My readers know that when I travel abroad it naturally encourages me to see my own country, and profession (higher education) through different lens. As I write this reflection, I have been under the influence of driving around the south of France, for a week, with my wife, Betsy Barefoot, who does all the driving and thus gives me even more opportunity to take in visually my new surroundings. And what I don’t see here is what I see everywhere in the US: post secondary institutions.

In the States, almost everywhere you drive, even less populated areas, you see evidences of the huge post secondary industry in America, for our 20 million plus regular constituents (note I chose not to call them “customers”, a concept I still find anathema).

We see billboards and other forms of signage, directing us to such and such a college or university. Some of them we have heard of, others we have not. Often times, separate institutions will be right across the street from each other. In some cases that was because they may have originally been founded as single sex, private, institutions and their co-location facilitated socializing of students from the same social classes, one of the original purposes of college in America.

When we read newspapers, listen to the car radio, watch television, or, of course, surf, we are inundated with advertisements for colleges and universities, usually not the elite ones, and almost always, the hungry ones.

But not in France. We have been driving now for seven days, in both the countryside and more urban areas, and haven’t seen one, literally. And not one billboard advertising one either. But a quick check on the internet tells me that in this country of more than 60 million people there are at least 90 public universities and 170 professional schools, in addition to many more vocational schools. But I haven’t seen one of them.

This all strikes me as somewhat paradoxical. In America where we are constantly reminded of both the need for and accessibility of higher education, as a route for upward social mobility, there are nevertheless much greater degrees of inequality as measured by such indicators as degree attainment and per capita income, than here in France where higher education is not visible at all to this naked eye. I am struck with the paradox: the ubiquity of higher education in my own country, including in the literal, visual sense, but with ever rising levels of inequality. I recall that just a few weeks ago one of the former Republican presidential candidates told an audience that if elected he would do everything within his power to maintain inequality of attainment.

And there are other things I don’t see in France but I know are here to differentiate from my own country: universal health care, greater life expectancy, the 35 hour work week, retirement age pegged to government pensions at 62, and paid vacation durations that American workers have never had and never will.

I am glad though that US higher education is so omnipresent. I would certainly never want that to be any different. It is part of our transparency of trying to create opportunity. I just want to see us get better at the attainment of that opportunity.

Usually I can explain, at least to myself, the way my mind works. So this posting is about a tourist visit I made while on vacation in France with my wife, Betsy Barefoot. Said visit making me think of what time of the academic year it was back home—“end of term.”

Betsy and I were outside the charming village of St.Remy-De-Provence in France, where we visited the mental asylum St-Paul-de-Mausolee. This is the facility where the artist, Vincent Van Gogh spent the last full year of his life, 1889-90, when at the peak of both his madness and creativity he was so inspired by the beauty surrounding him, including nearby archeological ruins of extraordinary significance, known as Glanum, literally just a few minutes’ walk away. The artist discharged himself and shortly thereafter committed suicide. Visitors like ourselves can enter the building where he resided, visit his quarters and look out his sleeping room window to see the same view that had to have inspired him too.

Van Gogh’s room in what still is today a psychiatric hospital, for women only, is exactly the size of an American college student’s residence hall room. And this made me think of our students as they are at “the end of term” but hopefully, not at “the end of term” in the sense that Van Gogh was.

How fortunate we are to live in an era when the kind of depression, bi-polar disorder, that afflicted and killed Van Gogh, can at least be treated, managed, if not prevented, by modern medicine. Still, the end of term is one of those turning points in the academic and personal lives of our students that are stressful, and at which time students often make decisions which are not in their best long term interests.

Not so many years ago the prominent US higher education researcher, Clifford Adelman, in his now well disseminated so-called Toolbox presented us with compelling data demonstrating the correlation between attending summer school and ultimate degree attainment. Taking part in any amount of summer school accumulation of academic credit favorably advantaged students for graduation. Summer school is a way then of staying connected.

So we need to urge our students to consider ways that they could stay connected, to us that is, even though after finals they may feel compelled to disconnect, physically withdraw for a period, earn money to return, etc. But as we know from many other college student behavioral choices, the decisions they make often only exacerbate the original conditions that put them under stress in the first place, like drinking excessively or going home for visits as a means to cope with homesickness.

At the end of term then is a good time for you to help your students reflect on the significance of the term, where they are now in their college journey, what mileposts have they passed but yet have in front of them.

It is a good time for them to NOT make major decisions about whether or not to return.

It is a good time for them to make the one last herculean effort to “pull their grades out”.

It is a good time to remind them that in some courses, there is still hope for the power of redemption and that not all faculty grade simply on the basis of mathematical averages.

It is a good time to get them to consider some things they could do over the summer that would insure greater academic success when they return and forms of staying “connected” during the summer hiatus.

One way of staying connected is to stay connected with you, literally.

Another would be to participate in study abroad, or now more commonly, internships.

The very notion of “end of term” and of summer break, recalls of course the original rationale for giving college students the summer off. It was all tied to the original agricultural cycle when the young were needed “home” to labor in the fields, to help the family, and just to continue and extend the public school culture. In an era when only a tiny fraction of college students are still needed on the family farm over the summer months, the very notion of “end of term” seems anachronistic. And it is. But students still experience this as a “transition” and it is one more transition of which we need to be mindful, supportive, and perhaps even directive.

One of the many benefits I have found of foreign travel is the incentive it gives me to look at my work in higher education from new perspectives. Case in point: I write this piece in Venice, Italy, a city where no automobiles or bicycles are allowed due to the lack of streets (“streets” meaning vehicular conduits), narrow passageways, narrow little bridges over the canals, and heavy pedestrian traffic which must be protected. It took a while for this to sink in: that I was in a city with no cars. No automobile noise. No having to look out for vehicles that might hit me as a pedestrian. And no fire trucks or vehicular ambulances either. Amazing. What if we banned all automobiles from our campuses?

The absence of this invention that changed the landscape of America really stunned me. I am almost never anywhere in the US where cars are banned. And the last time I was in a city that banned them was in Siena, Italy, in November of 2011.  This set me thinking about the plethora of impacts on American civilization wrought by the automobile including: the liberation of women (sexual, familial, and professional); the liberation of teenagers (sexual); the creation of the “burbs” and the flight from cities; the stultifying culture of the suburbs leading to the return to America’s most livable and interesting cities; all the “drive-in’s” from used-to-be movie theaters to eateries to liquor stores to funeral homes; to the industrial base that played a key role in our winning World War II; I could go on forever with this litany.

So what if we took just one of the givens out of the typical higher education campus? How about banning cars from residential campuses and forbidding the students to have them? Think what that would do for the “suitcase” campus. Think what that would do for student participation in co-curricular activities. Think what that would do for student engagement. And besides, we already know that teenagers are forgoing cars as a necessary tool to meet people now that they have the internet linked with the right apps for their smart phones.

What if we removed varsity revenue sports? Even just one. Now there would be a game changer. But that would be downright un-American. Which would be easier or harder to get rid of: football or automobiles?

What if we got rid of general education, and allowed our students to do what most of them want to do anyway and go right into their majors? We would reduce the time-to-degree periods necessary for a bachelors degree and save governments, families, and students a fortune?

What is there that we absolutely have to have to constitute an institution of higher learning? What could we never get rid of? The library? The faculty? No, we could redefine and outsource those two. Security. Now there’s a function that could not be currently outsourced. Perhaps in a decade or two with surveillance cameras everywhere and drones on demand to rescue those in distress we could even do away with security. Well, how about administration? Surely we could never outsource or outright eliminate administration. Somebody has to be in charge.

Wait a minute, I almost forgot. Here’s something else that we could not eliminate: students. But I have heard it said by some higher educators that their campuses really are nice places to work when there are no students around. This is in the same vein as I have frequently observed to flight attendants: you would have a good job if it weren’t for the passengers.

I am glad I have been encouraged to think about the givens and which of them I/we could give up. It has become increasingly obvious we can’t afford and don’t want to keep on doing all we do, have, maintain, support in the US higher education structure, as our national public policy currently leads us on a race to the bottom.

But while in Venice, I spent most of my time thinking more pleasant thoughts, facilitated by the absence of the noise made by cars. Eliminating such modern urban sources of noise sure does help reflection.

I recently spent part of a day in Venice, Italy, with my wife, Betsy Barefoot, being guided by an Italian university professor, who had just finished his first year or so in what he called a “permanent” slot, our equivalent of a tenure track position. From him I learned some things that made me contrast the similarities and differences between our lives in the academy in our two countries: 

•  the oldest universities generally have the greatest prestige
• entry level faculty has significantly lower teaching loads than senior faculty (now there is a practice what would revolutionize the cost of instruction in US higher education! Full professors generating more credit hour productivity than assistant professors is almost hard to contemplate.
•  “deans” favor those disciplines that bring in the most extramural revenue support over many fields in the humanities such as the classics
•  recent graduates face unemployment rates in excess of 30% (considerably higher than the US)
•  and these recent graduates are either continuing to live with parents or are moving back in with them.  Same as in the US.
•  and most distressingly, many of these graduates now assume they will not live as well as their parents due to the shrinkage of “permanent” jobs (with benefits) in all sectors
•  Italian universities are now trying to provide more opportunities for residential accommodations for students (the picture is mixed in the US where we are very aware that on-campus residential status is a strong predictor for graduation
• where once Italian students paid no fees, now they do, at an ever increasing rate, approximately 2000 Euros per year (still low by US standards)
•  Italian universities are making more efforts to assist students to increase retention and graduation rates (we invented this in the US with much help from the author of this blog).
• publish or perish is alive and well in Italy
• Italian university students, and their families, do have a social safety net provided by university health coverage, about which we heard no complaints at all, except for waiting lists for non emergency elective procedures.
• Italians educators are amazed by the issues in dispute in the current US presidential election campaign, such as whether or not to have anything approaching universal health insurance coverage.

President

Here it is nearing the end of the traditional academic term. At this point in the semester I always found it difficult to restrain my natural inclination to give my students some unsolicited advice, not only about how best to cope with finals period, but some perspectives on their decisions that might be made after term ended and before the next one—like whether or not to come back.

A few months ago I was on a campus and was given a fairly lengthy tour by an outstanding senior. As we walked and talked and began to get to know each other, I learned that he was confronting two major decisions: 1) whether to take a lucrative job in corporate America or go to graduate school; 2) and if graduate school, whether or not to go to same grad school as his significant other. If he chose # 1 it would very likely mean the end of his relationship and if he chose a graduate school other than one she was committed to, probably the same result for the relationship. I mean these were really heavy duty decisions. And any choice he made could have lifelong consequences.

As we walked his beautiful campus we strolled by the chapel. I asked him what it was used for and if he ever used it himself. He told me he had never been inside, and he had been there all four years, on a residential campus. So I offered to escort him inside! We wandered in and we both noted how quiet it was. I suggested he return sometime, alone, and just sit down and think about his choices.

This student was like the overwhelming majority of today’s college students—they live lives without silence. They are constantly connected. But their connections are mainly for succinct communications and rarely involve any thinking or communicating in depth of any kind.

I find myself constantly having an interior monologue with myself speculating if my life, and those of others around me are, on balance, better with all out gadgets for connectivity. It is, of course, not a simple yes, no, or even maybe. I am one of many academics and public intellectuals who have become very concerned for the alienating effects of technology on our students, how in some ways it prevents the very depth and intimacy that I wish they could experience, both personally and intellectually.

There are two excellent writings just out on this that have come to my attention, one the day of my writing this blog and the other just a week or so before. I recommend the piece “The Flight from Conversation” in “Sunday Review” of The New York Times, April 22, 2012, page 1, above the fold, by Sherry Turkle. She is a psychologist and faculty member at MIT and the author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.

The second piece is the most recent issue of the Atlantic. On the cover there is an undressed couple in an intimate embrace. The man is looking over the woman’s shoulder and holding up his smart phone without her being able to see what he is doing. He has a frenzied look on his face as he reads his phone screen, while his lover unknowingly appears lost and content in her own embrace. The article is entitled “Is Facebook Making us Lonely?” It is written by Stephen Marche.

When I look back on my own college experience, I can easily recall so many rich, rich experiences, intellectually, developmentally, personally. But above all, the richest were those that I experienced in conversations with others. I am so glad I didn’t have a smart phone then, didn’t tweet, didn’t text. For me the word “text” had multiple meanings and that alone made me very different from today’s students. For me, text was a noun, not a verb.  And here ends my “text” for the day.

I shall continue in this vein of delineating the various ways I have noted that baccalaureate receiving transfer institutions treat transfer students differently than “native” students.

7. Eligibility for participation in student organizations: it has long been known that another predictor for retention is joining behaviors when directed towards institutionally sponsored and licensed student organizations, clubs, activities. There again we are discovering instances of policies which favor native, full-time students, who start early in the undergraduate period with these organizations. The realm of participation in intercollegiate athletics is another type of student experience which is highly skewed to favor the non- transfer student.

8. Opportunity for on-campus employment: there has long existed good research to substantiate the finding that both where and how much a student works during the undergraduate years is a predictor for graduation. Of particular note is the finding that college students, who work on campus, controlling for the same amount of hours worked when compared to students who work off campus, are more likely to graduate. Because the availability of on-campus employment, particularly that which may not be tied to eligibility for College Work Study funding, is limited, naturally, native students have a better shot at initially obtaining and retaining these positions, thus making it more difficult for transfer students to secure these plum assignments.

In summary, the existing organizational structures, policies, traditions, and culture are highly biased in favor of non-transfer, “native” students.

I know this in only a partial list. I would be interested in hearing from my readers of other examples they have observed in their own or other higher education settings.

This series of three blogs does not address “reverse transfer” in community colleges – which also were not designed  for their own transfer students. “Reverse transfer” now has an entirely new meaning with respect to awarding retroactive associate degrees to students who transferred “out” before completing that degree. But I will leave this topic to another posting perhaps.

I wrote these three blogs because I am concerned with the bias against transfer students even though the experience is now normative. As a country we cannot attain our aspirational goals for increasing baccalaureate completion rates unless we provide more equitable treatment to transfer students.

In my previous posting I was attempting to enumerate examples of disadvantageous discrimination against transfer students. I was just getting started with several examples of discrimination, having presented two such. Here are some more.

3. Eligibility for on-campus residential living accommodations: in part, because of demand outstripping supply, and the long standing tradition of requiring on-campus housing only for first-year students, the majority of institutions do not have capacity to provide on campus housing for all the students who might desire such. Priority then is almost universally given to new, first-year students, and continuing students, space permitting. In that sort or prioritization, transfers are left either out or way behind. This affects probability of degree attainment as we have long known that one of the better predictors of who will graduate is where the student lived (on or off campus), particularly in the first year. Bottom line: on campus residency predicts for degree completion.

4. Orientation: This is another traditional college function that was designed for the “traditional” aged student, largely who was beginning college for the first time at a given university. There is a grossly disproportionate emphasis in terms of institutional time, energy and effort already directed to this function with variance by institutional type. This means that the more selective, residential, traditional aged student focused, and baccalaureate degree awarding the institution is, the more likely it is to devote substantial support for orientation for new and native students. Many institutions will even require orientation for its new students. In these same institutions, this will almost never be the case for transfer students, for whom orientation if offered at all, will be “optional” and will be much less extensive. In spite of evidence that transfer students need orientation, and that just because a transfer student was successful at a prior institution, does not mean the same student will be as successful at the new institution, orientation is not offered for transfers with the same degree of emphasis, time, options, imprimatur. In effect then, we are giving transfers more opportunity to be less successful than native students.

5. Academic Advising: Due to the professionalization of academic advising underway on college campuses since the late 1970’s, with the advent of the National Association for Academic Advising in 1977, it is now well established, especially in baccalaureate institutions, that first-year students are well identified targets of opportunity and priority for emphasis for intrusive academic advising, often coupled with “early alert” systems to monitor signs of student underperformance in courses more typically taken by traditional new students. Such early alert systems are usually not targeted on either transfer students per se or especially on upper division courses that transfer students are more likely to be enrolled in. Institutions have made great investments in the recruitment, selection, training, evaluation, and rewarding of academic advisors for students new to college. There is no comparable effort for transfer students. Rather than being advised in a central intake advising unit, transfer students are much more likely to be advised on a decentralized basis in the academic units which award the degrees they transferred to obtain. With respect both to priority and quality in these units, academic advising is a cottage industry with almost no institution-wide effort to guarantee common standards for the quality of this effort. Hence, once again, the odds are stacked in favor of the native students.

6. Registration: all colleges have course registrations that include some kind of system for prioritization. And within that priority system, there are evidences of transfers receiving lower registration priority than native and continuing students. Obviously, when you register determines the probability the student will be able to receive optimal times, and especially access to required courses needed for timely progression in the major.

The above are enough for one posting. Do any of these apply to your institution? If so, how might you address some redress of these?

John N. Gardner

As part of the Foundations of Excellence^® Transfer Focus self study process, one of the core services provided by the non-profit organization which I lead, we work with institutions to complete what we call a “Current Practices Inventory (CPI)”. This CPI includes an enumeration of all the policies, rules, etc that pertain to transfer students. Another part of the Inventory is a listing of all the programs and interventions offered to assist transfer students, rationale and goals for such interventions and numbers and proportions of total population served. This inventory is part of an overall process of self study to critically examine everything the institution does, either to send transfer students or to receive them. This self study then becomes the basis for an action plan to improve institutional performance.

It has been in the process of assisting institutions in this Foundations of Excellence self study process, that we have had the opportunity to observe colleges and universities, particularly those on the receiving end, identify and acknowledge both policies and practices that we could label as discriminatory, meaning providing less favorable treatment for transfer students than that received by “native” students.

Perhaps the most important statement I can make about what all this means is to suggest that almost all American colleges and universities were NOT designed for transfer students. They were designed many decades, even centuries ago, and that design and accompanying culture remains dominant. And this is a culture that assumes that students come to the institution, most often as a first choice, often live on campus, do not pursue remunerative employment while in college, attend full time, and remain at the same institution for the entire undergraduate period. For students who can experience that kind of undergraduate education, indeed college works very well. No surprise – that’s what it was designed to do. But for students who enter after the traditional beginning term or year, that is who “transfer”, the experience is very different.

In our work with these “transfer focus” self studies we have observed institutions discovering and honestly reporting that they have policies and practices which by design favor “native” over transfer students. These are policies with respect to these critical areas:

1.    Acceptance of credits

2.    Financial aid

3.    On-campus residential living

4.    Orientation

5.    Academic advising

6.    Registration

7.    Eligibility for participation in student organizations

8.    Opportunity for on-campus employment

Let’s consider just the first two in this posting and we can address the others in remaining posts.

1. Acceptance of credits: students who start at institution A are much more likely to have their general education credits earned at institution A apply to bachelors degrees of choice awarded by institution A. These so-called “native” students, especially in large institutions, still will face internal transfer, but they will fare better than external transfers.

2. Financial aid: it is commonly the case that institutional aid (non federal or state funded aid) is given priority to native continuing students, as opposed to new incoming transfer students. It is far less common for there to be special or substantial set asides of aid for transfer students.

And we are just getting started. Stay tuned for more. And be thinking of whether or not your institution discriminates against transfer students.

This morning I read a sign of relief—relief from the disaster that is the August train wreck on so many campuses in our country. The August train wreck is my metaphorical reference to our continuing to allow a public school, K-12 model of allowing all students who want to be educated to show up over a few days before the start of the term to be registered and allowed to begin. Our campuses are not geared for this onslaught and it is inevitable that we make all kinds of mistakes and thus insure that many of our students have been admitted with an opportunity to fail.

What did I read? I read the Friday, March 30, page one, above the fold, article in The New York Times reporting “2 Year College Squeezed, Sets 2-Tier Tuition”.

The piece goes on to describe Santa Monica College’s decision to offer some courses, starting summer registration, at “…a higher price so that students who are eager to get into a particular class can do so if they pay more.”

I realize this practice will not be greeted with universal approbation by my readers. It may even remind the historically conscious of the policy during the US Civil War that allowed some citizens to purchase their way out of the obligation towards subscription.

But I have long urged, always to not a single positive response, that we need to move towards a pricing tiered model that charges students as a function of when they register, how far they plan ahead. This would insure that they started the term on time, were able to experience orientation, obtained a better selection of course and schedule, and  perhaps most important, actually attend the first, second, third even, class meeting. This would be diametrically different from the situation now where at many of our college students register and start classes late, because we allow it. And because we allow it, because we want their money and body count, many of them are more likely to be unsuccessful, especially in the critical first term of college.

Who knows where this one college’s experiment with “2 tier” pricing will go? I certainly don’t. But as an example of risk taking and experimentation to improve a situation, I am glad to see this happen.

We have to mitigate the August train wreck. And surely there have to be other ways to do this. But rewarding students to plan ahead, and penalizing those who don’t, may be one way. This could be for everyone’s good. We’ll see. Our colleagues at Santa Monica College may well have started something that will go further than they initially intended. I hope so.

President

I have been trying to drive a higher education reform agenda on the beginning college experience for the primary reason of helping needy new college students and improving the educational quality of the first-year experience. However, everything keeps coming back to retention as the primary reason we should be doing anything for new students.

One example is the announcement by the President in the State of the Union Address that the government would be examining the issue of excessive tuition increases in colleges and universities. Even though the right thinks that all of us in the academy are much more to the left of center, we can be certain that the President’s announcement of Federal scrutiny of what we charge our students was not warmly greeted by college leaders.

This matter of what college costs is inextricable from retention and graduation rates. In order to get costs down, we have to get those rates up to decrease time-to-degree completion costs.

I write about this here with my primary intended audience being those who are responsible for or working in any initiatives that are connected on campuses to this retention agenda. It is always a challenge to make sure that front line troops get the big picture. What is the larger national context for the importance of our work? And what might be the latest external pressures that could bear on our work. And this external pressure is potentially a big one.

Perhaps the saving grace for colleges and universities will be that in this climate anything the President wants that could help him get reelected will be blocked by the “loyal minority” in the Congress. However, this issue could end up being truly bipartisan as there are plenty of Republican voters that also want to see college tuition rates decrease.

One bottom-line conclusion here I think we can all agree on is that this issue is just one more to make our work improving the success of new students even more important. I have always maintained that this work is in the national interest.