Category: higher education

Today in collegiate dystopia: when the metric is mistaken for the goal

February 10, 2022 • 9:30 am

by GREG MAYER

[This is a long post. Although focused on Wisconsin and my campus of the University of Wisconsin in particular, I think the issues are general ones in higher education. Here’s the TLDR: Higher education administrators, responding to the demands placed upon them by government and industry, have fixated on a flawed measure of educational success–the six-year graduation rate. They will use any means necessary to increase that metric. In doing so they have mistaken cause and effect, and are devaluing the credentials which they seek so ardently to award.]

The neoliberal consensus in higher education, endorsed in America by Democrats and Republicans alike, holds that higher education is, in its essence, a monetary transaction involving students and the university. The two parties differ only over a question that has become a perennial debate in higher education circles: are students the customers of higher education, or are they the product? Democrats contend that students are customers buying job training, and that the purpose of higher education is to get the populace good jobs; Republicans view students as products to be ordered and purchased by industry, so that the role of higher education is to discern the needs of industry and to train workers to fulfill these needs.

University administrators have embraced the consensus with enthusiasm, and have striven to remold their institutions so as to further its aims. Whether their keenness arises from conviction or an instinct for self-preservation is debatable, but the effects are indisputable.

However, in seeking to please their financial masters, university administrators have fallen into a familiar trap: they have mistaken a metric for the goal.

The metric they are in thrall to is the six-year graduation rate. This metric is used by both government and private agencies as the single best measure by which to evaluate an institution of higher education. Administrators thus have their eyes set firmly on raising their institution’s six-year graduation rate, and anything that would interfere with that–say, graduation requirements— are barriers to “student success” that must be overcome.

A recent report by the National Student Clearinghouse on six-year graduation rates for the incoming class of 2014 has found that Wisconsin is doing well by this measure. (That this group is a card-carrying member of the neoliberal consensus is announced on their homepage: they “Serve the K-20 to Workforce Continuum”.)  [Click on all screenshots to access the links.]My campus, the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, however, had the lowest six-year graduation rate of any campus in the University of Wisconsin system.Asked for comment on this, the administration said that graduation rates had improved a lot (they had), that raising them further was the university’s top priority (seems as if it is), and that student “demographics” explained it (I don’t know about that).

What’s the matter with six-year graduation rates? Traditionally, in the jargon of higher education, graduation rate is regarded as an “input measure”, rather than an “output measure”; that is, it measures the selectivity of the admissions process, and not the “value added” by the education within the institution. To use an analogy, if you bring your Ferrari to a car wash, it’s going to come out looking pretty good, no matter how indifferent the quality of the wash.

There are other problems with the six-year graduation rate–as usually defined, it misses incoming transfer students who successfully graduate, and students who transfer out and finish elsewhere– but these bugs could be remedied without addressing the fundamental drawback.

What leads to high six-year graduation rates? High graduation rates are characteristic of schools such as the Ivies, state flagship schools, and the service academies. You thus might be tempted to believe that since “good” schools have high graduation rates, then raising the graduation rate will make a school better. But that’s mistaking a correlation for a cause. High graduation rates are the result of 1. selective admissions, and 2. large input of resources. But public branch campuses (like mine) and most private colleges cannot be very selective in their admissions, nor can they command the necessary resources.

Why does UW-Parkside have the lowest six-year graduation rate in the UW System? I don’t know why it’s that way now (i.e., for the entering class of 2014). But I do have a strong idea about why it had the lowest graduation rate for the entering class of 2006, because eight years ago there was another kerfluffle about the campus’s low graduation rate. At that time, a local reporter asked me about why that was the case, and I was able to gather some data on graduation rates across the 13 UW System campuses, and show that the major reason was lack of academic preparation of incoming students, as measured by ACT scores. (The ACT, unlike the SAT, attempts to measure achievement rather than aptitude.)

This figure tells the story.

Across the 13 campuses, the average ACT score of the incoming class is a strong predictor of class graduation rate. (For the statistically adept, R² is 78%.) Parkside’s graduation rate is pretty much exactly what you would expect given the ACT scores of its incoming freshmen. The flagship campus (Madison) and Parkside have the highest and lowest graduation rates and ACT scores, respectively, but both fall within the expected relationship. (The only significant departure from the relationship is UW-Superior’s lower than expected graduation rate.) It was Parkside’s mission of providing access to the less well prepared that led to lower graduation rates.

The “demographic” explanation of Parkside’s low graduation rate invokes, among other factors, the presence of a high proportion of what are termed “under-represented minorities”. Parkside did, and does, have the highest proportion of such students in the UW System, but including this variable did not significantly improve the relationship between ACT score and graduation rate.

How can six-year graduation rates be raised? Parkside could perhaps raise its graduation rate by admitting freshmen with higher ACT scores. So why don’t we do this? Because part of our mission is to provide access and opportunity to students who are not as well prepared, due to a variety of educational, social, familial, and personal factors. Some of these students succeed splendidly, and we don’t want to deny them the opportunity to become successful. The City University of New York (and its institutional precursors) provided the opportunity for advancement for the largely immigrant communities of New York City through much of the 20th century, producing some of the great scientists, scholars, artists, and authors of that century. I don’t claim we are incubating a cultural renaissance here, but we hope we are helping another generation and population of students to succeed as individuals and contribute to society.

The flip side of success is failure. You can’t give opportunity to almost everyone, and not have some not make it. You could probably raise the graduation rate some with a massive influx of resources directed toward the least prepared students, but that’s not going to happen. So if you want to maintain opportunity, but also have everyone graduate, you need to redefine what it takes to graduate.

At a meeting on campus a few years ago, I learned that few incoming students needed remedial math classes anymore; formerly a considerable fraction had needed them. Impressed, I asked what accounted for the substantial improvement in mathematics preparation of our incoming students. I was distressed to learn that there was no improvement; “remedial” had been redefined downward. As Freddie deBoer drily wrote about increases in high school graduation rates, “There is no underlying trend in educational data that would suggest that this vast improvement is underwritten by actual student learning gains.”

So what’s the problem? By treating graduation rate as the goal, higher education administrators, government, and industry are mistaking the metric for the goal. The metric can be gamed. Thus, anything that impedes “student success” is a barrier that must be eliminated. They embrace the neoliberal consensus, but eventually their “products” will not be valued by industry. Again as Freddie deBoer put it, “Sooner or Later, Ability Rules“.

Higher education administrators are a fairly nomad class– they move on to other positions at other institutions, and thus do not always reap what they have sown. For government and industry, the attachment to the graduation metric is shortsighted– they are actually driving down the meaning of the degrees and credentials they demand that higher education give out.

What is to be done? Even within the neoliberal ideology there are contradictions that must be resolved. The goal of acquiring skills, whether for the benefit of the student or some eventual employer, is multidimensional, and probably cannot be encapsulated in a few metrics, let alone one. Higher education administrators must learn learn how to investigate causal relations among complex social phenomena, thus being able to distinguish causes, effects, and correlates. (It can be difficult!) Just as high graduation rates are an effect, in part, of selecting already successful students, it is almost certainly the case that good, successful, students take 15 or more credits a semester, and not, as a popular campaign in higher education insists, that taking 15 credits a semester will make a student good and successful. (One manifestation of this campaign– signs sternly warning students that “Time is money”– reminds me, in both a sad and funny way, of Rowdy Roddy Piper’s 1988 classic, “They Live“.) Students are not successful because they graduate; they graduate because they are successful.

I think we need to get rid of the neoliberal consensus. My own view is that the object of the educational system, taken as a whole, is to produce responsible citizens, and that the role of institutions of higher education specifically is the increase and diffusion of knowledge.

At the very time I was contacted eight years ago by the local reporter concerning the 2006 entering class graduation rates, I happened to be working with an excellent  student who was graduating that year– one of my top students, with sterling grades, a phenomenal hard worker, all while raising a child alone. Due to varied and (for our concerns here) unimportant circumstances, at one point in her academic career she moved elsewhere, took a few courses at another school there, and then came back; it took her seven years to complete her degree. By the popular neoliberal metrics of retention and graduation within six years at the same school, she was a double failure. But the reality is almost infinitely far from this: she is, in fact, an outstanding success, and a fine exemplar of my university doing its very best.

Higher education in general, and UW-Parkside in particular, should not– must not– give up on that part of its mission which provides access and opportunity to the less well prepared. But unless our understanding of that mission moves beyond the terms set out by the neoliberal consensus, we are condemned to contradiction, and failure to achieve the goals of that mission.

Today in collegiate dystopia: the triumph of Goodhart’s Law

June 11, 2021 • 9:15 am

by Greg Mayer

In a wide-ranging speech at a conference on academic freedom, Michael Higgins, the President of Ireland, has diagnosed the ills of the university in the western democracies. Unlike Bill Maher, who correctly senses that something is rotten in the state of higher education, but, as Jerry noted, has been unable to come up with a coherent critique, President Higgins hits the nail on the head. He decries the neoliberal consensus on higher education, the “market forces and the inexorable drive towards a utilitarian reductionism that is now so pervasive.”

A prime symptom of what Higgins describes as “the increasingly market orientation of the modern university” is that “student success” has become a term of art among college administrators, a metric to be increased, but which is not closely related to the acquisition of knowledge or skills. Higgins gets this precisely right (emphasis added):

Academic courses are now viewed as economic units whose success is too often judged in terms of arbitrary quantitative outputs of graduates, as opposed to the quality of the courses and the standards of academic excellence achieved by those participating in them.

This is a textbook example of Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure,” or the closely related Campbell’s Law: “[O]nce a metric has been identified as a primary indicator for success, its ability to accurately measure success tends to be compromised.” Since “student success” is defined as “output of graduates”, anything that slows down graduation (such as academic requirements or low grades) is a barrier to success, which must be eliminated. Higgins nails this, too:

The quality of university degrees, too, continues to be a source of great concern, with evidence of grade inflation that, alas, does not reflect improved standards of scholarship, but rather an ongoing slip in examination standards, emanating from pressure, sourced internally and external to the university, to report the achievement of continually higher ‘outputs’.

In a delightfully allusive comment, Higgins suggests that students need to be taught what universities are for:

May I conclude with a very modest proposal that could be easily implemented: teach a module on the nature and role of the university, including the cornerstone of academic freedom, to every incoming university student, raising awareness of the importance of such freedom and the critical, now precarious, position of the university in contemporary society

I commend his proposal, and would add that university leaders should be required to undergo similar training; they, too, seem no longer to know what they are for. As Higgins puts it

[U]niversity provosts, presidents and rectors now often describe and introduce themselves as CEOs of multi-million euro enterprises rather than as academics first and foremost whose main responsibility might be to defend and cultivate the intellectual life of their academic institutions, facilitating an enriching learning environment for staff and students alike.

I don’t know much about Higgins. His office is largely ceremonial, like the Queen’s. He’s had a long career in politics, but he seems to have picked up some academic chops along the way. As I mentioned, the talk is wide-ranging, and I’ve only highlighted a couple of worthy points here; there are many others. The full text of his talk is available here.

h/t Brian Leiter

Thursday: Hili dialogue

April 18, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s Thursday, April 18, 2019. It’s National Animal Cracker Day (do kids still eat those?). I loved them as a kid, biting the heads off the animals first. You can read more about the history of animal crackers here.  And it’s International Day for Monuments and Sites, also known as “World Heritage Day.”

I’ll be busy with various commitments today, so posting may be light.

On this day in 1521, Martin Luther’s trial for heresy began during the Diet of Worms. Refusing to recant his criticisms of the Catholic Church, he was eventually excommunicated. Here’s Pope Leo X’s Papal Bull from 1520 listing Luther’s errors and threatening him with expulsion. You can make out most of the the Latin (I’d never seen a Papal Bull before, a name that has inspired many jokes):

Moving ahead several centuries, it was on this day in 1909 that Joan of Arc was beatified by the Vatican. That’s the first step on the road to sainthood, which Joan achieved in 1920.

On April 18, 1923, Yankee Stadium was opened, and has been called “The House the Ruth Built”, referring to star Babe Ruth, whose best years as a hitter began at that time. (His famous 60-home-run season was in 1927.) And here is a weird one that someone should check: Wikipedia says that on this day in 1930, “The British Broadcasting Corporation announced that “there is no news” in their evening report.” The link says this:

On Easter weekend in 1930 (18 April), this reliance on newspaper wire services left the radio news service with no information to report after saying “There is no news today”. Piano music was played instead.

Only the Beeb would say “there is no news today” rather than “we were not given any news today”!

Finally, it was on April 18 of 1983 that a suicide bomber in Lebanon, driving a van packed with explosives, destroyed the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing 63. It’s considered the beginning of Islamist attacks on U.S. targets.

Notables born on this day include Lucrezia Borgia (1480), Clarence Darrow (1857), Pigmeat Markham (1904), Joy Davidman (1915), Hayley Mills (1946), James Woods (1947), Susan Faludi (1959), Conan O’Brien (1963), and Melissa Joan Hart (1976).

Hayley Mills and her faux twin (in the movie “The Parent Trap”) was one of the first love objects for boys of my generation, along with Annette Funicello. I found this short video describing what happened to her after her fame in Disney movies:

Those who died on this day include Julius Caesar (1636, yes, there was an English one), Erasmus Darwin (1802), Ernie Pyle (1945), Albert Einstein (1955), and Thor Heyerdahl (2002).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili speaks obliquely, and Malgorzata explains:

“Hili just sees too much of the interesting Spring-y world. She can’t process everything. But she thinks that it’s wonderful and she does not mind that there are so many new and interesting things about that she cannot see them all. She is overwhelmed but it’s OK, it’s “cool”.”

Hili: The world has become more interesting.
A: Do you see something?
Hili: I’m overwhelmed, but it’s cool.
In Polish:
Hili: Świat stał się ciekawszy.
Ja: Coś widzisz?
Hili: Wręcz zbyt wiele, ale to fajne.

Several readers sent me this Facebook meme on faith versus fact:

From reader Barry (I may have posted this before). The raccoon is clearly a color mutant:

https://twitter.com/rmayemsinger/status/1118208870336253952

Tweets from Grania. Someday this d*g will be able to handle that ball with ease:

https://twitter.com/DoggoDating/status/1115221750663532544

A tweet from the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office:

A lovely flyby from the ISS. Do you recognize the areas?

https://twitter.com/MichaelGalanin/status/1115432367492038657

That ginger and white moggie has a wicked left hook:

https://twitter.com/MichaelGalanin/status/1115626026174959616

Cats have been used by capitalists to sell goods for a long time. . .

Tweets from Matthew, the first one showing a beautiful weevil:

. . . and some even more beautiful stick insects:

In honor of yesterday’s Bat Appreciation Day, which I forgot:

This is really informative:

Remember the joke: “Go forth and multiply?” “We can’t—we’re adders!”

 

The University of Chicago and William and Mary top list of universities fostering viewpoint diversity; Yale flunks miserably

November 10, 2016 • 11:30 am

The Heterodox Academy, a group of scholars dedicated to maintaining viewpoint diversity as well as freedom of speech on college campuses, has taken the list of America’s top 150 colleges and universities and ranked them according to how well each meets the Academy’s aims of promoting or not suppressing viewpoint diversity. It’s really about whether these schools allow students to speak freely, express unorthodox opinions without demonization, and adhere to the Chicago Principles of Free Speech (see the link below; this is not the letter sent out by the dean to this year’s incoming students.) Here are the Academy’s criteria:

Our guide to colleges helps you evaluate schools on this question by integrating these four sources of information:

  1. Endorsed Chicago: Whether the university has endorsed the Chicago Principles on free expression
  2. FIRE Rating: Whether the school’s speech codes foster or infringe upon free speech. As rated by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
  3. ISI Rating: Is the school a reasonably welcoming place for conservative and libertarian students? Obtained from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) guide to Choosing the Right College. (We presume that open-minded progressive students would prefer not to attend a school at which students who are not on the left feel unwelcome, and are less likely to speak up.)
  4. Relevant Events Since 2014: Events on campus that indicate a commitment by faculty, administration, and/or students to protect or restrict free inquiry and viewpoint diversity. We ignore events that involve just a few students or professors and focus on those indicating broader sentiment, norms, or policy.

And here are the ten best schools for viewpoint diversity, in declining order. The reasons for the rankings can be see at the site. The

  • University of Chicago
  • Purdue University
  • The College of William and Mary
  • Carnegie Mellon University
  • George Mason University
  • Princeton University
  • The University of Florida
  • The University of Maryland at College Park
  • The University of Mississsipi at Oxford
  • The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Three of the schools I was affiliated with are on this list: the University of Chicago, where I am now, William and Mary, where I went to college, and the University of Maryland, where I had my first academic job as an assistant professor.

Here are the bottom ten, with the worst one at the bottom:

  • The University of Tulsa
  • Yale University
  • Brown University
  • Georgetown University
  • Harvard University
  • New York University
  • Northwestern University
  • Rutgers University
  • University of Missouri at Columbia
  • The University of Oregon at Eugene

I went to Harvard for my Ph.D, and have been distressed at its authoritarian and Regressive Leftist tactics, such as handing out “social justice” placemats telling students how to address political and social issues, and President Drew Faust’s punishments levied on students who join single-sex “finals clubs” that have nothing to do with Harvard. It’s sad that so many of the bottom-ranked universities have high academic reputations, but those also tend to be those with the more Left-wing faculty and students who promote victim culture and the demonization of viewpoints different from one’s own.

And speaking of Yale, famous for its Halloween fracas a year ago, which shook up the University, remember Erika Christakis, once a teacher and head of a Yale Residential College, hounded out of office last year by Snowflake Students after she wrote an email urging students to think for themselves about Halloween costumes? On October 28, Christakis wrote a retrospective for the Washington Post called “My Halloween email led to a campus firestorm—and a troubling lesson about self-censorship.” It’s worth reading, especially if you followed the earlier controversy. Here are two excerpts:

The community’s response [to Christakis’s email] seemed, to many outside the Yale bubble, a baffling overreaction. Nearly a thousand students, faculty and deans called for my and my husband’s immediate removal from our jobs and campus home. Some demanded not only apologies for any unintended racial insensitivity (which we gladly offered) but also a complete disavowal of my ideas (which we did not) — as well as advance warning of my appearances in the dining hall so that students accusing me of fostering violence wouldn’t be disturbed by the sight of me.

Not everyone bought this narrative, but few spoke up. And who can blame them? Numerous professors, including those at Yale’s top-rated law school, contacted us personally to say that it was too risky to speak their minds. Others who generously supported us publicly were admonished by colleagues for vouching for our characters. Many students met with us confidentially to describe intimidation and accusations of being a “race traitor” when they deviated from the ascendant campus account that I had grievously injured the community. The Yale Daily News evidently felt obliged to play down key facts in its reporting, including about the two-hour-plus confrontation with a crowd of more than 100 students in which several made verbal and physical threats to my husband while four Yale deans and administrators looked on.

One professor I admire claimed my lone email was so threatening that it unraveled decades of her work supporting students of color. One email. In this unhealthy climate, of which I’ve detailed only a fraction of the episodes, it’s unsurprising that our own attempts at emotional repair fell flat.

. . . I didn’t leave a rewarding job and campus home on a whim. But I lost confidence that I could continue to teach about vulnerable children in an environment where full discussion of certain topics — such as absent fathers — has become almost taboo. It’s never easy to foster dialogue about race, class, gender and culture, but it will only become more difficult for faculty in disciplines concerned with the human condition if universities won’t declare that ideas and feelings aren’t interchangeable. Without more explicit commitment to this principle, students are denied an essential condition for intellectual and moral growth: the ability to practice, and sometimes fail at, the art of thinking out loud.

I don’t know how Trump’s election will affect the anti-free-speech trends on American campuses, but I can’t imagine it getting better, especially because Trump stands for much that these students (and me) are against. But if his victory has enabled or emboldened conservatives to speak out, we are only the better for it if we allow them to do so on campus.

h/t: William L.