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Test Compatibility
The article “What Do They Measure? Comparing Three Learning Outcomes Assessments” in the July/August issue of Change recommends additional research on the comparability of the three learning outcomes measures included within the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA) and reported in the College Portrait. The VSA supports any research that further clarifies the differences and similarities across the CAAP, CLA, and ETS Proficiency Profile (formerly know as MAPP).
The three tests reported as part of the VSA were carefully evaluated and selected, in part based on each sponsoring organization's statement that each test or group of tests was designed to measure (at a minimum) critical thinking, analytic reasoning, and written communication, as well as the organizations' willingness to use a similar methodology to compute and report scores.
The Test Validity Study (TVS) was conducted to gather more information about the comparability of the results across tests and to mitigate concerns among some VSA institutions that it would be possible to “game” the results if one test consistently produced higher scores than the other two.
The TVS results demonstrated that gaming concerns were largely unwarranted and provided evidence that the test results were highly correlated and reliable at the institutional level. The VSA recommends that institutions select the test instrument that best fits the circumstances at a particular institution. The VSA is also cognizant of overextending the results of the TVS and cautions VSA institutions against doing so in source documents on the VSA website as well as within presentations to interested audiences.
In short, the VSA welcomes further study that delineates more precisely the construct or constructs measured by the CAAP, CLA, and ETS Proficiency Profile and increases the comparability of these tools for reporting on the College Portrait.
-Christine Keller
Executive Director, VSA
-David Shulenburger
Vice President for Academic Affairs, APLU
No More Muddling Through
Breaking Bad Habits: Navigating the Financial Crisis” by Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman in your May/June 2010 issue lays out the financial challenges facing higher education in a clear and concise fashion. Unfortunately, I fear that most states are entering a longer period of revenue stagnation than even they predict.
I've been through 30 years of state and local budget challenges in both higher education and K-12 schools in Connecticut. While we have been lucky to be a very high-income state, Connecticut has ridden the economic “boom-and-bust” cycle with the nation as a whole. Global economic change may be transforming what the cycle means for state spending.
For much of the second half of the 20th century, the United States enjoyed an economic surge largely protected from global competition. Every downturn could be survived with “muddling through” (as Jones and Wellman term it) during the tighter budget year or two before getting back on the upward revenue track. No one had to seriously consider tackling fundamental cost problems, because the next run-up in state revenue would buy you out of the problem.
Something changed by the early 1990s in this ever-upward revenue growth. For the past 20 years, especially in higher-income and higher-spending states, state revenue surges may have been based more on speculative bubbles (the Internet economy in the late 1990s and the credit explosion of 2005—2007) than on sustainable economic growth, and the “muddling-through” periods may have used so many budgetary gimmicks and one-time revenue tricks that the well of fiscal magic has run dry at the state level.
The next 20 years and beyond may be a very different state revenue environment than we “baby boomers” and younger adults have ever experienced. If global competition continues to grind away at the earning power of middle-class families, the vast majority of higher education institutions (both public and private) will face continual pressure on their public support as well as their tuition revenue.
Jones and Wellman are right to say that the traditional “cost model” of higher education cannot withstand these pressures. A select number of institutions may be able to maintain the status quo business model because their allure to higher-income families will generate the tuition revenue to do so. But all other colleges and universities are likely to face a period of persistent financial stress that has no historical parallel. To get the job done, we will have to figure out how to deliver on priorities with the money we have, not the money we wish we had.
Despite this gloomy perspective, I remain an optimist—for those institutions that are willing to change. And I remain an advocate for increasing public investment in education from early childhood to postsecondary education as the best long-term economic-development strategy available to the nation or any state. But I don't think there is much life left to the old strategy of “muddling through” until the new revenue or demographic surge saves us.
Whether we make it to 2030 as individuals or not, if our institutions want to be thriving in 20 years, we must begin to tackle the cost challenges now.
-Michael P. Meotti
Commissioner, Department of Higher Education, State of Connecticut
Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman's fine article in the May/June issue of Change is well organized and reasoned. If I were still Commissioner of Higher Education in Texas, I'd extract from the article the agenda for meetings I'd call with the college and university presidents. Then I'd get a select group to meet with the appropriate legislators and people from the governor's office. Kenneth Boulding said it long ago: The time you can make meaningful changes is in periods of decline and crisis. I hope that their work stimulates action and discussions at the state and national levels.
The one deficiency in the article, in my judgment, is that the authors did not dwell enough on “mission creep” and how this needs to be controlled. At least as a starting point, we used to require trade-offs before we would approve new programs or changes in mission. It can be done effectively only at the coordinating board level; schools will never do it voluntarily.
The pressure among schools and legislators in Texas for more flagship campuses is more intense than ever, even though Ray Paredes took the courageous position of explaining that creating a flagship campus requires 20 to 30 years of sustained support. But each flagship wannabe sees its manifest destiny as duplicating what exists at UT Austin, A&M, and other such schools. There are no imaginative visions for a new kind of flagship campus.
For years, undergraduate programs have been diluted and diminished as aspiring universities have focused on new graduate programs, some approved and some just a gleam in the eye of ambitious department heads, deans, presidents, and regents. It is futile to talk about substantial restructuring of costs and financing when any president who is not pushing for more graduate and professional programs—and is thereby asking the faculty to stand down on some of their fondest aspirations—has little chance of surviving.
And as to expecting any school to voluntarily sacrifice for the greater good, the research schools will argue that others should sacrifice so they can continue to make their greater contribution to society. Meanwhile the smaller schools will say, “We're always the first to be asked to sacrifice, and we won't do it until the big schools do some sacrificing first.”
Ah, how I do miss my years in the trenches. Dennis and Jane bring it all back all too vividly.
-Kenneth Ashworth
Former Commissioner of Higher Education, Texas Higher Education, Coordinating Board
Jane Wellman and Dennis Jones have done a great service to higher education with their article in the May/June issue. We owe them our thanks.
I agree with my friend and former colleague Ken Ashworth that “mission creep” is a major problem in most states. Another colleague has written to me recently that his state's coordinating agency “still doesn't believe in differentiation among institutions in any meaningful sense.”
The de-regulation of our corporations and financial institutions, which began in the mid-1990s, has caused havoc throughout the world. What we ought to have learned—and should have known—is that institutions of all kinds will do what benefits them regardless of their obligations to the well-being of individual women and men or to the state or nation of which they are a part.
De-regulation of higher education began at about the same time and is causing havoc today. Universities and colleges are institutions; just like banks and investment companies, they will act in their own best interests unless their behavior is governed to some reasonable extent. In an ungoverned environment, in which every institution seeks to be “elite,” the notion of serving all the people becomes a joke. Quality is measured by research volume and admissions selectivity.
About 140 years ago, our land-grant universities were established to advance agriculture and to provide educational opportunities for the rural populations of our states. Today, almost all the land-grants focus on research, with scant regard for the millions of “have-nots”—urban and rural—among us.
Public colleges and universities are not bad. They're just institutions, and institutions will behave in what they perceive to be their own best interests. The people hired to run them will not survive unless they act accordingly.
States need to become serious once again about higher education governance and coordination, as well as about supporting their public colleges and universities.
-Gordon K. Davies
Former President, Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education
I read with a good deal of interest Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman's article in the May/June issue of Change. Most of their suggestions would, as they noted, require statutory changes (at least in Pennsylvania). That creates a real conundrum. If institutions really want to change the paradigm, they may not be allowed to.
In Pennsylvania, major components of the benefits package and the appropriation process are totally out of our control. For example, the General Assembly and governor are working to restructure the state pension programs as I write this, and our labor contract with AFSCME (our second-largest union) is linked to the state's master contract. We are in dialogue with elected officials concerning changes in the incremental approach to budgeting for us.
We are included in the omnibus state budget because we are a state agency. So that makes it difficult to change the budgeting process for us. That creates a real problem: because we cannot control costs in key areas, it becomes extremely difficult for us to be creative and do things differently. So we need concrete suggestions about what to do when it's impossible to get laws changed.
There's another unspoken barrier to success that confronts state systems from time to time—politics. Consider this: A state system wants to restructure what programs it offers on which campuses. There is agreement from all major campus constituencies. Then a legislator introduces a bill or an amendment that requires the system to offer a specified list of programs at the campus or changes the funding formula to reallocate monies from other campuses in the system to that campus.
Although many of these bills and amendments are stopped, some pass. It is important for state systems to understand the concerns of legislators and to develop good working relationships with them so all understand the rationale behind decisions about program cuts (or additions). Those discussions in Pennsylvania have helped move the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education forward, with legislative support.
Public universities are not really the same as private businesses. Apart from highly regulated industries, most businesses are free to eliminate product lines or divisions without government interference. But when we go through the extremely difficult process of eliminating unproductive programs, that work can be undone or changed at any time by legislation. Suggestions on how to manage these kinds of end runs would also be welcome.
We need a more focused dialogue on the challenges in public higher education, split into a number of threads: (a) how to change things over which we actually have control, (b) how to change the way our boards think, and (c) how to affect the way state governments behave with regard to changing the law or the state constitution.
-John C. Cavanaugh
Chancellor, Pennsylvania State, System of Higher Education
In their recent article, Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman (May/June) called for new thinking about higher education. They ask educators and state policymakers to shed traditional “bad habits” to deal with their fiscal crises. They recognize that single institutions must react within their own mission and capacity but have the responsibility to implement academic cost restructuring. Jones and Wellman do not wade into the murky waters of how this can be done, though. We would like to offer some steps for institutions to consider that are based on our activities over the last four years.
While combining some departments, restructuring a college, ceasing to offer very-low enrollment programs, and the like, we began introducing our faculty leadership to issues beyond those specific to this campus and state system. We used every opportunity to raise national realities with faculty, sent them to conferences on higher education policy and funding, and brought speakers to campus who focused on the broader higher education picture.
We invested in faculty members willing to try teaching differently in bottleneck courses for beginning students by crossing departmental lines to make courses such as mathematics more relevant. We sent faculty members to workshops to develop the capacity to incorporate appropriate technology into their teaching of lower-level courses and established a Math Achievement Center (MAC) that continues to grow. This has helped faculty in our mathematics department focus seriously on student success, regardless of grades.
Reclaiming faculty “reassigned time” to return our tenured faculty to directly guiding students' learning and development took almost a year of very difficult work. Our academic deans examined each case of released time based on a faculty-agreed-upon set of principles; the effort paid off in budget savings.
We used our savings to invest in critical support services that included stronger academic analytics and pedagogical and technical support for faculty. We also used an educational lean process (see ProQuest Digital Dissertations database - UMI No. AAT 3331426) to examine many university functions, as well as some curricular redesign to further streamline our operations.
In addition, we changed our summer school model to allow academic departments to gain from their entrepreneurial activities, which resulted in income growth and more degree-relevant and online courses. A faculty-led initiative is now redesigning our general education requirements to ensure that they are relevant to a 21st-century baccalaureate education and can be delivered at a lower cost.
Academic cost restructuring requires that campus leaders guide faculty in changing their culture. Such profound change is not easy, but there are no other options. The re-examination of all academic programs will continue and include cost as one variable. With each retirement or shift in student interest, the new normal becomes the way this university will do its business.
-Sally M. Johnstone
Provost, Winona State University, Minnesota
-Judith A. Ramaley
President, Winona State University, Minnesota
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