About the Author

Bob Zemsky describes himself as being old and round enough to be mistaken for a pooh-bah. He was a member of the Spellings Commission and, as an author and researcher, has focused on making colleges and universities mission-centered and market-smart. He has focused on what globalism might really mean for higher education, on what technology has not accomplished, and how to make learning important to the higher education market. Bob currently serves as professor and chair of The Learning Alliance at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Brainstorm is The Chronicle Review's team of bloggers on ideas, culture, and the arts.

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Recent Posts

In Praise of Karen Arenson | Comment [8]

What Would a Higher- Ed FDA Look Like? | Comment [2]

Does Higher Ed Need to Be More Accountable? | Comment [7]

Into the Wind | Comment [8]

The Wrong Way Web | Comment [6]

Featured Articles By the Author

A Whining View of Higher Ed

Have We Lost the "Public" in Higher Ed?

The Rise and Fall of the Spellings Commission

Today's Colleges Must be Market Smart and Mission Centered

Why the E-Learning Boom Went Bust

May 8, 2008

In Praise of Karen Arenson

I am often surprised and occasionally dismayed by the comments our Brainstorm postings generate. But I never respond, knowing that to do so only invites more of the same. Some of the comments occasioned by Stan Katz’s celebration of Karen Arenson, however, need a response. What and how Arenson accomplished what she did are too important to be marginalized by nonsense.

What ever her background and personal proclivities, Arenson is no elitist. Her best work was devoted to the educational landscape of New York City, with its mélange of institutions of every stripe and persuasion. Her stories informed as well entertained, shocked as well as moved us. Collectively they formed a tapestry whose warp and woof were the accomplishments, failures, and inanities of the institutions to which she paid such exquisite attention.

Like every really good journalists she covered stories rather than being part of them. At the same time she was always available to provide background and context, always in the hope that people like me wouldn’t make more of a mess of things. There was, to be sure, a quid pro quo. We had to tell her what we were thinking and why. Often without quoting us, she wove those aspects into her stories. Hers was an art that was prescient as well as gracious.

Karen, you owe us a book. I have no doubt it will prove painful to read, but we will do so because we trust your observing eye.

Thanks.

May 6, 2008

What Would a Higher- Ed FDA Look Like?

Discussions of the need for increased accountability in higher education are mostly mindless. There is a presumption on the part of what I have come to call the “accountability police” that colleges and universities today are not accountable — paired with a reluctance to specify by whom and for what colleges and universities ought to be held accountable. There is just a sense that a college education today is too expensive and not worth the money given that college students are not learning enough. Finally there is the assumption that if the public had more data, accrediting agencies more power, and state governments more gumption the nation’s colleges and universities could finally be held accountable.

I keep trying to make sense of this argument. My current gambit is to imagine an accountability process that actually tests the quality of higher educational products — both courses and degree programs. What would happen if there were something like a U.S. Higher Education Administration modeled after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) — a federal agency that currently promotes itself as the consumer protection agency of the U.S. government? To insure safe and effective pharmaceuticals, the FDA conducts clinical tests of new drugs before they are released to the market and then insists that their manufacturers continue to test and report on their safety and efficacy. A higher education look-alike would be expected to do the same thing — test products and monitor their continued efficacy. This proposal differs from other calls for increased accountability by focusing specifically on educational products, by insisting that they be rigorously tested, and by establishing an external mechanism for post-test monitoring. Thinking about the problem of accountability from this perspective makes clear that simply having more data and tests won’t work unless there is an external agency doing the testing and monitoring the data collection.

If nothing else, I hope my imaginary, admittedly impractical proposal makes clear that a search for accountability ought to be about more than sloganeering. Those who think colleges and universities need to be more accountable, or accountable to something other than a fickle market, have an obligation to specify in considerable detail how products are to be tested and monitored, how data is to be collected and used, and how the process is to be paid for.

My further hope is that those currently pushing the accountability agenda would, if actually called upon to provide the details of a practical accountability system, soon conclude that there are other, less disruptive, less expensive ways to improve the nation’s colleges and universities. What won’t work are more helter-skelter calls for increased accountability that tar all institutions by implication.

May 2, 2008

Does Higher Ed Need to Be More Accountable?

Being accountable ranks right up there with being nice and responsible. Not being accountable is the same as being selfish or out-of-control or irresponsible. Simply raising the subject is enough to put higher education on the defensive and its principal institutions on edge.

The implication is that higher education is not accountable to anything or anybody outside the academy itself — a charge that simply won’t hold water. What the critics who pursue the accountability agenda really mean is “higher education is not accountable to me!” What they don’t like is that colleges and universities are instead accountable to a market that favors selectivity, brand names, national visibility, winning sports teams, and, in the case of the nation’s medallion universities, major research portfolios.

Professional programs are also accountable to their cognizant accrediting agencies. In the fields of law, medicine, dental medicine, veterinary medicine, business, and engineering, in particular, those agencies regularly exercise the real power they know they have. On the other hand, for undergraduate education writ large accreditation remains a hodgepodge of regional agencies that talk tough but in the end don’t make enough of a difference. The inevitable result is that the kind of accountability the market exacts becomes ever more important.

Given these circumstances, there remain just two avenues for making undergraduate education accountable to someone else or something other than those attributes the market currently rewards. One could join with Lloyd Thacker and his Educational Conservancy to create a consumer movement that understands and has the means and stamina to make educational values more of a factor in the college-choice process. Such a movement would be akin to the kind of consumers’ movement that changed the cars Americans bought and, in the process, made Consumer Reports a national buying guide. That kind of process, however, takes time and so frustrates the reformers who expect to change higher education now and forever.

Product regulation represents the other path to a different kind of accountability. Governments do have the power to regulate products whether they help pay the cost of acquiring them or not. Here it helps to imagine what a higher education FDA might look like — a subject I will take up on Tuesday.

April 29, 2008

Into the Wind

I am back from two weeks in France and the Netherlands, where I spent part of the time bicycling into the wind — a 20-mile-per-hour headwind whose constancy loomed ever larger in my imagination. My survival solution was to spend as much energy as I could afford working through what I have come to see as a wondrous puzzle: Why should an enterprise devoted to rationality, clear thinking, and precise exposition spend so much of its time arguing about a set of words that have literally lost their meanings?

The words I have in mind belong to a set I have come to call the four horsemen of higher-education reform: access, accountability, affordability, and quality. In her charge to her Commission on the Future of Higher Education, Margaret Spellings asked us to provide guidance on how to ensure that our American higher-education system celebrated those four qualities. I now realize that I never really understood what she was asking of us — and have become increasingly convinced she didn’t know either.

So, heading into the wind, I tried to imagine what each of my four horsemen might mean and just how seriously we ought to take — or not take — calls to make them the cornerstones of federal higher-education policy. I hope those of you who follow this blog will spend a little time thinking about what those terms mean to you. On Friday I will begin posting my cycling-induced notions as to what they might mean — and not mean.

April 11, 2008

The Wrong Way Web

The absence of sustained demand and a viable link to educational reform only partially explain higher education’s tepid response to electronically mediated learning. The rest of the story involves the nature of the World Wide Web and its limitations as a platform for learning.

From the outset the Web has been a utility for connecting people with people and people with things. Think Amazon.com or Netflix.com, or any of the dozens of sites you use to make airline and hotel reservations. MySpace, Facebook, even YouTube are sites that primarily allow you to see other people’s postings — and then encourages you to share your own experiences. Facebook probably says it best when it describes itself as “a social utility that connects you with the people around you.” Blogs distribute ideas. Wikipedia is a collection of definitions and short essays collectively posted. The Web is primarily used to buy and sell things — books, cars, hotel rooms, old antiques, clothes, gardening supplies, exotic spices, tools, you name it and in all probability you can find a vendor that will sell it to you online.

The fact that the Web is primarily a distribution system helps explain why Blackboard and other course-management systems are the most widely used e-learning technologies across higher education. Course-management systems give students what they want most — their assignments, their course packs, and their grades. This distributional quality of the Web also helps explain why the great majority of learning routines that students can access through and use on the Web — that is, online — are in reality not much more than automated workbooks — multiple-choice exercises that let the student call up discrete learning modules and questions in a largely preset order.

One should not be surprised. The Web began primarily as a network for distributing messages and data among a limited number of researchers in the physical sciences. To run their complex, often collaborative experiments they needed to be able to communicate quickly. For the most part, their experiments produced large data sets that needed to be processed by individual members of the network working in different locations.

In general, mainstream e-commerce Web sites have shied away from the kind of real-time programming and simulation that e-learning’s advocates promised. The routines themselves are expensive to develop, their actual presentation on different platforms hard to control, and the returns difficult to translate into revenue streams. If the product is complex, like a movie in a DVD format, better to have a short preview, a catchy review, and a simple read-and-click order form for sending the movie in the mail.

The moral? Better to think of e-learning modules as things to be distributed on the Web rather than programs to be run there.

(Image from Photobucket.com)

April 8, 2008

Is E-Learning Forever Trapped in a Field of Dreams?

In the years since Bill Massy and I published Thwarted Intervention, I have come to better understand higher education’s tepid embrace of the new learning technologies. My “aha” moment occurred at the San Diego meeting of the Spellings Commission in February 2006. Before us were three technology experts. Each had come to plead for more money to support the development of open-source educational software. More exasperated than usual, I mused during the comment period that what the technologists needed was not more money, but more customers. The genesis of my observation was the finding in Thwarted Innovation that there was no demand for e-learning software, particularly on the part of faculty, and hence no market.

It turned out that the most senior of our witnesses was even more exasperated. He was not interested in hearing that customer demand might be required to spur e-learning’s development. Looking me in the eye he said, “You don’t understand. If we build it they will come.” For nearly 20 years I had used that line from the 1989 film Field of Dreams to parody the assumption by educational researchers that what intrigues them will be of interest to those whose lives they are trying to change. I called it the Kevin Costner theorem of strategic change, after the star of the film about an Iowa farmer who hears a mysterious voice telling him to turn his cornfield into a baseball diamond. Suddenly it was not parody but fact — the deeply held conviction that the new technologies in themselves would drive educational reform. Faculty would change how they taught because they could not resist the beguiling power of the new technologies.

Sometimes the spread of an innovation does follow the “if we build it” scenario. It’s not clear, for example, that there was a huge demand for a new kind of MP3 player prior to Apple’s introduction of the iPod. But that device proved beguiling enough to spawn whole new forms of communication including, but not limited to, podcasts. What was clear to me that afternoon in San Diego, however, was that e-learning was no iPod. It was not an innovation that would drive change but rather would prove to be one that could spread only in response to someone else’s demand for change. In short, what the technologists needed was not more grant money but more faculty customers who were willing and able to invest their own time and their institution’s funds in a set of innovations that solved their problems rather than satisfying the technologists’ inquisitiveness.

April 4, 2008

Imagine a Spellings Process Rather Than a Commission

Last Tuesday I suggested it would be an interesting parlor game to speculate whether a Bologna-like template might have resulted in more reform of U.S. higher education than resulted from the work of the Spellings Commission.

In any event, here is my imaginary scenario which substitutes a “Spellings Process” for a “Spellings Commission.”

Phase 1: April 2005 – March 2006. Newly confirmed U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings launches a multi-year process focusing on the future of American higher education. The two primary goals she wants the process to focus on are expanding access to higher education and insuring that an American college education remains affordable. During this initial year she quietly meets with a wide variety of college and university leaders, the leaders of higher education’s national associations, and a goodly number of policy wonks. By mid year she begins to convene a limited number of working groups charged with suggesting the key initiatives on which a national higher education policy ought to focus.

By the February 2006 these discussions begin coalescing around two key proposals: 1) A total redesign of the federal system of student financial aid; and 2) a plan to make a three-year baccalaureate degree the nation’s standard undergraduate degree. The first proposal derives from a growing consensus that the current system of federal aid is too cumbersome, too dysfunctional, and too much a collection of special interests to really achieve the broad access the Secretary seeks. The three-year baccalaureate degree has as its principal attraction an immediate 25-percent reduction in the price of an undergraduate education. As those working on this idea quickly discover, however, the proposal also offers the prospect of breaking the institutional gridlock that now derails nearly every attempt to broadly change undergraduate education in the United States. To move to a three-year baccalaureate degree will require a truly national discussion focusing on the purposes of an undergraduate education — precisely the kind of discussion that Derek Bok’s new book, Our Underachieving Colleges, has just called for.

Phase 2: April 2006 – March 2007. This phase is kicked off with a higher education summit presided over by President Bush and attended by all 50 state governors. In carefully prepared sessions the president, his secretary of education, and her staff, supported by the key participants of Phase 1, succeed in winning a bipartisan political commitment to the principal of redesigning federal student aid and moving the United States to a three-year baccalaureate degree. At the conclusion of the summit, the 50 governors pledge to designate their state’s chief educational officers as the public officials charged with making sure every state is fully engaged in the planning necessary to implement the principles the governors have just endorsed. This planning to plan and then planning to implement activity consumes the balance of the year with the chief educational officers meeting all together three times over the next 11 months.

Phase 3. April 2007 – March 2008. With the outlines of a plan of action — though perhaps a better term would be, a pathway to change — in hand, Secretary Spellings turns back to the key actors she worked with in this process’s first year — institutional leaders, association leaders, and policy wonks — to develop specific plans of action for simultaneous consideration by the U.S. Congress and the 50 state legislators. Meetings — both large and small public, as well as quasi-private — continue to be held with the explicit purpose of sustaining the consensus to move forward even in the face of a growing opposition from a number of special interest groups who have known all along their power resides in business as usual.

At this point there is a pause in the process to await the results of the 2008 national elections. But regardless of which party wins, there will have been sufficient bipartisan involvement to make it difficult to derail the effort. No doubt another four-year cycle of meetings, consultations, presidential convenings, and public discussion will follow. Patience will become an important strategy in itself. The pay-off will be a recast federal system of student financial aid and a reinvigorated undergraduate curriculum that is less costly to deliver and more open to continuous change.

Could it happen this way? Could the process be truly bipartisan? Could the 50 states actually work together and work with the U.S. Congress in implementing a process of purposeful change. Given the enormous sums of money involved in federal student aid, could the standpatters ever be won over? Probably not, but at least it is worth thinking about.

April 1, 2008

Europe and Higher-Ed. Reform -- Lessons for the U.S.

This May the European Union will begin planning for a second decade of purposeful higher education reform. Dubbed the Bologna Process in honor of the Italian city where, in 1999, the Ministers of Education from 29 European countries defined a common reform agenda, the Bologna Process has gone a long way towards creating commonality and interchangeability among and between Europe’s competing systems of higher education. What began slowly, almost haltingly is now being celebrated as a remarkable achievement in multi-national cooperation and reform — leading me, at least, to ask, “What did the Europeans know that those of us who served on the Spellings Commission did not?”

At least four characteristics of the Bologna Process are worth noting in answer to that question.

First it was conceived at the outset as a multi-year process. No need to hurry. No need to try to fix everything is a single year of frantic activity.

Second, it was a process explicitly linking four sets of key actors: Ministers of Education, university leaders, European Union bureaucrats, and policy wonks. The latter helped define the issues and shape the agenda. The EU bureaucracy staffed the meetings, making sure that schedules were kept and deliverables delivered. University leaders served as much-needed brakes, making sure that what the policy wonks proposed had institutional traction. The Ministers of Education provided the political muscle.

Third, rhetorical excesses were kept to a minimum. The underlying idea was to support and extend the value of the continent’s universities rather than hold them up to public scrutiny.

Fourth, it was a disciplined and focused process. A limited number of goals were set with clear benchmarks leading to verifiable implementations.

If nothing else it makes for an interesting parlor game to speculate whether a Bologna-like template might have resulted in more reform of U.S. higher education than resulted from the work of the Spellings Commission.

More on Friday …

March 28, 2008

Making Sense of Accountability

Part slogan, part dare, too often employed by policy wonks who would remake higher education in their own image, the call to make colleges and universities more accountable has become a standard item in the reformer’s catalog of how to fix higher education. Before we give away the store, however, we ought to ask “Accountable for what?” and “Accountable to whom?” These are real questions that would-be reformers too often gloss over. Instead, they settled for claiming that higher education is not accountable or that higher education needs to be more accountable.

Here is a stab at making sense of the rhetoric. In the first place, higher education is currently accountable to a market that rewards tradition, prestige, reputation, and, to a certain extent, chutzpah. Whether we like it or not, these are the attributes that sell not only issues of U.S. News, but places in the freshman classes of the country’s priciest institutions. What reformers like Lloyd Thacker and others want is for the market to be shaped by other, decidedly more educational values. And I agree — it would be great if parents and students made how, as well as how much students learn, key market values. But to say that is not the case today is not tantamount to saying higher education is not accountable.

What we need to be able to imagine, then, is an education enterprise that is held accountable in the marketplace to educational values. The means to that end is not greater accountability (what ever that might mean) but an educational reform movement — for the most part centered in the nation’s middle and secondary schools — that inculcates educational values of the kind that Thacker has promoted. Get students and their parents to want something different, and my guess is that institutions will respond precisely because it will be in their interest to do so — and that is tantamount to saying that it is the market for educational services that will hold colleges and universities accountable for supplying the educational products students and parents want and are willing to pay for.

March 25, 2008

Have Student Loans Become Yesterday's Good News Gone Bad?

Two years ago I would have said that American higher education had a rational financing plan — one that was increasingly being emulated across Europe and Asia. Given that public treasuries could no longer afford to provide full subsidies to all learners in an age of massification, it made sense to instead provide equitable financing (a.k.a. student loans) which would allow benefiting students to pay for their higher educations over an extended period of time.

To be sure there were problems. Taking out loans only made sense if one earned a degree. The students who policy makers most wanted to help were often averse to loans, while financially better-off families understood that borrowing at favorable rates in an expanding economy was a form of arbitrage they could more than afford. The more-than-abundant supply of loans also allowed families to shop up and, not so surprisingly, allowed institutions to continue to increase prices faster than inflation. These concerns notwithstanding, however, the system was working.

Today it is harder to be as sanguine. The scandals involving financial aid officials — higher education’s own form of payola — have made clear there was too much loose change floating through the system. Rich institutions, seeking to protect the tax-free status of their endowments, have rushed to substitute grants for loans without ever thinking through what their actions might mean for the system as a whole. Institutions that cannot afford to match their largesse are caught in a bind. They are unable to offer the same financial aid packages as their richer competitors, and really unable to lower their prices without doing visible damage to the quality of the educations they provide.

What is clear, to me at least, is that unless the U.S. is prepared to return to a system in which less than a quarter of its young people enroll in college following their graduations from high school, somebody had better find a printing press somewhere.

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