the new dormitories being built. There is an arms race going on in U.S. higher education to provide greater amenities to 17-year-olds who go and visit campuses and make choices about where they should spend their next four years. While this is not a sensible way for the sector as a whole to be moving, it has moved very far in that direction.

This can be seen in the way instruction is often assessed on college campuses today, where too often the only measure of teaching quality that the institution considers is the course evaluation surveys that students fill out at the end of the semester. Those course evaluation surveys all too often are nothing but consumer-satisfaction surveys. “Did you like the class? Would you recommend it to a friend? Did you find it interesting?”

Many institutions are not asking questions about the academic content. “How many hours did you study? What kind of reading requirements did you have? What kind of feedback did you get on your paper?” So to the extent that institutions assess learning or teaching, it’s often again the consumer-client model, rather than a model that would promote academic rigor and excellence.

Another way to look at this issue would be to track expenditures. Over the last couple of decades, colleges and universities have increasingly invested in non-full-time faculty and student support services. The fastest growing sector of higher education is professional and quasi-professional staff in charge of student well-being. Now again, all things being equal, that may be well and good, except these are choices that the institution has to make about where investments are going to be made and where they are not going to be made. Increasingly, colleges and universities are making investments in non-academic functions through these amenities, through the student support services and again with a decline of full-time faculty.

So I think in broad strokes, those are some of the cultural factors that might be seen throughout higher education. This varies in many institutions and certainly not all are being judged exclusively on research and scholarship productivity, but many of the colleges and universities are busy, working to move up in their rankings. That again has little or nothing to do with undergraduate education and academic rigor. It has to do with what type of students you’re going to attract to the institution, the research and productivity of faculty. However it is not a measure of actual learning that’s occurring.

DiSalvio: In your research, you have found that learning in higher education is characterized by a persistent and a growing inequality. You maintain that there are significant differences in critical thinking, complex reasoning, writing skills when comparing groups of students from different family backgrounds and racial and ethnic groups. Given that there is a gap, what do you think has to be done to deal with that gap?

Arum:  The inequalities within higher education in terms of learning are a very important part of our book that is often ignored. In K-12 education, these inequalities have long been noted and we have a great deal of public policy discourse and public policy made to target and reduce them. For example, “No Child Left Behind,” with all its faults, brought increasing attention to assessing learning outcomes for not just average groups of students but for different racial groups of students, to make sure that all students, regardless of their backgrounds, were demonstrating growth and learning. In higher education, we haven’t had much of this debate at all. In fact, faculty often are in many institutions discouraged from working with students that are struggling because of the time commitments that are involved. They are implicitly encouraged to limit those investments and instead invest in the talented, and rewarding students in terms of their academic promise.

The struggling students are often diverted to remedial course work or remedial centers on campus. The effect of some of these programs and course work is unclear. I know there is a whole national debate emerging on the lack of effectiveness of remediation and remedial course work. Students are often put there, spin their wheels and take these courses repeatedly and their progress is compromised and suffers. We need to figure out how to do all the remediation in a smarter, more effective and efficient way. I think we need to pay greater attention to that area, just the way we do in K-12 education.

DiSalvio: You have said that the limited learning that exists on campuses qualifies as a significant problem and should be the subject of concern for policymakers and practitioners and parents and citizens. Yet you also say that limited learning on college campuses isn’t a crisis because the institutional actors implicated in the system are receiving the kind of organizational outcomes that they seek, so neither the institutions themselves nor the system as a whole seems to be in any way challenged or threatened. Why then should limited learning be a subject of concern?

Arum: In the book, we argued that we didn’t think it was a significant crisis because all the actors were generally happy. Institutions increasingly have been able to generate additional revenues through increasing tuition and other means. The students were generally happy, even those from whom not much was asked, because with their short-term orientation, it seemed like they had the best of both worlds. They are getting a college degree and it actually didn’t take much to do it. They had increasing time to devote to other pursuits, whether that was working additional hours to pay for their education or just engaging in leisure pursuits.

I think there’s evidence that actually both those things are going on. Students spend about five more hours today working for pay than they did in 1960. And there are another eight hours that are just unaccounted for in terms of their studying less, but not working more. So I think there is a lot of reason to think there has not been a crisis. Since that book came out in January 2011, increasingly there is a sense of crisis in the air. That is, I think, in part because of this unsustainable increase in the cost of higher education and that financial model coming up against some real limits.

The ability to increase tuition at twice the rate of inflation indefinitely and still have more students every year attend your institution, may now be hitting some natural limits. Debt load of students, the availability of additional funding for programs in Washington and economic circumstances are leaving large numbers of people to raise questions that during the time we wrote the book were not being asked. Additionally, what has changed is that technological disruption has accelerated. And so there is increased experimentation with alternative instructional delivery mechanisms, such as online education.

For those reasons, the sense of a crisis in higher education is becoming a more plausible argument, and in fact we are in a period of uncertainty when there appears to be some profound restructuring or reengineering happening.

Economically, today’s graduates have to compete in an increasingly globalized world. And so it’s not the case as it was maybe 40 or 50 years ago that their limited learning might not have mattered because they are still going to do better than the high school graduate who did not go to college. That still may be true to some degree, but they are competing today not just against the high school graduate but the software engineer in Ireland and the architectural design firm in Germany and the engineering companies in Asia.

The consequences of this limited learning for them and for the country as a whole are increasingly going to require addressing and remedying.

Limited learning in terms of critical thinking and complex reasoning and communication also has implications for the ability of our country in the future to have a functioning democratic system. The college graduates today are expected to be the civic leaders of tomorrow and yet the students that we’re tracking into the labor market were asked how often they read the newspaper in print or online and 36% of them said monthly or never. How can a functioning democratic system exist when the educated elite in the country are no longer reading news on a regular basis?

So, to think critically about the political rhetoric and to think systematically about the complex problems of the day are essential skills for the broader civic society. If we ignore this problem, I worry it will have much more profound implications than just our economy losing its competitive edge.

DiSalvio: What should higher education leaders and policymakers take away from your work and is it a call for action?

Arum:​ Hopefully it will be read as a call for action and that call for action will come from the leaders of higher education institutions. We feel strongly that the federal government, in a well-intentioned effort to address these problems, should not impose an accountability scheme on higher education in a centralized manner. We feel that would end up leading to all sorts of distortions and counterproductive changes as was seen in the "No Child Left Behind" program and the resultant imposed accountability frameworks imposed.

Because there is a real problem, demonstrated by consistent and overwhelming empirical data, we feel higher education has a responsibility to address this in a systematic way. The best place for that problem to be addressed, particularly in the U.S., with its decentralized higher education system and very large private sector, is at the institutional level.

Institutional leaders should take these issues seriously and must be willing to assess learning in their own institutions and to identify areas of concern to improve. We’ve been very clear to say that higher education institutions must answer three questions: 1) How are you measuring learning on your campus? 2) Where are the areas that need improvement? 3) What are you doing to improve those areas?

We should not need the federal government or a state government or even a board of trustees to tell us to do that. Every academic leader should be asking those questions because that is, in part, what defines academic leadership and what differentiates higher education institutions from an ordinary business.

DiSalvio: In your experience, how have higher education leaders generally responded to that call for action?

Arum: Higher education leaders overwhelmingly agree with the idea that there is a real problem. Some might express concern about the reputation of their own institution and say that the problem does not exist on their campus. But overwhelmingly, higher education leaders acknowledge that there is a problem because their institutional data confirms that the problem exists.

So, while it appears there is a widespread sense that there is indeed a problem that should be addressed, many feel they do not have the adequate tools to be able to do the work. There is not always a sense that the assessment tools available match up with their institution's needs.

While course evaluations are commonly used in higher education, I think different instruments might be used to track student’s objective learning growth. As those tools become available, our hope is these tools will be embraced and widely utilized by the vast majority of institutions.

Degree-granting authority for ...]]>

New Hampshire has emerged as a leader in international education. Recognizing the value in offering the opportunity for an American-style higher education in other parts of the world, the New Hampshire Legislature has acted favorably on legislation that my colleagues and I have sponsored to help create universities in Greece, Italy and Jordan.

Degree-granting authority for the three universities was established through New Hampshire law. They are monitored on an ongoing basis to ensure they live up to the standards set by the state. They must produce reports to the state Higher Education Commission and have site visits by a group set up by the commission.

New Hampshire institutions have been involved in international education for a long time. In the past, both Franklin Pierce and New England College offered a semester or a year abroad. In the case of New England College, a campus was established at Arundel, England, but has since closed. But this is the first time that international institutions based in foreign countries have sought degree-granting authority in New Hampshire for campuses abroad. Next, they will seek accreditations from the New England Association of Schools and Colleges.

The international collaborations will expand opportunities for Granite State students and faculty to go abroad and for their foreign counterparts to travel to New Hampshire.

The overseas programs will be taught by English-speaking faculty, some from the U.S. These are homegrown instructors who are trained in American-style education but remain local.

The Hellenic American University was established in 2004 by an act of the New Hampshire Legislature and is located in Athens, Greece. The university began with a small focus on business administration, but in the ensuing years has grown to offer a variety of liberal arts programs and, in 2008 launched its first doctoral program.

St. John International University is a for-profit American University located in Torino, Italy. It was founded in 2007 and incorporated in 2008 by the state of New Hampshire through legislation providing degree-granting authority. It has a strong emphasis on the environment and promoting a culture of sustainability. St. John is currently authorized to grant five different bachelor’s degrees and three different master’s degrees. The degree areas include environmental studies, art history, film study, business administration and environmental architecture.

In addition to the degree-granting authorization bestowed upon St. John by the state of New Hampshire, the university has taken it upon itself to seek regional U.S. accreditation for all its degree programs. Regional accreditation is a must for all U.S. chartered schools in the world. It is a key to their viability.

I recently traveled to Jordan to attend the grand opening of the American University of Madaba (AUM). The event was attended by the King of Jordan. AUM is authorized by New Hampshire to offer 18 degree programs in seven disciplines, including: engineering, science, health sciences, art and design, business and finance, information technology and languages and communications.

To be sure, each overseas venture offers challenges. AUM has 1,000 students, most from Jordan, most Muslim, both men and women. There is a fear of spillover from Syria’s civil war. In Greece, the housing situation is problematic and the specter of austerity and backlash are real. The St. John campus in Turino, is located in a renovated castle, however recent financial problems have gathered headlines. At this time, these problems have been taken care of and the college is in a positive position. There is no question that this part of the world is not stable. Hopefully education will produce the impetus for better relations.

All these universities embrace the concept of an American higher education and believe wholeheartedly in the opportunities that a quality education can provide. They strive to give each student the opportunity to reach their highest potential. They adhere to the belief that education can transform lives and society as a whole.

These institutions are funded through private capital and tuition. In the case of the University of Madaba, the Catholic Church, through the Vatican, has helped with capital expenditures. The other two institutions, one non-profit, the other for-profit, are funded through tuition and other sources. SJIU offers a 20% discount on tuition to residents of Italy and New Hampshire, similar to the lower in-state tuition rates you see at public institutions in America. The HAU offers a work-study program to help offset tuition costs for students.

While these countries share many of the challenges that the U.S. faces in terms of covering the cost of tuition and expanding access to higher education, they also have added political and economic problems that exacerbate the challenge. Jordan, for example, has the stress of volatilities in its neighboring nations and throughout the Middle East region, and Greece’s financial troubles as a nation have been widely reported. These institutions have been established to emulate the American style education that is desired throughout the world.

Lou D'Allesandro is a New Hampshire state senator and former chair of NEBHE.

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NEJHE Forum on Internationalization

Fall 2006 Journal: World Ready?

The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Carnegie Foundation ...]]>

In April, NEJHE launched its New Directions for Higher Education series to examine emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices.

The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Carnegie Foundation President Anthony Bryk about the future of the credit hour; the second featured DiSalvio's interview with Fastweb.com and FinAid.org Publisher Mark Kantrowitz about student debt; the third, DiSalvio’s interview with Lumina Foundation President and CEO Jamie P. Merisotis about Lumina’s commitment to enrolling and graduating more students from college; and most recently, his interview with American Council on Education (ACE) President Molly Corbett Broad about the efforts ACE is making to raise educational attainment in the U.S. and around the world.

In this installment of the series, DiSalvio interviews Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), on why liberal education is essential to America’s global future.

The context

From its founding in 1915, AAC&U has focused on advancing and strengthening liberal education for all college students, regardless of their intended careers. AAC&U sees liberal education as a philosophy of education that empowers individuals with broad knowledge and transferable skills and prepares them to deal with complexity, diversity and change. This liberal education approach, characterized by challenging encounters with important issues, is more a way of studying than a specific course or field of study. AAC&U maintains that this can be achieved at all types of colleges and universities.

While some argue that the best possible preparation to meet the challenges of the 21st century is a liberal education, others say that liberal arts colleges and the concepts behind the usefulness of a liberal education have been falling short in communicating the purpose of a college education, what a good education looks like and how education should fit into the higher education fabric of the nation.

Proclamations about “the death of liberal arts,” and reports about student debt and the unemployability of those with an undergraduate liberal education abound. Others ask how practical versus idealistic college should be. In a recent New York Times interview, Hunter Rawlings, the president of the Association of American Universities, stated: “You just don’t know what your education is going to result in. Many of the kids graduating from college these days are going to hold a number of different jobs in their lives, and many of those jobs have not yet been invented. For a world like that, what’s the best education? It seems to me it’s a very general education that enables you to think critically.”

Carol Geary Schneider provides a perspective on the state of U.S. liberal education today.

The interview

DiSalvio: The broad goals of liberal education have endured even as the courses and requirements that comprise a liberal education have changed. How has liberal education changed over the years? Is it relevant today considering the rapid pace and complexity of change in today’s global economy?

Schneider: There are three broad goals of liberal and liberal arts education that have endured not only just over the years, but over the millennia. In each era, we rethink the meaning, the content and the approaches through which we address those goals, but the goals themselves endure. I’d also argue that there’s a 21^st century addition to liberal arts education.

The first enduring goal of liberal education is the acquisition of a broad understanding of the society of which individuals are a part; this requires broad knowledge about science, culture, society, history and the kind of knowledge needed to navigate the world. For a long time, liberal education was restricted to very few people, and those people were leaders in society. Now we have a more expansive understanding of who needs this kind of broad knowledge. Understanding the world of which one is a part is the first core goal of a good liberal education.

The second enduring goal of liberal education is developing the powers of the mind. In earlier centuries, these powers included grammar, rhetoric, logic and dialectic. Today, we use the vocabulary of critical inquiry or communication skills. But when we talk about capacities like critical thinking or information literacy or communication fluency, we are talking about powers of the mind—the adaptive capabilities that enable people to reason through complex questions and to use evidence-based analysis to inform their choices and actions. Fostering these capacities is absolutely essential to a liberal or liberating education.

The third enduring goal is ensuring that learners acquire, through their studies and through the mentoring that’s part of those studies, a strong sense of ethical responsibility to themselves and to society, as well as a strong sense of their responsibilities as citizens. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and the founders of this republic all understood civic virtue as necessary for sustaining a just and self-governing society. Ethical and civic responsibility is as essential today as it was in their time.

These enduring goals are addressed in new ways today. Knowledge has changed. The skills we are discussing have certainly changed, especially in the age of digital revolution. And our understanding of civic responsibility has evolved as we have become more conscious of the challenges and responsibilities of living in a diverse democracy—not just a democracy, not just a republic, but a society that really respects all people and all perspectives.

I think those are the three big goals of liberal and liberal arts education over the millennia. I would argue that in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, there is a fourth goal. AAC&U describes it as integrative and applied learning. Other people may have other language for it—flexible learning, adaptive learning—but it is the notion that students need to learn how to integrate their knowledge, their powers of the mind and their sense of responsibility and to apply that learning to real problems in real settings. That kind of knowledge can then be used to work through problems encountered in the economy and problems we face as a globally engaged democracy.

To my mind, teaching students to apply their learning to new problems and contexts needs to be signature achievement of liberal education in the 21^st century. The focus is not just on what we know and understand, but on what we can do and how well we take responsibility for the application of knowledge in real-world settings. When it’s described in that way, liberal education is not only relevant, but indispensable. It’s the most relevant and powerful form of education we’ve ever developed—that any society has developed—because it places such strong emphasis on teaching people to use their intellectual faculties and their knowledge of the complexities of the wider world in order to reason through new problems and make contributions both to their workplaces and to our democratic society.

So for all these reasons, AAC&U has taken the position that liberal education is not only our most powerful form of learning, but that it is, in fact, the best form of learning for all students—not just for some students. That is the final way in which liberal education is evolving today. In the 20th century, we thought of liberal education mainly as something that was done in liberal arts and sciences disciplines. The academy itself constructed a very clear dividing line between liberal arts learning, on the one hand, and professional and career fields, on the other. AAC&U’s approach to liberal education says that those dividing lines need to be erased and that the forms of learning I am talking about apply to learners in all fields—career and technical fields as well as the arts and sciences. We owe it to every student who comes to higher education to make sure that, in ways appropriate to their career goals and their choice of academic discipline, they actually acquire all the hallmark capabilities that characterize liberal education in the 21st century.

DiSalvio: Under your leadership, AAC&U launched Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP), a public advocacy and campus action initiative designed to engage students and the public with what really matters in a college education for the 21st century. With the LEAP initiative, AAC&U has set out to champion the importance of a 21st century liberal education. How will LEAP accomplish the goals of that initiative?

Schneider: The LEAP campaign is organized around a robust set of "Essential Learning Outcomes"—all of which are best developed by a contemporary liberal education. Described in College Learning for the New Global Century these essential learning outcomes and a set of "Principles of Excellence" provide a new framework to guide students' cumulative progress through college

Today, and in the years to come, college graduates need higher levels of learning and knowledge as well as strong intellectual and practical skills to navigate this more demanding environment successfully and responsibly.

Other areas of work around the LEAP initiative are campus action, public advocacy and evidence. In many ways, campus action is the centerpiece of the LEAP effort. LEAP now formally involves 350 colleges, universities and community colleges working in ways appropriate to their individual missions and their own students.

In addition, we have a formal partnership with the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges and with the New American Colleges and Universities, a consortium of private colleges and universities interested in the blend of liberal arts, career programs and civic learning. All these institutions and systems have adopted some version of the LEAP Essential Learning Outcomes.

In terms of public advocacy we wanted to test out advocacy strategies in local contexts with local state priorities. Rather than trying simply to make the case for liberal education as an invaluable resource for everyone from 30,000 feet above ground level, we prefer to connect liberal education with the growth agenda in Wisconsin, for example, with the access to excellence and equity agenda in California, with work already going on in Texas as they rethink their core curriculum, with efforts to improve educational performance in Indiana, and so on.

We have tried hard to ensure that LEAP’s work intersects with the college completion agenda, which is probably the dominant public priority at both the national and state levels across the nation. But we go beyond the completion agenda by focusing, not just on whether students have achieved the right number of credits in a timely fashion, but on whether students are completing with high levels of “demonstrated achievement” on the Essential Learning Outcomes.

The work we have done on what are called “high-impact practices” has demonstrated that when students frequently participate in forms of learning that ask them to do significant analytical, creative, problem-solving work, they are more likely to complete college as well as more likely to achieve the Essential Learning Outcomes. The high-impact practices include first-year seminars and experiences, common intellectual experiences, learning communities, writing-intensive courses, collaborative assignments and projects, undergraduate research, diversity/global learning, service learning, community-based learning, internships, and capstone courses and projects. There is new evidence emerging about additional high-impact practices that also result in higher rates of completion and better learning for students; we will undoubtedly revise the list of high-impact practices as we go forward.

Especially successful as a form of advocacy is our work with employers. Employers are urgently requesting that higher education do a better job of preparing students with the full set of Essential Learning Outcomes that LEAP advances. We have tried to get out of the way and let employers speak about this in their own voices and using their own vocabularies through a series of national surveys we have done.

Another form of advocacy is the LEAP President’s Trust. This includes over 100 college, university and community college presidents who care passionately about the educational and public value of liberal education, and who have committed themselves to use the pulpits that presidents routinely command in order to make the case for liberal education.

The employment of authentic evidence is another area of work in the LEAP campaign. We have been working on employing the evidence in two ways. One way is to build tools and resources for faculty to use in assessing the extent to which students are, in fact, achieving the learning outcomes that LEAP advances. Secondly, we are providing syntheses from various available national studies of what the evidence shows about students’ current progress, or lack thereof.

The portrait that we have put together is not an encouraging one. It shows, for example, that only about one-third of students report that they’ve made significant gains in college on global learning, an outcome that everybody today would agree is an essential part of the knowledge one needs for 21st-century competence. Only about 50% of students report that they’ve made significant gains in college on learning to engage perspectives different from their own. And ETS data have been showing us for years that on their tests for critical thinking, mathematical competence and writing, only about 10% of graduating seniors are proficient. Taken together, these and other studies indicate that we have a long way to go in order to achieve the goals that LEAP is promoting.

DiSalvio: Some argue that the best possible preparation to meet the economic development challenges of the 21^st century is a liberal education. Is that realistic, given the rising tuition costs and burdensome debt and the labor market itself?

Schneider: I think we have to make a very clear distinction between an educational strategy that is focused on short-term costs and one that is focused on the long-term interests of our entire society and the individuals within it. We believe with Tom Friedman that liberal education has historically been America’s “secret sauce.” It has cultivated, for at least a segment of the population, those innovative, adaptive, creative capacities that are so central to an innovative economy.

While it’s always been true that the U.S. economy has prospered through innovation and resilience and adaptability, in the current highly competitive global economy—with many nations now rising through their own new forms of economic creativity—it really matters that we invest in forms of learning that allow us to remain the world leader in terms of economic innovation and creativity. So to focus educational investment on short-term training for immediately available jobs, with no attention to whether or not graduates have the intellectual skills and knowledge needed to adapt to the next job and the next industry is to shortchange such individual learners and to shortchange America’s competitive future.

Yes, the kind of education we’re talking about cannot be done on the cheap. But the U.S. made its way to world standing, economically and as a democracy, by taking investment in education seriously. I think we need to recognize the historical sources of our strengths as a society and make sure that those strengths are being reinforced rather than eroded as we go forward.

I would also add, of course, that there are many ways that we can reduce costs within higher education. For example, we’re spending a lot of money on courses that never were designed to help students. If the only point of a course is to “deliver content” and see whether students can pass multiple-choice tests on that content, we can indeed “deliver” such courses via technology much more efficiently and cost-effectively. But, our top goal should be to ensure that all college students have frequent opportunities to go way beyond “content recognition” to meaningful competency development. You learn evidence-based reasoning by actual practice with evidence-based reasoning. I believe that higher education should do “content delivery” as inexpensively as possible while redeploying resources to high-quality competency development.

DiSalvio: Those who look at the intellectual benefits of liberal education may be saying that learning for learning’s sake is its most significant benefit. But aren’t the public and politicians and policymakers more likely to be swayed by other arguments that they deem more practical?

Schneider: When we launched LEAP, AAC&U made an official determination that defending liberal education as “learning for its own sake” was a non-starter in persuading skeptics. The notion that the liberal arts are primarily intended to cultivate a love of learning and personal development, leaving it to the individual to decide how that learning and development can be applied once they left college is a 20th-century idea. The argument we make today is that liberal education, when it is done well, is actually developing practical intelligence. Of course, we do hope that students will come to love learning for its own sake and we definitely want them to become people who are committed to continuous lifelong learning.

But in making the case for the long-term value of liberal learning, you do not start with “learning for its own sake.” If you are talking about an 18-year-old, you start with the fact that the student is struggling to understand why she is in college in the first place. You need to help her understand how what she is studying connects to the life she hopes to make for herself and that it is contributing to her development of an adaptable, portable set of capabilities and a flexible, adaptable base of knowledge. And you do that by getting her really involved in making connections between what she is learning and real-world problems that she can see need to be solved. Some of those problems will be enduring ones, such as those concerning identity and religion and social justice. Others will be contemporary problems, such as sustainability and climate change and what we do about hunger in our own communities or about HIV/AIDS.

Novice learners must be helped to see connections between the world they are living in and the lives they hope to make for themselves, on the one hand, and what they are studying, on the other. If you do that well, then I think they will also come to love learning for its own sake. But we start with their need to make connections between life and learning. And the same is obviously true for all those students who are coming to college as returning adults. They’ve already learned a lot from being out there in the real world. We need to connect their informal learning to the studies they will pursue. We need to recognize what they’ve already achieved through other means. We need to be prepared to validate forms of liberal learning that didn’t happen within formal academic settings. And all of this is intended to ensure that liberal learning is practical and useful and that it helps people make better lives, create better societies, and do better work. Once you describe it that way, then I think it’s easier to make the case to policymakers.

DiSalvio: In the 2010 AAC&U "Quality Imperative" report, the AAC&U Board of Directors states that, "It should not be liberal education for some, and narrow or illiberal education for others ... access to educational excellence is the equity challenge of our time." Yet, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, first-generation and disadvantaged students are less likely to take courses in the humanities, foreign languages and the arts, and are more likely to enroll in institutions and programs that provide narrow training. What must happen to equalize access?

Schneider: First of all we need to shine a strong, searing spotlight on the inequities. One of the things that’s so striking to me is that we recognize that our K-12 system was built along highly stratified lines. Some students are moved into college prep courses and tracks, while other students are moved into work tracks that are much less demanding educationally and much less likely to prepare them for college.

K-12 policy has been trying to undo this stratification and has been emphasizing the importance of high-quality, internationally competitive "common core standards" for all students—not just for some students. The goal of the No Child Left Behind program was to provide access to excellence for everyone, but it was deeply flawed in its tactics. Within the K-12 framework, we’ve had a dawning realization that our future as a society and our decency as a democracy depend on creating equal opportunities for students to learn at high levels as they go from preschool through high school.

Oddly, we’re not applying much of any of that to the discussion of higher education. People have been perfectly happy to accept a tiered system, or tracking, within higher education. In fact, many of the public policy priorities in several states deepen and accelerate and accentuate inequities and stratifications that already exist. For example, I’m thinking of policies—in states from the South to the North—that focus on getting students into certificate and short-term credential programs with the ultimate goal of getting them quickly into the workplace and, thereby, reducing the unemployment rate.

Questions are not being asked about whether those programs are helping students develop the broad knowledge, strong intellectual skill sets, anchored sense of responsibility and demonstrated capacity to deal with new complex problems that characterize a liberal education. We’re just asking whether they can manage computerized records; if they can, then they can have a job. AAC&U is trying to take dead aim at that deepening stratification by getting employers to acknowledge that people who are locked into mental cubicles are not promotable. And if people know how to do only one set of tasks and one job, then they will be employable only as long as that particular set of tasks needs to be done and as long as that particular job exists. If people want to be promotable and adaptable, they need a broad skill set, not one that has been narrowly tailored to meet the needs of a specific job.

Our surveys have repeatedly shown that employers do not recommend study in one particular field alone. Sixty percent of them recommend that college students pursue a combination of broad-plus-specialized learning, and 20%of them recommend that students pursue broad learning only. So just one in five employers—and we’ve asked this question several times in our surveys—would say that the right strategy for a young person or a returning person is to zero in on one field and become competent in it, much less to zero in on one set of skills that are a subset of a field, and then hope to make a career or an income-generating set of career choices on that foundation. It won’t work.

I think the right strategy is to focus on where the job market is going broadly. It’s churning out 30 million jobs every year that didn’t exist the previous year. We want to prepare people to succeed in those newly emerging jobs, not to be left in the jobs that are being outsourced or are simply disappearing. It is important to get employers to say that we need people who have portable, adaptable, resilient skills—not people who just know how to do one thing. And we need to rally as a higher education community around a commitment to inclusive excellence and against the stratification of opportunity that we already have in our educational system.

American Student Assistance has a unique window onto students during some very important milestones in their formative financial years. Our nonprofit interacts with students from the time they’re choosing a college, to applying for financial aid and loans, to starting ...]]>

We need to find the teachable moments within the higher education financing and repayment process ...

American Student Assistance has a unique window onto students during some very important milestones in their formative financial years. Our nonprofit interacts with students from the time they’re choosing a college, to applying for financial aid and loans, to starting a first job, getting that first apartment, making that dreaded first student loan payment, and all the way through to successfully paying off their student debt.

Not unexpectedly, we’ve seen a serious lack of financial acumen among student borrowers for quite some time. But now, with outstanding student debt in the U.S. surpassing $1 trillion, student loan delinquency and default on the rise, and the national financial recovery stalling because student borrowers can’t fully participate in the economy, the situation has become dire. Understandably, higher education institutions are stepping up their financial literacy services for students as more and more families weigh affordability and student debt in their college attendance decisions, and alumni cut back on donations.

The traditional methods of financial literacy instruction, though, as practiced by the higher education community, are proving ineffective. Many institutions have ramped up their efforts beyond the traditional one-time entrance and exit interviews (federally mandated debt management sessions for all federal student loan borrowers upon the start and end of their college years) to include multiple financial literacy workshops for their in-school student populations, both in person and online. But studies show that early financial education, however well-intentioned, often fails to have a lasting impact on money management behaviors. Meanwhile, student loan delinquency and defaults continue to grow, despite the preponderance of financial literacy programs available from schools, banks, nonprofits, the government and others.

So where’s the breakdown?

Today, most content for student financial education is rooted in foundational basics that are consistent across service providers, from educators at the secondary and postsecondary level, to third-party vendors specializing in financial education, to lenders and credit-card providers, to government agencies. All of these entities deliver instruction on planning for higher education expenses, employment and income, budgeting, student loans, credit and debt management, savings and investing. It’s not that we have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to financial literacy curriculums; it’s that we have to reinvent the way we engage students to use that wheel effectively.

That’s what ASA learned in experiments conducted over the past decade to prove that proactive education about debt management can positively change student borrowers’ repayment behavior. While our research shows conclusively that hands-on, practical communication prevents problems with loan repayment (out of the more than 1 million student loan borrowers we serve, 94% have loans in good standing), our key takeaway has been that we must deliver the right information, at the exact right time, in the right format and using the right vehicle.

For example, at ASA, we knew that students who withdraw early from college without graduating are at the highest risk for defaulting on their loans. We developed a series of communications with the right information for this population: reaffirmation that the debt must still be repaid, when repayment was set to begin, available payment plans, options to postpone payment, and the benefits of returning to school to earn a degree or certificate. To get the timing just right, we made special arrangements with our partner colleges to be notified as soon as possible after a student borrower withdrew. Typically, we would have to wait for status updates from the National Student Loan Data System to learn that a borrower had dropped out—a process that could take months.

Reaching these borrowers could be a challenge, as they could have moved to a new residence and/or changed email providers since their time in school. So we used a variety of different formats and vehicles for our communications, from snail mail letters to phone calls to emails to online information, to deliver the information how and where borrowers were most open to receiving it.

Any conversation about financial literacy instruction, then, needs to examine not just what’s taught, but by whom and when. For starters, we need to acknowledge that financial education should be a lifelong learning experience, not a one-and-done event. There’s been a push in recent years, mostly at the local state level, to move financial education ever earlier in the life of a student, to instill financial capability at a younger age and thereby prevent student loan over-borrowing, credit card mismanagement and the like. Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia, all require a standalone personal finance course be taught at the high school level, while Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and West Virginia mandate personal finance education as part of another high school course offering.

Starting this type of training in high school and even middle school is a welcome initiative, but there needs to be an equally strong commitment to providing financial education to students once they become adults. As with so many subjects, financial education is best absorbed and retained when it can be put to use immediately to positively impact the learner’s situation. We tend to forget what we never use (do you remember anything from your high school trigonometry class?). So while teaching a sixth-grader how to build a budget is a noble cause, we must remind this same student of the information and reinforce good budget behavior when it comes time for her to strike out on her own.

The rush to integrate financial literacy into the classroom setting stems from our antiquated notion of what “education” looks like. Financial literacy for college-goers is most often associated with pedagogy, which is the art and science of helping children learn. But andragogy, or adult learning, offers a better model for today’s student loan borrowers. After all, the majority of college students nowadays are adults far outside the traditional college age range of 18 to 22. Many are part-time and may be struggling with other financial obligations.

It’s also illogical to constrict financial literacy training to the in-school period, when recent reports by the Federal Reserve and Consumer Finance Protection Bureau suggest as many as 30% of student loan borrowers in repayment are struggling financially and need debt-management training just as much as incoming freshmen. These individuals don’t need financial literacy theory; they need practical advice and hands-on to do lists they can implement immediately. In short, they need to learn by doing.

Learning from real life

But pedagogy presents a challenge to this type of experiential learning, which, research suggests, offers the greatest potential to fundamentally change an individual’s behavior. While a pedagogical model in the classroom may include experiential learning, it cannot accommodate the time in between lesson and real-life experience, meaning there is often not enough time for the user to put what she’s learned into practice.

That isn’t to say there’s no place for pedagogy in financial literacy. Particularly at the high school and college level, the pedagogically based curriculum has a role to play in giving students a solid foundation in the key concepts, principles and technological tools that are fundamental to being smart about money. An advantage of this systematic approach is that we can teach many students at the same time, in the same place and at the same pace, thereby enforcing that students learn equally. Results measurement is made easier since you can track and compare learning outcomes across one group of participants.

But a drawback of this teaching method is a lack of self-motivation for the learner; often, she is participating in the learning because of an external force and is never required to re-engage with the material after the class ends. For example, many schools mandate their students participate in financial literacy seminars or courses, and all federal student loan borrowers are required to complete entrance and exit counseling upon starting and ending their college careers. These efforts are well-intentioned, but they’re not well-timed or well-matched to the learner’s real-life situation and therefore fall short. In the case of exit counseling, we’re asking students to retain information about loan repayment options six months before the first payment due date–that’s a lifetime for a recent graduate who needs to find employment and housing before even thinking about loan payback.

In contrast to pedagogy, andragogy is geared toward the adult learner who 1) is self-directed; 2) learns by building upon an existing base of information; 3) is motivated to learn in ways that are relevant to his or her life experience; and 4) is interested in learning that addresses and solves problems with real-world application and relevancy.

Andragogical research suggests that a traditional content-based curriculum is ineffective in enabling all students to fundamentally understand and retain key concepts in financial education. Financial education, then, is best served by an approach grounded in “adult learning theory” that utilizes best practices associated with social networking and sustainable behavioral change.

In the Adult Learning Theory model, users choose to engage at critical decision points in their own lives and direct the learning experience. With their varying levels of financial competency, adult learners take time to absorb the information and practice it multiple times, repeating topics as necessary. They take their own path through the material at their own pace. Additionally, financial education for the adult learner must be customized in order to be the most effective. The financial literacy provider must be equipped to engage the individual user on her own terms and supply her with personalized on-demand content that not only satisfies her immediate request but also anticipates her other needs.

For example, a college graduate who hasn’t yet found employment may visit a financial education provider’s website to learn what she should do about her student-loan payment. While there, she should be able to easily find information on payment options, but she should also be directed to additional useful content on careers, interview skills and making ends meet during unemployment. Today’s financial literacy provider must acknowledge that financial decisions are rarely made in a vacuum; work, earnings, debt, savings and expenses are all intertwined. Financial education must strive to meet the learner's needs, those both explicitly stated and implied.

Financial literacy must also be delivered in multiple content formats (videos, interactive games, online chats, podcasts, articles, etc.) to satisfy different learning styles. For example, some people may best learn about saving up for a big purchase by reading a static webpage. Others better learn visually or aurally, so they benefit from watching a video or listening to two people talking about how to save for a large-ticket item. Still others will need hands-on experience through an interactive tool where they can enter their own specific spending and saving goals. We must provide users with content they need in a format they want–and we must go to them where they are. By taking advantage of all the technological advances in communication today, we can engage the learners on their PCs, tablets, mobiles, etc., while still offering the personal human touch of a phone call or old-fashioned snail mail when appropriate.

The marriage of technology and financial literacy brings greater integration of social networking into program offerings. Peer-to-peer online communities and discussion groups offer users a way to share information, common questions, ideas and advice, thereby allowing users to pass along what they have learned and gain a fuller mastery of the subject matter.

Where the Adult Learning Theory model presents a challenge is in the measurement of educational effectiveness, because users navigate the program at their own pace and self-select program entry and exit points. Under a traditional pedagogical financial literacy curriculum, we can ask about users' behavior and financial attitudes before engaging with the class. Then, we can require them to take a final test and gauge their satisfaction, behavior change and confidence regarding the material taught.

Leveling with adults

With adult learners, though, we cannot mandate excessive testing because users will choose not to engage. Instead, we must take a more sophisticated phased approach to metrics that can provide insights on four different levels. In Level One, we track participation: how often do individuals use and engage with the program, by measuring number of registrations or content consumption via site statistical tracking.

In Level Two, we measure how satisfied users were with the engagement, through surveys, user referrals and their engagement in the community such as via online communities.

Level Three is about learning; through testing, surveys and polls, we measure their retention of the subject material, their confidence in their new knowledge and any relevant behavior changes. For example, ASA’s financial education program, SALT, launched a mobile app, Fixx, that shows how cutting back on small purchases can save big money. We gave Fixx users pre- and post-surveys to gauge self-reported behavior changes; 61% reported a decrease in small expenditures.

Another way we can measure outcomes for adult learners is to observe their behavior in online discussion communities. Research shows that if users are feeling confident in their knowledge and understanding of financial topics, they are more likely to engage in conversation openly with experts and even peers.

Finally, in Level Four, we look to see if they walk the walk as well as talk the talk. We must confirm whether or not users' financial behaviors change for the better, such as through improved credit report scores or bringing more of their debt into good standing.

To best develop financial capabilities, we should be looking to new educational models that incorporate highly interactive online educational environments and adult learning methodologies. We need to find the teachable moments within the higher education financing and repayment process, and give learners the opportunity to absorb information through these experiential situations; reinforce these teachable moments with practical tools; and give learners the opportunity to share ideas and experiences in a community of their friends and peers.

Alisa Wilke is managing director of product development for American Student Assistance, the nonprofit creator of the financial education program SALT (saltmoney.org).

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Cashing chips at Dartmouth? Dartmouth College did not need the round of controversial headlines that were about to come its way nor the cascade that was surely to follow. Only weeks in office as president, Philip Hanlon found his ...]]>

An expert on the college presidency weighs on on challenges facing presidents at Dartmouth and NYU ...

Cashing chips at Dartmouth? Dartmouth College did not need the round of controversial headlines that were about to come its way nor the cascade that was surely to follow. Only weeks in office as president, Philip Hanlon found his back to the wall. What had happened and so early on his watch? A quickly brewing storm was gathering as a result of the college’s recent appointment as dean of the Tucker Foundation of a high-profile African bishop who until a very recent apparent change of heart, held highly public views not only failing to condemn but arguably no doubt condoning his home nation of Malawi’s criminalization of homosexuality.

Hanlon had very little choice confronted as he was with a looming disaster. Smartly, though having to cash in a lot of chips early in his presidency, he quickly moved to pull the plug on a failed senior administrative appointment. The historically esteemed Tucker Foundation where chaplains, religious life and community service leaders are to guide the “moral and spiritual” life of the whole of the Dartmouth community was going to have as its leader a man with hefty moral and spiritual baggage. Something had to be done.

Hanlon and Dartmouth confronted the reality that it would be nearly impossible for this imported bishop, James Tengatenga to have the stature required of the foundation’s mission let alone Dartmouth’s grander principles of decency, equity and fairness. Given his strong, outspoken negative opinions about gays and lesbians, notwithstanding Tengatenga’s recent protestations of a change of heart, it is impossible to fathom how he could fulfill the role of dean. Needless to say, it is unbelievably puzzling that his appointment got this far along the chain of a search process and formal offer to serve Dartmouth in such a position of religious, moral and spiritual leadership. But indeed, he was about to assume his office.

Freshly minted college presidents, as any new leaders, have honeymoons of indefinite duration. There is a pile of chips at the ready on their desks to be played in the face of inevitable crises and problems. Hanlon acted decisively. Some may applaud the courage of his stand, ready and willing to extend his honeymoon. He has expended chips, but they may turn out to be well spent.

However, Hanlon’s honeymoon could be significantly abbreviated if the wolves decrying political correctness come to the Hanover Plain to condemn his rescinding of the bishop’s appointment. They may say, “Here you go again,” now in the form of presidential action at a college marked over three decades as the epicenter of collegiate ideological battles fought over race, women’s, gay and lesbian and other minority rights and agendas.

But Hanlon cannot be worried about how his staunchest allies and his sternest critics will line up in degrees of support and condemnation. He had to act and he had to act then.

What would this appointment have looked like if it had gone forward? Tengatenga could have tried to remain silent about gays and homosexuality, taking a when in Rome do as the Romans do approach. He could have argued for his recent change of heart. But he still would have been rightly hounded to speak out about whether his new rhetoric was simply a guise to cover long believed and argued assertions for which he is so noted in his home country and in his church community there. He is certainly entitled to believe what he believes, to feel what he feels. But the extent to which he is entitled to do this anywhere, with any audience is the question. Certainly, he is free to return to Malawi and preach to his heart’s desire in favaor of criminalization of homosexuality—or against it, if that is his new position.

The problem for Dartmouth and Hanlon was that they could not have a leader with a questionable, even if more recently mixed batch of assertions about gays and lesbians in their community. If he remained, everything that the college asserts that it stands for would be continually hoisted on a petard as nothing more than mere hypocrisy.

Dartmouth may well be assailed for being politically correct as a result of Hanlon’s decisive action. There will be those who will cloak their criticism of the president’s stand as an infringement of the bishop’s academic freedom. There will be de rigueur allegations that Dartmouth is a bastion of ultra-liberal, progressive intolerance. This despite the counter dose of political incorrectness created by the Dartmouth Review, the independent rightwing campus newspaper that for decades has sought to instill in the public mind an alternate caricature of the college. But the notable reality is that Hanlon has exhibited courageous leadership, cutting is teeth as a new president in a state of affairs that had to be confronted. In the face of those who react by condemning him as a high priest of political correctness, Hanlon can justly wear the outlandish allegations as a badge of honor.

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Sexton under siege at NYU. While Hanlon confronted presidential challenges at the very outset of his tenure, John Sexton was deep into his time at New York University when he was forced to grapple with faculty upheaval.

Sexton was in the middle of the transition as president New York University (NYU) from appointment to inauguration when the September 11^th 2001 attacks rained a horror and debris over the university. There could be no more inauspicious moment to start a university presidency. Over a decade later and in his 12th year in office, Sexton confronts a rising tide of rancor from his faculty and its vote of no confidence in his leadership. What is to become of Sexton’s presidency? Have his grand, some argue overreaching, visions for NYU created a wake so large that the community can no longer follow his lead?

Sexton’s personal style is impossible to miss for anyone who meets him or even follows his life and career from afar. He can be summed up in a word: passion. He is passionate about life, about NYU, about the academy, about teaching and learning, and when he meets you, about you. He is a fascinatingly high-energy, enthusiastic and epic figure. The tales of his way of doing a presidency are legion. He teaches a remarkable load for a college president, in most semesters between one to three courses. There are other college presidents who teach but not to this degree. Sexton holds open office hours and town meetings on the campus with students and faculty. He dedicates many Saturdays to morning and afternoon sessions meeting individually and in groups with professors about their research, about the issues and problems they confront in teaching, and about who they are as people.

However, despite Sexton’s passion and dedication, yet maybe because of it, all is not well at NYU. If Sexton once looked like he brought about Camelot, harsh reactions from constituents rubbed the wrong way now cast a shadow on Sexton’s future. His plans for the university have always been grand, to his critics, grandiose. The result is a severe test of Sexton’s leadership; fearful faculty arguing that NYU’s over-the-top plans are fashioned by the grandiosity of its president.

The foremost contention is “Framework 2031,” a two-decade plan unveiled five years ago that sets the university’s future sails and now moves into its construction stage. It calls for a gigantic expansion of NYU’s footprint in its already-cramped confines in Greenwich Village that would spread even further to surrounding parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn. This shape-shifting strategy already includes Sexton’s highly touted launch of not a mere satellite campus, but truly NYU in Abu Dhabi. To underscore his personal commitment to this venture and how much this piece of Middle East desert no different than NYU in Washington Park, Sexton flies there regularly to lead, to meet, to greet, and to teach courses. But this too only confirms his critics’ contention that he and the university are spread way beyond reality.

Represented by enough of its leaders to create a fuss, NYU faculty have heaved their bodies in Sexton’s path saying, “enough is enough.” The result: a no confidence vote by a large but not overwhelming majority. The hugger-in-chief, the open and engaging Sexton is now viewed as arrogant, detached at least from faculty interests, a CEO having to tolerate his minions, mounding up too many frequent-flyer miles. But in their actions, ironies pile on ironies. Throughout the landscape of our colleges and universities many, joined no doubt by significant numbers of NYU faculty, mourn the passing of the colossal college president of old. “Why can’t we have leaders like that?” is the all-too-frequent cry. We need activist presidents in- and outside the gates of the campus to move us, move our colleges to ever-greater heights and visibility, move our hearts, speak out in the public square.

Ironically John Sexton is one of those titanic figures. Of course, beware what you wish for. When we confront a contemporary giant, especially up close as the leader of our university, then we don’t want them. However, Sexton can take cold comfort because many of these larger-than-life presidents of yore—Nicholas Butler at Columbia, James Conant at Harvard, Robert Hutchins at Chicago--swooned over in many quarters today, were frequently reviled in their day.

Sexton too is a force to be reckoned, a 21st century university president who embraces the classical ideals of the academy, is willing to fight to preserve its best interests and principles and embraces the bully pulpit. He has relentlessly criticized political correctness. He insists on a university that can stand for the social and cultural discourse that we must have in a democracy. He decries the shouting inanities of the masses at the gates and on cable television, not to mention among our elected leaders. And he wants to be remembered as the president who built the NYU of today into what it will be in the future. That is a leader with large visions and intent on generating a legacy.

Sexton is a giant. Maybe with sufficient giant-killers around his feet, he will be brought down. However here the NYU faculty must be careful about what they wish for. They could be left with a much lesser light as Sexton’s successor.

Stephen J. Nelson is associate professor of educational leadership at Bridgewater State University and senior scholar with the Leadership Alliance at Brown University. His most recent book is Decades of Chaos and Revolution: Showdowns for College Presidents. A new work, College Presidents Reflect: Life In and Out of the Ivory Tower, will be released later this year