Let’s pretend you did some research and wrote a paper that got published. Say also that predicted a stunning shortfall of an expensively and highly educated population of employees. The paper was received well and embraced by most everyone. It became a driver for change.

A mere two or three years later you realized you were wrong. Badly wrong.

Shouldn’t you have told someone?

Read this story about the forecast shortfall of faculty jobs in the humanities. And then read anything by Rebecca Schumann here or at Slate.

I hope that I would have the courage and wherewithal to retract my original work early on. And the apologize. Profusely.

Really don’t mind if you sit this one out.
My words but a whisper your deafness a SHOUT.

I was part of a conversation this week with someone important. Someone who believes in the power of Big Data. Someone who believes in this more than I do. I believe in the power of data and the power of predictive analytics, but power is a two-edged sword that cuts as it is allowed. Power of this type is also dumb, it needs to be guided by intellect for good purpose. And an over-arching intent to first, and always, do no harm.

I was not the only one present in the meeting with this important person. I raised the question, “…while we are talking about training teachers on how to use these tools, will the training include knowing when to ignore the predictions?” I don’t now how my colleagues behind me reacted. I don’t really care.

I may make you feel but I can’t make you think.
Your sperm’s in the gutter your love’s in the sink.
So you ride yourselves over the fields and
you make all your animal deals and
your wise men don’t know how it feels to be thick as a brick.

I really want to live in a world where everyone has an equivalent opportunity to be successful. Not the same opportunity, but equivalent opportunity. Opportunity that recognizes disadvantages, provides an additional boost where needed, and allows for happy accidents.

And the sand-castle virtues are all swept away
in the tidal destruction the moral melee.
The elastic retreat rings the close of play
as the last wave uncovers the newfangled way.

If predictive analytics had been around years ago when I was young, I have no idea what they would have predicted for me. I’m not sure I really want to know as I was not good student. I was not academic. In fact, my original high school plan at Loudoun Valley was vo-tech – I was going to be a printer/press operator. With four-years of vocational agriculture along the way. (I actually only did two years in vo-ag.) The change to a college track midway in high school when I moved to Joplin was a good thing. It was also a good thing a few years later when I became an art major after my sabbatical in the Army.

I’d rather have taken the route I did than another, even if it might have been more efficient or led to greater success.

But your new shoes are worn at the heels
and your suntan does rapidly peel
and your wise men don’t know how it feels
to be thick as a brick.

I would be a lot more comfortable if the advocates of Big Data/Predictive Analytics (BDPA) would limit their talking points and their dreams to just modestly improving student outcomes. Outcomes like increased learning and reduced behavioral problems. They don’t need to promise to eliminate problems, just improve them a bit. I tend to trust teachers enough that I don’t think they need to be told what to do nearly as much as they need to be given the resources and freedom to follow their own intellect and knowledge of their students.

Certainly we can improve on the last bit. But how much do we really need to do? BDPA taken too far, which is not all that far, simply removes the professional and replaces her with a content-delivering automaton. Gee, let’s just go to Disney World!

Spin me back down the years and the days of my youth.
Draw the lace and black curtains and shut out the whole truth.
Spin me down the long ages: let them sing the song.
See there! A son is born and we pronounce him fit to fight.
There are black-heads on his shoulders, and he pees himself in the night.
We’ll make a man of him, put him to trade
teach him to play Monopoly and how to sing in the rain.

Yeah, I know that Pink Floyd would probably be a better understood piece of background music than Jethro Tull, but the day of this conversation I heard “Thick as Brick” at some point and it all came together. The only thing I thought might be better was Harry Chapin’s “Story of a Life” but I was sure it would be misunderstood.

The Poet and the Painter casting shadows on the water
as the sun plays on the infantry returning from the sea.
The do-er and the thinker: no allowance for the other
as the failing light illuminates the mercenary’s creed.
The home fire burning: the kettle almost boiling
but the master of the house is far away.
The horses stamping, their warm breath clouding
in the sharp and frosty morning of the day.
And the poet lifts his pen while the soldier sheaths his sword.
And the youngest of the family is moving with authority.
Building castles by the sea, he dares the tardy tide to wash them all aside.

I spent 10 years as a scout leader. During a span of those years I was involved in totem pole carving and overseeing scouts as they added their own bit of carving. Despite the maxim that a sharp knife (or chisel, or gouge) is safest, invariably a boy would cut himself before I could intervene. Including my son, who managed to cut through thick leather gloves before cutting his leg.

Even the sharpest tools can turn on the user. Especially if the user is neither strong enough or skilled enough to control the tool. Data are like that. They also can turn on the user because they don’t always represent what we think we see.

And sometimes predictions are wrong. The use of algorithms does not eliminate the human element, it merely puts it further away – writing the algorithms.

The cattle quietly grazing at the grass down by the river
where the swelling mountain water moves onward to the sea:
the builder of the castles renews the age-old purpose
and contemplates the milking girl whose offer is his need.
The young men of the household have all gone into service
and are not to be expected for a year.
The innocent young master – thoughts moving ever faster –
has formed the plan to change the man he seems.
And the poet sheaths his pen while the soldier lifts his sword.
And the oldest of the family is moving with authority.
Coming from across the sea, he challenges the son who puts him to the run.

In our search for efficiency and effectiveness in education, do we always need to kill the cat? Maybe he can find his own way out of the box before the timer goes off. I’m uncertain either way.

I’ve got two grandsons in public school. I want them to do well, but not at the risk that everything everyday is mapped out to the smallest degree. Let’s leave room for a little wrongness, a few more mistakes. I learned more from my mistakes than had I not made them. Including failing seventh grade math was I recalled the other day when talking to grandelf #1 about his classes (seventh grade). My mother was not happy as I recall – especially since it had far more to do with laziness and being obstinate than anything else.

So!
Come on ye childhood heroes!
Won’t you rise up from the pages of your comic-books
your super crooks
and show us all the way.
Well! Make your will and testament.
Won’t you? Join your local government.
We’ll have Superman for president
let Robin save the day.

I think I understand both sides of the BDPA debate, at least to some degree. As usual, I think the better answers are somewhere in the middle…probably more towards the traditional model of teaching. Let’s just accept the fact that education is expensive (since that it is at the heart of a lot of these innovations) and understand the most efforts to make education cheaper do little more than cheapen it.

You put your bet on number one and it comes up every time.
The other kids have all backed down and they put you first in line.
And so you finally ask yourself just how big you are
and take your place in a wiser world of bigger motor cars.
And you wonder who to call on.
So! Where the hell was Biggles when you needed him last Saturday?
And where were all the sportsmen who always pulled you though?
They’re all resting down in Cornwall
writing up their memoirs for a paper-back edition
of the Boy Scout Manual.

Remember, the joy is in the trip, not the destination. So also is the learning.

“Call me Mr. Massa.”

These are not the words I said to Ferrum College staff when my son enrolled there on move-in day. No, these were the words I said to my son when we moved up from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts.

“From now on, son, when we are at meetings or on camp-outs, especially camp-outs, I want you to call me ‘Mr. Massa.’ I want you to think of me as just another adult leader so that when things go wrong, you go through the leadership chain. The older boys are in charge of this troop, and we adults are just here to teach and keep things from getting out of control.”

That eleven year-old boy wanted to think I was crazy, but he knew better. The other adults, especially the moms, thought I was kind of harsh. I didn’t care as I wasn’t seeking their approval. Instead I was thinking about what I knew about leadership from the Army and various colleges. I was thinking about raising a boy that knew how to work with others, to some day be in charge, and ultimately, to live his own life.

I think it worked.

Not only do I have immense pride in the man he is at 23, I can’t imagine having a better, mutually respectful relationship with him.

It is also just too much work to be a helicopter parent. One of the constant lessons of our scout troop was responsibility for self. Each boy is responsible for his body (fitness), his gear, his responsibility to the patrol (such shared and assigned tasks), and his responsibility to the troop. It becomes much easier to send them off to college knowing that he’s learned that if he doesn’t make arrangements for food (bringing the meal(s) he is responsible for, getting to the cafeteria on time, managing a budget) that he doesn’t eat. And more importantly, both the parent and the boy learn that missing a meal won’t kill him. Other lessons are equally important.

“You said your hands are cold, did you bring gloves?” “No, I forgot them.” “Well, I hope you did not forget your extra pair of socks so you can put those on your hands.”

(Of course, in severe conditions, we always had extras. )

A few years later it becomes so much easier on the first day of class to say goodbye. Or, at the time the college is trying to split families from students to guide the families to the chapel for a final breaking away, to say, “Okay dude, your mother and I are done here. We are going to lunch. This is all your responsibility now. See you in a few weeks, give your mom a hug.”

Or months later: “Excuse me? You got busted for a keg party with the rest of the baseball team? Behind the president’s house?”

“uh-huh.”

Laughter. “You’re on your own, dude. Don’t do it again.”

It is much easier to laugh than making calls or driving to campus to interfere.

Two years later. Angry phone call. “My buddies and I were all set to move into the apartment we want, but they told me I don’t have enough credits to be a junior because I failed that religion course second semester.”

“Life’s tough. Grades are important and often have other consequences.”

“You don’t understand, I will have to wait in line with sophomores. Oh well, at least I will get in Bassett again and it is air conditioned.”

Next night. Really angry phone call.

“I want you to call these people and get this fixed. Other parents are doing so.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They won’t put me, or others back into Bassett. They are going to put all the new freshman in Bassett with a/c to try get more of them to come back the second year. They are going to put all sophomores in the crappy dorms across the lake.”

I laughed. And then I laughed some more. To top it off, I laughed some more.

“It’s not funny!”

“It is if you think I am going to call the president about this. I admire them for trying something out-of-the box to fix their retention problem.”

I hung up the phone and laughed some more. (The truly harsh piece of the story is that much of the reason he failed that course was worrying about me in Neuroscience ICU for two weeks at VCU/MCV following a 32 hour brain surgery. I still wasn’t going to get involved.)

How the hell is he going to learn to solve problems if I ride to the rescue?  A year later, Ferrum hosted us for and enrollment projections training session for private colleges. I did bring up this story then and learned that they did receive a lot of calls and backed off the experiment.

I wasn’t one of them. As I say, being a helicopter parent is far too much work.

So, for all you parents that have dropped your son or daughter off at college lately, relax, lean back, and prepare to laugh, just bit.

Well, duh. I did. Kinda sorta, “health communications” is pretty much liberal arts with a healthy dose of health and fitness knowledge thrown in. Besides, it is not like it was my choice. It was his choice. In fact, attending Ferrum was his choice. Now, I did have a lot of influence and I did not have to pay for him to go there.

In fact, I am the one that encouraged him to consider Ferrum, to consider private colleges in general. As a freshling in high school, he was vocal about never attending a private college. Despite the fact I had worked in private colleges for 10 years before coming to Virginia.

Almost 20 years ago, I attended my first Higher Education Data Sharing (HEDS) Consortium meeting shortly after I joined Willamette University. One of the discussion sessions was on the future of private colleges. The presenters were bemoaning the growth of public universities since WWII and reversal of college enrollment from 75% private to 75% public. I spoke up, as I have had a tendency to do, and espoused my belief that state funding was going to continue to drop and within a few decades the “real” cost of college (net price wasn’t really a thing back then) was going to be about the same at both publics and privates.

So, this is why Ferrum won out over Longwood. There simply was not enough difference in net price for my son (and I) to feel that was really a deciding factor. Other factors were much stronger; perhaps the physical similarity of Ferrum to Willamette, and their Methodist histories.

It is a shame though that a small public college (and it really, truly is a college more than a university) like Longwood has a net price for the lowest income students that requires them to come up with $50,000 (usually through debt) to cover four years of enrollment.We can do better.

Back to the liberal arts. For some people the choice of major has about as much relevance as the choice of going to college. These people will be successful no matter what, on their own terms, whether through privilege or a drive to accomplish their own personal vision. For others, the choice of major really is a just an effective way to hold their interest through four-years of study and other activities. For still others, major is about a chosen profession.

The liberal arts can handle most of these students.

Now the uncomfortable reality is that most liberal arts graduates will not make a lot of money. (Yes, I know this. Yes, I have data; but that is for another venue and another day, very soon.)  They won’t be poor, in fact, most will be above average nationally – especially if they marry another liberal arts graduate. The problem is that this is not a problem.

The problem is one of expectations combined with an unwillingness to pay for what we value. If we truly value an educated populace we should be willing to fund that. We are fully able to do so, it is simply a matter of choice. Relatively lower earnings compared to high demand occupations should be used as justification for greater support in order to reduce the reliance on student and parent debt. Policymakers need to develop realistic expectations of what various degrees are worth in the marketplace and what are needed in what quantities. They also need to understand that meeting the needs of the marketplace is not the not the only justification for public support of college education. Education is a good thing. And as the famous college founder, Emile Faber once said, “Knowledge is good.”

Of course, I am biased. I have an art degree (painting and jewelry). My wife is a special ed teacher. My father was a professor of communications. My step-mother, a political scientist. My mother, a K-12 teacher. Two sisters – one, a degree in communications; one, a degree in English literature. A third-generation with four out of five eligible completers (the one non-completer could justifiably be dropped from the cohort) with three of the completers in liberal arts and fourth is pre-med/biology (now a medical resident).

No one is ever hurt by a good liberal education. They can be hurt by too much debt. And a lack of awareness that the credential by itself may not be enough to succeed  in the workplace.

So, yes, I would let my son, or daughter, major in the liberal arts.

For one thing, it means low performance on a handful of federal measures.

Today, Washington Monthly released its college rankings and added four different takes on “America’s Worst Colleges.”  Five Virginia colleges were distributed across the four lists. One of these is Ferrum College, which is where my son attended and graduated. While I am not writing so much to defend  Ferrum, I am going to use it as an example as to the limits of metrics since I think I have enough information feel good about the quality of education there.

Washington Monthly does a separate article about Ferrum in “Held Accountable” to describe the type of school that should fear Obama’s college rankings. It is a fair article and it references the data we produce and publish at SCHEV.

But this explanation goes only so far. Nationally, there is a lack of data that can sharply distinguish between schools that are dropout factories and those that largely serve as feeder schools to more elite institutions. But in Virginia, making that distinction is far easier. That’s because it is one of a handful of states that keep track of whether college students who leave one in-state institution ever wind up graduating from another. And it also tracks what their earnings are if they go on to work in the state after graduating. What this information reveals about Ferrum is not pretty.

No, it is not particularly pretty. Washington Monthly used our data well, and used a pretty full spectrum of the data.

For example, only 22.8 percent of seventeen- to nineteen-year-olds who started their college careers at Ferrum in 2003-04 graduated within four years from Ferrum or from any other public or private nonprofit institution in Virginia. Yet 43.3 percent of their counterparts at all other private nonprofit four-year institutions in the state graduated within four years. Even ten years later, the 46 percent of students who started as seventeen- to nineteen-year-old freshmen at Ferrum had still not graduated from any college in Virginia, compared to a ten-year in-state graduation rate of 62.3 for students who previously attended Virginia’s other private four-year colleges.

Are there schools that do worse on this one metric than Ferrum? Yes, there are a handful. Historically black Norfolk State University, for example. But what makes Ferrum really stand out is the way that it scores consistently low across a broad range of performance measures. For example, Ferrum is a pricy place for what it offers. Even with grants and scholarships, the average net price to attend the college and live on campus still came to $19,324 in 2012. Largely as a result, fully 91 percent of Ferrum graduates take on student debt. This is far higher than the average borrowing rate for all private nonprofit four-year institutions in Virginia, which comes to 69 percent. Multiplying these borrowing rates by the amount of debt incurred by each graduate yields a weighted debt average of $26,169 at Ferrum, compared to an average $18,910 for all private nonprofit institutions in the state.

However, there is a bit more to the story.

First, any institution with less than a first-to-second year retention rate less than 60% is in trouble. As regular readers know, that is first of two warning measures for an at-risk institution. Second, Ferrum is an undergraduate-only institution with just over 1,500 students. That is well below my second threshold of 2,000 students. Ferrum has challenges, there is no doubt about that.

In 1992, fall enrollment was 1,231 students. In 1997 it hit 908, struggled to 951 the following year, and then stayed below a 1,000 through 2005.  The last eight years have been years of significant growth. Much of this growth has been in the first-year class, representing 585 of last fall’s 1,512 students. This is not an ideal mix.

I can prowl through the data and keep looking for bright spots. The fact is, relatively motivated students with family support can be successful at Ferrum, if they get through the first year. Of first-time, full-time students, 89%  who finish 60 credits with a “C” or better in the first two years graduate within five years. But this is only about 10% of the entering class. Similarly, 65.5% of transfer students who attempt 25 or more credits in their first year will graduate within five years. (I am using 2008 annual cohorts for these measures.)

When I look at graduation rates at Ferrum by income levels, I see that not even income is a good predictor of success, whether based on multiples of the poverty level (accounting for family size) or real dollar amounts. This is unusual, at least in Virginia. What this tells me is that my son’s biggest complaint about his time there, and the source of all his threats to transfer elsewhere, especially in the second year, was valid. There’s not enough to do.

This is a challenge for a small college in what is essentially the middle of nowhere.

Ferrum is a beautiful campus. The town, not so much. Little is really left of what it once was. The nearest community of any size, the nearest Walmart, is Rocky Mount, a full 12 miles away. Staff and faculty do what I think is an excellent job in providing activities and opportunities to keep students engaged. However, there are limits of funding and other resources. Students leave. Some transfer, many don’t. On my last visit to the area, the motel desk clerk recognized my last name and asked if the “big man Massa” that had been at Ferrum was my son. I said that was most likely the case and asked how he knew him.

He had been at Ferrum for a semester and did not go back. College was not for him. Based on other conversations in the area, I am pretty sure his is not an uncommon case. Ten percent (or more) of entering students don’t make it back for a second term. That’s a rather expensive proposition.

Ferrum leaders know they have a retention problem. It is not a secret. They have tried, and are trying, to address it. At least one non-academic attempt to fell flat a few years ago. In 20 years, the rate has never been good – barely over 60% just four times since 1992.

The accounts I heard from my son of the readings and work he did were not trivial. I don’t think there is an academic problem. I’m not even sure there is a support problem. I think there is simply not enough “there” there. One way or another, Ferrum has to solve this problem and build a community that students become invested in and don’t want to leave until they graduate.

Metrics can’t capture this, the best they can do is hint at something missing. At least, as long as the reader has additional information. I don’t think Ferrum has much to fear from the proposed ratings system as it does from its inability to retain more students. Of course, a rating system tied to aid eligibility without a chance for remediation would close Ferrum and dozens or hundreds of colleges across the country.

I wonder though what might happen to some of these campuses, out away from population centers should they close? I guess that is a post for another time.