University Business - September 2009 - (Page 52)

Radical RefoRmeR reasons for that. The rankings give the public some assurance at the top that they are spending their money on things that other people think are important—that’s the whole prestige thing. It has to do with higher education in the sense that it is about community colleges, but it isn’t fundamental to the enterprise. It may be fundamental to the economy but not to the higher education enterprise. So the rankings won’t be going away anytime soon? No. I’m just not persuaded anymore that there is going to be a You also take faculty to task by saying they “would not know consumer movement that changes higher ed. The consumer with if asked what exactly is expected of them when critics and the biggest voice in higher education is the federal government, pundits push the importance of critical thinking, analytic because it puts $100 billion into supporting it. One way they reasoning and problem solving.” can change higher ed dramatically—and I don’t recommend this—is to cut funding from $100 billion The battleground is in the middle schools of to, say, $50 billion and give financial aid only to really poor kids. Instead they give more federal financial aid America, not on the college campuses. in the form of low market loan rates and all of that to middle- and upper-middle-class kids. If they were to cut that out, the institutions would behave differently. I’m not sure Well, part of it is that I’m sort of sticking it to fellow faculty they would behave better, but they would behave differently. The members—that they haven’t really been paying attention to the government doesn’t have any idea what to do except to spend more learning discussion. But more importantly, I’m saying define for me what is “critical money, and that doesn’t seem to me to be the answer. thinking” or “problem solving”? These are “mush words” that have become slogans. So in the first place we have faculty that don’t In the chapter on attainment, you write that with the cost of understand learning, and now we’re confronting them with mush education continually rising, conventional wisdom says to words that have no meaning. put more money into the system, which will result in more graduates. But you argue the bigger problem is the large Following on that, you say that in its present form e-learning number of students who are just not ready for college. Can is not likely to help change higher education. Why? What’s you elaborate? I’m trying to make clear that we don’t really have an access missing? problem—we actually pay unprepared youngsters to go to college. One of the big problems is that we’ve gotten the idea that “it’s about The gap is not in those who start but in those who finish. But the web.” It’s funny—there’s a whole lot of interesting technology once you shift the focus to finishing, you start down a slippery on learning, but it’s not on the web. The really interesting stuff is slope. You realize we need to have better remedial programs. Why on discs. The web just doesn’t work. We’ve adopted a distribution do we need better remedial programs? Why don’t we just get the system that is like trying to run a race in a sack. The web is very linear, and learning on the web is equally linear. high schools to do their job? Eventually you end up with what educational researchers have known for a long time—the whole You do the problem, it gives you the answer, and if you get the wrong answer it circles back, and so on. That’s not the way you are going to battle is won or lost in the middle schools. I actually said in the Spellings Commission—to no response— learn a foreign language, for example. You can use really interesting let’s not put $75 billion in Pell, let’s put $75 billion in the middle technology to learn a language. Just don’t do it on the web. The second big problem, going back to what we discussed schools. As a nation, if we were really worried about the quality of the workforce on the one hand and the social equity agenda on the before, is that most people who are designing the technology don’t other, the battleground is in the middle schools of America, not on know how people learn. Almost none of us do. Most faculty stand in front of their class and say, “I want you to forget everything you the college campuses. know. I’m going to tell you the truth.” That’s just not possible. We never forget what we know; we have to replace what we know. But In light of that, what do you think of the Obama to replace it, you have to know what the student knew before. So administration’s stated goal of putting 5 million people through the community college system? Is that putting money a whole different style of technology learning would, for example, do a lot of diagnostics at the front end of any learning sequence so into the wrong place? No, but it’s interesting. I think that’s more about job training the program would know what the student knew and didn’t know and skill training programs. It doesn’t really address the higher ed to begin with. Do you know any web learning that looks like that? I don’t. I agenda. Where did he go to announce it? He went to a Michigan community college in one of the hardest hit middle-class areas, don’t see any big future for e-learning or whatever you want to call where the manufacturing workforce is losing all kinds of standing. it until that begins to happen. 52 | September 2009 universitybusiness.com http://www.universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - September 2009

University Business - September 2009
Table of Contents
Editor's Note
College Index
Company Index
Advisory Board
Behind the News
Viewpoint
Money Matters
Human Resources
Data Lockdown?
Getting Press
Multicampus Planning: Behing the Scenes
Radial Reformer
Community Colleges
End Note

University Business - September 2009