technology

I have been having many discussions around technology of late, and when I say technology, I am referring to digital and digital media technologies.  Underlying those discussions is  an assumption, or a premise, that technology is transforming our lives in ways we can't quite predict or control.  This is something of a truism, and technology has always been transforming lives in ways that couldn't quite be predicted or controlled, but the subject has taken on a sort of gravitas of late that wasn't present when I entered higher education.  The camps then were fairly well divided between those who just didn't give a damn so long as it didn't affect them, and those who took a science fiction interest in the matter.  Then, of course, the transformation was something in the offing, not something that was happening, and the discussions had that odd fascination of utopian promise coupled with apocalyptic dread that permeates our response to Hal 2000 or the Cylon Empire.  There were visionaries at the extremes with Nicolas Negroponte on the one side and the Unabomber on the other, but among those paying attention, there was also a strong presentiment that resistance was futile, that the brave new world was coming, and that higher education would need to adopt and adapt to the emergent technologies.

I really want to talk about technology in higher education, but if you will permit me a brief aside on manufacturing, I think it will help make my fundamental point clearer.   As everyone knows, manufacturing within the United States is in decline, but like most things that everyone knows, it is not exactly true.  In the beginning, manufacturing was a labor intensive enterprise, and required thousands of hands to person the assembly lines.  Most of those jobs, the un-skilled and semi-skilled labor that made up the bulk of line employment, has indeed been shipped overseas where labor costs are a fraction of what they were in the United States.  We could bemoan that trend, but it strikes me as inevitable.  The intervention of labor unions, of course, drove the price of labor up and secured what were, essentially, middle-class lives for those un-skilled and semi-skilled workers.  Today, we can wax nostalgic about our grandfather's work on the factory floor -- the sort of "Made in the USA" nostalgia that permeates a movie like Gran Torino -- but we need to remember that the middle-class children of those factory workers, many of them college educated, had no desire to follow their parents into the factory.  The work was demeaning, dirty, and often dangerous, and one suspects that, had the jobs not been exported, we would need to import labor (illegally) to meet the demand, just as we do in the more site specific construction and agricultural sectors.

There is talk of late about bringing manufacturing back, but manufacturing will come back transformed from a labor intensive operation to a technology intensive operation.  The mantra goes something like this -- if a procedure or process can be automated, it will be automated -- in part because the machines today, controlled through digital technologies, are more accurate, faster, and smarter than their human counterparts of yore.  I say "smarter," of course, with a caveat.  The machines reflect the cumulative intelligence of the engineers who designed and programmed them, and I say "cumulative intelligence" because the design and programming itself has been subjected to advanced, technology-infused management technique, captured under the euphemism of "continuous quality improvement."  The manufacturing that comes back will no longer require the un-skilled and semi-skilled worker, but rather a handful of skilled technicians to maintain the machines, and engineers to design and program them.  At least part of the anxious educational imperatives surrounding the so-called STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) is to have in place a work-force not only appropriate to the research and development efforts that engender new product, but the transformed manufacturing that will be required to produce those products.

This detour through manufacturing provides a tighter analogy to education than we might like to admit. Although I can hear the objections from my colleagues in the humanities now, the current structure of higher education, particularly within the United States, reflects 19th century industrial thinking.  We complain about the agrarian calendar of higher education, as if the whole enterprise were a throw back to the 16th and 17th centuries, but the so-called agrarian calendar reflects other social realities as well, not least that July is a better time to have time off to play than February.  Regardless, I am not talking about the calendar, but the structure of higher education, its processes, and there the student is input to an assembly line process of course treatments that results in a graduate, who, as the product, is subsequently subjected to the vicissitudes of the market, the job market.  That the input raw material is a human being, rather than wood or plastic, complicates the assembly line process of course treatments, insofar as we expect the raw material to assist in the effort of their transformation in ways that we would not expect wood or plastic to participate, but in the end, it is all about moving through a specified number of stations in a specified amount of time, the specification of which is reflected in the right number of the right credit hours.

The whole education manufacturing paradigm is, of course, being challenged on any number of levels, and technology has contributed to those challenges.  The typical higher education response to any sort of challenge is to absorb it as a program of study and crank up the assembly line.  There are any number of programs in technology studies.  In my own college, we have a whole division dedicated to digital technologies, and these assembly lines, these programs of study, ostensibly produce graduates with the knowledge and skills necessary to be a competitive product in a competitive job market.  I say "ostensibly," because the effectiveness of the assembly line process itself is being challenged.  Academically Adrift is one such challenge that has received wide attention, but it is a paean dedicated principally to the purpose of rescuing the current structures by improving the processes -- by insisting that the assembly line workers within each of the requisite stations do what they are being paid to do -- on the assumption that, should they do so, the results will be better.  There are, however, other more insidious challenges.  You have those like Peter Wood, for example, writing about the higher education bubble.  He quotes the conservative columnist George Will's definition of the bubble as "what happens 'when parents and the children they send to college are paying rapidly rising prices for something of declining quality.'"  In truth, the actual costs have not been rising, but as state subsidies for education have declined, the students' and parents' share of costs have been rising, but there is some uncomfortable truth in Wood's assertion that "tuition paying parents are buying prestige, atmosphere, identification with a community [and football team] and a conception of what it means to be an alumnus of a particular college more than they are buying what the college actually teaches.  That's why so many colleges get away with teaching hot-buttered nonsense for $40,000 or $50,000 a year."  The assumption behind Wood's assertion is that "quality" and "curriculum" are aligned, but that is like assuming that "quality" and "reliable transportation" are aligned in the production of automobiles, and that consumers are only, or are principally, concerned to purchase reliable transportation.  They are, as a minimum standard, but we also know that automobile purchasing consumers, not unlike tuition-paying parents, are purchasing what they can afford -- a Caddy or a Chevy -- a Harvard or a community college.  If neither the Caddy version or the Chevy version of higher education provide "reliable transportation" to educational outcomes, as Academically Adrift portends, then he status differentiation makes little or no difference and the bubble may well pop because the process itself is untenable.

Enter technology.  Unlike manufacturing, we did not outsource education, though I suspect we could have.  At one point in my career, while traveling in India seeking international partners, one private, for-profit provider of instruction assumed that we were there seeking ways to circumvent high labor costs (those pesky faculty unions).  Their product was a set of highly mediated, highly automated instructional program in digital technologies.  Students moved through well designed modules, were assessed both formatively and summatively, and setting aside concerns around the "college experience," it provided "reliable transportation" to a set of instructional outcomes well aligned with employer needs.  The conversation produced, not a partnership, but a crises of faith.  I am a humanist by training, if not wholly by inclination, and the prospect of a dehumanized education was disconcerting.   I wanted to believe, along with one of Wood's commenters that "students who can analyze , discuss, and write cogently about issues presented by, say, 'post-colonial identity studies,' s/he can analyze and communicate clearly about nearly anything, and that includes the complexities of the marketplace that Wood venerates," but that assumes students have engaged in analysis, not just the banking of information -- that students have engaged in discussion with other students that actually challenges and reforms their beliefs -- that students have actually been required to write, and that faculty have helped them through the successive drafts that make for cogent writing.  Academically adrift and frankly my own undergraduate experience, and even more frankly what I have observed in the classrooms up and down the halls of every college I have administered.  To do what the commenter suggests requires an enormous expenditure of dedicated effort, particularly with those students who are not academically inclined, who have no presumptive desire to "THINK FOR THEMSELVES," as the commenter loudly put it, at least not in the sense prized by academics where learning becomes an end unto itself.  For the vast majority of students, education is not an end unto itself, but is merely instrumental to another end, employment.  We should not dismiss employment, because education for the sake of education may well be desirable, but it is a luxury few can afford.  For most graduating students, burdened with upwards of $25,000 in student loans, employment of the sort that repays the investment in education is a necessity.

To do what the commenter suggests is enormously labor intensive, and requires of faculty at each stage of the manufacturing process something resembling an apprentice-craft approach, in each classroom a dedicated faculty effort over-the-shoulder of each individual student, but higher education has become, whether we like it or not, a mass enterprise.  Higher education has scaled up and out, the bubble has expanded outward, and higher education has done what it can to preserve the illusion of the craft approach, the dedicated effort on behalf of each student, but the student's experience is something quite different.  The large lecture hall is something of a case in point, and it forms a ubiquitous part of every undergraduate's experience.  Whether by default or by design it is a format dedicated to the banking concept of education, the dissemination of information, where the quality students most prize in the lecturer is not depth and breadth of knowledge, but rather their ability to entertain memorably.  A good deal of the scaling up and out within higher education has taken place at community colleges, where now over half of all undergraduates receive their first college experience, and where one can still find pride in the small classroom, but most students do not encounter a full-time instructor, dedicated to the apprentice-craft of teaching, but rather an adjunct instructor.  As higher education scales out further and further, absorbing more and more students, the adjunct faculty, who comprise the majority of the community college faculty, are of increasingly dubious qualification, particularly when one considers that the system must absorb ever greater number of students who have dubious academic ability, or at the very least who have little motivation to see education as anything other than an instrumental response to the real and pressing need for employment.  Unlike Richard Vedder, I have not "long been a proponent of Charles Murray's thesis that an increasing number of people attending college do not have the cognitive abilities or other attitudes usually necessary for success at higher levels of learning" -- and I have not been a proponent in part because there are environments, other than the collegiate environment, where one can aspire to quite high levels of learning, and there are abilities, other than cognitive abilities, like empathy and compassion, that are more to be prized than analytical skills or rhetorical skills -- but I do agree that "as more and more try to attend colleges, either college degrees will be watered down .. or drop-out rates will rise" or more likely some combination of the two.   The adjunct instructor of dubious academic skill meets the student with dubious academic motivation, and both think, "what the hell?"

Enter technology.  Were I to sit down today with those eager Indian ed-tech entrepreneurs, I might be more inclined to sign up.  The manufacturing mantra -- if it can be automated, it should be automated -- and a good deal of what a faculty member does in the classroom, depositing information with our students, can be automated.  If one thinks of "the book" as a piece of information technology, my capitulation is not much more radical than asking students to read the text, except that the state of information technology today extends "the book" in ways that are, for most students, more engaging, and more interesting than print technologies alone.  The text has become a multi-media environment, and more often than not, a well-designed multi-media environment, an environment subjected not only to a more rigorous set of instruction design principles, but an environment continuously improved by assessing its effectiveness in achieving the sorts of student outcomes that have been validated either by content experts in the discipline or employers or some combination of both.  It is not my generation's film strip, and while it is easy enough to critique it for being "canned," as if that ended the conversation,  I am not sure how that represents a condemnation relative to the scribbled notes of even the most sincere and dedicated adjunct X, drawn from the text, which he or she repeats over the course of 50 minutes to a room full of students distracted by Facebook on their phones.  It not only can be automated, but the ethical imperative implied by the "should" in "should be automated" has another dimension when we ask whether the automated or the adjunct provides the better instructional experience.

While I might agree that it dehumanizes education, that it would be altogether better if each student had a teacher, expert in their discipline, dedicated to the apprentice-craft of teaching, nudging him or her toward improvement in the third draft of their paper, the reality of such an experience for the masses in an era of mass higher education is remote.  I might also suggest that it opens the possibility that we might re-humanize education, that it might be altogether better if faculty were relieved of the mundane responsibility of information dissemination, if they could, in their one-on-one's, in their face-to-face encounters with students, focus on what is most valuable in education.  Information is important, exercise of analytical skills is important, and there is no need to water down curriculum in either respect because the machine, with the infinite patience of a machine, can iterate and reiterate information and can provide multiple and branching opportunities to practice their analytical skills.  Cognitive ability, and the extension of cognitive ability, is important, but more important and what is most often valuable in education, however, is neither information, not the ability to manipulate information -- what is most often most memorable is that moment of recognition.  I am not referring to the aha! moment of discovery, although that can be exciting, but rather the sense that someone recognizes something significant in us, something of value, and then actually extends the empathy and compassion to actually value it.  While that Master Card commercial goes through a litany of things that money can buy, and ends with that which money cannot buy, the priceless, higher education can engage in a market place transaction around information dissemination and receive a more effective and less expensive product than most faculty can produce on their own.  Information technology, however, is not the end, but simply the pretext.  Relieved of the tyranny of information dissemination, faculty might actually rededicate themselves to what is most valuable in education, that moment when a faculty member, even one of dubious academic qualification, recognizes something of value in a student, something before and beyond the market, that which is priceless, and both think, "what the hell!"                      

education and employment

I just spent two days with a room full of higher education leadership, and as one might imagine, there were several topics of discussion.  We are educators, after all, accustomed to parsing issues minutely.  There was one topic, however, that stopped conversation short, and that was the issue of higher educate finance. There were two strands to the conversation, and they kept entangling, which gave us plenty of fun in disentangling them.  One strand might be labeled ROI -- that is to say, does education have a sufficient return on investment to merit the investment in time and treasure?  The other strand, might be labeled "who pays?" -- this was the broader question of higher education finance, a question of particular concern to those of us who serve in public institutions.

The first question, on ROI, begs a follow on question -- "a return on investment for whom?"  Education at any level is highly politicized, and as anyone who has sat through meetings that involve legislators and educators knows, the major differences are definitional.  The notion of "return," for example is fraught with difficulty, some educators wanting the notion of "return" to include the social benefits of higher education -- the sorts of things like "citizenship" evidenced by the greater likelihood that holders of degrees will vote or volunteer -- like "self-sufficiency" evidenced by the lessor likelihood that holders of degrees will attach public welfare programs like food stamps.  All to the good, of course, but the social benefits of higher education are difficult to quantify, and even when one can find common ground on a quantification, they remain fraught.  It is hardly persuasive for those on the right, who believe themselves to be in the right, that higher education reduces public expenditure on welfare programs, in part because welfare programs, to their way of thinking, should not be offered at all.

I do, of course, believe such discussions are important, and if one buys into the traditional arguments of educators, it helps justify public expenditure on public higher education.  It is, in other words, a public benefit, but it is also a private benefit.  Here again there are various ways of parsing the notion of private benefit, some similar to the notion of social benefit.  There is reasonably good evidence to suggest that degrees contribute to the pursuit of happiness -- that people with degrees are happier in their marriages and their careers.  It is even more difficult to quantify a person's individual happiness, and most attempts to do so are always somewhat suspect and vaguely irrelevant as a public concern.  The other way of parsing the "private benefit" brings us around to a more tangible form of ROI -- earnings expectations.  Here again, there is substantive evidence that an investment in higher education in general provides a substantive return on investment in immediate employment prospects, salary on entry, and life-time earnings.  There is a sort of win-win in the equation of higher education and higher wages, the complementary equation of higher wages and higher tax returns, both a private benefit and a social benefit.

It is perhaps not surprising that much of the conversation between educators and legislators have been around the equation of higher education and high wages, but it also begs the question of who should make the investment.  If the principle ROI of higher education resides in a private benefit to the individual, shouldn't then the individual, not the public, make the principle investment?  The question is largely rhetorical, and to most legislator's minds the answer obvious.  They are nudged along by competing pressures on the state budgets for police and prisons, for roads and public transportation, for medicare and medicaid, and a host of other public goods.  Unlike public higher education, which has always had the revenue stream of tuition to offset some of the expense, most of the public goods do not have revenue streams associated with them, and when they do, it is rarely wise to ask for "increased revenues."  The periodic outcry when police are suspected of quotas on traffic stops, for example, points to some of the difficulty for raising "police revenues."  Public transportation might be an exception, where there is a clear fee for service, but increased fares disproportionately affect the working poor.  There are, in other words, all sorts of reasons to shift the priority balance away from higher education toward other more immediate public goods, particularly when individual investments in higher education return to the individual the substantiated expectation of higher wages.

It is perhaps not surprising as well that most state legislators have reduced the public expenditure and asked students to bear a greater and greater portion of the cost of the higher education.  While around 80% of the cost of higher education is largely centered in the faculty and staff, contrary to popular belief, increased tuition costs have not gone into escalating faculty costs.  At my own institution, for example, there have been salary increases of 1% per annum over the last five or so years. Those increases are below the increases of the consumer price index, and have been coupled with some rather significant increases in the cost of and their contribution to benefits, particularly health care benefits, which have been eroding over the same period.  In short, faculty, like most middle-Americans, have seen their real wages declining.  Most of the tuition increases at most public institutions have gone to off-set declines in state legislative support.   I say "most" of course because I am sure there are exceptions which would give someone somewhere the pretext of saying "there! there!  you see!"  I can say this ALL of the institutions with which I have been associated, either as an employee or as a colleague, have struggled to keep tuition costs down, and have raised them only as a matter of institutional survival, a matter of keeping essential faculty and staff employed, a matter of keeping valued instructional programs going, a matter of keeping the lights and heat operating.

While public tax-based support diminishes and tuition increases, there is an escalating increase in expectations.  First that higher education will absorb ever greater numbers of students, and second that they will actually deliver on the promise of higher wages.  On the first, completing the private ROI of life-time wages, there is a body of literature that suggests that attaining ONLY a high-school diploma relegates one to a life-time of economic struggle.  The evidence for that is compelling and beyond controversy.  The sorts of jobs where one could learn the skills necessary on-the-job are rapidly disappearing.   Whether one wants to blame off-shoring, the incursion of technology or both, there is considerable evidence that SOME post-secondary education is necessary to attain a middle-class income and life-style.  Just how much post-secondary education and what kind is still a matter of debate, but it is clear enough that SOME is necessary, and so higher education is increasingly seen as both a necessity and an entitlement for all.

Consequently, while public tax-based support diminishes and tuition increases, public institutions, particularly public community colleges, are expected to educate more and more students, many of them ill-prepared for collegiate work.  They are ill-prepared academically and attitudinally -- there has been plenty of press around that -- but often they are ill-prepared fiscally.  The traditional picture of "college" -- that students graduate from high school, go off to college and study for four years, then enter into adulthood and careers -- pertains to a small and shrinking minority of students.  Most are working part time at least, many are working full time or more at working poor wages, with the all familial and fiscal pressures that implies, and they are studying "in between" all the other obligations.  One young woman, Maria Sanchez, slept and slept soundly through the entirety of my 8 o'clock class (how awful!).  When I woke her at the end, she apologized and tried to make her escape, but indignantly I asked for an explanation.  She had worked her customary mid-shift (6 p.m. to 2 p.m.) and had gone home to find her child ill, which meant a lengthy wait at the emergency room (no insurance).  She had gone straight from there to my class, where she couldn't manage to stay awake.  Yet she was there.  I was still indignant, but not at her.  College in the traditional sense is increasingly an elite indulgence.  Maria needs better English skills to succeed in College, but she doesn't need a better, more committed attitude.  She has that.  What Maria needs to be successful in College is money, pure and simple, and she certainly cannot take a risk and ask her parents for that money.

On the second, when you consider students like Maria, it is rather important that higher education make good on its promise of an ROI on investment for the student. It is good, of course, that there have been some steps of late to curtail the predatory marketing practices of the for-profit sector of higher education with the Gainful Employment Act, which puts some pressure on all to provide evidence that attaining such and such a certification or degree will make the advertised difference in one's life prospects.  In fairness, for-profit institutions are, well, for profit.  Their business models are predicated on student demand, and they have been successful in adapting to that demand in ways that public higher education has not been successful, particularly the adult working students.  Their business models are also predicated on low overhead, so generally speaking, their programming tends to be low overhead, high demand programming.  One does not find too many for-profits entering fields where over-head tends to be high, as it is in most so-called STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math).  The exceptions might be digital technologies, where over-head is moderate, and allied health programming, where student demand exceeds the capacity of most public institutions, and the perceived pay-off is so high that students will pay the premium in tuition.   Beyond those exceptions, one will find instead a concentration on fields where over-head is low, as it is in business, public administration, and criminal justice -- fields where the for-profits can, well, make a profit.

Whether students can make a better living with low-prestige, high-cost education in those fields is another matter, but the cost is certainly high both for students and tax-payers.  The business models of the for-profits are also predicated on the existence of various federal and other subsidies for students.  If you make inquiry at a for-profit institution as a potential student, your first conversation is with an admissions counselor, but the admissions counselor is much less concerned (and often not at all concerned) with your academic ability, much more concerned with your eligibility for federal financial aid and guaranteed student loans.  Just as some health care institutions will provide care to the limits of insurance, many of the for-profits will provide education to the limits of the available financial aid and student loans, and beyond that the student is on their own.   Most drift away or drop out under financial pressure.   While there is no doubt fat in public higher education budgets that could be trimmed away -- things like high-cost athletic programs, which includes football at all but a small handful of institutions  -- and we find more with each round of budget cuts.  While the "privatization" of higher education is popular in some quarters, and the decreases in direct tax-subsidies from the states is incrementally "privatizing" higher education, it is mis-leading to think that the for-profits can provide education more efficiently.   On a program for program basis, the costs in the public and private sphere are roughly equivalent.  The difference is this:  they will offer only programs where there is a likelihood of profit, regardless of social need, and those profits will come from high tuition rates that are buttressed by federal subsidies, and loans.  Take away the subsidies, take away the loans, and the for-profits disappear tomorrow.

Of course, so would many of us in the public sector.  Frankly, we are not so different.  If higher education were priced at its actual cost of delivery, very few (perhaps the so-called 1%) could afford it.  In truth, even with existing subsidies, few can afford it.   The declining state support, off set by increasing tuition costs, will have a long-term impact on the student population graduating today as they enter the job market.  In a recent editorial in USA TODAY, Diana Furchtgott-Roth suggested that "huge tuition increases have also left those new workers with substantial debt.  The graduating class of 2011 left school with student loans of almost $23,000, the highest on record."  If default on exaggerated mortgage debt had a devastating impact on the middle-class in 2008, I suspect default on exaggerated student loan debt will have an equal, but more insidious impact on the middle-class in the future, particularly as education is increasingly commodified, and the commodity is increasingly devalued.  The same editorial reports that "even those with bachelor's degrees don't have it easy.  The unemployment rate in 2011 for new graduates with a bachelor degree was 9%, nearly double the 4.9% rate the same group experienced in 2006."  Of course, that 9% does not include the number of baccalaureate holders who are significantly under-employed -- the communications major, for example, working as an administrative assistant, not as the sportscaster she might have imagined -- and so have only marginal ability to make a decent living, much less pay off student loans.

When one begins to match the increasing cost and diminishing expectations of higher education, it does raise the question, "is it worth it?"  While a big pay-off for higher education is more and more difficult to guarantee, one thing is clear -- not pursuing higher education pretty much guarantees a life of diminished expectations on scales both human and economic.  The plane, so to speak, is significantly over-booked, but one thing is certain -- over booked or not, without a ticket you cannot get on the plane.  So there will be people clamoring to buy tickets, and people with tickets clamoring to get on the plane, but I have little faith that either political party will significantly increase the number of seats available.   While graduation ceremonies are appropriately congratulatory, the ultimate success of our students resides in what might be called "out-put demand," a factor largely beyond the control of higher education proper.  While we might take some steps to match "in-put demand," those clamoring for tickets, with "out-put demand," the employer needs that determine the number of seats on the plane, for the moment that is an elusive goal because the analytics that might allow us to predict the job market two, four, six years hence are less accurate than weather forecasts.  For those with modest memories, consider what the world looked like in 2007 and what it looks like today as the class of 2007 graduates.

In the meantime, here's hoping the student loan bubble doesn't pop, and that there are no riots at the gates as the numbers of modestly educated, but largely disenfranchised young people clamor for their place in the clouds.