Graduation Bonus

A debate is raging right now about the correct approach to fix the struggling global economy. In Europe, the French and Greek electorate have just rejected German calls for more fiscal austerity and signaled their desire for more stimulus spending. We see a similar debate domestically as politicians advocate for more balanced budgets or more spending now to stimulate the economy.

I come down on the side of long-term fiscal responsibility balanced by a short-term need to use government resources to tide us over until private sector demand can catch up, or what is called a Keynesian approach.

Mayor Emanuel declared his support for this approach on Saturday by pledging to pay the first month’s stipend for student who are hired by private sector firms. The stipend is a strong signal to private sector firms that we believe in our graduates. It may give the tipping point for an employer undecided about whether to take a chance on one of our students. It serves as a Keynesian response to our unemployment challenges with direct links to the work force. I don’t know which policy guru at City Hall thought this idea up, but I am impressed with its boldness and focus. In conjunction with the College to Careers initiative, the City is putting its money where its mouth is.

It is a good time to be at City Colleges, and an even better time to be a student here. We are pouring increasing resources into supporting and educating our students. We are focused on student success. And we have a Mayor and City Hall making big plans to push us even further. Fourteen months ago, I never dreamed that being at a community college would be so cool.

Taking Credit

The problem with writing a blog, I am learning, is that occasionally someone reads it. Worse, he may even remember what I wrote. And in the worst of all words, he physically confronts me and asks about something I have written.

At a recent party, the host came up to me and said, “I don’t know whether to congratulate you or not. I see that City Colleges has its highest graduation rate in ten years, but in your recent blog post, you argued that graduation rate doesn’t matter.”

Once I overcame the shock that someone actually read the blog, I managed a response of sorts. This post attempts to say what I really meant to say at the party.

My post argument is more nuanced than “graduation rates don’t matter.” What I argued, and continue to believe, is that if we execute on many of our strategies, the numbers measuring success will improve. To give my friend credit, though, I do argue that graduation rates as captured by IPEDS do not by themselves measure student success. I welcome the Department of Education efforts to review measures of success. My friend would argue, if I may take his side, that I can’t have it both ways – celebrating the graduation increase while downplaying its significance.

I do not take credit for the graduation increase. CCC overall reported the fact. My colleagues at other colleges are just as responsible and more so for the good results. I frankly did not expect to see dramatic increases my first year in the job, but I am pleased the trend is going the right way. The credit, to the extent we need to assign credit, results from a number of factors. The two most relevant deservers of credit for those of us who care about and work on Reinvention seem to me to be our students and the Heisenberg Principle.

Werner Heisenberg, considered by some the co-father of quantum mechanics with Niels Bohr, articulated the Uncertainty Principle. With all apologies to our Physical Sciences department co-chairs, Professors Collymore-Chalmers and Wilson, what I took away from my college quantum physics class was that the Uncertainty Principle, generalized beyond physics to general life, means that the very act of measuring something influences the outcome. In my former career, we boiled this down further into the aphorism, “You get what you measure.” 

When the Chancellor articulated that one of the goals of Reinvention was to increase the rate of transfer to four-year institutions after graduation, everyone understood that the old excuses about low graduation rates were not going to hold water. As I passingly mentioned in my earlier post, this goal above the others generated the most debate and discussion.

I believe that by publicly declaring graduation as a measure of success, and by starting to measure it, discuss it, and publicize it, CCC is actually influencing the number. I can’t break it down as elegantly as Dr. Heisenberg, but the very act of publicizing graduation rates makes every stakeholder aware that graduation matters. This leads to increased attention, and I argue, increased activity that leads to higher graduation.

As an example, at our career fair in the fall, I talked to one student who had 54 credits, within two or three classes of graduating. I asked her if she was excited about graduation. She replied, “I am not sure I am going to graduate. I am transferring to a four-year, and I don’t know that the Associate Degree by itself adds a lot of value to my resume.” I launched into two arguments. First, I told her, employers do see value in the AA (see Reinvention Chapter One, page 12). It shows you have the ability to complete. Employers also value the credential showing additional schooling Trying telling an employer that “I took a bunch of classes at HWC, and could have gotten my degree, but didn’t think it mattered.” As an employer, what I would hear is, “I have trouble completing things.” My second line told her that sometimes, life gets in the way, and that while I wished her every success in pursuing her bachelors degree, if her path is delayed, having the AA on her resume provides a great backstop until she obtains her BA.

By measuring and publicizing graduation, we are influencing the mindsets of faculty and staff who advise and in turn influence the thinking of students themselves. If I had used the argument many used with me, that transfer is a measure of success and graduation doesn’t matter, I would not have exhorted the student to graduate. We are changing from “graduation doesn’t measure success,” to “Get your degree, and then new worlds will open up to you.” I believe that students are hearing these messages and responding.

Which leads to my second deserver of credit, the students themselves. 800 more students this year did the work necessary to graduate compared to last year. Almost 3,300 students have obtained CCC degrees. This Saturday, 242 HWC students have elected to walk at graduation, joining over 1,900 of their CCC colleagues.

Our students’ achievement matters. They have demonstrated their ability to complete. They have obtained credentials of value. They are signaling to the world that they care enough to start something and see it through to successful completion. I am so proud of our graduates this year, and look forward to increasing numbers of students joining them in the future. Graduation rate does not tell the whole story about our students, but their degrees are a powerful symbol of their hard work and determination. This Saturday, thousands will be on hand to honor them and cheer their accomplishments. Congratulations, graduates. You deserve the credit. May your CCC degree be another milestone in your path to success.

The Imperiled Promise of College

Frank Bruni provokes with his Op-Ed piece today in the New York Times, “The Imperiled Promise of College.” While we in community colleges can take cold comfort in the fact that education at our schools is still affordable, the promise of increased wages at the end of the journey is at risk. Students today compete globally for jobs. There are no guarantees of easy entry into the work force upon graduation.

Two answers from Bruni: help students understand that majors matter, and some majors will lead to better jobs than others; and keep college affordable. Couple this with another NYTimes piece, “Brain Drain Feared as German Jobs Lure Southern Europeans,” and you get a sense that talented graduates will go where the jobs are. Others are left to sort through a diminishing set of options. All of this argues that College to Careers may give part of the answer. And that there are no easy answers.

Distinguished Professor

I have been busy the last few weeks putting the finishing touches on our draft operating plan submission, doing my best to advocate for our fair share of dollars to innovate, improve instruction and increase student success. Posting has fallen by the wayside.

Now I am coming up for air to announce this year’s Distinguished Professor, David Richardson. Members of the HWC community should read their emails for Professor Richardson’s bio. Loyal readers will know him as the webmaster for The Harold Lounge. Students of his know him as an engaging, challenging faculty member who pushes them to question assumptions and wrestle with preconceived notions.

Congratulations, Professor. You join a long line of Distinguished Colleagues who represent the best that HWC has to offer our students.

Victory – Or Is It?

From Inside Higher Ed comes word that we will soon be holding “Last Rites for Graduation Rate.”  The article says,

The Education Department has announced its plans to change how student success is measured in higher education, taking into account students who transfer, part-time students and students who are not attending college for the first time. The department outlined its plans Wednesday to carry out the recommendations of the Committee on Measures of Student Success, a federal panel that called for changing how data on completion rates and other measures at community colleges is reported in the Integrated Postsecondary Educational Data System, or IPEDS.

Since I started working at CCC in April 2010 consulting on the launch of Reinvention, I have heard the arguments against using graduation rate as the measure of success. “Our students are non-traditional.” “They don’t all come here to get a degree.” “Graduation rate doesn’t measure everything important about our students and our college.”

Two years in, I agree with those arguments. I also feel that the new measures may reveal a sad underlying truth. We are not serving our students as well as we could and should.

When all the new measures are mashed together and reported, I fear that we will still not look good in comparison to peer institutions. I like the movement of the Department of Education. I am hopeful that the new measures will give us a more accurate picture of how we are serving students. Yet I know from looking at our processes, operations and systems that we are not yet a world-class institution. We have world-class intentions, and world-class commitment by faculty and staff, but we do not have world-class execution.

We have made progress. Registration lines no longer stretch around the lobby. We have halved our advisor::student ratio. We hired more tutors for our students. District-wide, we have doubled the transfer rate to DePaul University and increased the number of transfers to IIT from 26 to 80.

We can do more. This past winter, VP Metoyer launched a “Graduation Initiative.” We found that almost 600 students had 60 or more credits – enough to graduate. Faculty and advisers called every single student, asking how we can support their efforts. We will expand this effort next fall, making contact with the over 1,300 students who have 45 credits or more to make sure we are doing everything we can to support them.

We need to do a better job of communicating pathways to our students. Many of us feel that students are served best when they are free to choose their own path. (I find this slightly ironic, given who at HWC makes the argument to me and the counterweight that Milton and Rose Friedman preached freedom of choice to support free market principles.) I argue that we need to be more directive with our students. If they don’t need the guidance, fine. But I suspect many more are asking for guidance, help, and prescriptive pathways that help them understand what success looks like – in the form of attaining General Education and degree requirements.

We need to be more deliberate in measuring what works, and then invest more in those items, and what doesn’t, and walking away from the failed projects. I am learning that I need to be more open to experimentation. Dean of Instruction Sarrafian is proposing in this year’s budget an “Innovation Fund.” After initially resisting the idea, I have come to embrace it (although I caveat the heck out of it – it is still a proposal and needs to go through the budget process.) The idea is to support great idea proposals from faculty and staff that help us meet Reinvention goals with funding, a form of idea incubator.

We need to do the little things right. This week, under the leadership of Brandon Pendleton’s “Service Excellence Committee,” we launched a new phone configuration that will fix the baobab-like phone trees we had previously. Brandon, working with Dan Freitag, has re-configured our phones so that it will be easier for students to reach us and that we will be more responsive. We need to keep fixing those little things that create big obstacles in how well we serve our students.

My hope is that when these new measures come out – and it could take years for this to happen – we will have made enough progress on things like giving every student a clear picture of what success means, the support to get there, and the skills to succeed afterward, that we will measure up. Until then, we need to keep working to have our execution match our intentions. If we do that, the numbers will take care of themselves.

 

Hail the Herald

For those of you who don’t read HWC Announce emails but do read the blog (I would love to see the Venn diagram showing those sets of intersecting populations), I happily and proudly recognize the outstanding achievements of our student-run newspaper staff at The Herald, with particular recognition for Greg Fairbanks, Editor-in-Chief, Rachel Banning, Managing Editor, and Molly Turner, Faculty Adviser.

The Herald made an exceptional showing at the Illinois Community College Journalism Association 2012 Spring Awards Conference April 29-30 at Malcolm X College. In Division II, The Herald staff won:

1st Place for Overall Excellence
1st Place for the website
1st Place for an Opinion
1st Place for Computer Graphic
1st Place for Freehand Cartoon
2nd Place for Layout
3rd Place for an Editorial
and an Honorable Mention for a News Article.

Congratulations and thanks for an outstanding job and for the recognition your efforts have brought the college.

Be Vewy Vewy Quiet. We’re Hunting Wabbits.

My father’s heart sank when he descended the basement stairs and found me, at 1 PM on a Saturday, still in my pajamas, watching cartoons. Only a father can understand the despondency of seeing his only son lazing about on a fine Saturday afternoon wasting his life away. Only with my easement into fatherhood did I understand the sense of failure, worry, and helplessness that swamps you when confronted with the spectre of a failed fatherhood. Today, forty years later, I know how much my father is proud of me and loves me. I also have a deep appreciation for the long road he traveled to get there.

Setting aside the otiosity that drove my father to despair, I took away from those many long hours a keen appreciation for the subtle lessons Warner Brothers and Hanna Barbara tried to impart in between thirty-second spells spent selling me sugary breakfast cereals. In contrast to the cartoons of the 40′s and 50′s, the 60′s cartoons introduced a self-awareness, an ironic appreciation that the kids weren’t as glassy-eyed as directors may have thought.

Every rabbit hunting season, Elmer Fudd donned that plaid two-peaked cap and carried his shotgun into the forrest. “What’s up, Doc?” wise-cracked the carrot-munching self-aware Bugs Bunny. “Sssshhhhh! Be vewy vewy quiet. We’re hunting wabbits,” Elmer Fudd replied. Bugs would then lean on Elmer, chomping away at the carrot, and say, “Rabbits, huh?”

We are in budget season. At our college, that means that departments are working to justify new projects and projects from the past they want to continue. I have pushed everyone to think bigger about what we can do for students. There is fear and opportunity, frustration and fecundity in the air. I spent the afternoon reviewing plans, both encouraged by many of the creative ideas making their way into our plans, and concerned that we were not thinking big enough.

If there is a theme to the plans, it is that we have a lot of good ideas that need analytical support to strengthen the case for implementation. We seemed constrained by our past. We have hopes of achieving great things, but are weighed down by the knowledge of past efforts.

The Reinvention team brings no such burdens to their efforts. Every issue  they take up demands rigorous data analysis. Out of this analysis springs new initiatives, unconstrained by the weight of past efforts attempted with middling success. Everything is a new shiny opportunity.

I straddle both worlds. I share the guilelessness of  Reinvention, bringing a hope that the answer lies within the data. If we study the problem enough, we will come up with a solution. I also have an appreciation for the hard work many in the College have put in to solve many of these same problems. Our College faculty and staff have confronted these same issues, sometimes for years, and have met with successes and failures.

As I reviewed the proposal for expanded activities for CAST (Committee for the Art and Science of Teaching), I was reminded of the Reinvention conversations in which we discovered that one key to improving academic outcomes was to improve the teaching and learning capabilities of faculty. The Reinvention team charged forward, deciding that a pilot program to implement Centers for Teaching and Learning at the colleges would tell us if this approach merited further investment. I agreed. I found out later, after a few months at Harold Washington, that we had a similar effort already underway in CAST, a subcommittee of Faculty Council dedicated to helping faculty improve their craft. The answer, I believe, is that they are both right, and both CAST and the new Center for Teaching and Learning have things to learn from each other.

I have a small worry, as we work through solutions to our many challenges, that we will be hunting for solutions when the answers are right there along side us. I know that many of these answers are incomplete, or not supported by the analytical rigor that will stand up to peer-reviewed academic journal scrutiny. I also appreciate that many of our staff and faculty have worked long and hard on initiatives that will deliver on the goals of Reinvention. My ask of faculty and staff, when I am hunting my own rabbits, that instead of leaning on me and saying, “Rabbits, huh?” that you instead grab me by the collar and show me the work of the past. I will listen. And together, marrying the two approaches, I am confident we will get to better answers.

 

A Year of Magical Thinking

At a recent Jazz Ensemble concert of student performances, I noticed that Anthony Florez was the faculty member leading the event. Matt Shevitz had usually been front and center. Matt showed up later to show his support, but Anthony was the leader of this concert.

It struck me that this is what happens when you hire great people. I had nothing to do with the management of this Jazz Concert (which, by the way, was outstanding. I encourage all members of the HWC community to take advantage of the weekly Jazz performances at 11:30 on Tuesdays in the Student Union.) Anthony, a newly hired faculty member, stepped up. He and Matt saw a need to arrange for our students to perform, and Anthony led the way. No administrators were involved. No presidents had to intervene. People stepped up, did what they thought needed doing, and created a little magic here at the college.

Today is my one year anniversary at Harold Washington College. I came here because I thought I could make a difference. I wanted to help our students be successful. I was afflicted by a bit of magical thinking, a type of delusion about what influence I could have on the HWC community.

A year in, I ask myself what have I accomplished? I started my year by aligning our operating plan and budgets with the goals of reinvention. As the year went on, I tried to learn as much as I could about what we can do to make students successful. We have improved our satisfaction rates during registration, giving students a better feeling about the college as they start their academic careers (taking our dissatisfied/highly dissatisfied ratings with registration from 33% to 11%). I asked for data about potential graduates, and directed efforts (undertaken by wonderful faculty members) to call almost 600 students who have 60 credits or more and are on the brink of graduating, to encourage them to take the courses necessary to graduate. I have attempted to foster a culture of serving our students with respect by making my expectations clear, by chartering a Service Excellence committee to develop standards of conduct for interactions with students, and by highlighting our collective and individual successes and failures to serve students well. We increased the number of tutors to better support our students’ academic efforts.

And yet. And yet. I am overwhelmed by how much I have not done. By how much is left to accomplish. By how much more I want to do for our students. The gap between where our students are and where I want them to be causes me physical pain. For every success story I meet, for every student who makes me feel so wonderful about why we are here and what we are doing, there are so many more who have left us, who dropped out, who gave college a try and for uncountable reasons did not continue.

I have been driven this first year, some may say afflicted, by this magical thinking, that not only could I make a difference, but I needed to accomplish it now, today. A year in, I reminded myself of one of the most important leadership lessons: no one can achieve great things by him/her self. Professor Florez’ example drove this home.

In my first year, we have hired or promoted forty people. I have interviewed every one of them, along with over 100 other candidates who aspired to join HWC. In every interview, I have asked how their job will support the goals of Reinvention and student success. One financial aid advisor candidate’s response almost brought tears to my eyes as I could feel the passion she had for helping our students succeed. These forty people join the 188 full-time and hundreds of part-time employees who show up every day to help drive student success.

It is my hope that these forty new people have been afflicted by magical thinking of their own, and that they have joined us with the belief that they can make a difference and drive us to support greater student success. My heart fills when I see examples like Anthony Florez creating opportunities for our students, CAST members contributing their time for CASTivities, Assessment Committee members and SIT members and Faculty Council and the Disabilities Access Center and advisors of the academic, financial, veterans, international, transfer and wellness types,  janitors, registrars, admissions, bursars and business officers, engineers, security officers, payroll processors, switchboard operators, testing and computing center overseers, student activity coordinators, mailroom and loading dock, OIT, HR, reprographics, writing lab, tutoring center, researchers, legal clinicians, food sanitation issuers and taxi instructors, CNAers, building services, career planners, librarians, 10KSBers, CDAers, directors and deans and associate deans and VPs and administrators and presidential assistants and most of all faculty who put in that extra time and effort to contribute to our goal of making our students successful.

And so, a year in, while the challenge seems as great as when I started, I am buoyed by the support, often unseen and perhaps seemingly unappreciated, from all that our team does to serve our students.

Thank you for the most magical year of my life.

To Be Mad

I have struggled recently with the value of fiction. In conversations with friends, we note that as we age, non-fiction appeals to us more. Non-fiction is pragmatic. It wrestles with real-world problems. It informs our daily lives with facts and guidance and useful stuff. Biographies of people who have lived lives that mattered hold particular appeal. These histories provide context and understanding. For example, I have made note in remarks at the college of Taylor Branch’s trilogy America in the King Years (I am two-thirds of the way through). The first volume illuminates the early 20th century debates about the role of vocational and liberal arts education for African-Americans that has an immediacy in our discussions about College to Careers. Non-fiction appears to have a hold on me that fiction held when I was younger. Is this a natural evolution in taste, an inevitable by-product of aging, or a symptom of the  type and quality of what I am reading?

Two articles from my Sunday morning reading of The New York Times added more fuel to the fires of my internal debate. (Who knew this topic had such a hold on me?)  Jhumpa Lahiri writes in “My Life’s Sentences,” “In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page.” I remember the joy of reading a passage that seemed to stick a fist into my chest and squeeze my heart, stopping my breath and causing blood rush to my head as new ways of looking at the world flooded my brain. One passage in particular, from Mark Helprin’s A Winter’s Tale, helped me thirty years ago navigate from the teeming insanity of adolescence into early adulthood. I cite it here, drawing from a favorite site of mine, Goodreads:

“To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been. And to protect their delicate vision of that other time, madmen will justify their condition with touching loyalty, and surround it with a thousand distractive schemes. These schemes, in turn, drive them deeper and deeper into the darkness and light (which is their mortification and their reward), and confront them with a choice. They may either slacken and fall back, accepting the relief of a rational view and the approval of others, or they may push on, and, by falling, arise. When and if by their unforgivable stubbornness they finally burst through to worlds upon worlds of motionless light, they are no longer called afflicted or insane. They are called saints.”

Reading that passage today transports me back to that time in my life when imaginable futures seemed so real and attainable and yet laughable to elders. I did harbor a secret hope that I could be a saint.

The very next article I read provided the context and scientific basis for an argument that fiction may have a neurological effect on improving our social interactions. Annie Murphy Paul writes in her piece, “Your Brain on Fiction,” that  ”individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective.” A week ago Friday, I was at a meeting where I had the opportunity to talk to Chief Human Resource officers from several Fortune 500 companies. When I asked them what they wanted from our graduates, they responded almost uniformly that they wanted candidates who could operate well on a team, who had a broader understanding of the world, and who had a social and emotional intelligence that enabled them to work in a changing and challenging environment. In workforce circles, these are called non-cognitive skills, described by James Heckman as “aspects of character” that include “traits such as personality, health, mental health, perseverance, time preference, risk aversion, self-esteem, self-control, preference for leisure, conscientiousness, and motivation.” Some of these traits are developed, according to Murphy Paul’s article, by fiction.

I reflexively defend the value of the liberal arts as a product of a liberal arts education and as believer in the value of a world beyond my equally beloved economic analyses of the rational actor. As I said, my faith in fiction has been flagging as decrepitude and pragmatism creep into my daily life. This morning’s reading has reminded me of the joy a well-written passage can awake in me. It has also given me the scientific ammunition that is increasingly important in defending the value of those parts of our mission served by literature – so much so that I will return to reading Infinite Jest with renewed enthusiasm and joy.

Hark! The Herald

The Herald’s online coverage continues to impress with this outstanding article, “Philosophy and Rhetoric Finds Forum on Floor 10″  by Evelyn Luviano about how Professor Swanson is using role-playing games to advance understanding in his Humanities 207 class. Kudos to Ms. Luviano for brining the class to life in her piece.

Taylor Lilly shows strong reportorial skills with “The Blight Next Door,” highlighting the history of fixing the ugly space next to our building. Dr. John Hader and Mark Shougar from The Wit, along with Instructor John Madsen, provide perspectives.

Check them out. These are excellent examples of solid student reporting, hitting issues that matter for the HWC community.