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Epilepsy is Not the End of the World

Epilepsy is Not the End of the World

By Baylis

Several weeks ago, I posted a blog entitled “Aphasia is not the end of the world.” The first paragraph of that post included the following statements: “I admit that at times I need to remind myself that my mild case of aphasia is not the end of the world. Really, the only things I’ve lost are just some words, and usually it is only a temporary loss. I still have the things that really count in life. I still have my loving and supportive family. I still have a compassionate and praying church family. I still have considerate and helpful neighbors. I still have concerned and respectful colleagues and friends from more than forty years in higher education. I still have a team of knowledgeable and caring medical personnel. All of these people are individuals on whom I can lean. I have a real social network, not a virtual one. In addition to all these people, I still have my mind. A piece of advice to caregivers and friends, I really do not need sympathy. Please just be there when I need you, be supportive and encouraging at every step of the process, that’s the best gift you can give, and the thing I need the most.”

Ever since then I have been thinking that I should say something similar about my epilepsy. So here it is: “Epilepsy is not the end of the world.” With the exception of the big “C” word “CANCER,” probably the most feared disease is “EPILEPSY.” Epileptics are afraid of epilepsy because they don’t know what causes it. They don’t know if or when the next seizure will come. People around epileptics are afraid because they don’t know what the disease is and they don’t know what to do if someone is having a seizure. My wife is afraid because she was present when I had my first seizure and she says that she never wants to see something like that again. She is also afraid because she knows that I have to take my anti-seizure medication faithfully on a fixed schedule, and I have to watch my diet because certain foods have been known to interact negatively with my particular anti-seizure medication. She is afraid she will do something wrong and cause me problems.

One big difference between my mild aphasia and my epilepsy is that with work and practice, my aphasia seems to be getting better, while with my epilepsy I have to rely on medication to help keep the seizures at bay. As long as I take my medication faithfully, I have a good chance of not experiencing any more grand-mal seizures. It is not a guarantee, but a good chance. So it is not the end of the world.

Having spent forty years in the academy, I had to know more about the expression that I was using. What is the origin of the expression, “It’s not the end of the world?” The saying on a very popular T-shirt sold in the town of Resolute Bay is “Resolute Bay is not the end of the world, but you can see it from it here.” Resolute Bay is the second closest Canadian town to the North Pole.

Resolute Bay is an interesting name. How did the town get its name? It was named after the British mid-nineteenth century sailing ship HMS Resolute. HMS Resolute had been specially outfitted for Arctic exploration and during one expedition was trapped by ice as winter descended on Northern Canada. She was abandoned as her crew walked across the ice to safety in a small settlement, that later was name Resolute Bay. From that location they were able to contact England and let the Royal Navy know that the ship was abandoned. Queen Victoria renounced any claim to the ship. When spring came, some American whaling ships came across the Resolute and freed her from the thawing ice. Although the British navy had renounced any claim to the ship, the US Government as a sign of good will returned the ship to Queen Victoria is 1856. After another twenty years of naval service, the HMS Resolute was ordered to be dismantled by Queen Victoria. She had at least three desks made from its timbers, one of which she kept, one of which she presented to the widow of Henry Grinnell for his service to the British navy, and the third which she presented to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880 as a sign of appreciation.  This desk which became known as the Resolute Desk has been kept in the Oval Office or the President’s private office in the White House ever since. If the name Resolute Desk sounds familiar, it is probably because it was an integral part of the plot of the movie National Treasures: Book of Secrets.

I find it ironic that an expression that most likely was meant to carry a connotation of surrender and fear has behind it a story so closely related to courage, resolve and perseverance.  So when I say “Epilepsy is not the end of the world, but I can see it from here,” it doesn’t mean that I am giving up. It means that I don’t know what’s ahead, but I am ready to push ahead to find out. I have the things that really count in life. I have faith in a loving God. I still have my devoted and supportive family. I still have a compassionate and praying church family. I still have considerate and helpful neighbors. I still have concerned and respectful colleagues and friends from more than forty years in higher education. I still have a team of knowledgeable and caring medical personnel. All of these people are individuals on whom I can lean. I have a real live social network, in addition to my virtual one. On top of all these I have the will to press on toward that unknown that looks like the end of the world.

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For Me, Aphasia is like solving jig saw puzzles with pieces missing

For Me, Aphasia Is Like Solving Jig Saw Puzzles with Missing Pieces

When asked what it’s like living with aphasia and trying to speak or write, I describe it by saying that it is like putting together jig saw puzzles with pieces missing. One trouble with both writing and jig saw puzzles is that you usually don’t know pieces are missing until you get pretty far into the process of writing or solving the puzzle. Like most people, I do jig saw puzzles section by section. After I work on a section for a while, sometimes, I get to a particular place and I find a puzzle piece is missing. I can’t find it. It is just not there. I have hundreds of puzzle pieces spread out in front of me. With writing I get to a particular place and I can’t come up with the right word. I have thousands of words running through my mind. Whether with jig saw puzzles or writing, I am shuffling through all those pieces and words, but the right one that perfectly fits in that one place, is not there. What do you do with jig saw puzzles in this situation?
Most people would usually start looking at another part of the puzzle and try to find puzzle pieces that fit into that new part of the puzzle. If I do that enough for a puzzle, I will use up all the pieces that were in the box, and then I would know for certain that a piece or two are missing. After searching the house for the missing pieces, I might get out the other puzzles and see if the pieces got mixed up in those puzzle boxes. After all that, I really only have three choices: 1) pick up the puzzle pieces and put them back in the box and mark the box to indicate that a piece or two is missing; 2) go to one of those websites that advertize that they can replace missing puzzle pieces and purchase new pieces; or 3) pick up the unfinished puzzle and throw it away.
With my writing, I operate similarly. When I find myself stuck on a word, I will finish the remainder of the essay and then come back to the part with the missing word. Sometimes by then I will have found the word. Sometimes I haven’t. At that point of time, I will start searching in earnest through the word helpers like a cross-word dictionary or a thesaurus to try to find the right word or words. If that doesn’t work, I will set the essay aside and come back to it later. If I can’t find the right word or words then, I know at that point it is time to ask someone for help to find the appropriate word or words. That is like going to the puzzle websites to buy missing pieces. If that doesn’t work, I can either put the project aside and wait for a long time before I come back to it, or I trash it and forget about it.
Right now I have five or six projects on my computer that I have started but are in various stages of incompleteness. For the ones that are almost complete, I have sent copies to friends and former colleagues and asked them to review the projects and make suggestions. For the ones that I think still have possibilities but are in a much rougher state, I have set them aside, and I will come back to them off and on, at much later dates. Over the past months, I have looked at several essays that I have started and have decided that they are beyond repair or restoration. I have trashed them. I keep a file of ideas for essays, just the ideas, but not the real rough starts. Perhaps, I will come back to these ideas with a totally different approach at a much later date. This is a whole new way for me to operate, but it permits me to write and still cope with my mild case of aphasia.
If someone else has used the analogy of living with aphasia to missing jig saw puzzle pieces, I apologize for appropriating it. As an academic I have been trained to give credit for ideas to where credit is due. I did what I thought was a fairly exhaustive internet search on this topic and came up with nothing that was similar to the approach that I am taking in this essay. There were references to many exercises in aphasia therapy in which the individual with aphasia is asked to fill in a missing word in a simple sentence or to name a missing object in a simple picture. However, none of them compared the exercise to missing pieces of a jig saw puzzle. There were many references to autism as living with missing puzzle pieces, but none to aphasia that I could find. In dealing with autistic individuals or individuals with aphasia, I would in no way suggest throwing them away. Here is the place for a therapist or a care giver to provide the right degree of challenge and support to help the individual. An essay or a piece of work is far different from and far less valuable than the individual, although, for many of us, we find it difficult to separate ourselves from our work. It is a lesson from which we could all benefit.

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Words and the Power of Words

Words and the Power of Words

 

Kevin Hall wrote in the introduction to his e-book, “Aspire”,

“We live our lives word by word-to build our relationships, to convey our points of view, to object to wrongs done to us or to others, to comfort our children and our friends. We also use the wrong words-sometimes unknowingly-and get ourselves into situations we’d rather not be in.”

 

Stephen Covey added these thoughts to the introduction of “Aspire”:

  • Words sell and words repel
  • Words lead and words impede
  • Words heal and words kill

 

For me, and I suspect for many others with aphasia, each day is a battle for words. We have lost the use of words, and thereby a piece of ourselves. For some of us, the loss is larger than others. For some of us, the loss is more permanent than others. For some of us, we will recover some of our former facility with words. For some of us, that faciIity is gone forever. Each person is different, and will have to live out his or her own story. I don’t want this piece to be discouraging or melancholy.  However, attempting to recover words is hard work and everything is not going to be joy and victory. Each day for me is a story of wins and losses. I must learn to savor the victories, the recovery of words, seemingly long forgotten, or the discovery of new words. It’s like a little child being allowed to go to the attic and rummage through the many boxes stored up there. In doing so he finds clothes and toys long forgotten, It can also be like that same child at Christmas opening up presents and finding new things to wear or to play with. With the child in the attic, there are many questions. Why would his parents have taken away that toy in the first place and deprived him of the pleasure of playing with it? However, most of the time there is also great pleasure in having it restored to him. Sometimes the child finds an obviously well-worn sweater that he has no recollection of ever having worn. However, now that it has been restored, it becomes his favorite sweater and he has to wear it every day.  With Christmas presents, we know there should be an attitude of thankfulness in receiving something new. However, sometimes we do not feel or show the appreciativeness that we should. Some presents become immediate favorites and we play with them until they are broken. Other presents find their way back into the cabinet and almost never see the light of day. When that happens, did we have too many things to play with or wear? Possibly, however, we should eventually come to realize that the particular gift was meant for our pleasure and we should come to appreciate and use it appropriately. Sometimes the gift slips into the back of the cabinet or dresser and is forgotten about. When that happens, it will eventually be taken to the attic to be stored away until it is brought out again well into the future.

Sometimes there are losses. What should we do with them? Once a wise coach was asked, “How do you expect your team to handle a loss?”. He responded that he did not want his team to dwell on that loss but to take it and learn from it. Is there something we did that we shouldn’t have? Is there something we didn’t do that we should have? Is there something that we could have done better? There are really two aspects for each of those questions. The first aspect is the personal reflection that goes into trying to answer them. Individuals must try to answer those questions for themselves. Those attempts can be very hard work and may not always lead to answers. The second aspect is that sometimes a coach must step in and help the individuals answer the questions. Have you ever heard the expression, “It’s as clear as the nose on your face?” For many of us, we must have a mirror to see the nose on our face. A coach or caregiver must become a mirror to help the individual see his nose.

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Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks

Living with Aphasia: Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks
By Baylis
You can’t teach old dogs new tricks. I have heard this saying for many, many years. (Does that make me an old dog?) Over the years, I have observed the difficulty in retraining dogs that have become acclimated to behaving in certain ways. You never heard this saying about cats. I don’t think cats were ever mentioned in the same way because cats are very hard to train in the first place. They train themselves. However, once a cat has settled into a routine, it is extremely difficult to break that routine. We had a cat that we started feeding first thing in the morning. After that, if we didn’t get up when the sun would first rise, this cat would come into our bedroom and gently remind us that it was his feeding time. He would put his face right next to our faces and start rubbing against us or purring.

I have now had first-hand experience with this adage. For many years prior to the hemorrhage in the  blood vessel in the tumor on my brain, I was not the best filer. My filing system has been called clutter. I would have eight to ten piles of papers or journals all around my office. There did not appear to be any rhyme or reason to the piles. However, I was renowned for my memory. I would easily have a dozen jobs in the air at any one time. When someone would come into my office to talk about something, I could inevitably go to the correct pile and within a minute or two, find the document that we needed to discuss. People were amazed that I knew where it was. I can’t do that anymore, although I still have eight to ten piles of papers all around my office at home. However, when I get an idea about how I can update an essay or article that I’m working on, I can’t find the documents. Since I can’t use my former filing system anymore and knowing what it was probably won’t help other people now, I will let you in on my secret of filing prior to the episode. As I said I had a good memory. But I was not remembering exactly where a particular document was. What I doing was constructing those piles according to the day that I worked on the particular project under question. All I had to do was remember what was the last day I had worked on the project. I could go to that pile and find the needed documents.

Since the episode I have tried to put all the documents that I work on in manila file folders and label the file folder. The difficulty that I will have to teach myself to overcome is to now put the file folder away in some semblance of order other than by date. I spent several days this past week alphabetically filing all the file folders that accumulated in my office, first according to author and second by title. It’s amazing what I have found. There were several duplicate files, that if I had been following this procedure all the time, I wouldn’t have had to create. What’s also true, but should not be amazing, is there are some things that I know I worked on but are now lost.

The second lesson that I have learned through this process is that one needs to keep one’s computer files in order also. There are documents I know that I have created but they are nowhere to be found on my computer. I have looked at all the files alphabetically and chronologically, and the documents under question are nowhere to be found. To try to remedy this situation, I first set up a spreadsheet listing all the files I created. The spreadsheet had entries that could be sorted by name of file, author, source (if it was from a journal or website), and date. As I created new files, I entered the information related to that file on the bottom of a front page and copied that front page to various pages that I then sorted by title, author source and date. I know this type of problem and process is more suited to data bases. Why did I use a spreadsheet and not a data base? I have always been more comfortable setting up spreadsheets than data bases. The old dog is barking again. I have learned the hard way this is more of a data base problem than a spreadsheet problem. The last two times I sorted the pages of the spreadsheet I didn’t make sure that I was sorting the whole page, and I found I was mixing up file titles with the wrong source or date. This week I believe that I will have to step out and try two new tricks. The first is to create sub-files on my computer and file documents in an appropriate sub-file. The second is to create a data base for my files. Next week I will report on my success or failure.

In our adult Sunday school class this past week we were discussing Abraham and someone asked the question: “Why do we seem to learn more from failures than successes?” Another individual brought up the example of Thomas Edison. After more than 100 attempts to construct a working light bulb, someone asked him if he was discouraged. I think his response can help us. He is reported to have answered the question by saying, “No, I am not discouraged. I now know 100 ways that won’t work. I won’t use any of them again and I can try something else.”

As I live with my aphasia and memory problems, I am collecting a whole set of practices that I now know I won’t have to try again. I won’t have to make those mistakes again. I have also learned the secret to teaching old dogs new tricks. It is actually quite simple. KEEP AT IT; DON’T GIVE INTO IMPULSES OR WHIMS. The minute you let the old dog revert to his old behavioral patterns, you have to essentially start over again with the training. With that in mind, I decided to try practicing some of the new filing techniques this week. How is it going? The best I can say is that it is going, but not as well as I had hoped. I must admit I have had to resolve to start over twice and I must also admit that I failed in setting up a working data base. Old habits (Old tricks) are hard to shake off. What actually are old habits? They are engraved patterns of behavior, etched into the synaptic paths of our brain. To construct a new habit, we must break down and eliminate as much as possible the old habits. What we know from brain research is that unless the paths are completely eliminated by damage to the brain, those paths are still there. We can make new dominant paths but the old paths are still there, and the individual can easily revert to those paths. It’s similar to putting a new roof on a house, you really should remove the old shingles before you put the new shingles on. If you don’t, the new shingles will not always as effective as they should be and you will have to replace them much sooner than you normally would. If you have read my first blog on living with aphasia, it’s all about the story of perfect practice making perfect. The amateur practices until he gets it right once. But that’s not enough. Chances are, when the next opportunity to make that play or perform that number occurs he’ll get wrong again. The professional practices until he can’t do it wrong. The muscles are locked into particular movements and the individual just does them naturally.
I have just discovered a new (new to me) site for aphasia patients and caregivers. It is a blog entitled Aphasia Corner. It can be found at http://aphasiacorner.com/blog/category/aphasia-corner.
I invite you to look them up. Someone involved Aphasia Corner has my type of humor. QUESTION: What is aphasia? ANSWER: It is the weapon on Star Trek used to blow up enemies. You don’t ever want to lose your sense of humor. Even in the toughest of times, a laugh can be medicine for the soul.

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A Modest Proposal for the Re-engineering of American Higher Education

A Modest Proposal for the Re-engineering of American Higher Education

By Baylis  ?2

For many years, I have been intrigued with any title that begins with a phrase “A Modest Proposal.” Jonathan Swift’s classic satirical essay from 1729 has conditioned everyone to know that what follows is anything but modest, and possibly bordering on sensationalism. I have deliberately used the phrase “A modest proposal” to get people’s attention. However, the heart of the essay is not a satire. I truly believe that American higher education would benefit from adopting some, if not all twenty, of the suggestions that I make in the body of the essay.

I will also admit that I used another sensational term in the title of the essay. “Re-engineering” grabs people’s attention because it has come to mean radical changes that could affect the entire institution. That’s exactly the idea that I wanted to convey.

  1. Education is helping students develop the knowledge, skills and dispositions necessary to move them from where they are to where they need or want to be. There are two actors in this process. Each actor has different responsibilities and roles. Students must come to education with goals. They should know what they want to be. The role of faculty is to identify where the students are and the best route to take the students to where they want to or need to be. Faculty need to realize that the students’ goals are important and they should not unnecessarily impose their own goals on students. Faculty should serve as guides in assisting students along the route to reaching their goals. Students need to realize that education is hard work. It is not an entitlement; it is a privilege.
  2. American higher education should adopt a Social Change Model of Education as the foundational philosophy for building its superstructure. The basic tenet of a Social Change Model of Education is that education should be about helping students learn so that they can improve themselves, society, and the community.
  3. Within the framework of a Social Change Model of Education, institutions need to focus the educational process on helping students acquire the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary to live useful lives in order to better themselves and society. An institution must pay attention to all three areas of knowledge, skills, and dispositions. In a 1978 hit song, Michael Lee Aday, commonly known as Meatloaf, suggested that in the area of personal relationships, “Two out of three, ain’t bad” However, in education, “Two out of three, ain’t enough.”
  4. Each institution must have a clearly delineated mission. All individuals involved with the given institution must have a solid understanding of the mission of the institution and a firm commitment to that mission.
  5. The mission of an institution must be clearly communicated to all prospective students and the community at large. The leaders of an institution, especially the president, administrators and faculty, must understand the history of the institution and how that affects the current development of the institution and possible future development.
  6. Institutions need to hire, evaluate and reward faculty in terms of helping students learn. Good teaching should be measured in terms of student learning. Teaching itself is only a means to the end of learning, not an end in itself.
  7. Institutions should consider revamping graduation requirements more in line with competencies instead of credit hours earned in course blocks. What’s more important, the number of credits earned by sitting through the required number of class hours, or what a student knows, can do, and values?
  8. Schools need to consider scrapping the current semester, trimester. or quarter systems that are agriculturally based, in favor of a more flexible schedule that allows or even encourages learning anytime and anywhere, possibly in a 24/7/365 format.
  9. Institutions should be aware and open to the possibility that curricula will evolve. Some new disciplines will emerge while some old disciplines will become obsolete.
  10. Institutions should consider revamping their fiscal model away from the charge for credit hours to one more closely aligned with charging students a credentialing fee based upon completion of competencies.
  11. Faculty must be encouraged to study learning theory with an eye to understanding and using different teaching modalities other than just lecturing. Faculty must be encouraged to experiment with educational pedagogies and technologies appropriate to discipline.
  12. Faculty must know their students. They must be aware of and account for the varying goals of the students they are teaching. It is not the job of faculty to produce clones of the faculty. The job of faculty is to help students develop the knowledge, skills, and values necessary to improve themselves and society.
  13. Institutions should be prepared to provide appropriate learning spaces and resources for faculty and students, including classrooms, laboratories, libraries, and technology.
  14. Institutions should consider paying faculty according to their track record of helping students learn or complete competencies, instead of their degrees and years of service.
  15. Institutions must be prepared to offer developmental resources to faculty to help them use the most appropriate pedagogies and technologies in their teaching.
  16. Faculty should be open to the possibility of unbundling their work. Faculty may have to be open to the idea that faculty governance is too expensive and inefficient.
  17. Faculty need to understand that tenure and academic freedom are not entitlements, but are privileges.
  18. Faculty and institutions need to be abused of their unattainable illusions of grandeur. Not all institutions can be prestigious, research universities. Institutions must get off the academic treadmill of trying to keep up with the institutions that are their neighbors or competitors.
  19. Institutions must realize that not all institutions will look the same. Some institutions will be geared toward a residential clientele. Some institutions will focus on commuter students and some institutions will serve a mixed clientele. Serving these differing collections of student types will mean institutions will have to tailor facilities, curricula, schedules, and teaching modalities to the students they are serving.
  20.  Everyone associated with an institution–Board of Trustees, President, administration, faculty, and students–must be held accountable for their part in the well-functioning of the institution and promoting student learning.

I believe the quality academic institutions of the future may look and feel very different from the quality academic institutions of the past. That’s the basis for my modest proposal. We should be ready to embrace the new look of academic institutions and not be afraid of it.

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Comparison of American Higher Education with American Automotive Industry

 

Comparison of U.S. Higher Education and the U.S. Automotive Industry

Bayard (“By”) Baylis, retired

Former Provost of Cornerstone University, Grand Rapids, MI

Recently as I watched a major league baseball game on television, the play-by-play announcer commented on the large number of Japanese players that were on the rosters of the U.S. major league teams. The color commentator pointed out that one of the up and coming star pitchers in Japan asked the Japanese pro teams not to draft him because he was going to go to America to play in the best league in the world. That phrase “best in the world” rattled around in my brain. Where had I heard that before? Twenty years ago, U.S. automotive manufacturers were throwing that phrase around in talking about their cars. The engineering and the construction was “the best in the world.” German and Japanese manufacturers were watching U.S. firms to see “how to do it so that they could emulate them.” But automotive manufacturers were not the only group throwing that expression around. For forty years, I have heard that same expression in higher education. U.S. higher education is the best in the world. People from all over the world are coming to America to take advantage of the myriad of opportunities and to see how it should be done.

What’s the problem? Look at the American automotive industry today. To investigate the health of the automotive industry, I did what almost every student of the 21st century does, I went to the internet.  I found a Wall Street Journal Article from November 22, 2005, entitled, “A Tale of Two Industries.” The article began by stating that General Motors had just announced that it would close nine plants and cut some 30,000 jobs. I did not remember that exact article. However, I remembered the announcement. We had just moved from a small Indiana county that was rocked by that announcement. The largest employer in the county was GM. Buried in that announcement was the fact that GM was closing one of its two plants in the county and cutting almost 2,000 jobs. Later that week we found out that this included the job of one of our former neighbors. These cuts took a huge toll on a county that already had an unemployment rate hovering at around 10% at the time.  The article continued by stating “There’s no doubt that GM and Ford especially are in a big hole thanks to high fixed costs and shrinking market share.” The article went on to outline the rise of a second American auto industry; one centered more in the South than the Upper Midwest. This new competitor was paying its employees well and as of November 2005 accounted for 26% of all cars made in America.  The article suggested that the decline in the Big Three companies represented a failure to provide products for which people were willing to pay a premium. What’s this got to do with U.S. higher education?

I believe a 2002 research piece by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education entitled “The Iron Triangle” explains the connection. The report begins with the premise that “parents and students…are starting to question whether higher tuition costs-and the debt families shoulder to pay them are always warranted.” How many students and parents are willing to pay a premium to go to a residential liberal arts college or a state flagship university?

Plant after automotive plant in the Upper Midwest has closed, wreaking economic disaster on family after family and town after town. Will we see the same thing in higher education? I don’t know but we have been led to believe that the rate at which colleges are closing is increasing. To check out this assumption, I did a little research on the matter.  Using the best list of closed colleges that I could find, which is maintained by Mr. Ray Brown from Westminster College in Fulton, MO. Mr. Brown maintains this list on a personal webpage <http://www2.westminster-mo.edu/wc_users/homepages/staff/brownr/ClosedCollegeIndex.htm> to help displaced alumni find out how they can get transcripts from defunct schools. In Mr. Brown’s list I found 1385 U.S. colleges that have closed since 1850. As I compiled Brown’s data I found counter to general public opinion and my intuition, which may have been biased by current publicity, the worst decade for school closing was the 1970’s with 183 school closings, compared to 46 so far this decade. The second worst decade was the 1930’s with 134. The next worst decade was the 19-teens with 126 closings. The 1990’s was the fourth worst with 100 school closings. I should have remembered the 1970’s. I was working at a struggling college at the time. It was just barely getting enough students to hang on. It did eke out an existence until the 1990’s when it finally closed, a victim of its own lack of foresight and planning during the good times. It lost students to colleges with better facilities and more programs.  Are there any patterns to the schools that closed? A quick look indicated that a higher percentage of the closed schools were smaller schools in agricultural areas west of the Mississippi River or South of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Data compiled from a list of closed institutions maintained by Mr. Ray Brown on a personal webpage

Why do college personnel have the opinion that we are in bad times? I think it is due to the fact that generally many of us in higher education administration experienced the good times and growing enrollments during the golden ages of the 1980’s and first half of the 1990’s. During these years, we grew comfortable in our kettle. We are like the crab or lobster that grew comfortable in the pot that was slowing coming to a boil. When we finally realized that the water was hot, we started clawing frantically to find a way out of the kettle.  Compared to the 1980’s, the last several years have been a famine. Given the actual number of college closings so far this decade, it appears that we are surviving the famine and the hot water. However, before we get too cocky, we need to remember that for every year of small entering classes, it takes four years of plenty to fill up the store house again; plus the conditions that brought about the famine have not improved and may even be getting worse. If we think about the dust-bowl conditions in Middle America during the 1930’s, some of those areas are still not fertile enough to yield significant crops. Am I suggesting that we are heading into an educational dust bowl? Not if we are cognizant of the dangers and act appropriately.

We can analyze school closings. What we don’t have is good data on the number of individual programs or degree offerings that have been shut down. I think it would be an interesting study to analyze program closings. Even for colleges that do not close, college administrators and faculty members are very worried about flat enrollment or enrollment declines. Without enrollment increases, the new buildings, the new programs and new equipment, and salary increases are not going to happen. I believe that the reason for this is the fact that U.S. higher education is using a revenue plan that is doomed to failure. To my brothers and sisters in the academy, I don’t apologize for thinking of higher education as a business. For forty years, I have been very thankful that the paycheck at the end of the month cleared the bank. I was also very thankful when I saw that the medical insurance premiums had been paid for another month. To provide the revenue for these items, colleges have to act as if they are businesses that provide a service in exchange for revenue. They have to sell something. What do colleges sell? I am pleased to say that most colleges do not sell degrees. What they sell are credit hours. Credit hours are the pricing mechanism used by most colleges. Credit hours are also the base for faculty wages. What’s the problem with this? How do you increase revenue? There are essentially five ways to increase revenues in this format.

  1. Sell more credit hours by increasing enrollment
  2. Sell more credit hours by making the current students take more credit hours
  3. Charge more per credit hour
  4. Pay faculty less by reducing wages per credit hour
  5. Pay faculty less by becoming more efficient in offering more credit hours for the same pay as now.

 

In the current climate, it is highly unlikely that the general public will take kindly to options 1 through 3. Options 4 and 5 will be fought by faculty members that believe they are already underpaid and overworked.

In the face of these prospects, there has been the growth of a second educational industry (sound familiar?). The Sloan Consortium which conducts an annual survey of online education in the U.S. reported in their 2008 report entitled, “Staying the Course,” that more than two-thirds of all U.S. accredited institutions offered some online education in 2007, with almost 4 million students taking at least one online course. This is more than twenty percent of all U.S. higher education students, eerily similar to the automotive industry numbers. It also represented more than a 12 percent increase over the number taking online courses in the fall of 2006. This rate of growth is more than 10 times the growth rate of the number of students taking on-ground courses in U.S. higher education institutions. Many proprietary institutions are prospering, as well as the online educational operations of public flagship universities and many residential liberal arts colleges. Why? They are providing a product at a reasonable price in a fairly convenient format for a public that does not believe the premium that the residential liberal arts colleges and flagship universities are charging is worth the difference in price. I think we should be taking seriously the question raised by Joseph Marr Cronin and Howard E. Horton in their May 22, 2009 Commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled, “Will Higher Education Be the Next Bubble to Burst?”