Fiat Lux*

My colleague the career field, the esteemed Dr. Marty Nemko, has long been an advocate of college accountability and education reform. For the most part, I agree with him. I believe college “consumers” (students) would be well served by more transparency from colleges as well as greater emphasis on teaching rather than research. But I believe one of his arguments is flawed. Normally, I’d just post a comment to his blog, but this will be a longer piece, so I decided to post it here — not to pull traffic from his site, but to avoid “hogging the mike” in the comment section. If you are not familiar with his views on this topic, I encourage you to go to his blog and click on pertinent labels (e.g., “college reform”). I know the man personally and his credentials are solid: PhD in Educational Psychology with emphasis on educational evaluation; consultant to 15 college presidents; former professor in the UC and CSU system. Marty, this is my open letter to you:

You frequently compare higher education’s value to drug efficacy, saying that if a drug’s likelihood of working were as poor as the four-year graduation rates at most colleges, the prescribing doctor would be sued. In the marketplace of ideas, I think you ought to let this comparison go at deep discount. Drug efficacy is very specific; higher education’s value is very amorphous. With the drug, the patient is looking for cure or symptom abatement, but with higher education, people might be looking for life enrichment or the opportunity to study a field in depth (e.g., women’s studies, art history or integral psychology) without thinking that it’s going to lead to a job or that they’re going to graduate in the standard four years.

The doctor who would be sued for prescribing an ineffective drug would probably look to defend himself by pointing to the patient’s failure to follow directions. Someone who skipped classes and took six years to graduate is like a patient who skipped doses and wasn’t cured. The colleges cannot possibly be held accountable for students’ choices any more than the doctors can be held accountable for patients’ behavior.

Even if colleges printed something like, “30% graduate in 4 years; 40% in 6 years; 20% in 8 years; and 10% in 10 years,” what would that mean? All freshmen would think, “I’m in that 30%” until they realize they’re in the wrong major, at the wrong school, they shouldn’t be in college at all, a loved one dies and they drop out either to take care of family business or because it sends them into a tailspin, or they get an incredible job offer based on contract work they’ve been doing, or they have health issues, etc., etc.,” — then they think, “Well, I guess I’m that 40% – 20% – 10% after all.” ALL of those apply to me (except for health issues), which is why it took me 12 years. Which of the many colleges I attended would you hold responsible for my failure to graduate in 4 years? Not only did I have a full ride to your alma mater, I began my college career there with 10 units under my belt from AP exams and having taken classes there in high school. Clearly, I was a “good risk” — are you going to nail the college to the cross because I made the decision to drop out after a year?

Both of us have taken classes in learning theory, so I’m outlining these ideas not so much to educate you but to include our readers. In common parlance, instruction is equated with education, but let’s say instruction is what colleges promise to provide in exchange for tuition and education is what happens when students assimilate knowledge they get through instruction, reading and project research. In other words, education is what we call it when true learning happens. In my “other” field of T+D (training and development), there’s been a similar shift of terminology to emphasize the active role of the attendee at instruction: the job title “Training Specialist” has become “Learning Specialist.”

Are colleges providing instruction? Yes, they are. It seems like they’re holding up their end of the bargain. A better simile might be that a college is like a restaurant. When you go into a restaurant, you pay the restaurant to provide food and it does. But you’ll come out edified or not depending on what you ordered and how much you ate. The art history major who comes out unemployable but who loved what they learned is like the person who ate nothing but sugar or “drank their dinner” and enjoyed every moment of it. Some people will order to get the most nutritional value for their dollar; some will not. The anorexics will hardly partake at all.

Despite marketing, everyone knows that chefs at chi-chi, expensive restaurants are focused on presentation, not large portions. (Hence the comment, “It’s good, but you’d better eat before you go.”) Despite marketing, everyone knows professors at research institutions are focused on research, not teaching. Give people a little credit. It’s the same with Fendi bags — anything designer-label is going to be more even though the materials cost the same as something cheaper. You’re paying for prestige. Unlike you, I was unimpressed with UC Berkeley (probably because I grew up with it in my backyard) and was determined to go to a community college until a guidance counselor suggested that I, for kicks, apply for a Chevron scholarship. (Of course, she knew I was, like you, poor, smart and first-generation college — the very type that scholarship providers look for.)

Your description of “professors who don’t care” is in line with my experience of UCB but it is not at all what I experienced at Cal State East Bay. At that school, maligned by you as “third-tier” (propagating the chase for more prestigious institutions), I met many amazing professors who cared very much about teaching. In fact, all were stellar instructors whom I came to respect even when I hated the subject they were teaching. All with one exception. That exception was a math professor from another country and I believe his short-temperedness during office hours was a reflection of his notion that women had no business taking differential equations in the first place. At UCB, I got the feeling I was bothering the professors every time I spoke to them. At CSUEB, they said, “Let’s have lunch.”

I do believe colleges should publish statistics about graduation rates, employment rates for majors and whatever else you can get them to reveal.

You want to remake general education? Who decides what gets included? I might even be more conservative than you on how much breadth is useful. I hate biology but was required to take it. I got one of the highest A in a class of a couple of hundred, but I remember nothing. Should biology be included in general ed? I never use it in real life. If it’s moldy, I throw it out, but I didn’t need a biology class for that. You’ll probably ensure that your beloved genetics will be included. Genetics to me is like stochastic processes to you — useless arcana. (I don’t plan on having any kids.) I’d say a survey of all the sciences compressed into one class is enough. (And I was a science major!) People should understand that warm air holds more moisture for figuring out the weather but no one really needs to know that we’re accelerating toward earth at 32 sq ft/sec — our practical knowledge of gravity is plenty. Is there a reason why we should know white light is composed of all colors? A lot of people get through life just fine without understanding rainbows. One thing we agree on is that school should be relevant with little theory and much real-world simulation, very like my master’s degree program at John F. Kennedy University.

I think you need an award like a MacArthur Fellowship to lend both funding and visibility — then you can get even more funding. The thing about such awards is that the winners are already doing the work. Utopia U. will never get funded unless you start a pilot program and show some results. And who will fund your pilot program? I have bad news, Marty. You will need to piggy-back your pilot onto an effort to help the underachieving in order to get funded. Why not run the pilot in Detroit, Pittsburgh or Oakland? Too much like sleeping with the devil? Do you believe your model will work with all students? Maybe your pilot students should be high-achieving people of color (perhaps with low-achieving histories) who are turning their lives around. You’re just continuing the success. Maybe instead of a two-year general ed program that feeds into a four-year degree, you could get scale it down to be a one-year program that feeds into a two-year degree, or even a summer-school version that fills a gap between high school and college. You emphasize the designer-label degree or certificate they’d get. Think about who would really like to have that. I had a client who went to a historically black college who continually reminded me that he had a certificate of some sort from USC.

And Marty… despite our occasional disagreements, you do shine a light in the darkness better than anyone else I know.

*Latin for “Let their be light,” the motto of UC Berkeley.

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