Colleges in Dire Financial Straits

[tuxthepenguin]

Nebraska Christian College had only 140 students at its recent peak enrollment.  If that sounds absurd, then go check out https://blog.prepscholar.com/the-smallest-colleges-in-the-united-states where there are many institutions listed at approximately that size.  40% of US institutions have fewer than 1000 students.  Maybe Wahoo just doesn't know what representative of the US higher ed looks like (hint it's not the 130 R1s and 135 R2s).

I was going to just ignore this, since I didn't read the rest of your post, but I don't like this claim at all. Dismissing R1s and R2s as not representative of higher education because there are only 265 institutions is a bad use of statistics. Representative is a tough concept to define because there is so much variation along so many lines. If you're going to make a numbers-based argument, you should not say "Only x% of institutions are R1 or R2, therefore they are not representative." In terms of enrollment, just the ten largest universities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_public_university_campuses_by_enrollment have 564,290 students, which is equivalent to 1129 schools with an enrollment of 500. You'd get a similar result if you use faculty numbers or employment of PhDs by universities.

NCC can only be described as "not representative". Few students graduate from that type of institution and few faculty work there. The most recent numbers I saw showed 15% of college students attend private universities/colleges, and of those, most attend the large ones, leaving small, private colleges with a few percentage points of market share.

Sorry to interrupt. Please go back to your regularly scheduled argument.

[jimbogumbo]

Social promotion exists because school is compulsory (required by law), but you can't have teenagers mixing with elementary schools kids, and you can't kids driving to middle school. That's why kids can only be held back once or twice. If you want to do away with social promotion, you would have to create separate schools for the kids who don't advance in grade-level but are too old to mix with their classmates.

That's one option, since kids that far behind obviously need more specialized help than they can get in a normal classroom setting. Another option would be to have seperate classes, potentially in a different area of the building, so even though students are in the same age range, there's no pretense that they're at the same academic level. That would also allow them to participate in the same extracurrricular activites with age peers.

Marshwiggle: do you seriously think the things you've mentioned haven't been tried in numerous schools numerous times?

[ciao_yall]

You want better K-12?  Great.  Figure out how to do that.  I see no reason not to have both better K-12 and better higher ed.   

Two things to vastly improve K-12 education:

• Eliminate "social promotion"; kids don't advance until they're academically capable.
• Stream early in high school. Have paths to move between streams, but like the item above, don't pretend students are capable when they're not.

One of the best ways to make teaching more productive is to narrow the range of ability in each class.  Whether one is teaching bright students or struggling ones, the job will be easier if the class is pretty uniform. The only reason to throw everyone in together is to create the fiction that all students of the same age are at the same level academically. Some students could get through the required curriculum in 10 years; others would need 14, but if we actually didn't let them gradaute until they really had completed it, they'd be much better off.

This assumes it is actually possible to measure the range of ability in each class in the first place. And then being able to parse out different abilities in different classes. So what happens to the kid who really knows his letters but struggles with phonics? The kid who is great with phonics but has trouble finding the main idea in a sentence? The one who is really bright and verbal but struggles with remembering the order of the alphabet?

[marshwiggle]

That's one option, since kids that far behind obviously need more specialized help than they can get in a normal classroom setting. Another option would be to have seperate classes, potentially in a different area of the building, so even though students are in the same age range, there's no pretense that they're at the same academic level. That would also allow them to participate in the same extracurrricular activites with age peers.

Marshwiggle: do you seriously think the things you've mentioned haven't been tried in numerous schools numerous times?

They're usually stopped for political reasons, rather than pedagogical reasons. For instance, parents beg for social promotion so their kid can stay with his/her friends. The one thing that caving in to this tells students is that school is really about image, not performance, and looking successful is more important than actually succeeding.

This assumes it is actually possible to measure the range of ability in each class in the first place. And then being able to parse out different abilities in different classes. So what happens to the kid who really knows his letters but struggles with phonics? The kid who is great with phonics but has trouble finding the main idea in a sentence? The one who is really bright and verbal but struggles with remembering the order of the alphabet?

Kids with complex needs like this are precisely the ones who need specialized help, which they can't get in a class of 35 (or even 20). On the other hand, the more uniform the class is they less class size affects performance. So, by having uniform classes which are larger it frees up resources (i.e. money) to have smaller classes for students with more particular needs.

On the other hand, having a big range of abilities in one class means the bright kids are bored, the weak ones are frustrated, and the teacher is stressed.

[Wahoo Redux]

Social promotion exists because school is compulsory (required by law), but you can't have teenagers mixing with elementary schools kids, and you can't kids driving to middle school. That's why kids can only be held back once or twice. If you want to do away with social promotion, you would have to create separate schools for the kids who don't advance in grade-level but are too old to mix with their classmates.

That's one option, since kids that far behind obviously need more specialized help than they can get in a normal classroom setting. Another option would be to have seperate classes, potentially in a different area of the building, so even though students are in the same age range, there's no pretense that they're at the same academic level. That would also allow them to participate in the same extracurrricular activites with age peers.

Marshwiggle: do you seriously think the things you've mentioned haven't been tried in numerous schools numerous times?

Marshy knows almost nothing about the things he comment on.

I ignore him.

[marshwiggle]

Social promotion exists because school is compulsory (required by law), but you can't have teenagers mixing with elementary schools kids, and you can't kids driving to middle school. That's why kids can only be held back once or twice. If you want to do away with social promotion, you would have to create separate schools for the kids who don't advance in grade-level but are too old to mix with their classmates.

That's one option, since kids that far behind obviously need more specialized help than they can get in a normal classroom setting. Another option would be to have seperate classes, potentially in a different area of the building, so even though students are in the same age range, there's no pretense that they're at the same academic level. That would also allow them to participate in the same extracurrricular activites with age peers.

Marshwiggle: do you seriously think the things you've mentioned haven't been tried in numerous schools numerous times?

Marshy knows almost nothing about the things he comment on.

I ignore him.

Or, google "teacher burnout" and see how much of it is  due to issues like I've mentioned.

[jimbogumbo]

Social promotion exists because school is compulsory (required by law), but you can't have teenagers mixing with elementary schools kids, and you can't kids driving to middle school. That's why kids can only be held back once or twice. If you want to do away with social promotion, you would have to create separate schools for the kids who don't advance in grade-level but are too old to mix with their classmates.

Marshwiggle: there is a long history of good research that you obviously haven't read. And, before someone chimes in with some nonsense about double blind studies, I'll remind you the best one can do in actual school research with actual students in actual classroom, the best you can do is single blind.

I've busted my ass in schools for 40 years. I KNOW about political reasons innovations are stopped. It isn't just parents. It is also academics (such as Peter Navarro) who talk as though they know things they don't know shit about.

Math prof, with extensive statistics background for any who might wonder.
That's one option, since kids that far behind obviously need more specialized help than they can get in a normal classroom setting. Another option would be to have seperate classes, potentially in a different area of the building, so even though students are in the same age range, there's no pretense that they're at the same academic level. That would also allow them to participate in the same extracurrricular activites with age peers.

Marshwiggle: do you seriously think the things you've mentioned haven't been tried in numerous schools numerous times?

Marshy knows almost nothing about the things he comment on.

I ignore him.

Or, google "teacher burnout" and see how much of it is  due to issues like I've mentioned.

[polly_mer]

Social promotion exists because school is compulsory (required by law), but you can't have teenagers mixing with elementary schools kids, and you can't kids driving to middle school. That's why kids can only be held back once or twice. If you want to do away with social promotion, you would have to create separate schools for the kids who don't advance in grade-level but are too old to mix with their classmates.

That's one option, since kids that far behind obviously need more specialized help than they can get in a normal classroom setting. Another option would be to have seperate classes, potentially in a different area of the building, so even though students are in the same age range, there's no pretense that they're at the same academic level. That would also allow them to participate in the same extracurrricular activites with age peers.

Marshwiggle: do you seriously think the things you've mentioned haven't been tried in numerous schools numerous times?

We could also change the laws and not make attendance mandatory for those who clearly aren't getting much out of school.

[Wahoo Redux]

Social promotion exists because school is compulsory (required by law), but you can't have teenagers mixing with elementary schools kids, and you can't kids driving to middle school. That's why kids can only be held back once or twice. If you want to do away with social promotion, you would have to create separate schools for the kids who don't advance in grade-level but are too old to mix with their classmates.

That's one option, since kids that far behind obviously need more specialized help than they can get in a normal classroom setting. Another option would be to have seperate classes, potentially in a different area of the building, so even though students are in the same age range, there's no pretense that they're at the same academic level. That would also allow them to participate in the same extracurrricular activites with age peers.

Marshwiggle: do you seriously think the things you've mentioned haven't been tried in numerous schools numerous times?

We could also change the laws and not make attendance mandatory for those who clearly aren't getting much out of school.

Sure, if we changed the child labor laws literacy would be unnecessary. 

[polly_mer]

CHE reports on hard choices higher ed presidents must make

I am amused at the idea that more seat time somehow leads to high rates of literacy by people who resist learning.

Whether a entity is representative depends on what population is being described.  Most students do indeed attend large institutions, but relatively few institutions are large.  The institutions at highest risk of just closing are not large nor are they research oriented.

[Wahoo Redux]

CHE reports on hard choices higher ed presidents must make

I am amused at the idea that more seat time somehow leads to high rates of literacy by people who resist learning.

That is why we give them tests and papers and pop quizzes and research projects and such like. 

You know that's what we do at school, right?  That's the "somehow" in higher rates of literacy.  Try as one might, the learnin's gonna get'cha if you go to school, maybe not to the degree one finds in the best of all possible worlds where Polly lives but book-learnin' takes place nevertheless.

Article's a bummer, man.  Scary. 

[marshwiggle]

CHE reports on hard choices higher ed presidents must make

One interesting quote from the article:

The other option is to cut expenses — both administrative and academic. While this strategy is uncomfortable to pursue, this crisis provides the impetus to push past institutional inertia that has delayed what many believe are overdue changes to our fiscal and academic models. Research on the 46 members of the ABC Insights consortium, for example, shows that 61 percent of the employees and 38 percent of labor spending are dedicated to administration, which has grown at a faster rate than academic personnel at many universities.

So for all of the people concerned about administrative bloat, this suggests the tide might start to turn, with more cuts to administration than to academics.

[polly_mer]

MacMurray will give no severance pay to faculty and staff.
. Note that IHE calls MacMurray "a small liberal arts college", in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

  Try as one might, the learnin's gonna get'cha if you go to school

That's not what more than fifty years of research on American K-12 education indicates.

There're good reasons why many countries have a vocational path that starts around age 12 for students who aren't academically minded.

There's a weird American thing to keep everyone in school until a given age instead of letting people take other paths as their talents and interests become apparent.

[polly_mer]

Still reading IHE,  will the higher ed stimulus money come fast enough to matter for some institutions and their students?

[Wahoo Redux]

Still reading IHE,  will the higher ed stimulus money come fast enough to matter for some institutions and their students?

Not sure who you are asking there, Polly.  I at least read it with a sinking heart.  And not just that one, but this one too. 

I don't pretend to have the knowledge base to examine these claims, I just hope that it was the right move to shutter the country, even if I perfectly understand why we did.

This is a very sad turn of events at a time when our colleges were already facing dire scenarios----which is a reason to rally all the harder once the pandemic is over. 

You're as sad as the rest of us, right Polly?