Pine Log Stoking Fires--Help is on the way!

This is a word cloud created from QEP survey responses.

Being overly political is something that causes me no problems.

But let me tell you what we're doing on these holy acres of Stephen F. Austin State University.

We get accredited through the Southern Association of Colleges & Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC).  We are up for reaffirmation every ten years; the next reaffirmation comes in 2020.  As part of our accreditation, we are supposed to show we know at least some of our issues.  We need to show a "culture of continuous improvement."*  One part of that is the Quality Enhancement Plan, or QEP.  It needs to be BIG.  It needs to come from our data analysis.  It needs to last 5 years, with the idea that whatever we do is going to stick permanently.  Our last QEP was one-point-something million dollars.  We're still hashing out our budgets for this plan.

The process of choosing a topic was transparent and painful (transparently painful?).  It took about 6 months to determine our area of improvement.

Should we work on our students' critical thinking skills?
What about writing?  They're awful at writing.
What about targeted undergraduate research projects?
Information literacy will only get more important.  Why not that?

As things shook out and narrowed, it became clear that we needed to focus on something else to really benefit students: we need to reduce student debt for Lumberjacks.  Our debt ratio is high, and SFA folks are concerned we are sending our graduates out with a heavy burden.

Think about that: SFA put all the standard, easier choices aside to confront the greatest threat to student success.

Recently, the school newspaper reacted to a "Twitterstorm" of discussion regarding this very topic.  It started with one student sending this tweet:

As you can imagine, there were more than a few reactions.  Including the Pine Log's editorial on the issue.  When things move from online to print, you know it's pretty significant.  Yes, I know this issue would have a super-majority on one side of it.  Still, you could sense the anger, the resentment, and the pain this one little tweet uncovered.  140 characters is not enough to dig deep, but grants and debt are sources of insecurity.  These students will head into a world they can only imagine, the only thing they know is that they will start out financially behind.  That 's a tough future to face.

Perhaps the real reason we need to give more financial support comes from the Google advertisement below the article.  We can reduce the debt significantly, I think.  But our graduates' critical thinking and information literacy skills will be tested by ads like this--ads that come as they get notice that their tax refund is withheld or they don't qualify for a home loan due to their student debt.



My guess is they'll do fine.

We just need to give them a fighting chance.

















* They're wrong, really.  What they expect is a culture of continual improvement.