October 2009

In July Dr. Jill Biden, a part-time, non-tenure track community college instructor, gave a speech to the UNESCO Higher Education conference extolling community colleges as one of America’s “best-kept secrets” and the “way of the future” for higher education in developing countries.  A week later the World Bank, hewing closely to their mission to keep the division between the first and third worlds intact, issued a report discouraging developing countries from trying to build “world-class universities” to compete with those in the United States and Europe.  Hard on the heels of that, and sticking to the summer education script, President Obama announced the American Graduation Initiative, a 10-year, $12 billion plan to invest in community colleges. 

All this national and international excitement about community colleges resonates with the situation here in Washington, where community college participation rates are among the highest in the nation, and state leaders, like Jill Biden, hail community colleges as a big part of the solution to our economic woes.  In the recent state budget reductions, the cuts to community colleges were not nearly as deep as those to the state’s 4-year universities.  In the hubbub surrounding those budget cuts, the community and technical colleges were labeled the portals for the people and the universities were identified as snobby sites of elitist indulgence. 

These two sectors of higher education should not be pitted against each other, but in this state they have been.  Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the Higher Education Coordinating Board’s System Design Study Group. 

The System Design Study grew out of two imperatives from the last legislative session: the usual longing in desperate times to squeeze more educational blood from an ever smaller stone and the need to impose some harmony on the cacophony of pork-laden higher ed proposals that roll into every legislative session.  Under the relentlessly reasonable leadership of HEC Board Executive Director Ann Daley, the committee has worked valiantly to come up with guiding principles for higher ed growth and to imagine a future time when money for that growth might actually be available.  But from the beginning, there have been tensions between the representatives of the community and technical colleges and the representatives of the four-year universities.

Those tensions busted out into the open last Monday at the meeting of the System Design Study Group at Pierce College in Puyallup.  As the group worked on its final set of recommendations, the representatives of the four-year colleges suggested a single line about encouraging more high school graduates to go directly to a four-year college.  The representatives of the community colleges insisted that this single line be changed to include both two and four-year colleges.  When a four-year college representative responded with some exasperation that Washington ranks 48th in the nation in 4-year college participation and that one of the main goals of the System Design Study is to find ways to produce more bachelors degrees, the game was on.  One community college participant announced that she found the four-year attitude “offensive,” another claimed that the four-year colleges were trying to “steal” two-year students, and the executive director of the State Board of Community and Technical Colleges said that he could live with the line in the report only if the “proportionality” between the two and four year colleges remained intact. 

There’s nothing like bad economic times to bring out this kind of crabs-in-a-barrel behavior, but it’s worth looking past the turf battle for a moment and exploring some of the larger issues beneath the 2-year/4-year split.

When people want to defend community colleges they talk about the percentage of baccalaureate degrees that begin at community colleges and when people want to kick community colleges they talk about very low graduation rates.  Both of those statistics depend very much on factors that go well beyond education and both are beside the point.  The point is what has and is happening to educational attainment in the United States.  We have reached a place where for the first time the next generation is likely to be less educated than the last, and if we’re going to talk about redesigning a system, we should try to systematically reverse that.

State-supported public universities and the community colleges that followed them were created, as Eugene M. Tobin writes, “to meet the social and economic needs of the states that chartered them, to serve as a great equalizer and preserver of an open, upwardly mobile society, and to provide ‘an uncommon education for the common man.’”  Flagship state universities like those in Berkeley, Madison, and Ann Arbor were supposed to give to large numbers of regular people state-funded opportunities that had previously been reserved only for those wealthy enough to attend private places like Harvard, the University of Chicago, and Columbia.  The economic trajectory of the twentieth century, especially after World War II, brought tremendous investment first in state research institutions like the University of Washington, and then in the transformation of normal schools into regional comprehensive universities like Western Washington University, Eastern Washington University, and Central Washington University, and finally in systems of community colleges.  The idea was a tripartite state-supported system that would allow anyone with the talent and drive to attain the highest level of education and the social and economic mobility that comes with it. 

Over the last thirty years, with dramatic state disinvestment in higher education, this system has been heading away from college as the breaker of class boundaries and toward college as the guardian of class lines.  Washington’s higher ed system of community colleges, regional comprehensive universities, and research universities most resembles California’s.  California ranks first in the country in the percentage of its higher education budget spent on community colleges and Washington ranks second.   Both systems have made access to the highest levels of education harder and harder.  Washington now ranks 48th in the United States in the percentage of its population that goes to its public 4-year universities, and California ranks only above Mississippi in sending high school seniors directly to four-year colleges.

In their recently published book, Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities, William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, and Michael S. McPherson demonstrate convincingly that, all other things being equal, a student with baccalaureate aspirations has a much better chance of attaining that goal if he or she enters a four-year institution directly than if he or she enters a community college.  They also show that one of the biggest barriers to baccalaureate degree attainment is  “undermatching,” which is the phenomenon of students failing to attend colleges and universities in which they will be appropriately challenged (so the 2,000 qualified applicants that lack the resources to attend the University of Washington this year are less likely to succeed if they enroll in community college than if they would have enrolled at UW).  If Washington’s higher education system were still about economic development and social mobility, we would be funding it in a way that allowed students from any socioeconomic background to enter the system at an appropriate level.  Instead, we have increasingly defined community college as the only public good in the higher education system and thus made community college a barrier rather than a conduit to class mobility. 

Community colleges are indeed, as Dr. Biden says, “a great place to go for new training.”  As New York Times columnist David Brooks points out in an essay lauding Obama’s initiative, community colleges give hope to the “kid who messed up in high school” or “a 35-year-old former meth addict trying to get some job training.”  They provide invaluable open admissions and second chances.  But neither Dr. Biden nor President Obama nor David Brooks mention one of the main reasons why community college is so attractive to government policy-makers.

It’s cheap.    

The primary reason community colleges can operate so economically is that they are running faculty sweatshops.  Almost 70 percent of community college faculty in the United States are contingent, part-time workers, most of whose second jobs don’t come with the perks that Jill Biden’s does.  This kind of staffing is much more conducive to training students in the vocations that will allow them to take their places on the lower-middle rungs of the economy than it is to giving students the lower division general education they will need to succeed at a four-year university.  This is, of course absolutely in keeping with the desires of the leaders of Washington businesses, who don’t want to pay any more taxes for higher education and can recruit nationwide for their best jobs.  What they do want is a pool of people no further away than the end of the bus line who have been trained to fill their technical and vocational jobs.  This training has become the primary mission of Washington’s community colleges.

And even when heroic community college faculty are able to overcome the lack of resources (which they do on a regular basis) and prepare their students for four-year college, those students have almost nowhere to go in the state of Washington.  Whether you enter directly from high school or transfer from a community college, if there are limited spaces and increasingly high tuition (due to increasing skimpy state support), the odds are stacked more and more against you. 

If the System Design Study has shown anything, it is that Washington’s institutions of higher education are doing an incredibly good job.  Washington spends less per student and less per degree or certificate than almost any state in the country while turning out very high quality degrees.  The obvious conclusion to be drawn from all the data is that Washington needs to invest more money in higher education, especially in the four-year sector.  But since there is no money to invest, members of the study group continue to entertain the fantasy that things like on-line learning, three-year degrees, and two-year colleges offering four-year degrees will allow us to produce thousands more baccalaureate degrees without spending any more money.

The bottom line is that Jill Biden’s kids didn’t go to community college.  Sasha and Malia will never see the inside of a community college.  The kids of the people who run the World Bank aren’t going to community college.  The people who gathered in Puyallup last Monday were overwhelmingly white and all of them had four-year degrees.  Their kids aren’t going to community college.      

Washington is, unfortunately, completely in step with the rest of the world in its educational policy and budget choices.  From Paris to Puyallup, we’re lowering the educational possibilities for future generations and reinforcing the division of our society along the lines of race and class.

In a previous post we noted that reduced funding for classroom instruction is not sustainable. In the short term, some faculty may be willing to over-enroll students in their class, taking on extra work, in order to help those already enrolled graduate. In the long run, however, without adequate funding, there will be fewer classes, and perhaps bigger classes. In essence, quality of instruction will go down even as the time it takes to get a degree goes up.

To understand this equation, we must clear up a misconception. When higher education funding is cut, faculty are constantly asked, "why don't you just raise class sizes?" It is often assumed that faculty are too lazy to raise their class sizes. In reality, faculty are protecting the quality of education, not the quantity of work.

Faculty will work the same amount regardless of class size. They already spend well over forty hours each week on teaching, research, and service to the university and the community-all part of their job description. Think about teaching. A good teacher must not only be up to date in his or her field-which takes time during the school year and over summer-but must design effective courses, evaluate student learning, and offer meaningful feedback on student work. Moreover, we know that students learn better when they are engaged in the learning process-when they can discuss the readings, design their own experiments, write their own research papers. If we want students to learn well, we must invest in each of them.

This simply cannot be done effectively in a large class. Faculty work the same number of hours whether the class is large or small, but students do not get the same quality of instruction. Large classes tend to have more lecturing. Large classes have fewer and inferior assignments. Often, multiple choice tests replace essays. Large classes offer students fewer opportunities to engage with the material. Certainly, large classes rarely allow faculty to cultivate the kinds of relationships with students that research suggests is vital to student learning. Smaller classes, on the other hand, allow faculty to offer detailed feedback on papers and assignments. Faculty can assign more work per student, can evaluate that work better, and give each student more time to ensure that she or he leaves the class comprehending the material. For faculty, the work is the same. For students, larger classes are decidedly inferior.

Reformers and policymakers often accuse faculty of not paying enough attention to teaching and learning. Almost all scientific research on learning suggests that students learn best when they have meaningful relationships with their teachers, have opportunities to be actively involved with the learning process, and can grapple with difficult material in class and in their assignments. Compare this with a large lecture class filled with half-engaged students scribbling notes and taking multiple choice tests that assess their short-term memory rather than their long-term development!

Faculty do not teach small classes because they are lazy. Small classes often take more preparation time because faculty cannot recycle notes from last time and because they must offer more feedback on complicated assignments. If we were lazy, we would just teach large classes straight from the textbook and offer tests that machines could grade. Instead, we want our students to learn.

Large classes are inefficient. Efficiency means doing the same for less. Large classes are, however, decidedly inferior because faculty simply cannot offer the same quality of instruction as they do in smaller classes. For faculty, their workload does not change. For students, however, it makes a big difference.

Johann Neem is Associate Professor of History at Western Washington University and author of Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts.

In William Styron’s 1979 novel Sophie’s Choice, the main character Sophie Zawistowska is forced at gunpoint on an Auschwitz train platform to choose which of her two children will live and which will die in the gas chamber. Washington state higher education is certainly not comparable to the horrors of Auschwitz, but professors at our universities are now being asked to make a much less dire but still similar choice.

Last spring, when Washington state legislators cut state appropriations to our universities by almost thirty percent, they added language to the legislation demanding that these cuts come from the fringes of the universities and have no impact on the quality or accessibility of our students’ degrees. This will be no small trick, given that Washington’s universities are already some of the most efficient and cost-effective in the nation, but even if we do succeed in cutting in ways that don’t affect our students now, the price for Washington’s future college students will be great.

Lawmakers faced with ever-declining revenues from the most regressive tax system in the country are constantly preaching the gospel of greater efficiency and resource reallocation. Most of their time is taken up with trying to squeeze ever more blood from the stone. It’s a pretty safe bet that when the 2011 legislative session rolls around, if our students have continued to get the classes they need, have continued to graduate on time, and have been only minimally inconvenienced by the budget cuts, the legislature will be tempted to declare that the slovenly universities have finally gotten the religion of efficiency and there is no need to restore any of their lost funding.

So Washington’s universities and their faculties are now faced with a version of Sophie’s choice. We can either punish our current students or punish our future students.

In the short term, we can act heroically—we can teach extra classes, we can teach classes of 50 as though they were classes of 25, we can stay later for the students who need just those three independent study credits to graduate, we can spend our weekends doing all the extra grading, two people can do the student advising that four should do.

We can do all that and huge budget cuts will only have small effects on our current students. And doing all those things will almost guarantee that legislators and their staff will not see restoring funding to Washington’s universities as a priority in 2011. They will assume that since our students weren’t affected too badly, the universities are more or less O.K. and the draconian budget cuts of 2009 will become permanent.

Two or three years later, our students who are now in high school will pay the price for our heroic efforts, because those heroic efforts are not sustainable, even by the most dedicated faculty and staff. The students of the future will arrive on campus to overcrowded classrooms, months and years of waiting for the classes they need, less contact with their professors, more and more of those professors working part-time for low pay and no benefits, and very little advising, counseling, or career guidance. They will be paying more and taking longer to get degrees that will be worth less. And it will be because we chose to save our students now.

The folks who work in universities are accomplished people who have spent years getting graduate degrees and have chosen teaching and serving students over much more lucrative careers. We could have been lawyers and doctors like our mamas wanted us to be. Our sustained intelligence, hard work, and dedication are why Washington’s universities can spend less per student than almost any other state in the nation and yet consistently perform near the top of their categories. It will be almost impossible for university faculty and staff not to make the heroic effort to make sure that our current students do not suffer for last spring’s legislative decisions. When our students are in our offices crying because they can’t get the classes they need to graduate, our instinctive response will be to over-enroll, overwork, and overburden the already overburdened infrastructure of our universities. Those desperate students sitting in front of us will make it difficult to remember that helping them will probably punish those who come after them.

The bone deep cuts to our universities will not be fully felt by our students right away, thanks to the efforts of the incredible faculty and staff who have made Washington’s university system, pound for pound, the best in the nation. This temporary stay of execution should not be mistaken by the legislature or anyone else as a permanent solution. Saving the students we have now should not condemn the students of the future.