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.
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.
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.
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.
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