Seed Corn and Payday Loans

Daily Kos: Cuts to Higher Ed Funding: Were Eating Our Seed Corn.

Together with:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-stafford-20120428,0,1118808.story

Education is one of those things that tends to get shoved under the carpet in politics. A conservative president (George W. Bush) increased funding to schools immensely. The only catch: public schools now focus a large portion of their energy on high-stakes standardized tests. At every turn, we see "limited government" radicals joining "social justice" radicals to make such tests the most important thing to a school. So much so that children are no longer so much human as numeric. For an utterly disturbing article on this phenomenon, click here. The video is here.

The goal is to make students "college and career ready." I've already covered the idea of career training in a previous blog. As far as college readiness, I'm dealing with a state that is not requiring handwriting, keyboarding (typing), public speaking, or even health. Here are four things that our district doesn't require. Why? The state doesn't require them. Everything is at a minimum...running on the least common denominator.

In general, I think it comes to this: education should make kids smart. These days a really good education is designed to make kids rich. That distinction plays out over time, I think. Your first job is one thing...your last job is the most important one. One colleague of mine is giving a commencement speech this month. One of this person's "first" jobs was managing a used bookstore. According to present policy, the college education was a failure. According to reality, such an education was wildly successful.

Today, Americans owe more in student loans than they do in car loans. Want to increase automobile sales? Perhaps lessening the student loan burden would help. But that could lead to higher taxes, and that is unthinkable in this day and age. Well...

Educated people tend to pay more taxes. Want to lower the tax rate in 10 years? Fund education, legitimately. Teach students what they need to know to be successful--you can't write programming code very well from the world of single-finger typing or dual-thumb texting work. Forget interest, altogether. Give all students the chance to choose their schools based on fit and merit, not money. Antioch is taking a chance by completely waiving tuition. Their tuition-free plan could make them a leading institution in the nation. Quickly. And think of how much those students will cling to Antioch as alumni.

It's a brave move, but we see how timid Congress is in an election year. Lack of action leads to disruptive change--disruptive, negative change.

LACs, public schools, and many other social systems in America need to embrace such disruptive change...and control it. Otherwise, they will become victims of outside forces with little or no interest in long-term success...or even viability.

The Hard Is What Makes It Beautiful

 

I went to USD. Of course, that's usually called "South Dakota" on the sports tickers. That's because there's another USD: The University of San Diego. It's a Jesuit school, and it's in the middle of a controversy.

A group on campus is putting on a drag show Wednesday. The question becomes this: does a Catholic campus allow it?

The discussion goes deep. Nobody's having sex. Not all drag queens are gay. Not all drag kings are gay, for that matter. Many people attending drag shows are straight and love the spectacle of the whole thing.

But the connection to homosexuality is there. Now, it becomes a question of whether or not cross-dressing for performance is something the Catholic institution should allow on campus. The president supports the students' right to express themselves. Donors have threatened to quit contributing to the school. Groups have formed. Some are calling on USD to strenuously promote "Catholic values" by forbidding the show's production. Others have rallied around the "anti-hate" aspect of this issue.

It's a mess. A strange, confusing, beautiful mess. Bet it sells out, though! That's life on a liberal arts campus. Ideas fly everywhere. Disagreement abounds. It gets ugly sometimes. It's beautifully ugly.

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Meanwhile, at UC-Davis, they finally got the official report from the Reynoso Task Force, or what could aptly be named, "The Committee of the Obvious."

Their conclusion? “Our overriding conclusion can be stated briefly and explicitly. The pepper spraying incident that took place on November 18, 2011 should and could have been prevented.”

Then follows wording about campus culture--debate and dissent being important. Then there's the whole idea of better communication before you pepper spray unarmed college kids in front of hundreds of people.

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No matter what happens in San Diego, I can assume everybody is safe for having different opinions. Most times, such differences of opinions dissipate and get forgotten. Sometimes, though, those opinion clashes can result in great things. USD attracted $25 million and the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice. I wish the people at UC-Davis felt the same way.

One of the hardest jobs in higher education right now? The Admissions Director at UC-D.

Business Surpassing Education...Again?

http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/09/opinion/wilkinson-jobs-act/index.html?eref=rss_latest&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_latest+%28RSS%3A+Most+Recent%29

Here's the quote that caught my attention:

We must enhance commercialization of research out of U.S. universities. One way to do this is to adopt a standardized licensing agreement for spinoffs. Another way is to make open-technology licensing a condition for universities to receive federal research dollars. Currently, the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 requires faculty innovators to work through their own university technology licensing offices. This creates significant delays.

It seems as though crowdsourcing is a rough parallel to much of the work happening in academia. Of course, in the business world, such efforts involve money, not just ideas. The trouble facing academic circles is that ideas are cheap, and many are flat-out free.

In public education, things have changed to some extent. Used to be, when a teacher (say, 3rd grade) had a great idea, it would be passed informally around the campus. District meetings would result in sharing among campuses. Soon, "best practice" was in place by word of mouth. At some point, the term best practices became formalized. Suddenly, a good idea was a way to make money, especially if the idea could be linked to test scores in some way. Now we see entire careers launched over a good idea in public education.

It seems higher education is still in the informal stage, regarding new information. Wiki's are not money-making ideas. Collaboration tends to result in better teaching or learning or scholarship; however, it often has no direct monetary value attached to it. Faculty make their salary, and little else. Their work is documented in their dossiers, and it may lead to tenure or promotion. Other than that, this kind of work is expected. Great ideas are supposed to come from campuses.

The business world may change that.

Two Unhappy with This Appointment

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/23/jim-yong-kim-world-bank_n_1375040.html

I was just listening to the news at the top of the hour. I was just minding my own business. I didn't expect to hear something directly affecting my job: Mr. Jim Yong Kim (as Vanguard refers to him) is Barack Obama's choice as nominee for president of the world bank.

He is a Harvard-trained physician with a Ph. D. in anthropology to go with it. Still the financial group Vanguard is placing him in a list as Mr. and comparing him to another candidate, Dr. Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

The Korean-born Kim, 52, according toUSA Today represents a break from the financiers and bureaucrats who have run the World Bank. "For the first time in the bank's history, it will have a president whose life mission is what the bank aims for: the elimination of poverty . . . . It's a brash decision which breaks the standard practice of going with a banker or a political insider." Those words from a man some thought would be a good choice for the position, himself. Forbes magazine seemed to want him.

This frustrated me. Dr. Kim hasn't been responsive to my work recruiting him, but he was someone I felt we could talk to. His speeches online give me hope that this leader understands the value of liberal education. From the report, it sounded like I was the only one bothered by the appointment on the planet. Everybody seemed so happy and pleasantly surprised. It was a love fest of a news story.

Not surprisingly, Forbes found another one. Somebody at Harvard with economics degrees from BYU and MIT. Dr. Lant Pritchett. He calls the appointment "craven" and accuses the Obama Administration of caving to the left-wing. Dr. Lantt does claim credit for supporting Barack Obama's election in 2008...nothing in the article mentions his support in 2012.

I'd push a Utah/BYU/Romney connection here, but that would indicate "bias."

This is where you find pushback: people who have degrees in one thing and have held two (2) jobs. The point is specialization. It makes you an "expert." Unfortunately, the World Bank deals with complex issues, and such a specialized approach has produced failure in the past. Failure to the point where some have called for the U.S. to pull out of the World Bank, altogether.

Dr. Pritchett ends his Harvard biography with this:

[And nothing else. Some bios list non-family and non-professional accomplishments like climbing Everest or playing the cello making it seem as if all of the rest was just tossed off. I believe the only point of this is to make the rest of us, who collapse on the couch and watch Friends reruns at the end of the day, feel like slackers. I think getting the above done while being a husband and father to three children is plenty.]

I don't disagree. I just don't want someone like this running the World Bank.

Or Dartmouth.

Strategically Missing the Point

When people write blogs, they hope to get a half million hits and go viral. This has not been my experience. Nobody from one particular liberal arts college has read any of my previous posts. That's understood. My bad marketing. New plan for this LAC: put initial employment data online for everyone to see.

In May, the college will begin publishing employment and salary data for the class of 2011, building on it with every class. A spokeswoman for the Council of Independent Colleges said its president and researcher had never heard of a nonprofit, private college making such data public.Anderson knows the risks: "First, people might look at your data and not be impressed. The other risk, though, is that you have no data, and you're this black box where people dump $50,000 a year for four years."If I could pick one of those two risks, I'm going to take the first one."

I'm not naming the college, but suffice it to say the school just dropped from contention for any Henley family tuition money. It strikes me as a liberal arts college that has lost the key ideas behind the purpose of LAC's.

It all stems from the perspective of a father, I guess. What's the real purpose of higher education? Is it to prepare them for their first job at age 23...or their last job (not to mention all the ones in the middle)? This ignores what kind of mother, daughter, sister, voter, leader, and person I'm trying to create out of the 16-year-old clay I was given. It also ignores the 12-year-old son and my sick daughter of 11 years on the couch downstairs.

When I came out of college with a music education degree, my first job was at Dunn and Bradstreet (my student teaching supervising teacher got fired--bad taste in my mouth for teaching). I've held multiple jobs with multiple foci. My wife's job changes (significantly) every year...and she never leaves the elementary school she's working in. She's constantly getting more schooling to make up for her "focused" degree. My job at NITLE has shifted significantly in less than a year. My personality, a high school debate coach, other relationships, and sheer fear guide me through transitions.

If you have 4 years to prepare for a life that demands constant change, then where do you go? I think the answer is LACs, if you can afford them. This should be a priority. I think wedding rings should have precious metal in them, too. Meanwhile, a girl named Indigo prepares for her first on-campus concert in front of her peers--a chance to explore, become adventurous.

If we drop the purpose of higher education to job training for twenty-somethings, then LACs don't hold up. The smart move, then, becomes two years at a community college to get the "generals" out of the way. Then two years at a public in-state institution for the degree. Then the job. Done. Texas wants to offer degrees for $10,000, total. That's a savings of a quarter million if tuition rises. The Edpunks Guide...makes it even cheaper. Who needs integrated learning, undergraduate research, personal attention from PhD's, a community of learners...any of that? I used to have a button on my jacket that said, "I don't need college. Just the degree."

And that's what most 18-year-olds think. Except you have to work for another 45 years after college. And at age 25, you realize that you HATE accounting, or that you can't be a partner unless you can bring in business...and they fire you if you can't. Next thing you know, you're wearing a Statue of Liberty outfit, trying to get people to bring their income taxes to you instead of using Turbotax.

If only there were an integrated accounting-theatre course you had taken...

A Patent Lie: How Yahoo Weaponized My Work | Epicenter | Wired.com

A Patent Lie: How Yahoo Weaponized My Work | Epicenter | Wired.com.

via A Patent Lie: How Yahoo Weaponized My Work | Epicenter | Wired.com.

NITLE News: CLIR and NITLE to Launch Digital Academic Publishing Program

NITLE News: CLIR and NITLE to Launch Digital Academic Publishing Program.

When I first started working at NITLE (the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education), one of the advantages of staying in the position was (and is) the tuition exchange program between liberal arts campuses throughout the nation. Sending my children to fantastic schools without the burden of tuition? That could be fantastic!

Then I had a conversation with my brother, who had just finished putting three kids of his own through college.

Tuition? That's maybe a third. "Then you got fees..." he told me. On top of that, books are..."ridiculous. I couldn't believe it."

The same is true with academic and scholarly research. To build my own website, using my own research examples, I ended up paying through the nose for the rights to my own writing. I wrote it. Then I paid for it. And I paid a lot.

Further investigation for my job revealed the thousands upon thousands of dollars that libraries pay for journals read by few, if any, faculty and staff. Forget about students reading those journals, especially undergraduate students. That's not really even a thought given to most of the very expensive journals.

Today, my employer (Southwestern University) and my actual employer (NITLE) are partnering with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to change all of that. Anvil Academic is going to offer a real alternative to the current juggernaut held on academic publishing by a very small group of publishers and groups.

This could change everything. I'm proud and grateful to be a part of such a transformation. Libraries, scholars, consumers, students, even taxpayers will see their lives change for the better over time. And it all started today.

Adrenaline...WAY better than caffeine!