Demonization, Deviance and Higher Education

I learned something new, and mildly horrible, this week: there is this thing called “Broken Windows” Education. I stumbled on it via an article “PunitiveSchooling” by Owen Davis in Jacobin Magazine Online. Basically this is the application of Zero Tolerance Policing to K-12 education. Davis describes the process in the following way:

As the policing theory goes, minor instances of supposed disorder —spraying graffiti, panhandling, selling single cigarettes – createsan environment of lawlessness, leading to acts of theft and murder.Busting jaywalkers and homeless people for misdemeanors, it follows,will decrease the homicide rate. Some of the fastest-growing charter school networks explicitly draw on ...  law enforcementmethods to run their schools...”

I find it extremely bizarre to think that “law enforcement methods” can be a considered an acceptable way to run an educational institution. That is just an odd pedagogical stance. But I don't want to spend time indicting this system. Methinks if you approve of it, nothing I can say would change your mind about it. If you don't approve, then I am just preaching to the chorus. (Plus the Jacobin Magazine article does a pretty good job of it.)

But this dovetails with something similar I have been thinking about: parallels between our criminal justice system and schooling. 

Jock Young in his book TheExclusive Society lays out a framework to think about how we, as a society, approach the concept of "criminalization."  He argues that as America has moved from a “Modern Society” into a “Late Modern Society” we have gone from being “inclusive” to “exclusive.”(5-9) He condemns both, but for different reasons. The Modern, inclusive society was framed in terms of integrating everyone into society; that everyone could “get in.” Unfortunately, as he points out, this approach “demanded uniformity, a homogeneity of culture and identity." (149) You were expected to become like everyone else. (If interested, this link connects to a 1999 essay by Young“Cannibalization and Bulimia”  that appeared in the journal Theoretical Criminology and that later became Chapter two of The Exclusive Society .)

In the Late Modern Exclusive society, things have changed. Young argues we are now much more tolerant of difference. We celebrate diversity and don't expect everyone to be like everyone else. At the same time, we have become less tolerant of difficulty. (59)  You can be different, as long as you don't cause problems or make work for other people. Those that are “difficult” are viewed as deviant, then “demonized” and removed from society (as in criminals being sent to prison). (16-17)

He lays out this framework in extensive detail – relating it to crime at many levels, showing how entire cultures have bought into the system. He even lays it out to account for the spiraling number of African-Americans in prison. (16-20; 75)  He makes a fairly compelling argument. A few generalizations aside, I found most of his claims reasonable.

More significantly, I also found them disturbing. As I was reading, I kept thinking that his inclusive/exclusive criminalization model, applies almost perfectly to higher education. Despite numerous calls for more access to college, the actual system has become increasingly “exclusive” and many people, in and around higher education, spend a lot of time “demonizing the other.” Too often intentions and actions are divorced from each other.

Proponents of the Broken Windows approach  are fully aware of what they are doing. They have made a conscious choice to select a zero-tolerance approach. They know very well they are applying the same standards to children as they might apply to criminals. (Although maybe they would disagree with my wording here.) By showing zero-tolerance they believe they can prevent “deviance” from developing.

To a certain extent I respect them for the depth of their beliefs. They are both “talking the talk” and “walking the walk.” Even if I disagree with it – at least they are trying to do something and they are very up front about it.

What bothers me is I feel like I have seen their same attitude from many people in higher education. People, I suspect, who would claim outrage at the Broken Windows method approach. They argue for inclusion and understanding – but then turn around demonstrate most exclusionary behavior. They talk one talk but walk a very different one. I think this is a huge problem in higher ed.

To really make this argument I want to go back to one of the classics of sociology Robert Merton's 1938 essay “Social Structure and Anomie.”In it, Merton lays out five categories of response to socialization: conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreat, and rebellion. (676) Seeing that education is a process of socialization, I want to use Merton's categories as a lens to study student types in higher ed. What I have found is, over-generalizations aside, students exhibit these categories of behavior almost perfectly.

Merton claims that two primary forces work on the individual – the immediate culture and the larger institutional forces of society. Individuals who develop a strong sense of the former, usually develop a stronger sense of identity, of who they are, and will develop some inner strength. Those who develop a stronger sense of the latter, end up more “other directed” , have a weaker sense of identity and will look to the outside for guidance.(672-676) The five different categories depend on the combination of reactions as below in Table 1:

Response	Cultural Goals	Institutional Means
I Conformity	+	+
II Innovation	+	-
III Ritualism	-	+
IV Retreat	-	-
V Rebellion	+/-	+/-

Table 1: Merton's five responses to Socialization. A “+” sign indicates positive relation while a “-” sign indicates negative relation. (676)

I want to skip category V Rebellion. (It may be part of a later blog entry.) Instead I want to focus on the other four, starting with students who have a positive societal orientation (a "+" in the Institutional Means  column).

Conformity is basically the “win-win” category. These students have had a positive cultural upbringing and have developed a healthy sense of identity. At the same time, perhaps because they are comfortable with themselves, they are equally comfortable with the rules and guidelines laid out by society.(677)

I would argue these are generally the more successful students, and as instructors, probably the type of student most of us prefer. After all, they are the “easiest” to deal with. They are fairly well-adjusted and have sufficient inner “gumption” that they have a sense of independence while still recognizing where/how they fit into the larger social structure. These students do their work, probably do it fairly well, and are usually good citizens in the classroom.

In contrast, those in the Ritualism category, while also having a strongly developed society orientation, lack the inner strength or well-formed identity to balance it out. As a result, they look to the outside for guidance, prefer to have others tell them what to do. (Merton 678)

Personally, I find these the students the most frustrating to work with. They are not bad students. In fact, they can be quite good. And quite nice. But they are often uninspired. Even worse, many seem to not want to become inspired.

These are the straight-C students who want to know they are doing just well enough to get by. Or they may be stronger B (or even A) students who have never had an original thought in their lives. They have some gumption so they do all their work and technically, do it well. However, they have gotten so used to being told what to think, they have forgotten how to think.  They are simply not critical thinkers.(I suspect this was, at least partially, me coming out of high school.)

These students are generally easy to work with -- though for all the wrong reasons. Their work may not be sterling, but it is almost always good enough.  They hit every deadline and fulfill every requirement. They cross the T's and dot the I's perfectly.  They want to be left alone so they do nothing that draws attention. Their goal in life is to move forward (invisibly, if possible). If you oblige, you probably forget about them 10 minutes after they leave your class. (I try not to oblige. Which I suspect has made some students very unhappy with me. :))

I worry that in this day and age, this group may make up the biggest population at many schools -- at least outside elite circles. And I worry that things like Broken Window Initiatives will increase their number. Employers claims they need workers who are good critical thinkers, but what sort of critical thinking does one learn by sitting with hands in lap, having all spirit squashed out of you?

In many ways, these students offer something more valuable than being "good"; they offer obedience. They do enough, and do it well enough, to always get passed on through. Because they are so “easy” and play so well by the rules – they are rewarded. After all, who can get angry at a student who turns in every assignment on time and shows up for every class (especially in this day and age)? A friend of mine who is a Dean often remarks: “Half of passing is just showing up.” This is truer than he may even realize.

Merton's other two groups are not nearly as easy with which to work. These are the “deviants” – individuals who in some way act outside accepted academic or behavioral norms.

Interestingly, the Innovation group is my favorite typology – though I suspect there are a LOT of teachers who feel different.

Innovators are students who have developed a strong sense of identity, but have chosen to reject some/many societal standards. They are the entrepreneurs, smart types who chafe against limitations. They don't play by the exact rules but neither do they necessarily thumb their nose at the system.  If anything, they try to co-opt the system for their own purposes. (Merton 678) How much they can "get away with" often depends on how “brilliant” they are.

I have worked and taught at an architectural college. Design school is a very challenging environment and tends to prize skills that differ from more conventional schooling. I have seen some very “difficult”students given a lot of leeway because they were “brilliant designers.” At the same time I saw others, who had fair, but less-enticing, talent  - and a set of demands - given no flexibility at all. Each case needs to be judged on its own merits, but I always had the sense people around the school felt these latter students just weren't worth the bother. They weren't gifted enough to make an effort for. People just wanted them to “behave” and do what was asked of them. To advocate for them after they  openly “broke the rules” would encourage future bad behavior. (For the record: I spent a lot of time advocating for these students. :))

For all the talk about critical thinking and independent thought, there are a lot of people working in higher education who do not want to be bothered by Innovation students. They are “demonized” and may even earn bad reputations. I recall one student who was referred to me for academic support. She came with less than glowing recommendations. Two separate administrators rolled their eyes about her and warned me to that she was “difficult.”

I found her delightful. Fun to talk to. Good sense of humor (though with a sarcastic edge - which may have been the issue).We completed her work. She got an A. She later came to work for me as a tutor. As close as I could tell, everyone else liked her. I later had her in class and yes, she was a bit challenging to work with – her work came in at odd intervals – but it was always good work. Maybe she was not the most “gifted designer” but she was a good student and a nice person. But she had clearly done something to earn that "difficult" label. 

These “difficult” innovators are viewed as “problem children"  because they ask questions; they raise issues; they challenge rules. And often what they turn up has a lot of legitimacy so cannot just be dismissed. That is what makes them such a pain in the neck for an administrator – the last thing anyone wants is another problem.

I really find it ironic that we currently talk about needing to breed entrepreneurs for our economy. But the baseline educational approach is to stifle this perspective. Double ironically –we now have entire programs that teach entrepreneurship – I guess to replace everything that was previously quashed. (Or is there a way to be an entrepreneur without being “difficult”?)

Merton's second deviant typology is the Retreat student. These do exactly that – they pull back; they give up. They have a poor sense of self and they have rejected, or just can't handle, institutional rules. ( They choose not to play. As Merton puts it they "are in society, not of it." (677)

Currently this is an omnipresent and very demonized group in higher education. These are the under-prepared students who in the past would not have gone to college; but because college is now the accepted path to success they attend.

Unfortunately, many are not ready to be there. They lack knowledge. Or they lack skills. Or they have behavioral issues. Or they just don't understand the ins-and-outs of academia. Ofttimes they just sit there with deer-in-the-headlights" expressions too frozen to do any work.  And this makes them "deviant." Even worse, this seems to make them a threat to the academy itself. Critics start crying that standards are under attack and education is being diluted. In addition, some professors complain about being forced to work with students who are far needier than college students are supposed to be.

I once had an instructor literally say to me about such a student (and an advanced student at that): “This is not part of my job description.” To give her credit, after we talked, she went back and worked extensively with the student – who passed her class. But she was so resentful.

This is where Young's framework really comes into play. There may be a lot of talk about inclusiveness in higher education. People talk about wanting to give students opportunity. There is the oft repeated line that education leads to social advancement (even though a lot of evidence suggests otherwise). But the only place this lens is sincere is in the external lens. Diversity and access may be talked up by Admissions. Inclusiveness may prominent in mission statements. Unfortunately, it just doesn't always make it past the mission statement. Once these students matriculate – the exclusion process begins.

What happens is a subtle process of demonization. Yes, some students simply do not do well and need to leave school. I am talking about something different. The problem is less the "deviant" performance itself as how many people react to that performance.

Demonization is the internal attitude of the instructor who came to me and saying it wasn't her job. It is in the professor who writes atop a paper  in big letters (with multiple exclamation points): “GO TO THE WRITING CENTER!!!!!” communicating that the student's work is defective (and ergo, so is the student). It is in the attitude of the professor who is incensed that such an unprepared student can be at the college; not because of the fact the school took his money, but because it is having a negative effect on the professor's workload.  It is deciding that just because a student has somewhat bloodshot eyes, that he must be a stoned, which accounts for why he isn't doing his work. It is a creeping attitudinal neglect where people treat/view students in ways that diminish them. In ways they themselves would probably not want to be treated or viewed. It is death by a thousand cuts – often by the people who think they have the student's best interests at heart.

For me this issue is exemplified by an encounter I once had with a high-level administrator. I was talking to her about a long-standing academic disciplinary issue. We had given a student multiple opportunities to address some problems; every time he dropped the ball. It was time to take more drastic action. As I tried to fill this administrator in, she took on an air of deep concern about the student and his well-being. Every time I said something, she interrupted with, “Well, have you tried this? Have you tried that?”  She communicated caring and concern at all levels. 

I finally was able to tell her the entire, long story – that we had tried EVERYTHING without success. At that moment, without missing a beat, she then said: “Well, we don't want that type of student in this school.”  And the student's dismissal papers were signed by the end of the day.

The student needed to take some time off. There were academic issues that were as extreme as any I have ever seen. It was an unhappy resolution to an unhappy overall situation. But what has stayed with me most about it is the statement: “We don't want that type of student in this school.” (The emphasis was hers.) What happened to all the concern? The caring? In a flash, the student went from being a person to worry about to being something that could be discarded by the side of the road.  

For me this summarizes a significant aspect of what is wrong in higher education. Many people talk a brave talk about access, opportunity, and diversity, but when it comes time to walk the walk – they don't want to be bothered by "that type of student." Saying you want to provide opportunity to someone is easy. Let him or her in the school.  What is not so easy is dealing with the difficulties that follow if that person is not ready to be there. If a school enrolls a student, it is the responsibility of everyone there to make sure that student can do the best he/she can. The student can not be a problem that is just foisted off on someone else. If higher education is going to actually be inclusive this "difficult" student is the exact type of student everyone needs to embrace and deal with.   If inclusiveness is even possible at the college level, it requires a level of commitment that I am not sure a lot of people are really ready to give. (They may think they are, but then they get into the trenches and the commitment goes away. "It is just too hard.")

I am not a believer in "college for all." I just don't think it is appropriate for every person. Trying to force everyone down this same path is counter-productive, and ofttimes damaging to the student. I believe we should be developing alternatives -- lots and lots of alternatives. However, as long as we are going to maintain the facade that college is for all -- and that any one can succeed there -- there need to be some attitudinal adjustments from those on the inside (maybe especially from those who most loudly advocate for access). Too many people embrace the sanitized buzzword of multiculturalism rather than the key underlying concept of difference.  It is easy to heap criticism on the Broken Windows approach as a spirit-quashing, homogenizing methodology; but as I said earlier, at least they are up- front with what they believe; their words and actions match up. I would maintain that a lot of people need to ask themselves:"How many spirits have I quashed (even inadvertently) because, in some way, I deemed the student wasn't the "right type of student"? I have seen too many allegedly progressive people demonstrate the most intolerant attitudes the moment they decided a student was not worth the problem. All I can say is -- if a school has accepted them, they are worth the effort. Not just because the school has an ethical obligation to those they accept, but also because they are human beings. I feel like in our corporate, Neoliberal culture, this latter point is too often overlooked.



WORKS CITED

Merton, Robert. "Social Structure and Anomie." Reprinted in American Sociological Review.  Posted to: <https://www.soc.umn.edu/~uggen/Merton_ASR_38.pdf>.  Accessed: 27 Oct 2014.

Young, Jock.  The Exclusive Society. LA: Sage Publication, 2007.

Confessions of a Former College Administrator

It occurred to me that if I am going to call this blog what I am calling it, maybe I should confess something.

Nothing juicy. Just an internal conflict I have long wrestled with, that previous entries have hinted at.

I worked for an open admissions, non-profit professional college. I directed Academic Support and Advising so worked extensively with many of the more "at risk" students in the school.

When I first started at the school, the tuition was low. Very low. Several thousand for an entire year. However, as has happened at many schools, it sky rocketed and is now closer to $20,000 a year. It used to be open admissions gave students a chance to "experiment" with a profession and it didn't cost them too much if they didn't make it.

As tuition increased, no longer.

Some of the open admission students we worked with we knew were not going to make it. They came from impossible backgrounds. While they had a high school degree, they had no academic preparation. There were behavioral issues. Sometimes even dependency issues. Since the school was open admissions, we had to take them. We might advise the weaker ones to defer or not attend, but they usually ignored us.

Let me give you a case study. This is a composite student. Unfortunately, not exaggerated. Possibly even less extreme than some I have experienced.

He was a new student who had barely graduated high school. His high school grade point average (GPA) was under 2.00, and though he was quite affable, he openly admitted he hated school. Yet he had taken out a loan for more than $10,000 and was attending college. Once the term started, he did not show up for many classes, nor turn in any work.  It was clear to everyone who met with him he was not engaged by school and had no idea why he was there. However, he was also resistant to all advising and could not be counseled out. Since he had paid his tuition for the semester, we felt it was our ethical obligation to try and get him through.

And we did our best. We did a group intervention. We case-managed him through the semester, passing him from person to person. . His adviser  met with him weekly. I or another tutor would sit down with him whenever we could. He was given extensions (that he met). And he pulled it together enough to get a C and passed the semester. He ended up on probation, but he passed.

Possibly a success story?

Then for the second semester he paid his tuition and tanked. He sporadically attended classes up to the deadline to keep his financial aid, then vanished. There were rumors of a serious family crisis but we never got any sort of documentation. We had to chase him down just to make sure he was still alive. He took a 0.00 GPA for the term and never returned.

So we put all this time and effort into getting him through that first semester -  all so he could pay the school another semester of tuition but get nothing for it

Theoretically, there was no way to know positively that this student would not make it. But after you work with enough students like this, you get a sense of who will turn the corner and who won't. He wasn't going to.  It was pretty clear from the start this student wasn't going to make it. Did we do him a disservice by not letting him flunk out that first semester? We did the ethical thing by helping him. Helping him extensively. But the ethical thing ended up putting him an extra few thousand dollars in debt. (I have seen students running financial aid scams. This is a student I would not put in that category.)

Which way is up here? I have had many students like this at several different schools. Some, against all odds, graduated. Some stayed in school an extra semester or two and paid a lot of tuition. Did I help really help them or did I just cost them more money?

I just want to know I am more part of the solution than part of the problem.

Collateral Damage in Higher Education -- Part 2

Please click here for Part I of this entry. 

I left off in Part 1 by throwing the higher education establishment under the bus (especially the most Progressive parts), essentially claiming we have been involved in perhaps the largest (and most officially sanctioned) bait-and-switch in history. I want to further explore this idea.

But three clarifications first.

First I don't think my claim applies to all schools. I think it mainly applies to schools who service the type of populations I am talking about.  This is probably some second-tier, and most third-tier, schools, as well as many public institutions.

Second, I LOVE the idea of education equaling opportunity. I have worked with first-generation and at-risk populations for years. They may be my favorite students. I am NOT saying we need to limit opportunity. I am just saying that the opportunity we currently present may not be the opportunity we believe it is. Wanting something to be good does not mean it is good.

Third, I am not assigning malicious intent here. I think most of us have good intentions. We WANT to be doing good. If this is a bait-and-switch, then in a way we ourselves have been deceived. (Or we have let ourselves be deceived.)

However, even if we have been somewhat "deceived", we still have abetted  in this process. We went to college ourselves. We drank the Kool-Aid, liked the taste, and wanted to share. So we have told the younger generation that they too should go. And we have meant it! We have sold the narrative. Teachers. Guidance counselors. Parents. Politicians. Advocates. College Administrators. College Professors.  We have given the hard sell to the population that can least afford to go to college. And since we are their "trusted advisers" and since we so sincerely believe in what we are saying, we are very convincing. They listen to us.   They go to college and take out loans in the process. 

Much has been said recently about students graduating with college degrees and debilitating debt. This is not good, but at least they have the credential. At least they have the potential to move forward.

I am more concerned about all the students who don't finish college but still have this debt!

The for-profits have been (deservedly) crucified for predatory recruiting and having unqualified students take out loans. But even though intentions may be more "honorable" on the non-profit side (I hope), many of  the outcomes are the same.

We tell ourselves we are doing good because we are engaged in Education. (Which is a much nobler cause than profit!) We tell ourselves, our intentions are good.That allows us to look at the problem and perhaps not see our complicity.

But how come all these good intentions at the individual level seem to add up to so much dysfunction? How come they seems to create (an unethical) system that often takes far more than it gives? Yes, there is the Principle of Unintended Consequences, but this seems bigger than just that. What is going on here? 

I think part of the problem lies in a dated meta-narrative. The current college narrative is about a world that no longer exists (if it ever did).We want to believe a college degree is this ticket to a better life. And, if one can afford to not go into debt, it still most definitely is. However, these days many (most?) seem to have to go into debt and this debt level is rising. The present reality differs from the ideal world spun in the meta-narrative. 

In the world of finance, mutual fund companies often sell their funds by pointing out past performance. However, critics are oft heard to say that “past performance does not guarantee future results.” Just because a fund has returned 25% a year for the past five years doesn't mean that it will do so the next five years. In fact, if performance “returns to the mean”, it may very well under-perform.

Yet we sell college based on past performance. A performance that took place in a rapidly receding world, a world that was more affordable and had better public support. One that contrasts sharply with our current world:

• A world where college tuition rates have outpaced inflation for years.
• A world where “financial aid” for most students means loans (that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy).
• A world that is deeply indebted at both private and public levels and where public funding is consequently at risk

I am not saying that college still cannot be a good thing. I am claiming that we need to recognize that we may be playing by a set of rules for a game that longer exists. We may have good intentions, but by reciting dated arguments, we may actually be more part of the problem than part of the solution.

Over the last couple years, it seems there have been several new reports that confirm college is still "worth the investment." The problem is that these results cite  a "statistical" figure. It does not predict how a given student will do. It predicts how the theoretical average student will do. The student who comes out of high school with a 1.7 Grade Point Average is not average, but now that student thinks he should go to college to get his payoff. ( Keep in mind, that 1.7 GPA student is balanced out in the calculations by the 4.0 GPA student who will be going to Harvard and earning six-figures upon graduation.)

 The Right may be guilty of cuts, but the Left (at least some of us) can be said to be guilty of tunnel-visioned thinking . We continue to recite the meta-narrative and blindly push students toward a system that, for many, is just as likely to beggar as lead to success. We tell ourselves it provides opportunity, but we selectively focus on those for whom it has actually done so; we avoid looking at the many for which it has not.

There is nothing we can do about the past. We can only change things moving forward. However, I think we need to stop hiding in a dated mythos of higher education and recognize the world for what it is. Problem solving needs to take place for this world. We don't have to like the way things are, but we can't pretend they are anything but what they are. If opportunity and access are still going to be major aspect of education, we need to rethink how it can be done else we will be actively complicit.

What do we do? I am honestly not sure. I guess that is what this blog is for. However, I do want to refer to an earlier post A Few Ground Rules. I think there I begin to lay out a lens to approach the problem. It will not be easy. (In fact, I worry that it is near impossible.) But if we really care, we have to try. If we just sit back and accept the status quo as the "cost of doing business", I think we are being unethical. 

Collateral Damage in Higher Education, Part 1

This is a long, difficult entry. It gets at the core of things that have been bothering me for a couple years.

I want to talk about what I perceive to be good intentions but sometimes hazy ethics in higher education.

In recent years people have criticized for-profit schools for predatory behavior and miring unqualified students in debt. I want to suggest that many non-profits are just as culpable. I also want to suggest that those of us who work in this industry spend a lot of time engaging in willful blindness about this problem.

I have worked at a non-profit, open-admissions, professional college for more than 15 years. For the longest time the school officially had “providing opportunity” as part of its mission. It wanted to give a chance to people who might otherwise not have that chance.

Its heart was in the right place. And it did give a lot of people a chance to break into a professional field they probably otherwise would never had had a chance to get into.

In hindsight I realize this school had (and still has) a hard-core Neo-Liberal, survival-of-the-fittest approach. Now that I know more about NeoLiberalism, I don't feel great about that. Like any open- admissions school, its attrition rate was (and is) high; a lot of students spent a lot of money and often came away with very little.

Yet there were students who succeeded. And I feel good about helping them succeed. (There are a few I suspect would not have made it without me.)

The school provided opportunity and a few succeeded. But at what cost? How many failed for every student who succeeded? What was the collateral damage?

Collateral damage refers to civilian casualties of war – and how many deaths can be be considered “acceptable" in the successful completion of a mission. For education: how many failing students is acceptable in the successful pursuit of a school's mission?

In education we tend to be fairly casual about attrition. And to an extent, that makes sense. Not every student who attends college is going to complete college. While it would be nice to have a 100% completion rate, that is not going to happen. You are going to lose some. Even at elite schools there is attrition. You don't have to be happy about it, but you do have to accept that is the way it is.

However, I want to draw a distinction between attrition and collateral damage.

Consider students who attend an elite school.  To have gotten into that school, they (hopefully) went through a thorough vetting process to make sure that they had the tools/potential to succeed at that level. While no predictive process will be 100% correct,a vast majority of these students deserved to be there. Someone deemed they had the ability to succeed.

So if they do not, why not? A variety of reasons: personal, medical, academic. Maybe they get sick. Maybe they get homesick. Maybe a family member passed away. (Grandmothers drop dead right and left in higher education.) Basically there are situations that are "acts of God" -- external situations that a student has no control over. Shit happens. In the process they may lose some tuition dollars.

Or maybe they partied all semester and failed every class. They are simply immature and need to grow up. But these are situations where students have to take responsibility for their own performance. They had the skills to succeed, but made bad choices and failed. In this process, they have wasted tuition dollars.

This is what I would call pure attrition. Some students simply do not complete a program they have the qualifications to complete.

Collateral damage is slightly different. It is a type of attrition, It also consists of students not completing their education. Tuition dollars are similarly lost. But the underlying reasons for this lack of completion differ.

Access has long been a core issue in higher education. A very narrow population (mostly elites) attended college until well into the 20th century. It wasn't until  after World War II, with the GI Bill, that the floodgates opened and larger numbers began to attend.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, we had the "open admissions" movement where many schools stopped vetting students, and instead accepted everyone. This is a great and noble idea in theory. What can be better then give everyone an opportunity to succeed? After all, education is the ticket to a better life!

Unfortunately, practice and theory did not match up here. It was discovered that a lot of students were not ready to be in college. They didn't have the basic skills. They didn't have the study skills. So a lot of these students did not make the grade.

At this time most of these schools were public colleges (See the City College of New York, for instance). Public money paid for tuition. Students bore few or no costs. The financial "risk" of attendance was not born by the student but by the taxpayer. Shared risk born by millions that limited liability for thousands.

Which if all these students had gotten degrees, would have made it all seem worthwhile. However, as more and more students did not complete programs, more and more people began to point out that  more and more money was going to "waste." (The same cry today we hear from the Right about how much Federal Student Loans cost the taxpayer.)

I don't want to get into a debate about how higher education should be financed. I am honestly not sure. While I would love for it to be solely publicly funded, I would probably realistically lean more toward a private/public partnership. Too complex to discuss here. Maybe a different entry later on.

The important thing is that even though not everybody was happy with the outcomes, the burden was shared. Risk was reduced for the student.  If a student attempted a degree and did not succeed -- there was generally limited long-term financial impact. To that end, while it might not have made good "business" sense to let under-prepared students into college, it made good ethical sense.  It gave more people access to more skills and knowledge.

That was then. This is now.

Since then, funding for higher education has slowly eroded. Federal grants have decreased. Costs of college attendance have gradually been shifted onto the student.

The concept of "opportunity" has been redefined. It used to mean: "We will pay to give you a chance to succeed." Now it means: "We will help you pay for the chance to succeed."

In terms of under-prepared students, the former approach is generous -- maybe even overly generous. The second approach -- much less so.

When an unprepared student attends college today and does not succeed, he or she not only leaves with an incomplete degree, but often debt.  Often a lot of debt. This is where I think the concept of attrition transforms into collateral damage.  It is noble to have the mission of opportunity and access, but do these noble intentions automatically justify the associated negative outcomes?

Some critics might argue that these students are not so innocent. They made a choice. They accepted federal loans. They need to take responsibility for their decisions.

To an extent, I agree with that. I think personal responsibility still needs to be considered in the equation. However, I think it is not the only issue that needs considering.

We live in a Neoliberal world. An individualistic, survival-of-the-fittest, “Fuck you, this is mine and I will do anything to get it” perspective. And this attitude trickles down to all aspects of our existence. We are all individual corporations who have to “skill-up” as much as possible to maximize our earning potential

And we have all heard how a college degree can earn a person up to a million dollars more during a lifetime. So we all “skill-up” by attending college. This has become the accepted, and until recently, almost completely unquestioned approach.

What I find interesting is that at the time college was less "necessary", there was more funding for it. , However, as its importance has increased, funding has decreased.

Yes, students need to accept a degree of personal responsibility, but I think it is important to recognize the larger context. They have been repeatedly sold the line that "college is the ticket to a better life." This message has been baked into most of our consciousnesses. These students are just doing what they are supposed to do; what they have been told to do;  I do not think it is fair to place full responsibility on them. (Are there some students who need to accept more responsibility. God, yes. I have seen some real "winners". I just think that this issue  is not quite so black and white.)

If you step back and look at the inverse relationship of necessity and funding –  it could be viewed as the greatest bait-and-switch ever seen. We got hooked on education and once we were hooked – and once it became a necessity – financial support was withdrawn and the price was increased.

I am not a conspiracy theorist, but if you wanted to spin one, you have pretty good material here. 

You could say the Powers-That-Be arranged all this. Feeling threatened by the rising masses, they corrupted higher education by making it a necessity and making people pay for it.  That way any advantages gained by getting a degree were offset by the accompanying debt.

But this seems too far-fetched to believe. I actually suspect that this result has arisen more from unintended consequences and simple incompetence.

The end result however, is a new type of attrition.  Unprepared students now, doing what they think they should be doing, blindly rush forward, unaware of what they are really getting into. They end up not completing programs because they were not ready to be there in the first place. And we are making them pay for this opportunity to flunk out. In most cases these days, student take out loans that don't magically go away when they don't complete the program. So they now have no college degree AND they have debt. Even worse, many struggle to pay back their student loans. This limits their life opportunities, and probably limits the chance of their ever getting a college degree. They bought into the narrative that this was the path to opportunity, but ended up with even fewer prospects.

Have some students succeeded? Yes. Has the college meta-narrative proven true for them? Yes. But how many students end up with diminished prospects because they chased this drea?. For every student like this who succeeds, how many do not? What is the collateral damage? Can there be an acceptable level when put in these terms?

My issue is that I think a lot of people in higher education don't really pick up the nuances of this situation. I can understand being a college administrator and accepting "pure" attrition as the cost of doing business. But how many of us are accepting large amounts of collateral damage as the cost of doing business? We pat ourselves on the back because we are giving "opportunity." But are we?

This is where I really get lost in an ethical haze. I will talk more about that in Part 2.

A Few Ground Rules

It is easy to critique education but very difficult to actually solve anything. Part of the reason is that education is just hard. It is a lot harder than most people outside education realize. But I also think part of the reason is that while many of us want to improve education and have good intentions at heart, we are on different wavelengths. We have differing underlying assumptions that get in the way of our having constructive conversations.

To that end, I want to identify four major perspectives I have about higher education. I want to use this entry to build my most general "lens." I would like to think that the points listed below are such that a reasonable person, anywhere on the political spectrum, could give at least some buy-in.  This is not an  all-inclusive list. It is just a general outline of the "playing field" as I think we need to see it. 

• Let go of the “good old days.”

Stop lamenting how much better things used to be. 


I am as guilty of this as anyone else. I criticize students and talk about how things used to be much better. Students worked harder. Students knew more. Teaching was more satisfying!

However, I have doubt that these “good old days” existed as we remember them. If I am honest to myself, I have to admit that when I went to college I was the sort of student that these days make me wince. I would not want a class full of my 18 year old selves. I was not alone. There were a lot of smart kids at my school, but they did a lot of VERY dumb things.

I don't think that students are getting worse. They are just getting different; in the same way we were different than the generation that preceded us. And if that is the case, as teachers and administrators, it is up to us to understand how and adapt accordingly.

I am a writing teacher and one of my basic rules is: “You can't blame your audience for not understanding what you have written.” If your audience doesn't understand, it is up to you to find a way to communicate things more clearly. I feel the same thing applies here. It is easy to point fingers at the students and say: “We are doing everything right. The problem is with them.” Except maybe it is not.

This is not to say that there are some problematic differences. There are. I just mean that different does not have to mean worse. .

• The problems with higher education are EVERYONES fault.

Even if we get past blaming students, there is still a lot of finger-pointing going on.

For instance, we have the Right pointing out how the “liberal” academy is failing; how so much of what it has attempted has not worked. And to an extent they are right. A lot has not worked. Or it is not working relative to the price students pay. At the same time, we have Progressives criticizing cuts, claiming that things would work fine if we would only fully fund them. And to an extent, they may be right as well. Cuts have hurt. Cuts have prevented many students from getting ahead.

The reality is, everyone is partially correct. It has taken all of us to create a mess this big (including students when it comes right down to it).  I think we should all just accept the fact that, regardless of perspective or political leanings, some of our ideas are good and some not so good. I don't mean this as a critical judgment as much as a simple statement of fact.

Which leads to the next point...

• We need to be real.

Most Isms work better in theory than in reality. We can't be blinded by our own ideals.

This applies to everyone up and down the political spectrum. I am not saying we should give us our ideals. I am just saying, we can't be so tunnel-visioned that other ideas can't even be considered.

Similarly, as I noted in my first bullet, the world is changing and we are not going back. Too many of us adhere to perspectives that are more appropriate for a different world. We are not going to be go back to a 1950s curriculum. Similarly, considering current Federal debt levels, we are also not going to get complete educational funding. If you believe in the value of an old-fashioned education, good for you. Home-school your kids. If you want higher education to be free, good for you as well. Please solve our huge budget issues.

Problems must be solved in context! Theory is great, but there is this thing called reality, and in the end, reality will win out.

• Recognize that education supports the status quo, but “status quo” does not mean blind adherence.

While I think education can help individuals get ahead and can help social advancement and social equality –  education (at all levels) is also about preparing people to participate in our society. Students have to be indoctrinated into societal norms. They have to learn how to act and behave. And I agree with this.

However, there is good and bad indoctrination. I worked at an open admissions professional school and many of our students were wholly unprepared for academia or any sort of professional career. They were not ready at both the intellectual and emotional levels. They just needed to grow up. However, they were paying their tuition, so we tried to help them as we could.

But there were times I felt more like a bronco-buster than a teacher. I felt like the cowboy who rides wild horse trying to pacify them.

Sometimes the students may indeed have needed to be “broken.” (The student who never does his work isn't doing himself any good.) But there is breaking good and breaking bad. At times I wasn't sure which I was doing.

The breaking good is making the student aware of the world and their place in it. Giving them both practical skills and critical thinking skills that allow them to navigate and negotiate the world. To make then independent agents who can have a say in their own lives.

The breaking bad is indoctrinating students into the system. (Think Dead's Poets Society.) The students are again taught how to behave, but they are taught how to behave because that is how the system needs them to behave. They must be well-behaved cogs in the machine. They learn their place. And they learn their role in life. And that is that.

I worry that even with the best intentions, too often we end up programming students to be passive cogs rather than proactive individuals.

I am trying to sidestep here the question of “What is the purpose of higher education. I don't want to debate (at least right now) whether colleges should create citizens or employable persons. What I am trying to get at transcends these distinctions. Regardless of the ultimate purpose, all of us in higher ed are playing a part in perpetuating society – it is a de facto outcomes of schooling. The question is: are we creating cogs or independent beings? 

There is a common theme in all of the above points – critical reflection.

I find it ironic that a major focus of education is teaching students to be critical, reflective thinkers. Yet all of the items above are a call for educators to think more critically. What concerns me is that I suspect most people would read this entry and think: “Oh, this is not about me.” I think my point is actually, this is about all of us. And I include myself. I know my own critical thinking skills have improved over the years. For the longest time I thought I was a terrific critical thinker – only to discover how much I wasn't seeing; how many of the things I was certain about education were probably wrong. I think I have learned more in the last five years than I learned in my first 15 years in academia. I also think I realize I know less. (Cue the sound of one hand clapping.)