DIY U

I had a conversation with a well-informed friend in DC who urged me to sound a bit more skeptical note in my comments on the growth of for-profit colleges.

The case for for-profits is as follows: They concentrate on students who are nontraditional (aka the new normal: working adults) and underserved by traditional colleges. They offer them help filling out the FAFSA forms, more convenience and better customer service. They aggressively pursue growth in enrollment–growing at an estimated rate of 5% to 10% a year or five times to 10 times faster than the overall market. That type of growth is needed to fulfill people’s demand, not to mention our national goals of a more credentialed population. And to the extent that the sector is truly market-driven, they have the potential to be more innovative and efficient than public or nonprofit colleges have proven to be (although a Twitter friend pointed out that the majority of online students are still enrolled public and nonprofit colleges, forprofits certainly have a disproportionate share of the online market at 42% vs 9% of all students). Some for-profits have good fit with some DIY U ideas: open enrollment, unbundling of services, judging their programs on quality of results rather than prestige, and tying degrees more closely to workforce needs. In my book I relate these ideas back to John Holt’s Instead of Education, where he praises the Berlitz language school, among others, as a “schools for do-ers”.

The case against for-profits is that they are not so much “serving” the underserved as they are targeting or exploiting them. Although students take out loans similar to those at private colleges, the quality of education is really in many cases more like community colleges. Although enrollment rates are high and growing, graduation rates are very low. And students who attend these colleges are twice as likely to default on their loans. A recent paper by Mark Kantrowitz found that 60% of the discrepancy in default rates was due to the demographics of their students, which leaves 40% that the for-profits still have to answer for.

My friend argued forcefully that this situation is highly reminiscent of the mortgage crisis: that these colleges are peddling yet another false promise of the American Dream, in this case, the college diploma part of the dream, not the homeownership part, to those who are truly not qualified to take advantage of it. That their graduates and especially their non-graduates will have a very hard time pulling in salaries commensurate with their debt. Yet unlike the hapless homeowners, they can’t go into foreclosure or walk away from their debt under any circumstances, and so they’ll be stuck all their lives.

Points very well taken, and I’ll try to be more balanced in the future. I may have been guilty in the past of bending over backwards to be fair to the sector, perhaps out of my own contrarian streak.
I just want to add a couple of observations:
One is that for-profits, even more than other colleges, essentially operate as federal contractors, because their revenue comes from tuition which comes mostly from federally subsidized student loans and Pell Grants. That means if we’re concerned about quality in the sector, federal regulations are the way to go.

The second is that the same kind of policies that would improve the performance of for-profits would improve the performance of all colleges, but they freak traditional higher ed out. Things like administering tests to see what students are actually learning, or imposing real accountability for terrible graduation and default rates.

And finally (and perhaps sounding a more conciliatory note) the historical tendency in higher education has been for successful institutions’ goals and aspirations and standards all to drift upwards. Some may see it as naive if I celebrate the fact that Grand Canyon University has community service extracurriculars and liberal arts classes, but I see it as part of a necessary trend if we’re going to get to a higher education future that serves everybody.

watch it here:

I talk about Generation Debt and DIY U.

CSPAN has an amazing video library. I also looked up my appearance from 2006 for Generation Debt, where you can see that I am, embarrasingly, wearing the same blazer, and Pedro still mispronounced my name.

But it’s really an amazing show, with some really loyal viewers.

Probably the most common question I get about the future of higher ed. In the words of Ezra Klein:

“So in Kamenetz’s world — a world that I agree would be far better for pure learning — what steps into the role played by accreditation, both the one you get from the college you went to and the one you get from the relative selectiveness of that college against other colleges?”

This question assumes that the system of accreditation we have works well today, for the majority of people.
Actually, accreditation today works well for people like Ezra and myself who managed to get into and graduate from selective schools. This is by definition a small minority of people since “selective” means “lets in a small minority.”

It works less well for people who graduate from less selective schools.

It works extremely poorly for people who do not get degrees–often because they are poor and have to work more hours while they’re in, or instead of going, to school. They are cut out of a good percentage of decent-paying jobs. In fact, even in progressive circles there isn’t much public conversation about improving the quality of non-college jobs because the human capital policy we have assumes–”oh we’ll send more people to college so they can qualify for good jobs.”

This third group is a majority of Americans–just over 60 percent have less than an associate’s degree.

So, “accreditation” today aka the BA imperative, does not work well for most people.

I am going to argue that as long as the value of your degree is correlated with the selectivity of the college you went to, we’re probably forcing out a lot of very talented people (Harvard could fill its undergraduate class with valedictorians ten times over–sucks for all those kids who don’t make it!). As long as your success in college is correlated with how much money your family makes, even if you are just as smart and just as well prepared, for the simple reasons that you have to work more hours in school and that the cheaper colleges you attend have fewer resources to help you, our accreditation system works against social mobility.

I’m going to also argue that what we really want, to promote maximum prosperity for the maximum number of people, is for everyone to be able to find jobs suited to their talents. “Bad fit” leads to comparatively lower earnings and less job satisfaction. This is just as true by the way for the double-Ivy-League degree lawyer who’d rather be building boats in Key West, as it is for the waitress with a keen analytical mind who should be working for Accenture.

Still, accreditation remains a huge unresolved question.
One answer I look at in DIY U involves building reputation-based online networks where people can create portfolios and be judged on their actual work and accomplishments, not by the names on their diplomas. The Internet generally makes it easier to hire based on demonstrated skills, not how you look on paper.

Another answer involves judging colleges differently, for instance by their graduates’ improvement in learning or by starting salaries of graduates, rather than by how selective they are. Judge by outputs, not inputs.

Yet another answer is simply to create new forms of accreditation. Excelsior College for example is a pioneer in assessing and awarding credit for independent learning.

Thanks for the thoughtful questions, Andrew!

I talk about how higher ed is like both the mortgage bubble and the health care crisis.

I was so excited to open the Education Life section and see a whole article about free and open courseware, including reviews of individual courses and online, a sampler of popular lectures from MIT, Berkeley, and Yale.

The piece covers the news that broke at the Hewlett OER conference at Yale where I spoke last week. Hewlett has been instrumental in funding the open courseware movement to date. Now they are tightening their purse strings and also tightening their focus. They want to fund projects that focus on “deeper learning”, that improve teaching and learning practices, that track who participates and how they benefit, and that create “proof points” that can be taken to Washington, DC and to state legislatures and used to inform bigger policy programs.

Ultimately the vision is for publicly funded, evidence based education that is far more affordable and accessible than we see today.

The parallel movement of course as I talk about in the book is for self-learners and, even more exciting, self-organizing communities of learners to be able to take advantage of these resources to educate themselves, for free, outside the auspices of institutions.

Originally wrote this on spec for the Times but they 86′d it so I put it up on the Huffington Post.

“Opportunity to create a commercial webisode series for New York City’s most renowned Sports store.”
“[Assist] a Brooklyn-based visual artist/art director/blogger/tastemaker with several upcoming projects.”
“MODELING AGENCY –You will be required to do hands on work with assisting models and staff with the company.”
“Exciting lingerie company…responsibilities include: preparing packages, swatching, various paperwork, organizing design room & samples.”

What do these New York City jobs found recently on Craigslist have in common? All are for unpaid summer internships. And all are quite probably illegal under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

On April 29 at 9 pm, I’m doing a call with the members of the Evolver Social Movement (a very cool website/network you should definitely check out.

They’ve also posted an edited and recustomized excerpt of DIY U on their site, Reality Sandwich:

The whole project of formal education has been historically based on the idea of society transmitting its ideas, values, and technologies from one generation to the next, and from dominant civilizations and cultures to “backwards” or “primitive” ones. In the modern era we added the task of making and incorporating new discoveries into the curriculum year after year. As our society got more complex, we developed bigger and bigger institutions to teach more and more people more and more things.

All adapted from/related to DIY U.

New York:

“The larger question could be whether it’s possible to reunite frugality with prestige in a new breed of higher education—one that relies on achievement, not new geranium beds. For customers of Rodarte’s Target line or a McDonald’s cappuccino, it may just be the perfect recession-era combination.”

Alternet:

“The student loan beast is bloodied, certainly. But it’s not yet on its knees. More changes to the federal student-aid system are required to relieve thousands of people already saddled with unaffordable debt, to calm the growth of private loans, and to tame tuition increases.”

Good:

“These days, tuition at public colleges commonly rises five, seven, or even 15 percent in a single year, and students shoulder five and six-figure debts to pay for their degrees. It’s easy to forget that it hasn’t always been this way: Many public colleges and universities were once tuition-free.”

An excellent “mind map“by  Simon Buckingham Shum from the Open University UK of my talk yesterday at the Hewlett Foundation’s Open Educational Resources meeting (the rest of it is here)