From: Edwards, Alan (SCHEV)

Sent: Tuesday, June 09, 2015 12:38 PM

To: Hix, Dan (SCHEV); ExecStaff (SCHEV)

Subject: RE: College is not a commodity. Stop treating it like one. – The Washington Post

Jeff Selingo at WaPo agrees with Tod; it’s colleges’ fault if/that higher ed is seen as a commodity:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/06/16/higher-ed-as-a-commodity-colleges-have-only-themselves-to-blame/?wpisrc=nl_highered&wpmm=1

—–Original Message—–

From: Massa, Tod (SCHEV)

Sent: Tuesday, June 09, 2015 9:56 AM

To: Hix, Dan (SCHEV); ExecStaff (SCHEV)

Subject: RE: College is not a commodity. Stop treating it like one. – The Washington Post

Perhaps if colleges stopped advertising as if it were a commodity things might change. Colleges, and their associations, make the comparison of student debt of graduates to a new car and they have been doing this for years before graduate wage reports were done.  Also, many institutions have used graduate outcomes as selling points for decades, to blame it on governors and legislators is just a bit misleading.

On the AAU website is a link for “Economic Impacts AAU Universities.” I guess it is appropriate to talk about the economic impacts of institutions broadly at the macro level, but not specifically about students on the micro level? I disagree.

Great idealism combined with mixed-messaging is why American higher ed is in trouble. It is not the result of measurement.

Tod R. Massa

Director, Policy Research and Data Warehousing

State Council of Higher Education for Virginia

“Someone Cares for Higher Education in Virginia”

________________________________________

From: Hix, Dan (SCHEV)

Sent: Tuesday, June 09, 2015 9:14 AM

To: ExecStaff (SCHEV)

Subject: College is not a commodity. Stop treating it like one. – The Washington Post

FYI…

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/06/09/college-is-not-a-commodity-stop-treating-it-like-one/?hpid=z11

When I first encountered the term “ablist” I was taken aback. I didn’t like it and felt it was an effort to intentionally create difference and dischord.

I was wrong.

Spending the last year helping my wife navigate life with a variety of mobility devices I continue to be amazed how inaccessible certain places are.

Such as nursing homes.

Just for reference, or as a pro-tip, if you are going to have a kick-off meeting to plan a patient’s rehab, and you  have invited the patient, and you KNOW the patient is is non-ambulatory (after all you have her file in front of you) it seems common sense that the conference room be accessible.

You know:

A clear space at the table for a wheelchair.

A 36″ wide (or greater) pathway to that space.

It seems a no-brainer to me…especially when you have dozens of such patients.

Of course, making the patient rooms easily accessible might be a greater priority. But for goshsakes just do at least one of these things!

At least this place is not the warehouse of death I was afraid it might be. Closer to a fulfillment center, I think.

A friend took great offense at yesterday’s Dilbert strip.

http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-05-11

The idea that someone would turn down a job paying $34,000/year was offensive in that it was “a lot of money.” Of course, the amount of money considered to be “a lot” varies greatly where you live. In the San Francisco Bay area, $34,000/year might not be enough to afford housing. In Joplin, MO it may be enough to live quite comfortably.

In the strip, the job applicant complains he would have to live under a bridge for that salary because he has $200,000 in student loans. Here’s the problem.

I don’t know how much Adams knows about student loans. Maybe he has bought into the hype based on extremes that are reported. Maybe he just doesn’t care because, after all, this is a daily comic strip. But, let’s talk about it anyway because, after all, student debt posts get the most clicks.

Do students actually graduate with this much debt?

Undergraduates? Very, very few. I haven’t seen any quite that high so far. The highest I have seen is about $171,000. Nationwide I am sure there are some, and if so, the debt likely includes private loans.

Graduate students, with degrees or not, rack up this much debt. MDs do on a regular basis.

Should we be concerned or feel bad for this DIlbert character? Certainly not if he is a conscienceless sociopath writing for the New York Times in which case living under a bridge and foraging for food is better than he deserves. All the news fit to print and all the op-eds to line a bird cage. The fact is that if these are all federal loans he probably qualifies for some kind of income-based repayment his payments could be well under $200/month. If these are all private loans, his situation is not good as his payments might well exceed $2000/month.

Life is rough and one really needs to think long and hard about signing on the bottom line. Are the things you have been promised? Or more appropriately, the examples of students that went before you and were successful, just how much like them are you?

For the record, $34k out of college is not bad. It is about the median in unemployment insurance covered jobs for recent college graduates in Virginia. Of course, that means half of graduates earn less than that. This bears repeating since I don’t think a lot of people understand: Half of college graduates earn less than the median wage for college graduates. In fact, half of those graduates earn MUCH less.

Much less.

A college degree is a great investment for a lot of people. But it is not a guarantee of a high-paying job, it is also still up to the individual and a fair amount of luck.

Advice is available though:

We are making progress in the house. All the repairs, reconstruction, and remodeling are done that were necessitated by the failure of the water lines. We’ve gone a bit further, including making the upstairs bathrooms more accessible. Soon we start the project of making the first-floor bathroom accessible.  This has the potential of spiraling out of control. We have at least learned from replumbing the upstairs bathrooms that additional water lines come into play that will have to be moved in order to install a pocket door, and probably even just to widen door to 36 inches. We’ll see what happens. But we can’t/won’t start that project until everything is in place, including a stair lift, to move back upstairs and there are a few things that have to happen first, such as carpeting the stairway. Do things in the wrong order and costs and headaches increase dramatically.

The paragraph above was written some weeks ago. I just was never able to find the time, or voice, to work further on this. Time is precious and it is increasingly difficult take a few minutes to do things that don’t fall into the categories of: for her, work, required, and urgent. Probably it is just as well as I have little to say of real value.

The stair lift we hope will arrive to be installed this week. The timing is close as her knee replacement is a week from today, although she will spend at least a few days in the hospital, and perhaps weeks in a rehab center or nursing facility. Her body is still very week, but she has made incredible efforts to be more active and deal with the pain of walking. The project to make the downstairs bathroom accessible has taken on new dimensions as we have decided on a new approach and offering a different closet as the needed sacrifice. There are a lot of reasons to like this new design. I think.

Gildor: “That Gandalf should be late, does not bode well. But it is said: “Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.” The choice is yours: to go or wait.”

Frodo: “And it is also said, ‘Go not to the elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.'”—The Fellowship of the Ring, ” Three is Company“

I offer free advice to leaders, and those purporting to be, in (or of) higher education.

1) The legislative remedy you receive will most likely not be the one you requested. The result’s semblance to the request is strongly related to the number of people involved. Unfortunately, the direction of the correlation varies based on a multitude of factors. For example, a bill to give greater autonomy is all too likely to end up with greater intrusion than you imagine and much less autonomy than desired.

2) In a similar vein, be careful in your data requests. Such requests to public agencies are often subject to “Sunshine” or Freedom of Information laws, or more importantly, the data provider may wish to treat all institutions fairly and publish the data for everyone. This may not be your intent. It also may not be in your best interests, especially if the data are contrary to your expectations.

3) Unless you are an undergraduate working at three o’clock in the morning to write a research paper at the last moment for an eight a.m. class, research does not consist of running queries to generate cherry-picked data points that support your opinion of a proposal you haven’t actually read. In any event, you should have left that behavior in middle school.

4) Despite their imperfections, movies like Heavy Metal, Hooper, and Speed Racer provide excellent aural and video wallpaper for complex analytics and probably add more value than a weekly cabinet meeting.

5) If you haven’t read enough William Gibson, you probably have no idea how data reveals who you are and what you have done, even when you think the data are not about you.

6) The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act is not the authorizing law for institutional privacy.

7) Every time one of your own suggests that some institutions might intentionally underperform on one measure rather than improve on its companion measure, sad laughter rings out and is muffled in the cubicle farm as another check-mark is made.

8) Any sentence beginning, “You might consider…” is either a direct hint or plot element to allow the (alert) hero to escape in the final scene. It is almost never  just “advice.”

9) If you were offended by the comparison I made here, congratulations on your ability to read for comprehension.

10) If you are wondering how much of this is meant as honest advice instead of snarky sarcasm, I’m sorry that I can’t help you more.

Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he put out on the air. “Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down the gag, the snap ending.”

“Snap ending.” Mildred nodded.

“Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as ten- or twelve- line dictionary resume. I exaggerate of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumor of a title to you, Mrs. Montag), whose sole knowledge, as I say, was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors. ([Or a show called Sons of Anarchy.] Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual for the past five centuries or more.”

Mildred arose and began to move the room, picking things up and putting them down. Beatty  ignored her and continued:

“Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, Uh! Bang! Smack Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!

…

“School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fixing nuts and bolts?”

Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451

I’m not sure what else there is to say. The edtech dream is real, it’s coming, but it is not new. Only the specifics are new, some of which are pretty amazing, but there is risk. We are still in the nursery of edtech, and there are lions in the veldt. And there are tygers. Here.

But the Harlequin was told to repent, and he did. But three minutes were lost.

Friend and colleague Carlo Salerno (@edanalyst) calls for eliminating FAFSA instead of simplifying it. I agree. Let’s do that. Let’s rely solely on the tax return for calculating the Estimated Family Contribution (EFC), Pell grant eligibility, and student loan eligibility. I see no reason for one agency to create and manage a complex form/endeavor with a black box calculation for EFC that relies on data that another agency collects, calculates, holds, and enforces. It is would be more efficient to do things this way, save money, and eliminate  the need for some applications to be verified.

It also eliminates families sending detailed financial information to colleges before they can be told their price.

I have a dog in this fight. I have build a fair amount of reporting based on family income, including graduation rates. For example, we have published for two years now, graduation rates of students from families with incomes of $150,000 and above that pretty much demonstrate that the Pell Institute report that stimulated this blog post by Matt Chingos and Susan Dynarski was wrong on the face of it as the data could only be assumed to be irrelevant if Va was so unrepresentative. In fact, Virginia has just about the highest four-graduation rates of public institutions in the country.

I would be willing to give up access to these income data in pursuit of greater efficiency and less burden.

How would we calculate Pell eligibility?

Perhaps like this:

Pell Value – Total tuition and Fees, plus cost of text books, for most expensive public community college in nation.

0 to 200% of Federal Poverty Level – 100% (No income cut-offs, based on family size, 100% Pell for each family member in college).

EFC = 5% of family income above 150% of poverty level divided by number of family members in college.

201% to 400% of Federal Poverty Level – 50% of Pell for each family member enrolled in college, eligible for 100% of remaining need to covered by subsidized loans covered by PAYE.

EFC = 10% of family income above 150% of poverty level divided by number of family members in college.

I guess I am tired and feeling cranky. Thursday’s InsideHigherEd story from Michael Stratford, U.S. Keeps Scrutiny of Risky Colleges Secret convinces me that USED cares very little about its credibility. Apparently the Department is afraid to release the names of over 500 institutions under funding restrictions and enhanced scrutiny.

“But the department has refused to provide the names of those colleges because of the “competitive injury” it may cause them.“

Really.

And what the hell will happen to institutions receiving the lowest PIRS ratings? Seriously, this makes no sense. Unless they are designing the ratings to give specific institutions the lowest ratings. This would mean they are targeting a specific group of institutions and that the game is rigged. Or that a different group of inmates is in charge of each of these projects. The Department really needs to think about consistency in its behavior and make an appeal to the President to back off PIRS or ask the Wizard of Oz for a backbone and courage. Yeah, I am probably reducing or eliminating the number of invitations I will receive from the Department in the future with this comment, but I am just so disappointed in this kind of inconsistency.

Of course, I am still waiting for Ted Mtichell or someone else from the Department to call me about using state data, but apparently that’s not going to happen. Perhaps because I suggested that our timeline probably would not be as quick as theirs. I’m not sure why that would matter since they haven’t hit any of their promised deadlines yet. (I often have that problem as well, and that is the nice thing about self-imposed deadlines – you can move them at will.)

Published on the same day, also at InsideHigherEd, is this story covering the release of a report from the National Student Clearinghouse showing that nearly half of the graduates with four-year degrees had experiences in community colleges. In fact, 65% of had three or more semesters of enrollment at a community college. Matt Reed writes about this pointing to the disconnect between thjhese data, the IPEDS GRS, and what typically is defined as success or failure for community colleges. Reed makes the further connection between community college transfer to four-year institution and student debt. What he leaves out is the connection to PIRS.

Yes, everything comes back to PIRS.

If PIRS happens and Congress somehow embraces it, it will drive federal data collections and definition of metrics for years to come. For good or ill, the concept paper from Senate HELP Committee suggests how things might be throttled back, but Congress has never been shy about adding things it wants to College Navigator.

We, my wife and I, spent last week in Jacksonville, FL at the Mayo Clinic. I was simply driver and escort. This was her week of attention and an attempt to find answers.

Mayo is an interesting experience. Once they agree to see you and work out the doctors you need to see, and the initial tests you need, they tell you when to show up and how to send your records to them. They also recommend you hand-carry them if things are not scheduled well in advance. Then they send you an itinerary.

When you arrive at the information stand just before registration and check-in, the volunteers print a fresh itinerary for your use. After check-in, you’re off to the first stop on your itinerary. I don’t know how it works with other patients, but in our case our first stop was with a specialist that might be the most knowledgeable of the core of my wife’s least-easily identified issues. We spent almost 90 minutes with this doctor while she took a full history, made an examination, talked about possibilities, ordered tests, and made referrals to other doctors.

She also explained how the system worked and how to make best advantage of our time there.

After the consultation was completed, we returned to the waiting and were asked to standby for a new itinerary. Twenty minutes later we were provided one that included a lab appointment, appointments for that week, and appointments several weeks out. We were then told that some consultations had to be handled in a specific order, which ones were, and then how to talk with schedulers about trying to find openings for the week we were there as well as how to request standby appointments.

Each floor is essentially its own practice and has its own specific rules about standby appointments and scheduling. While this lack of uniformity is frustrating on the surface, I think it makes sense. The amount of time these doctors spend with patients is quite impressive and they do seem much more interested in identifying and solving problems than rushing patients through assembly-line medicine.

Tuesday morning, following an orthopedic consult that brought a great deal of needed clarity, we began a day of sitting patiently in hopes of a consult with a specialist in physical medicine and rehabilitation. By mid-afternoon we learned that the doctor had promised to see us. Just before five we were called and guided to an examination room. For more than an hour my wife was able to tell her story to someone who not only seemed to care, but who believed the reality of her pain and could explain its foundations. This doctor, as they all ended up being, was extraordinarily helpful and exemplified what I think we all wish our doctors to be.

By week’s end we had consulted with eight doctors, visited the lab three times, had three sets of x-rays, one abdominal CT scan, and an ultrasound. Along the way we had access to an online portal that allowed immediate access to her Mayo records, including her doctor’s notes – often the same day of the visit. The Mayo Clinic runs a good operation.

We came away without all the answers we wanted, but we now have greater clarity about what to pursue. Importantly, we also know some things not to do. Previously planned surgeries are now completely off the table. While these surgeries had been suggested to help her, we now know they are ill-advised for someone with her issues. So, something less to worry about over the next couple of years. All of this made the trip worthwhile.

I suppose I should make some comparison to higher education, but I am not sure I can. Colleges, four-year colleges especially those that are predominantly majority-serving, do their best  to admit people who need the least help and are most likely of success. Mayo, and other specialty clinics, do a lot of the opposite. Guess which job is tougher? Certainly there are parallels to minority-serving institutions and community colleges, but I am not sure these institutions are intentional about seeking the most challenging, the most interesting cases. They simply do not turn their backs on them if they do show up.

We still have a long way to go. Of what we have learned, some has been a relief, more is quite scary. I wish I could take this burden from her and carry it myself. It may be though that she is stronger than I as she has been carrying this burden from birth and it has simply gotten worse. My wife has been quite amazing.

“We Shall Overcome” is a protest song. It is, as I have said before, also a love song. It declaration of strength and a commitment to shared strength. It’s a song of love. It’s a protest against injustice and badness.

We shall overcome, we shall overcome,
We shall overcome someday;
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We shall overcome someday.

We’ll walk hand in hand, we’ll walk hand in hand,
We’ll walk hand in hand someday;
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We’ll walk hand in hand someday.

We are not afraid, we are not afraid,
We are not afraid today;
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We are not afraid today.

USED has announced that it is considering two ratings systems for PIRS. One using raw data for consumers for consumers, one using input-adjusted metrics for accountability (access to Title IV student financial aid).

Why not five?

Why not ratings based on wealth-adjusted metrics?

Why not ratings of public institutions based on levels of state-support adjusted measures?

Why not adjustments based on the proximity of Starbuck’s (since that was apparently a factor in Sweet Briar’s closing)?

Clearly I can go on (and on) because once you go down this path there are dozens of legitimate arguments to make. A good ratings “system” would allow different ratings to be created based on the user’s preferences or needs. But to say we will have two ratings will create confusion – especially if the Department is not COMPLETELY transparent in its methodologies and the results of each are markedly different.

I imagine a dining room table conversation where a parent says, “Gee, the this college is rated a poor performer by the consumer rating, but a high performer to be eligible for Pell grants  and loans, so it must be doing something right, even if almost no one seems to graduate in six years.”

Yep. That will be helpful.