The business of higher ed – for faculty

Faculty tend to shy away from the business aspects of higher education. Perhaps this is because business logic and business reasons have been used from time to time to justify change antithetical to what the faculty member believes is best for higher education. On their side, people who make decisions about higher education based on business realities don’t always take the time to differentiate whether faculty resistance is due to a selfish desire to preserve the status quo, or due to a desire to preserve the classic functions of higher education: to preserve and disseminate knowledge.

However, in the Catalyst Boot Camp we always spent significant time discussing societal pressures on faculty to change, and specifically how technology is positioned to such discussions. Because at least some faculty have very negative opinions about technology in teaching because it has been so often put forward as a way to meet the business interests of higher education, namely, teaching larger classes with fewer faculty, or serving more students, or helping students to learn more and retain what they’ve learned better.

Behind these goals there are broader ones: to reduce the cost of higher education, and still give more people access to it, and to ensure that they are successful at it.

And then behind these goals are some even more fundamental assumptions, and you have to go all the way back to these base assumptions to begin to address the divide between faculty goals, and the drivers of the business of higher education. Because many faculty come to education with the assumption that education is a public good. Public higher education, at least, was founded in this country at least partly to educate voters. The assumption, in this fledgling kingless democracy, was that people (at least a small subset of people) could run the country by voting if they knew enough to understand and decide the issues for the greater good. Education therefore aided democracy by educating voters, as well as (classically) creating, preserving, and disseminating knowledge for the benefit of society.

Over the past thirty or forty years, however, the public’s opinion on what higher education is for has diverged from this. State and federal governments have cut financial support for education, and the voting population has pushed for it or at least allowed it, because public opinion now is that education is a private good. A college education is expected to provide a college graduate with measurably higher lifetime earnings, as well as various types of opportunities that tend to lead to career success. Parents want those things for their children, and they focus on them; that is part of the reason they are framed as they are in political campaigns. Perhaps it is related to this forty year period of declines in real wealth for American families; perhaps it has always been this way. But parents have focused on their children’s ability to earn a living, pretty much to the exclusion of other concerns.

Certainly there are parents out there who want to raise their children to be educated voters; there are also parents out there who want their children to live “the examined life”, a life of purpose and fulfillment that they believe only comes through education. But primarily and overwhelmingly, parents want their children to be able to earn a living. Education is perceived therefore to be a private good, for the benefit of the individual child.

At the same time, costs have gone up astronomically for that same college education. Partly because of the lack of state and federal funding, but obviously not solely because of that, the cost of higher education has risen in the United States faster than the cost of a car, or even health care. In Boot Camp, we don’t have time for the valuable pertinent debate about why those costs are going up. I don’t think anyone can successfully argue that the costs haven’t gone up.

So should this “business concern” affect the average faculty member’s class? I would argue that whether or not it should, it does. Because if the student or the family shouldering the significant financial burden of a college education doesn’t perceive that their goals are being met, that disaffection, that disenchantment, will come back to haunt higher education, if not one’s own institution. That student might well not just drop the class, but ultimately might withdraw from the institution. Even if that doesn’t happen, however, the student who graduates and still feels that his or her goals were not met, may well become the voter who continues to support federal and state cuts in higher education.

Far from advocating grade inflation and edutainment, instead I recommend closing this communication gap.

At least some of the college graduates who are now pushing for change in higher education are disillusioned with the college education they themselves had. They never understood why their education was conducted the way that it was. The connection between their goals and our goals as faculty was never elucidated.

Certainly now, higher education has upon it the burden of proof. But does that mean that the average faculty member can leave public education about education to their presidents and go on about his or her business as usual?

I’m not sure that we can or that we should. I have noticed that any group enterprise goes better when everyone understands why they’ve been brought to the table and why they’re being asked for the contribution that’s being asked of them, and ultimately, on a good day, it really goes well if everyone at the table agrees on what they’re trying to achieve.

We often do convey our expectations to our students about what they are to accomplish with a particular assignment. Why not convey our expectations to them about what they should take out of the class, indeed, out of the major and the degree in general?

It’s too broad, and you’re not talking about technology any more, I hear you say. Well, I’m just talking about my own classroom, but I frame the activity of the class this way:

I believe that one of the primary goals of education is to produce informed, practical, humane voters. This is easy to connect to my field, which is global media studies. I ask the students to synthesize information into their own analyses, which should be practice runs at being informed, practical, humane voters. In my field, there are direct applications. Should an artist be able to make a living solely from creating art? What should the role of government be in subsidizing media, or alternatively, allowing media to exist or to be distributed? How do corporate concerns and governmental concerns intersect with the goals of the artist and with each other when it comes to media production and distribution? These are just some of the basic questions my class investigates, but they are ones I can connect directly to public issues that are not at all hypothetical.

I want my students not just to be able to read international media intelligently, with an eye toward global history and cultural factors; I want my students to understand the economic and political implications of that international media’s production and distribution. If your class isn’t a global media class, it probably doesn’t have exactly these same goals. But there is probably some aspect of what you teach that you teach because you want your students to understand it more broadly and for the rest of their life.

Even an introductory science class that usually exists to serve as the foundation for upper level science classes – with or without the stated goal that the student eventually become a bench scientist – has goals of broader scientific understanding, a reliance on the scientific method, that need to be elucidated for students who didn’t come in for that. Basic writing courses prepare students to communicate lucidly and effectively in their jobs (and personal lives – critical in an era of internet dating!) as well as in their upper level courses. Introductory language courses lay the foundation for understanding not just a language, but a global world. I don’t think that there exists an academic field in which the faculty don’t have opinions about how their work serves or benefits the world. Our students don’t automatically absorb our goals, if they ever did. We need to spell them out.

Okay, you may think, goals goals goals, but what about this technology stuff?

There are many ways in which technology can help close the gap between what our students expect and what we’re trying to achive, and many reasons to use it to do so.

First and always foremost, technology is the basic tool for every human interaction our students have. What does it say about education if we conduct it entirely without technology? It’s fine to take a stand against the modern world’s reliance on technology-assisted communication. But we have to realize that to our students, it looks like a repudiation of the modern world, end of statement. We are not medieval monks in caves, nor do most of us want to appear to our students like medieval monks in caves.

Fortunately this ship has sailed. 80% (probably more by now) of faculty use some form of social media in their teaching. Not only does this show students that we do know that it’s the 21st century, it models good uses of social media for them, and hopefully helps them learn how to evaluate or engage in such communication once they graduate. So, fantastic. Students need to know that learning is related to life, not divorced from it, and at least the appearance of modernity helps; if it doesn’t always engage them, at the very least it doesn’t alienate them.

If you look, however, you’ll see that many communication tools used in the classroom are still passive for the student. They’re asked to watch YouTube videos, listen to podcasts, or even read blogs. Preparing them to engage in the world requires their active participation. Students need to make YouTube videos, podcasts, or blogs. They don’t need to do it as some sort of job training; they need to do it because they’re communication modalities that will be with them for the rest of their lives and because communicating lucidly and effectively in any modality is a critical skill for a competent, compassionate, sensible voter (or senator!) as much as it is for valuable employee.

In fact, one of the reasons colleges and universities are often pushed to adopt technology is because so much of the higher education experience is still very passive, and yet there is such a great need for our students to be active. Whether they are voters or employees (or even just participants in dating sites), if no one creates anything, even just a connection, very little will happen. And in life, unlike on Facebook, participation and creation often calls for more than just pressing the Like button.

So our students need to learn by making, reading, finding, and doing and we can use technology to facilitate this. The model of teacher-talk, students-listen served particular institutional requirements in its day, but technology actually can help us break out of that model. It doesn’t have to do so in a way that’s antithetical to our goals. It can be made to serve us.

So automatically graded quizzes, for instance, can be used to enroll tens of thousands of people in a course with one instructor; or they can be used to help one instructor with thirty students identify who’s not keeping up, when a particular topic needs to be reviewed, or even just to ensure that everyone does the reading homework for what is otherwise a very traditional class. (This is an artificial dialectic, of course. They can also be used to help a student see when she’s at risk of failure, and help an advising professional route the student to tutoring, which can be positive or negative or neutral from the faculty member’s point of view. I’m just trying to explore these tools from the faculty’s point of view.)

Video recordings can replace teachers by replacing lecturers; or they can be used to give students anywhere-anytime ability to review tough material, practice composing in a new form, or the chance to tackle material in a different format for those students who learn best aurally.

Learning management systems like Blackboard can be used to deliver the most rigid, listen-and-regurgitate course for classes small or very large; or it can be used (though it is not built for this and needs to be pushed and pulled to make it do this) to facilitate student-to-student learning interactions, the formation of learning communities, and a class that is literally going on all the time, everywhere.

Cell phones, by the way, can be used by students to escape class (by checking Facebook under the table) or engage in class (by recording their own interviews or presentations, participating in polls using clicker software,  or by forming a class community on Twitter or Facebook – much of which happens outside the classroom but which, if used, greatly reduces the incidence of phone use inside the classroom).

Technology is neutral; technology is a tool. If faculty feel their interests are opposed to the business interests of others, or the interests of the students, the difference in attitudes that groups express about technology is a symptom of that opposition, not the cause. More than possibly ever before, faculty need to understand and, I believe, engage in dialogue with others about the differences between their goals for higher education and society’s.

Rather than rejecting technology per se, I hope faculty elucidate to themselves and with their students the goals for their classes and why those results don’t need or can’t be aided by technology. That is, check into the question and address it, rather than just avoiding it. The gap between what we’re trying to do and what students are trying to do is too big and the business needs are frankly too great for us to ignore how technology is being used as a bludgeon in arguments that aren’t really being addressed.

I personally believe that the gap in expectations can be closed, if it’s identified and addressed openly. I even think it’s good for us as faculty to do this, as too often we can lose sight of our educational goals. It’s incredibly difficult to change a teaching methodology that has been successful for us into something that may be less successful for a while. We can’t expect good students to lead us to this, as they have been very successful in traditional classrooms and don’t want us to change, even as they may still be disillusioned about their “purchase” of higher education because their goals were different from ours’. We can’t therefore entirely adopt a seller/buyer relationship with students, either, because for the most part, what we’re selling isn’t what they’re buying.

We can explain, though, what we’re trying to achieve with our class and – this is the part that’s new – ask our students what their goals are, and then try to get them to dovetail. It isn’t enough to bemoan that students just want a credential to get a job. Some of them have families who have literally gone into a lifetime of debt to get them the college education they believe is a necessary requirement to get that job, and to deny that reality is not helpful. (Note data provided in Elizabeth Warren’s Jefferson Memorial Lecture at UC Berkeley from 2007 [uploaded Jan. 2008], right around minute 44, where she quotes from Gallup polls in 2002 that indicate that twice as many Americans believed that the moon landing was faked, than believed that you could make it into the middle class without a college diploma.) Students and their families are blaming us for the costs of higher education and students’ failures to parlay those educations into jobs. Understanding those concerns and trying to bridge that expectation gap can only help the cause of higher education.