Category Archives: Writing

The evidence on college dropout rates is exhaustively examined in a recent American Enterprise Institute study Diplomas and Dropouts, done by some first-rate researchers (Rick Hess and Kevin Carey, among others). The study shows what veteran college professors like myself have long known, namely that students who come to college well qualified have a very high probability of graduating –the graduation rate at top Ivy League schools is well over 90 percent, while at schools with open admissions that take any high school graduate who can write a check, it is not uncommon for graduation rates to be well below 25 percent.

Two pillars of the Higher Education Establishment, William Bowen and Michael McPherson (former presidents of Princeton University and Macalester College, respectively) have teamed up with Matthew Chingos in their new book Crossing the Finishing Line to apparently argue, according to news accounts (I have not read the book yet) that a major problem is “under-matching”: talented students with lower incomes that fail to go to the best school available, choosing instead to go to schools with low graduation rates and mediocre quality instead of higher quality institutions with low dropout rates.

Why Are Graduation Rates So Low?, Richard Vedder

I am never quite sure what to make of these sorts of articles. It sounds like yet another lament in the “some kids are just not meant for college” vein. Maybe, maybe not. The key term is the phrase “well-qualified.” Professors always say this sort of thing: “If we only had higher standards, our students would do well.” Basically, if our students were educated we wouldn’t have to educate them.

This is especially true in subjects like math and writing. Professors want their students to have “the basics” before they get to college so that they– the professors– can get on to more interesting subjects. Hidden in all of this, of course, are the mechanisms for maintaining the class hierarchy. Is it surprising that the best-funded schools have the best graduation rates?

I feel the same way about this term “under-matching.” It could be yet another euphemism, or it could be an academic attempt– perhaps well meaning– to talk about class. It seems pretty obvious that if you gave schools more money and resources they could increase drop-out rates. Well, it would if you could stop the administrators from spending it on sports and landscaping.

When critics question the validity of the calculations U.S. News & World Report uses to rank colleges, one answer the editors of the magazine have given is to note that it publishes not only the total rank, but also data on how colleges perform in the various categories that go into the rankings. So a prospective student who cares more about faculty resources or competitiveness or any other factor can see how colleges do there, and judge accordingly.

But if the factor that would-be students and their families care about is a percentage of full-time faculty, you can’t count on the numbers about research universities to be correct. The two universities with the top scores in this category (both claiming 100 percent full-time faculty) have both acknowledged to Inside Higher Ed that they do not include adjunct faculty members in their calculations. U.S. News maintains that colleges do count adjuncts (or are told to) so that figure gives a true sense of the percentage of faculty members who are full time. But the two with 100 percent claims are not alone in boosting their numbers by leaving adjuncts out.

Calculation That Doesn’t Add UpScott Jaschik, September 13, 2009, Chronicle of Higher Education

Two myths dominate the public view of Universities in the U.S.: the myth of the liberal university and the myth of the powerful professor. Part of the problem is that extreme right wing ideas have become so normal-sounding. If a university teaches evolution, or does research into stem cells, it must be liberal. But universities are extremely conservative by nature, if not tradition-bound; as the cliche goes, battleships don’t change direction easily or quickly.

Another measure of their conservative nature is the way universities treat their employees. Slowly, quietly, step by step, institutions of higher education are pulling apart the profession of college professor, dismantling it into what they often call more “flexible” pieces. No job-security, no academic freedom of speech. That brings us to the myth of the powerful professor. In the fairy-tale view, these (always liberal) professors are free to teach what they want, if they teach at all, and cannot be fired.

The American Federation of Teachers and the Chronicle of Higher Education’s responses to the U.S. News and World Report’s college rankings begin to put the lie to that last story. In fact most college teachers are not tenured, much less tenure track. And because the professors are not well-organized, they have so far been unable to stop the ongoing dismantling of their profession. Of course, this is also what happened to auto-workers, and steel workers, and…

NYACK, NY — 08/20/09 — Flat World Knowledge, the leading publisher of commercial open source college textbooks, today reported a dramatic increase in the number of colleges and classrooms adopting its textbooks. This fall semester, over 40,000 college students at more than 400 colleges will utilize Flat World textbooks, up from only 1,000 in Spring 2009 at 30 colleges.

The increased adoption of Flat World’s free and low-cost open source textbooks follows two semesters of successful in-classroom trials. During Spring 2009 trials, Flat World textbooks were shown to reduce average textbook costs to only $18 per student per class, an 82 percent cost reduction compared to traditional printed textbooks averaging $100 per student per class.

Flat Word Knowledge Press Release, August 20, 2009

Flat World Knowledge may well have developed a “Fremium” model that saves students money and could save the textbook industry from an ignoble but well deserved end. I particularly l like the idea of a textbook that can be accessed in multiple ways: downloaded and printed, ordered as a black and white or full color book, as audio-files, on the web, and so on.

The textbooks can be updated easily and, according to Flat World, the authors make money. There’s probably going to be a place for this sort of thing in the post-textbook era but there’s also a lot of potential problems. It’s very possible that students will unknowingly get ‘nickled and dimmed’ to death by this sort of publishing. Markets don’t need to be ethical.

What’s really missing here is the pedagogical opportunity to make the static textbook into a dynamic knowledge making enterprise shared by teachers as well as students. The software and services are available. What’s harder is convincing universities that they should put time and energy into facilitating broad based initiatives to create and maintain fully open source textbooks.