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Faculty Reward Systems and Faculty Priorities

Only a few, chosen ones, the best of the best may enter into Nirvana. Enter faculty and enjoy your rewards on your terms. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

In a previous post A New Millennium – The Same Old Story, Part I, I introduced the topic of Faculty Reward Systems and Faculty Priorities as one of the current crises in the academy. In the short note about these problems, I referenced an article written in 2001 with the intriguing title Paradise Lost: How the academy converts enthusiastic recruits into early-career doubters. In the almost two decades since that article appeared there have been hundreds of articles lamenting the doleful and declining conditions in the academy for all faculty, not just the early recruits, but even the seasoned veterans.

Paradise Lost. Adam and Eve expelled from Eden. An etching by Gustave Dore from a Dutch Bible. As a faithful reproduction of a two-dimensional work of art in the public domain, this image is in the public domain. Image courtesy of Jan Arkesteijn and Wikimedia Commons.

My first reaction to the article’s title was one of affirmation. I thought I understand the authors’ frustration with the impression that faculty as a whole had lost access to the Garden of Eden, the Land of Milk and Honey. However, the more I reread Milton’s tragic epic the more confused I became. The allegoric allusions between the Biblical creation story and the plight of modern university faculty made less sense to me.

A 16770 line engraving of John Milton by William Faithorne. As a faithful reproduction of a two-dimension work of art in the public domain, it is in the public domain. Image courtesy of Jfhuston and Wikimedia Commons.

In his 1674 version, Milton begins Paradise Lost – Book I  with a verse that is often referenced and quoted:

OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos: or if Sion Hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flow’d
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’ Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.
And chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th’ upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know’st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad’st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumin, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men.

Where did that truck come from? I was minding my own business and it just knocked me down and ran me over. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

Having read the Trower, Austin, and Sorcinelli article many times, I don’t get any sense that they are attempting to “justify the ways of God to men.” On the contrary, they are blaming fate and the evil administrations of universities for taking away the riches of which they had dreamed and for which they had worked so hard. I find no sense of contrition or admission of wrongdoing on the part of the faculty that have been expelled from paradise. 

The gates to paradise have been closed to all faculty. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

I selected this article to introduce the topic for a number of reasons. The first reason was very personal. The article was based on the authors’ presentation at the 2001 Conference on Faculty Roles & Rewards, held February 1–4, 2001, in Tampa, Florida. The three authors of the article, Cathy A. Trower, Ann E. Austin, and Mary Deane Sorcinelli, were invited by Gene Rice, director of the American Association of Higher Education Forum on Faculty Roles & Rewards to make a combined panel presentation at the Forum’s annual meeting.

A divided opinion within the audience with faculty cheering it, while administrators and trustees panned it. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

I was at that Forum and I remember their presentation and the mixed response it received from the audience. The faculty side of the crowd loved and cheered the presentation and its conclusions. The administrators in the audience viewed the presentation with semi-veiled skepticism. A couple of trustees with whom I spoke after the presentation expressed undisguised disdain for any thought that faculty had an unalienable right to Nirvana and that trustees were in any way or form complicit in destroying paradise.  

The day the AAHE folded was the day the music died. Higher education lost a great resource. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

I think I missed only one of the dozen Forums on Faculty Roles & Rewards sponsored by the AAHE before it folded in 2005 due to lack of support from the higher education community. In my mind that was a sad day for American higher education.

The American Association of Higher Education was the only membership organization in higher education that was fully open to everyone involved in higher education. It embraced graduate students, faculty, student affairs professionals, administrators, trustees, the staff of higher education organizations, government officials, journalists, higher education commentators, and funding sources.

The AAHE was a forum for airing disagreements. Sometimes those disagreements became heated. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

In the end, its diversity was probably the prime reason for its downfall. It wasn’t specialized enough. Many faculty thought student affairs professionals and administrators had nothing to offer them. Student affairs professionals and academic administrators used different languages. Trustees became quickly frustrated with the bickering between the groups. Graduate students were only interested in finishing their degrees and getting jobs. The government officials felt belittled and badgered for more money for education. Commentators and journalists found cheaper ways to get the stories they needed for their articles. The funding sources only heard cries for more funds and saw little appreciation for their prior gifts.

In spite of its obvious problems, I still believe the AAHE was the best higher education association of the 20th Century. It was a one-stop shop for the most recent research on higher education topics and practical solutions to higher education’s most troublesome problems which had been tested in the crucible of real applications.

I had a soft spot in my heart for the AAHE. It was a great organization. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

In the interest of full disclosure, I admit that I had a soft spot in my heart for the AAHE which impacted my choice of the introductory article. I was privileged to make presentations at ten AAHE conferences: one Annual Meeting; two Technology Conferences; two Faculty Roles & Rewards Forums; and five Assessment Forums. I was invited to make one presentation at a Faculty Roles & Reward Forum and one at an Assessment Forum. For that Assessment Forum, my presentation was designated the principal offering of a given time slot and I had my picture in the conference program. I felt honored to have the opportunity to present an assessment research project design to an audience of over 2,000 higher education professionals at one time. The other eight AAHE presentations went through the normal vetting process by which conference presentation proposals were judged.

I was privileged to serve on two panels reacting to presentations by keynote speaker Gene Rice. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

The invitation to present at the Faculty Roles & Rewards Forum came from Gene Rice. Six months after the AAHE conference where Trower, Austin, and Sorcinelli presented their research findings, Gene Rice was the keynote speaker at a Faculty Development Conference sponsored by the Council For Christian Colleges (CCC). This organization was the predecessor to the Coalition for Christian College & Universities (CCCU). In that intimate setting of approximately 80 faculty members and administrators from 50 Christian colleges, Gene made three plenary presentations over the three-day conference. The format for the conference called for a structured panel response and an audience free Q&A sessions after each of Gene’s talks. I was scheduled to be on one of those panels. However, when at the last minute a panel member for another talk had to withdraw, I was asked to sub on that panel also. Thus, I had the opportunity to comment on Gene’s work twice during the conference, in addition to a presentation that I made on some research that I did on faculty salary models and scales within the CCC. 

This conference was not the first time that I had met Gene Rice. Due to his close association and work with Ernie Boyer, Gene spoke once at Messiah College. Ernie was an alumnus and a long-time trustee of Messiah College. However, whatever I said at the CCC Faculty Development Conference must have impressed him. He sought me out at the luncheon on the closing day of the conference and invited me to present at the next Faculty Roles & Rewards Forum. I told him I would think about it, and 30 seconds later I agreed to do it.

As early as 1970, discussions were beginning about where faculty allegiance and hearts were. Were faculty more likely to be loyal to their institution or more committed to their discipline? The answer wasn’t even close. The overwhelming majority of faculty felt more loyalty to their discipline than to their institution.

There are several reasons for this. The first is the discipline was their first passion. They have spent years immersed in the discipline, training and straining to reach its heights. They see the institution as a means to the end. It is a necessary evil to achieve their goal of climbing to the summit of the discipline.

I raise a glass to toast and honor my discipline. It has nurtured and sustained me when others have deserted me. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

The second is expressed by James Dixon (pseudonym of a professor in the humanities at a college in the South) in the Chronicle of Higher Education December 2015 article Loyalty, Schmoyalty: What do you do when your devotion to your institution is not reciprocrated?. Dixon in a vindictive diatribe decries the “corporatist administrators”, “bitter colleagues”, and the “faceless abstractions like departments and colleges” that inhabit higher educational institutions. [Italics mine]

No more! I finished with those things. From now on, I will only do what is absolutely required by my contract or benefits me or the people that I care most about. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

Dixon summarizes the main points of the article, in the middle of it with the following paragraph:

“But at this point in my career, my priorities have changed. I simply decline to do anything for my department or institution that: (a) interferes with my family life, (b) isn’t strictly required by my contract, or (c) does nothing to benefit me or the people I care about most.”

Senior faculty should leave the grunt work of spinning the mouse cage wheels to the junior faculty. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

Dixon goes on to state that senior, tenured faculty should concentrate on the things that can reward them with love and respect: their family, their discipline, congenial colleagues, and the process of teaching. Leave all the grunt work like committees [Italic emphasis, mine] to the junior, non-tenured faculty so that they can reach the point in their careers where they can concentrate on the really important things. [Italic emphasis, mine]

Faculty work hard the meager pittance that they receive from their institutions.

As a means to an end, institutions do provide faculty with monetary rewards in order to “make a living for oneself and one’s family.” Over the past half-century, there has been much discussion about this. Returning to Gene Rice and why he asked me to present at the Faculty Roles and Rewards Forum, my presentation at the CCC conference was on some research that I had done on faculty pay.

At this time, as a group, the 80+ CCC institutions were fairly uniform. They were generally small. The average enrollment was about 1,200 students. They averaged just under 100 full-time faculty members. Although a few of them were experimenting with non-traditional education and graduate education, most were almost exclusively traditional, residential, liberal arts and sciences, undergraduate colleges.

Traditional faculty ranking system: Top step – Full Professor; second place – Associate Professor; third place – Assistant Professor; not on the podium – Instructor. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

In one way that the CCC institutions resembled the rest of higher education was the fact that more than 97% had a traditional ranking system for faculty: Instructor, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Full Professor. Only two institutions in the organization did not have faculty ranks.

With the exception of All 4-Year Publics and 2-Year Privates, the CCC institutions mirrored the IPEDS data for Institutions with Tenure Systems. Image from NCES Data and Data collected by this blog’s author. The graph was created on Libre Office Software by blog’s author.

There were small differences between the CCC institutions and higher education in general related to the question of faculty tenure. In 1995, according to AAUP statistics, approximately 35% of all faculty were tenured or on tenure-track, while 33% were part-time faculty and almost 20% were graduate students. However, the AAUP statistics also indicated that 65% of all full-time faculty were tenured or on tenure-track. College Board data indicates that 92% of public four-year institutions had tenure systems, while 66% of private four-year institutions offered tenured. 

The 1995 picture at CCC institutions was slightly different. The percentage of all faculty that were part-time was just over 40%.  Since very few of the CCC institutions offered graduate programs, less than 1% of faculty were graduate students. Just over 37% of CCC institutions did not offer tenure at all, mirroring the College Board data for private four-year institutions. At the CCC institutions, just over 50% of all full-time faculty were tenured or on tenure-track, which is less than the percentage for all institutions from the AAUP data.

Annual negotiations over salary may carry the connotation of begging for more from the boss. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

One key aspect of my research was the question of whether institutions used a faculty pay scale or relied on annual negotiations or a negotiated starting salary and fixed annual increases. Similar data is not readily available for all four-year institutions. For the CCC institutions in my data set, 97% had fixed salary scales of some sort. Only 2% relied on a negotiated starting salary with fixed annual increases, with the other 1% resorting to annual negotiations.

In my survey, I found that 80% of CCC institutions claimed they had no disciplinary differentials in their salary scales. This egalitarian approach seems to be much different from the general higher education approach. Most likely it is an expression of the faith-based, Biblical ideal of equality and reverence for everyone, and the common service for the Kingdom.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28, KJV)

The results of the annual College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR) salary survey show significant differences by discipline in salaries for faculty with the same rank and experience across all of higher education. Salaries for business and finance faculty average twice the salaries for humanities and social science faculty. Overall, the salaries at CCC institutions ranged from 30 to 70% of the salaries listed in the AAUP or CUPA-HR surveys. CCC faculty saw their teaching as a ministry to which they were called.

For all of the institutions that indicated that they had a fixed salary scale, they described it in terms of ladders or sets of stairs. They all began with one uniform base salary. The differences occurred in what institutions used to determine an initial salary and annual increments.  

In my survey, I asked about items that went into determining a faculty member’s initial salary. Every institution indicated that a faculty member’s academic experience, academic degrees and credentials, and starting rank were included as factors in starting salaries. Only 25% of institutions included a factor for professional experience outside the academy. As noted earlier, 20% of CCC institutions factored an individual’s discipline into the salary equation. In all such cases, this factor was positive for a few in-demand disciplines, while there were no subtractions for the many disciplines with lesser demand.

Even in good economic times, a quarter of the CCC institutions had some economic trouble, and another quarter was very strained. Data collected by blog’s author, with graph created on Libre Office software.

I next asked about annual increases. In the decade from 1985 to 1995, the national economy was generally good and inflation had cooled off after the flame up of the 1970s. There was only one downturn around 1992. Therefore, I asked during the decade 1985 to 1994, how many times were salary increases given. Within my survey universe of CCC institutions, 50% gave increases every year, 25% withheld salary increases once, 15% withheld salary increases twice, and 10% withheld increases 2 or more times.

The next set of questions dealt with the factors that went into determining the amount of the increases when they were given. Every institution indicated that they gave an increase for the extra year of service and any promotion in rank that occurred during the preceding year. In addition, 60% of the institutions said that they gave credit for being awarded tenure.

One of the hot buttons in faculty salary and reward circles of this period was the question of merit pay. Of the CCC institutions, 50% said that they rewarded meritorious service with a monetary award. Most of these (42% of all CCC institutions) offered these rewards as one-time bonuses, while the remainder (8% of all CCC institutions) gave the faculty member a step reward, which in effect carried over to succeeding years.

The final set of questions in my survey dealt with whether institutions took inflation into account in salary increases and, if so, how did they handle it. Of the 90% of CCC institutions that regularly gave annual increases (7 or more times in the decade 1985 to 1995), a significant majority (70%) treated the Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) as an adjustment to the previous year’s salary, which meant it carried over from year to year. The remaining institutions (30%) credited the COLA as an adjustment to the base salary only. Over the years, this had a negative effect on faculty salaries in keeping up with the cost of living.

The final question returned to the question of the compressed nature of CCC faculty scales in light of the tendency toward egalitarianism. As a Chief Academic Officer, I can guarantee that it was much easier for me to hire an entry-level faculty member rather than a senior faculty member. This was particularly true if the senior faculty member was coming from a public or non-sectarian four-year institution. Our entry level salaries compared much more favorably to other institutions than did our senior-level salaries. The last question asked whether annual increases were applied equally across the board, or were adjustments made by rank. Not surprisingly, egalitarianism won out. More than 80% said increases were always equal percentage-wise across the board. Only 20% said that occasionally adjustments were made by rank, in order to honor senior faculty.

It might not have been as dramatic as God speaking to Moses via the burning bush, but still, God calls faculty to CCC institutions. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

After presenting this data, my colleagues from public and non-sectarian institutions expressed surprise and pity. They could not understand how CCC institutions could attract quality faculty under these conditions. My answer was that we couldn’t attract them. They had to have a sense of calling from God, and that His Spirit did the convincing. 

The next crisis facing American higher education with which I will attempt to deal is The Commercialization of Higher Education. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

       

 

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A New Millennium – The Same Old Story, Part I

Many in American Higher Education were looking forward to the 21st Century, hoping it would bring back the good old days. Unfortunately, after the cork was popped, the new drink fizzled. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

In spite of the high hopes and great expectations of many in American Higher Education, the end of the 20th century and the beginning of a new millennium brought little relief to the beleaguered systems of AHE. In my previous post The First Age of Disruption in American Higher Education we left American higher education in a precarious situation. It was buried under numerous train wrecks brought on by many training storms or crises. Unfortunately, the incessant crises have not stopped during the first two decades of the 21st century. Not only have they continue unabated, but the frequency of their occurrences has also increased. 

The future outlook for American Higher Education is dire! Another scandal rocks AHE! The image is the author’s interpretation of current events in AHE. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

Instead of the period of recovery hoped for by the academy, the new millennium brought an unrelenting season of storms and turmoil to American Higher Education. A cursory examination of the reports and articles out of the general public and higher education media outlets during these first two decades of the 21st century yields an abundance of fuel for the argument that American Higher Education remains in deep trouble.

Just what I need – another project! Image courtesy of Presenter Media

The following list highlights some of the various crises that have made headlines in the 21st century. I have labeled many of them using academic code words. The task of explaining all the academic jargon associated with these code words would fill a book which I may write (Just what I need another writing project! – Is there anyone out who wants to help me?). In the meantime, to bring the project within manageable limits for this blog, I will provide a reasonably short synopsis of my take on each crisis and its immediate effects on AHE in separate posts which will follow.

The crises hit AHE repeatedly and rapidly. There was no time to rest. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

For those too anxious to wait for my follow up, I am providing an example of a commentator or the media’s interpretation of the crisis. The list is in chronological order according to the appearance of the media article that I reference. I have chosen to list the topics in this manner to show the rapidity and pervasiveness of crises in higher education which were occurring during these two decades.

I will have more to say on this topic later when I have time to reflect on the matter. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

The particular article I have selected may not necessarily be the first time the topic is addressed in public. However, I believe the articles selected are repesentative examples of the treatment which the topic has received. In some cases, the article referenced reflects my views on the topic. In other cases, it doesn’t. I will reserve my comments until I have the time and space to more fully explicate them.

  • Adjunctification of the faculty threatens academic quality across all of AHE is a theme that began appearing in higher education circles in the 1980s. It has exploded with much force in the new millennium. Gabriela Montell begins her December 15, 2000 article A Forecast of the Job Market in English in The Chronicle of Higher Education with the conflicting statement: “It would be an overstatement to say the job market for faculty members in English is booming, but scholars have reason to be mildly optimistic…” Later in the article, defining the term adjunctification, she notes that “Many professors also say they are concerned about universities’ reliance on part-time and temporary faculty members…the great worry…is adjunctification, which could keep students from getting the proper tenure-track jobs they clearly deserve.”
  • Faculty Reward Systems and Faculty Priorities are subjects of internal and external heated debates. Three researchers, Cathy A. Trower, Ann E. Austin, and Mary Deane Sorcinelli, collaborated in the study Paradise Lost: How the academy converts enthusiastic recruits into early-career doubters. This paper “captures the sense of dreams deferred as well as the tension between ideals and reality that young scholars face as they move through graduate school and into faculty posts … if they move into faculty posts.” It appears in the May 2001 issue of the AAHE Bulletin.
  • The Academic Lattice is the seemingly constant expansion of administrative support structure to handle tasks and duties seen by many as not directly related to teaching and learning. It is very frequently blamed for unneeded increased costs. This phenomenon is often derogatorily called “administrative bloat”. The study The Cost of Prestige: Do New Research I Universities Incur Higher Administrative Costs? by Christopher C. Morphew and Bruce D. Baker seems to say it does apply to some institutions. However, it leaves the question open for others. The paper appeared in the Spring 2004 issue of Review of Higher Education, Volume 27, Number 3.
  • Basic questions concerning College Admissions which have been around for hundreds of years remain tauntingly unanswered: “Who should go to college?” “How should a college decide to whom they offer admission?” Ross Douthat addresses one particularly sticky question in his article Does Meritocracy Work? His article concerns the fierce competition among prospective students to gain entrance into elite institutions, and the extensive pressure on elite institutions to enroll a more diverse student population. The article appears in the November 2005 issue of The Atlantic.
  • Since the Reagan tax revolution, many public higher education officials and commentators have debated the issue of whether the privatization of the academy threatens public higher education. In 2005 Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, published the white paper The Perfect Storm and the Privatization of Public Higher Education, a version of which appeared in the November 2005 issue of Change Magazine. Ehrenberg argued that the privatization of public higher education and the shrinkage of public support threatened to do irreparable damage to public higher education. In a November 2009 blog post Reality Check: The Privatization of Public Higher Education, Travis Reindl partially rebuffs the Ehrenberg arguments. In the decade since Reindl’s post, public support of public higher education in terms of government funds have continued to decline. So where are we?
  • Sweeping demographic changes are altering the face of AHE. These changes began in the last half of the 20th century with the entrance of women and some minority students into our colleges and universities. However, they have picked up steam heading into the new millennium. Rob Jenkins sketched the new “traditional student” in his October 2012 article The New ‘Traditional Student’  in The Chronicle of Higher Education. This new student is married, living at home, and working. Within a few years, the majority of students will be over 25 years of age and a person of color. 
  • Scandal after scandal rocks AHE and drags its reputation through the mud. Prior to the dawn of the new millennium, AHE was not immune from scandalous activities. However, as social media access has accelerated the news cycle, information about scandals has become more available, more quickly. A Google search for “college scandals” took less than 1 second to produce over 75 million results. One of those results was a Harvard Business School Working Paper The Impact of Campus Scandals on College Applications, which was published in 2016. The abstract of this study by Michael Luca, Patrick Rooney, and Jonathan Smith begins with the provocative statement: “In recent years, there have been a number of high profile scandals on college campuses, ranging from cheating to hazing to rape.” In their paper, the authors attempted to answer the question “With so much information regarding a college’s academic and non-academic attributes available to students, how do these scandals affect their applications?” The authors looked at the top 100 American universities ranked in the 2015 U.S. News and World Report, “Best Colleges.” They then constructed a database of reported scandals on these campuses between 2001 and 2013. They found that during these dozen years, 75% of the top American universities reported at least one major incident. Since their databased cut off in 2013, they didn’t include recent major scandals including the Michigan State gymnastics incident (2014), the Baylor football scandal (2016), University of North Caroline cheating scandal (2017), the fraternity hazing death of Timothy Piazza at Penn State (2017), the Ohio State sexual abuse scandal (2019), and the Varsity Blues Admissions fiasco (2019). It also doesn’t include the Louisville basketball scandal (2017), Temple falsification of USNWR data (2018), or the implosion and collapse of ITT (2016) since these schools were not in the top 100 universities on the USNWR rankings.
  • Are athletics taking over the academy? Many including Richard Vedder, the director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, think so. He presents some ammunition for his opinion in the op-ed piece Athletic arms race hurts academics, which appeared in the December 31, 2013, edition of the Omaha World-Herald.
  • The Academic Ratchet tightens its grip on AHE. The automatic response of many within the academy to solve every budget or enrollment deficit is to seek new students via the addition of new programs and faculty, or an increased effort by the admission, recruitment, and fundraising offices. “To solve our problems all we need to do is rachet up our efforts, programming or personnel.” The obvious problem with this solution is that for most institutions it just doesn’t work. There aren’t enough funds, faculty, and students to satisfy all of AHE. In addition, institutional personnel doesn’t have the time nor expertise to do all of the necessary work. To help alleviate the academic rachet problem, in the late 1990s Robert C. Dickeson developed a process he called Program Prioritization. He outlined it in a 1994 book which was later updated in 2010. It is titled Prioritizing Academic Programs and Services: Reallocating Resources to Achieve Strategic Balance, 2nd edition. Over the next 25 years since Dickeson’s process was first released, more than 500 institutions attempted program prioritization. Some were successful in achieving a strategic balance. Many were not. In January 2014, Alex Usher, a consultant with Higher Education Strategy Associates, wrote a blog post Better Thinking About Program Prioritization critiquing the Dickeson plan.
  • As Academic Arms Races heat up in all segments of AHE, the burning question is “What is the price of prestige?” Kevin Iglesia attempted to answer that question in his 2014 Seton Hall University dissertation The Price of Presitge: A Study of the Impact of Striving Behavior on the Expenditure Patterns of American Colleges and Universities.
  • The question: “Is virtual teaching a replacement for the traditional classroom?“ has perplexed higher education since the University of Illinois created an Intranet for its students in 1960. It was a system of linked computer terminals where students could access course materials as well as listen to recorded lectures. It evolved in the PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) system which at its height was operating on thousands of computers all over the world. By the time we entered the new millennium, millions of students were not only using computer-aided instruction for supplemental course work, but they were also taking entire courses and even degree programs online. Faculty members and universities were asking the question of whether these students were getting a quality education. Along the way, faculty began to worry about whether they were becoming viewed as superfluous. Universities became concerned about whether their brick-and-mortar palaces would be ghost towns replaced by a new costly virtual infrastructure. In a June 23, 2018, blog posted on the eLearning Industry website, Allistair Gross asked the direct question Is Virtual Teaching A Major Threat To Teachers?
For the past two decades, have educators been running from crisis to crisis trying to save American higher education? Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

Having reached 10 crises and running out of room in this post, I have decided to save another 10 crises for a Part II of A New Millennium – Same Old Story. Tune in next week for more troubles, calamities, cataclysms, emergencies, and disasters in 21st century American higher education.

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Basketball, Billboards, and Promises We Can’t Keep: a Problem in Higher Education.

My chronic fatigue still has me falling asleep “on the job.” Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

In spite of several excellent nights of sleep according to the data from my BiPAP breathing machine which is supposed to be helping me, I’m still fighting severe chronic fatigue. Thus, I’m not ready to publish the promised second post in my series on Key Performance Indicators. Therefore, I am very happy that Erik Benson, a guest author of two previous posts (Where are you? Cultural intelligence and successful leadership in a university context and  The Value of the Liberal Arts to the University), has volunteered to jump in with his essay below that actually fits very well with some of the directions I intended to pursue in my future posts.

Basketball, Billboards, and Promises We Can’t Keep: A Problem in Higher Education

In the movie White Men Can’t Jump, the two main characters (played by Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson) meet on a basketball court. Snipes’ character sizes up Harrelson’s as an easy mark for a hustle but needs some cash to place his bet. He assures his friend who stakes him the money that they will go out for dinner with the winnings. He soon discovers, however, that he has been hustled, and cannot make good on the promise of dinner.

Besides appealing to By’s passion for basketball, this anecdote is a classic example of making a promise one can’t keep. While funny in a movie, it is also a sad reality in higher education. There is a common expectation that a college education guarantees one a job for life. Yet a wide array of sources, from systematic surveys to social media, reveal that many college graduates (and their parents) have been left feeling that this promise has gone unmet. The college graduate who is struggling to find a job and has moved back in with his or her parents has become a common cliché.

This cliché is not baseless, nor is it limited to the “usual suspects.” As Derek Newton notes in a 2018 article in Forbes magazine, liberal arts majors are popularly associated with the college-educated Starbucks barista. Yet a recent study of the employment prospects of college graduates yielded some surprising results. It focused on underemployment, which refers to people with jobs “for which they are overqualified.”

The study revealed that a surprisingly large number of graduates with majors in business and health-related fields were underemployed, even five years after graduation. Newton observes, “In other words, for every cliché of a barista or bartender with a liberal arts degree, there were ten with a degree in business.” Considering that business or health-related fields are often sold as “safe” career choices, the reality must be shocking for many graduates. Little wonder, then, that many have growing doubts about the efficacy of a college education.

Popular manifestations of this are readily evident. Mike Rowe, the face of such shows as Dirty Jobs, is but one of the critics questioning the conventional wisdom about college education. Rowe emphasizes that he is not “anti-college,” but that he has a problem with the overwhelming push to get young people to go to college. For one thing, not everyone is “cut out” for college. For another, there are many unfilled jobs that do not require a college education, but simply some vocational training and a willingness to work. Coupled with the high cost of college, the intense pressure on young people to go is even more inexplicable. In sum, the ideal that is sold doesn’t match reality.

Rowe is not a lone voice. Even within higher education ranks, doubts abound. In a 2018 piece on the state of higher education for Christian Scholar’s Review, Jack R. Baker and Jeffrey Bilbro comment on seeing a slew of billboards along I-94 in southern Michigan for numerous institutions (including their own) rife with promises of fulfilling jobs, careers, and lives. The fact that each makes the same promise of a unique or distinctive experience is remarkably ironic. Their experience is anything but unique. Such billboards abound across the country and are but one venue of the onslaught; television, radio, laptops, and electronic devices are all flooded with such sales pitches. My own institution has ads that pop up on seemingly every webpage, and billboards throughout western Michigan trumpeting a 94% job placement rate for graduates and a chance at “a life that matters.”

This points to additional promises colleges make beyond material rewards. They offer assurances about safety, significance, and future fulfillment. Whatever the slogan, graduates are assured of a life of adventure and significance. Of course, this ties in with material results; few likely envision a life of significance as a barista. Yet there are non-material results. Christian colleges have long been seen as being an ideal venue for finding a spouse. However, besides the fact that this is not the institution’s reason for being, this ideal runs afoul of such realities as student demographics. Still, this is on oft-repeated sales pitches to potential students and their parents. Of course, this has been part of a larger narrative of Christian colleges as “safe havens” for students. This is a big selling point for parents who fear what their children will be exposed to at a state institution, and who thus want assurances that their children won’t be challenged regarding their beliefs. In fairness, on the flip side, many state institutions are marketing much the same idea of being “safe places,” albeit under different guises. Yet the reality is that a good college education exposes one to different people, divergent ideas, and deep thinking, none of which are “safe.” Put simply, we will disappoint those to whom we make that promise.

The tendency to make promises that cannot be kept poses a big problem for higher education. The more it is done, the more the narrative of unfulfilled promises is fed, the more doubts about the value of a college degree rise, and the more downward pressure we will see on enrollment. Put simply, the “brand” will lose its credibility, and “sales” will reflect this. It is a tendency that needs to be broken, and the starting point for doing so is to acknowledge and engage with reality, as we are doing in this forum.

References:

The Permanent Detour: Underemployment’s Long-Term Effects on the Careers of College Grads (Boston: Burning Glass Technologies, 2018).  

Jack R. Baker and Jeffry Bilbro, “How Wendell Berry Helps Universities Inhabit Their Places,” Christian Scholar’s Review 47:4 (Summer 2018), 415-22.

Derek Newton, “It’s Not Liberal Arts and Literature Majors Who Are Most Underemployed,” Forbes 31 May 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereknewton/2018/05/31/its-not-liberal-arts-and-literature-majors-who-are-most-underemployed/#7959111911de (accessed 11 February 2019).

Mike Rowe, “Mistaken Stance on the Importance of Higher Education,” Mike Rowe (17 July 2017). http://mikerowe.com/2017/07/otw-mistakenstanceonimportanceofcollegeed/ (Accessed 31 January 2019).

 

Erik and I trust that this post has provoked some thinking on your part and we hope that you will let us know those thoughts via the comment section below. At this point, I make no promises concerning my next post other than to say it will either be a follow-up to Erik’s post or the second post in my Key Performance Indicators series. Even after 10.3 hours of sleep last night, according to the readout on my BiPAP, my body is telling me it’s time for a nap. Until next time, I’ll snore away!

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We’re Back in Business, Part II

As promised Higher Ed By Baylis LLC (HEBB) is officially back in business. This post is a continuation of Today is April 11! This is no April Fools’ joke. We’re Back in Business. So I begin this post with the third and fourth announcements which I had planned to make.

The above picture of a store front with a Grand Reopening  sign is only symbolic. HEBB doesn’t yet have a physical building. However, we are in the process of building a new viable, and vital business entity. I have placed emphasis on several words and concepts in the preceding sentence.The emphasis is on the word we.  From January 2013, the official beginning of Higher Ed By Baylis LLC, By Baylis was the only investor and only operating  consultant. My loving, loyal and responsible wife of 47 years, had access to all records of the HEBB, including the finances. I took this prudent step in case something happened to me, since twice in 2009, I entered a hospital as a member of the ABB (All But Bagged) Club. What does “All But Bagged” mean? The best description I can give probably came from the doctor that greeted Elaine when she got to the hospital when I first experienced the exploding artery, imploding tumor, and what looked liked a stroke. The doctor truly thought that I would leave the hospital in a body bag. When Elaine was introduced to the attending doctor, the doctor told her to call the family together. Elaine asked for an explanation. The doctor said, “If he survives the operation, he’ll never be the same.”

The first significant change is that HEBB will very soon officially be a “we” It will no longer be just By Baylis. Over the past several years, as I talked with potential clients about their needs, it became obvious that the needs and the potential solution to these clients’ problems were well beyond the capabilities of one individual. To remedy this deficiency, quoting the Lennon and McCartney song title, I have called for “a little help from my friends“. I have been in discussion with a number of former colleagues and the friends that I have built up over my 40 years of experience in the world of higher education. Out of those discussions, I am pleased to announce that almost a dozen highly qualified, experienced consultants and coaches, have agreed to work with me. There are several possibilities concerning the final cooperative arrangements. In some cases, the individuals may actually join HEBB and become principals. In other situations, HEBB and some consulting/coaching practices may form an alliance and work together cooperatively.

The above discussions are ongoing because they involve intricate legal negotiations. As soon as individual arrangements are finalized, we will make those announcements. I know I am pleased with the caliber of my current, potential partners. I am very confident that potential clients will find the collection of experts that emerges from these discussions to be a powerful force, which can easily and economically help them identify their watershed decisions and find practical and feasible answers to those organizational, world-changing questions.

It is not yet clear what form the final entity will take when it emerges from the above mentioned discussions. I guarantee that the final entity will share the dream that lead to the founding of Higher Ed By Baylis LLC. It was a dream of resilient, welcoming, wise, listening, flexible, entrepreneurial organizations that had a strong sense of integrity, honesty, confidence, determination, and quality. For Christian colleges, this meant they had to have a central anchor of Christ. Emanating from the proposition and relational truth expressed in Christ, were cultures of learning, scholarship, engagement, hospitality, evidence, excellence and worship. A culture is a group of people who have a foundational set of values, beliefs and principles. These people generally or habitually behave in a manner consistent with their values and have developed a collective knowledge base that has grown out of their beliefs and actions. A culture is who the people are, what they know, and how they  typically behave. I expressed my dream of  21st Century Christian University in the following diagram that appeared in the 2006 Winter edition of the Cornerstone magazine:

 

courtesy of By Baylis and Cornerstone University

Returning to a discussion of the words emphasized in opening paragraph of this fourth announcement,  some of you may be asking the question, “Don’t the terms viable and vital mean the same thing?” In one sense, they both carry the connotation of being alive. However, in another sense, they mean something very different. I am using the term  viable in the sense of being capable of success or continuing effectiveness. I see HEBB as having a good probability of being successful. It can easily be very effective. I am using the term vital  in its sense of having remarkable energy, liveliness, or force of personality. I foresee HEBB as a force with which to be reckoned in the coaching and consulting world. The team which we are assembling will be second to none. They will all be recognized as experts in their fields and masters of their trades. It is very important to note the plural designation on the words field and trade. HEBB will be a one-stop shop for organizations seeking help. In the educational arena, we are assembling a team that can cover the waterfront of accreditation, accountability, admissions and recruiting, advancement and fund raising, alumni relations, athletics, curriculum development and management, educational law, facility planning and management, finance, information technology, human resources and professional development, leadership development and succession, planning (including strategic, operational, tactical  and master planning), regulatory compliance, and student development.  HEBB will be able to work with and help any institution, whether public or private, at any educational level including primary, secondary, or higher education. Do you get the feeling of why I am excited to be back in business? Although the emphasis to this point has been with educational entitities, I foresee in the near future extending the vision of HEBB to service Christian and non-profit public service ministries, since there are many similarities in mission and operations with educational institutions. 

If you are an individual who would be interested in joining HEBB as a principal or you represent a  coaching/consulting practice that would be interested in collaborating in an alliance with HEBB, I would be very interested in talking with you. Please leave a comment in the reply box with your name, area(s) of expertise, an email address, a  phone number, and the best time to contact you. Since I have the protocols set so that I must approve any comments before they appear, your contact information will not be shared with anyone.

from Presenter Media
from Presenter Media

The fourth and final announcement in these two blog posts relates to the HEBB website which you can find by clicking here: HEBB. For almost 18 months the website has been effectively shut down. With the reopening of Higher Ed By Baylis LLC, that’s about to change. The website is going to experience extensive remodeling to reflect the changes in HEBB.

The first change you will see is a new welcome page which will introduce people to Higher Ed By Baylis LLC, its mission, vision and core values. There will be a staff page that will introduce people to the HEBB team, a brief bio and their areas of focus. There will be a blog page with links to the blogs written by our people. There will be page of introduction to HEBB services for institutional clients. There will also be a  page of introduction to services for individual and family clients. There will be a page of resources available to the general public. There will be a page of the cost of various HEBB services. These changes should be in place by the end of April.

 

 

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Life Cycle of Alumni: Part XIV – It Takes an Institution to Develop Successful and Satisfied Alumni

Alumni development can’t be delegated to just a few people. It takes the whole institution to develop successful and satisfied alumni. For more than 40 years, I was involved in the oversight of admissions offices and the processes of recruiting and admitting students. Since my earliest days in the admissions area, I have believed that one of the most important tasks of an admissions office was to begin the task of developing satisfied and successful alumni.

At that time, college education was definitely a family decision. The most significant people in helping prospective students with their college selection process were the parents. You must remember that this was more than a half century ago. At that time, students were different than they tend to be today. The over-whelming majority of students were traditional age (18 to 25 years old). Most of those students started college immediately after high school or a short stint in the armed services. My first administrative position was in a traditional liberal arts, residential college, with almost no commuter population. One of the largest tasks of the admissions office was to sell the campus experience.

I wanted our recruitment efforts focused on two ideas or pictures. The first was to help prospective students picture themselves as students on our campus. They had to see themselves on campus. What would that look like? How would they fit in? In developing these pictures, we could not forget the parents of these prospective students. Parents needed to see how our institution would assist their students in furthering the process of development that the parents had begun.

The second picture that I wanted to help prospective students develop was the picture of themselves as successful alumni. What did they want to do with their lives? What was the ministry, vocation or career to which they felt called? How would our college help them achieve their goals? I also wanted to plant the seed of the question: “As a successful alumni, how could they give back to their institution so that others could have the same experience?”  Not forgetting the parents, the institution needed to also show them the possibilities of what successful alumni were doing and could do. If their students were successful, these parents would become powerful allies, in their communities, as well as their social and professional circles, for not only the admissions effort, but also for the advancement office.

As I noted in a previous post in this series, the selling job does not stop once a student applies, has been admitted, or even enrolls. College admission did not guarantee graduation. The path from matriculation to graduation has been a hard journey for many students. Retention very much depends upon students seeing that their goals are stronger than the challenges that they incur. To assist in that process, we had to put faces on the successes of our alumni. Students needed to know that others had previously trod this path and successfully traversed it. It could be done. Success stories are an ecnouragement to those still on the journey.

To help paint the picture of successful and satisfied alumni, I recruited alumni to assist our efforts. I asked alumni to distribute materials and talk to their family, friends, neighbors and colleagues. I asked alumni to host admissions parties for other prospective students and their parents to meet real alumni and students, as well as the paid recruitment staff. Sometimes, I was even able to convince faculty to become involved in these efforts.

Once the prospective students became enrolled students, I continued my effort to involve alumni. I recruited alumni to become volunteer career counselors via telephone contact or campus and off-campus visits. At this point of time, email was a fledgling idea and not a practical option.  I used alumni in internships and practicum placements. I encouraged faculty to invite alumni into their classes to speak about the career opportunities in their fields or to give guest lectures about specific topics. This did two things. It kept the alumni involved with the institution, and made them feel good about giving back to the institution. It also planted the seed in the minds of students of the possibility of doing the same thing after they graduated.

The selling job on alumni is not even finished at commencement. The institution has to keep meeting the needs of the alumni. This definitely involves maintaining vehicles for the communications network that students had begun to develop while enrolled. This could also involve the maintenance of a placement office for career assistance. Another option is the provision of life-long learning opportunities involving faculty, staff, and other alumni as instructors and participants.

In the next post in this series, I will address some of the substantial educational questions involved in helping and guiding students from matriculation to graduation, and hence to alumni status. Happy, successful and satisfied alumni are much more eager to be involved alumni at all levels.

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Life Cycle of Alumni: Part XIII-Fundraising Law #10

The tenth of Richardson and Basinger’s laws of fundraising was:

Law #10: The Law of Uncertainty. People will do whatever they please. To paraphrase an old expression, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink or give.” Likewise, “don’t count your chickens before they hatch.”

This post will consider how this fits into the process of student recruitment, retention, and alumni development.

Recruitment: For many years the student recruitment industry used the concept of an admissions funnel to describe the process of recruiting, admitting, and enrolling students. At this time, some admissions experts are saying that the new electronic communication age has made the concept of a funnel obsolete. I will agree that some aspects of how institutions worked the funnel previously are no longer applicable. However, I believe that in talking about the numbers of people interested and in contact with your institution at any one time, the funnel is statistically still a viable concept.

In the old model, the institution would pour a very large number of prospects into the wide mouth of the funnel by advertising or buying names from direct mail sources. That number dropped off dramatically as the prospects either lost interest in your institution or found institutions that were more appealing. You worked your prospects until you had your list of inquiries. At this point, you worked your inquiries to attempt to get them to take the next step of commitment and apply. They were now applicants.

At this point the institution stepped in to whittle this number down further by taking the step of accepting students for admissions. The institution was saying to the student, we want you. Different institutions had different strategies in accepting students. Some institutions are more selective in their choice of students, while others took a more “open door” approach.

With an offer of admission, the process was now back in the lap of the prospective student to decide whether or not he or she would accept the offer of admission and pay a deposit to confirm that decision. However, even with the payment of a deposit, the job of recruitment wasn’t necessarily complete. Not every deposited student would enroll.

With the advent of internet and television, some admissions experts suggest that institutions no longer have to necessarily go out as aggressively and identify the names and addresses of prospects.  Institutions can let the prospects shop anonymously until the prospects make the first move. At this point the institution can aggressively pursue them.

Although the landscape of higher education is changing, I believe that this new process is most effective for institutions with good reputations already established. If your institution is not well-known, you may still have to do some things the old-fashion way. You have to earn the trust of prospective students. You may also have to find ways to make your institutional mark with the general public. Surveys of enrolled students indicate that an overwhelming majority of students had their first introduction to the name of their college before they began junior high. I’ll leave that topic for another post.

Earlier I alluded to the statistical basis behind the admissions funnel. In institutions with which I have worked, it was not unusual for the number of inquiries to be less than 2% of the number of prospects. At these institutions, an average of 10% of the inquiry pool actually completed applications. Of the completed applicantions, on average the institutions accepted 70%. Of the accepted students, these institutions had 65% confirmed acceptance with a deposit. From the deposited students, on average of 85% enrolled. Thus to enroll a new class of 500 students, these institutions had to start with a prospect pool of more than 250,000. From this prospect pool, the institutions had to generate almost 13,000 inquiries. From the inquiry pool, they had to generate almost 1,300 applications, from which they admitted approximately 900. Of this admitted pool, approximately 600 paid a deposited. From this confirmed pool, finally a new class of 500 enrolled students emerged.

Retention: Once a student enrolls, in other posts we have emphasized that the job is not done. An institution must work to keep the students involved and interested. The national average of matriculates graduating is less than 50%. At the institutions at which I worked, I liked to track year-to-year retention.

As an example at one institution, when I arrived the graduation rate was less than 20% and the first-to-second year retention rate was less than 50%. Think of the strain this puts on an institution, if it must replace half of its students every year. With a first-year program in place, the first-to-second year retention rate went up to 85%. With the addition of a second-year program, and then a senior-year program, the year to year retention rates also increase dramatically. The second-to third year retention rate went from 65% to 80%. The third-to-fourth year retention went up to 90% and the percent of seniors that graduated kicked up to over 95%. This produced a matriculate graduation rate of almost 60%, much better than the national average. However, it still meant that 40% of entering students did not graduate. No matter what you do, people will do what they please or what they have to do.

Alumni: If you have done a good job in tying individuals into your institution while they are students, the job of keeping them interested and involved as alumni is much easier. In a major assessment project, I worked with more than 50 institutions in surveying their alumni two years after they graduated. Although there was a great variation in individual statistics, from all 50 institutions we had valid contact information for less than 50% of all graduates. You can’t hope to keep people involved in your institution, if you don’t have contact information.

This says to me that there are several major difficulties. The first is that the institutions didn’t sufficiently meet the needs of these graduates when they were students. Otherwise, I would have thought the graduates would have made an effort to remain in contact with the institution. If the graduates did try to make contact, then the institution either didn’t respond or keep track of contact information. This means the institution has many more problems to fix.

Without a spark of interest on the part of the alumni or proper contact information, there is no hope of developing further alumni invovlement. Even with alumni interest and proper contact information, it is possible that the alumni will refuse the institution’s advances. People will do what they please.