68 Institutions in Nine States to Pilot New Approach to Learning Outcomes Assessment

I am just seeing this piece on higher education accountability in light of the previous piece I just posted that is a must read.  A hot link appears to this current page that I think is very important to policy development and practice as regards higher education accountability policies, nationally.

Regarding testing college students, here is what the previously-posted piece says:

Step V: Destroy the students.While claiming to offer them hope of a better life, our corporatized universities are ruining the lives of our students. This is accomplished through a two-prong tactic: you dumb-down and destroy the quality of the education so that no one on campus is really learning to think, to question, to reason. Instead, they are learning to obey, to withstand “tests” and “exams,” to follow rules, to endure absurdity and abuse. Our students have been denied full-time available faculty, the ability to develop mentors and advisors, faculty-designed syllabi which changes each semester, a wide variety of courses and options. Instead, more and more universities have core curriculum which dictates a large portion of the course of study, in which the majority of classes are administrative-designed “common syllabi” courses, taught by an army of underpaid, part-time faculty in a model that more closely resembles a factory or the industrial kitchen of a fast-food restaurant than an institution of higher learning.

This book was also cited there and strikes me as a must-read:  Unmaking the Public University: The fourty year assault on the middle class.  

There have been proposals here in Texas that call for so-called higher education accountability through increased student testing. I was particularly involved in this during the 82nd Texas Legislative Session in 2011.  You can read about this here: 

2011 - 82nd Session of the Texas State Legislature

• House Bill 9 Policy Brief: Relating to Student Success–based Funding for Public Institutions of Higher Education
  (PDF file)

Forewarned is to be forearmed.


-Angela

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

For Immediate Release
Contacts: Debra Humphreys, Vice President for Policy and Public Engagement, AAC&U
Humphreys@aacu.org
202.387.3760, ext. 422
Julie Carnahan, Senior Associate, SHEEO
jcarnahan@sheeo.org
303.817.2129

68 Institutions in Nine States to Pilot New Approach to Learning Outcomes Assessment

Multi-State Collaborative Announces Institutions that Will Participate in New Initiative Employing VALUE Rubrics to Assess Student Achievement of Key Learning Outcomes

Washington, DC—June 23, 2014—The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) announced today the 68 institutions—including both 2-year and 4-year institutions—participating in the Multi-State Collaborative to Advance Learning Outcomes Assessment (MSC) supported in its initial planning year with funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The nine states currently participating in the MSC include: Connecticut, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Utah. See: www.sheeo.org/msc for full list of participating institutions.
“I am pleased and excited that faculty and leaders from so many public colleges, community colleges, and universities in so many states are joining together to assess students’ work using a common approach,” said George Pernsteiner, the president of SHEEO. “What our faculty learn from this work will help them improve teaching and student learning and will provide valuable and defensible information to show that students are learning, and what that learning means in terms of the understanding and skills needed to succeed in life.”
Part of AAC&U’s ongoing VALUE (Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education) initiative, the 68 institutions in the MSC will pilot test a cross-state and cross-institutional effort to document how well students are achieving key learning outcomes like quantitative reasoning, written communication, and critical thinking by assessing authentic student work products using a set of common rubrics. Faculty members across the 68 institutions will be sampling and assessing students’ work and establishing the reliability and validity of cross-institutional assessment using this new approach. During its initial year, the project will be building faculty assessment capacity and collecting student work products. The project will also be developing a Web-based data platform for uploading student work samples and assessment data.
In its earlier phases of work, VALUE published 16 rubrics developed and tested by teams of faculty and other educational professionals that are aligned with the LEAP Essential Learning Outcomes and also with the intellectual skills highlighted in the Degree Qualifications Profile. Over 2,000 colleges and universities and community colleges in the U.S. already are using VALUE rubrics to assess student work.
Leadership in organizing the MSC came through the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, which, as part of its Vision Project, piloted use of AAC&U’s VALUE rubrics to assess student learning in Massachusetts. Working with AAC&U and SHEEO, leaders in Massachusetts subsequently helped organize a nine-state collaboration that is developing platforms and protocols for scaling the use of this approach to quality assurance.
”The calls are mounting daily for higher education to be able to show what students can successfully do with their learning,” said AAC&U President Carol Geary Schneider. “The Multi-State Collaborative is a very important step toward focusing assessment on the best evidence of all: the work students produce in the course of their college studies. It is exciting and inspiring to see that so many campuses want to be part of this important national study and change effort.”
For more information, see VALUE and Multi-State Collaborative on Learning Outcomes Assessment.

Related Categories: 

Academic Policy and Quality Assurance

Related Issues: 

Student Learning and Accountability

 Important, troubling read. The following quotes should make us all question this move toward centralization of services that is currently taking place in higher education—and much to the despair of parents that have to account for this through ever higher tuition costs, as well as to the despair of part-time faculty and teaching assistants who "now account for half of instructional staffs at colleges and universities, up from one-third in 1987, the figures show."

During the same period, the number of administrators and professional staff has more than doubled. That’s a rate of increase more than twice as fast as the growth in the number of students.

The ratio of nonacademic employees to faculty has also doubled. There are now two nonacademic employees at public and two and a half at private universities and colleges for every one full-time, tenure-track member of the faculty.

Centralization has been promoted as a way to reduce costs, but Vedder points out that it has not appeared to reduce the rate of hiring of administrators and professional staffs on campus—or of incessant spikes in tuition.

“It’s almost Orwellian,” said Vedder. “They’ll say, ‘We’ll save money if we centralize.’ Then they hire a provost or associate provost or an assistant business manager in charge of shared services, and then that person hires an assistant, and you end up with more people than you started with.”

New administrative requirements —and the "thousands" of regulations they must follow—related to services that higher education needs to provide are getting blamed for this.  But critics aren't buying it.  Universities will draw from their state operating budgets to pay for the many staff that help them raise dollars for their capital fundraising campaigns only to turn around and never actually intend for any of money to at least in part go back to staff for pay raises, job upgrading opportunities, improved working conditions and the like. In short, this is tantamount to an attack on workers.

We read all the time of the economic polarization that exists and is increasing in our country.  Universities are crucibles for this pernicious reinscribing of power relations that exist in our society.

-Angela

New Analysis Shows Problematic Boom In Higher Ed Administrators

New England Center for Investigative Reporting  | By Jon Marcus

Posted: 02/06/2014 11:58 am EST Updated: 02/06/2014 5:59 pm EST 

 

The number of non-academic administrative and professional employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 25 years, vastly outpacing the growth in the number of students or faculty, according to an analysis of federal figures.
The disproportionate increase in the number of university staffers who neither teach nor conduct research has continued unabated in more recent years, and slowed only slightly since the start of the economic downturn, during which time colleges and universities have contended that a dearth of resources forced them to sharply raise tuition.
In all, from 1987 until 2011-12—the most recent academic year for which comparable figures are available—universities and colleges collectively added 517,636 administrators and professional employees, or an average of 87 every working day, according to the analysis of federal figures, by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting in collaboration with the nonprofit, nonpartisan social-science research group the American Institutes for Research.

“There’s just a mind-boggling amount of money per student that’s being spent on administration,” said Andrew Gillen, a senior researcher at the institutes. “It raises a question of priorities.”
Universities have added these administrators and professional employees even as they’ve substantially shifted classroom teaching duties from full-time faculty to less-expensive part-time adjunct faculty and teaching assistants, the figures show.
“They’ve increased their hiring of part-time faculty to try and cut costs,” said Donna Desrochers, a principal researcher at the Delta Cost Project, which studies higher-education spending. “Yet other factors that are going on, including the hiring of these other types of non-academic employees, have undercut those savings.”
Part-time faculty and teaching assistants now account for half of instructional staffs at colleges and universities, up from one-third in 1987, the figures show.
During the same period, the number of administrators and professional staff has more than doubled. That’s a rate of increase more than twice as fast as the growth in the number of students.
It’s not possible to tell exactly how much the rise in administrators and professional employees has contributed to the increase in the cost of tuition and fees, which has also almost doubled in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1987 at four-year private, nonprofit universities and colleges, according to the College Board. Those costs have also nearly tripled at public four-year universities—a higher price rise than for any other sector of the economy in that period, including healthcare.
But critics say the unrelenting addition of administrators and professional staffs can’t help but to have driven this steep increase.
At the very least, they say, the continued hiring of nonacademic employees belies university presidents’ insistence that they are doing everything they can to improve efficiency and hold down costs.
“It’s a lie. It’s a lie. It’s a lie,” said Richard Vedder, an economist and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.
“I wouldn’t buy a used car from a university president,” said Vedder. “They’ll say, ‘We’re making moves to cut costs,’ and mention something about energy-efficient lightbulbs, and ignore the new assistant to the assistant to the associate vice provost they just hired.”
The figures are particularly dramatic at private, nonprofit universities, whose numbers of administrators alone have doubled, while their numbers of professional employees have more than doubled.
Rather than improving productivity as measured by the ratio of employees to students, private universities have seen their productivity decline, adding 12 employees per 1,000 full-time students since 1987, the federal figures show.
“While the rest of the economy was shrinking overhead, higher education was investing heavily in more overhead,” said Robert Martin, an economist at Centre College in Kentucky who studies university finance who said staffing per students is a valid way to judge efficiency improvements or declines.
The ratio of nonacademic employees to faculty has also doubled. There are now two nonacademic employees at public and two and a half at private universities and colleges for every one full-time, tenure-track member of the faculty.
“In no other industry would overhead costs be allowed to grow at this rate—executives would lose their jobs,” analysts at the financial management firm Bain & Company wrote in a 2012 white paper for its clients and others about administrative spending in higher education.
Universities and university associations blame the increased hiring on such things as government regulations and demands from students and their families—including students who arrive unprepared for college-level work—for such services as remedial education, advising, and mental-health counseling.
“All of those things pile up, and contribute to this increase,” said Dan King, president of the American Association of University Administrators.
“I think there’s legitimate criticism” of the growth in hiring of administrators and other nonacademic employees, said King. “At the same time, you can’t lay all of the responsibility for that on the universities.”
There are “thousands” of regulations governing the distribution of financial aid alone, he said. “And probably every college or university that’s accredited, they’ve got at least one person with a major portion of their time dedicated to that, and in some cases whole office staffs. These aren’t bad things to do, but somebody’s got to do them.”
Since 1987, universities have also started or expanded departments devoted to marketing, diversity, disability, sustainability, security, environmental health, recruiting, technology, and fundraising, and added new majors and graduate and athletics programs, satellite campuses, and conference centers.
Some of these, they say—such as beefed-up fundraising and marketing offices—pay for themselves, and sustainability efforts save money through energy efficiency.
Others “often show up in student referenda, to build or add services,” said George Pernsteiner, president of the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. “The students vote for them. Students and their families have asked for more, and are paying more to get it.”
Pressure to help students graduate more quickly—or at all—has also driven the increase in professional employees “to try to more effectively serve the students who are coming in today,” Pernsteiner said.
But naysayers point out that the doubling of administrative and professional staffs doesn’t seem to have improved universities’ performance. Since 2002, the proportion of four-year bachelor’s degree-seeking students who graduate within even six years, for instance, has barely inched up, from 55 percent to 58 percent, U.S. Department of Education figures show.
“If we have these huge spikes in student services spending or in other professional categories, we should see improvements in what they do, and I personally haven’t seen that,” Gillen said.
Martin said it’s true that adding services beyond teaching and research is fueling the growth of campus payrolls. But he said universities don’t have to provide those services themselves. “They can outsource them, the way that corporations do.”
To provide such things as security and counseling, said Martin, “You can hire outside firms, on a contract basis with competitive bidding. All these activities are a distraction from what the institution is supposed to be doing.”
Universities and colleges continued adding employees even after the beginning of the economic downturn, though at a slightly slower rate, the federal figures show.
“Institutions have said that they were hurting, so I would have thought that staffing overall would go down,” Desrochers said. “But it didn’t.”
There’s also been a massive hiring boom in central offices of public university systems and universities with more than one campus, according to the figures. The number of employees in central system offices has increased six-fold since 1987, and the number of administrators in them by a factor of more than 34.
One example, the central office of the California State University System, now has a budget bigger than those of three of the system’s 23 campuses.
“None of them have reduced campus administrative burdens at all,” said King, who said he is particularly frustrated by this trend. “They’ve added a layer of bureaucracy, and in 95 percent of the cases it’s an unnecessary bureaucracy and a counterproductive one.”
Centralization has been promoted as a way to reduce costs, but Vedder points out that it has not appeared to reduce the rate of hiring of administrators and professional staffs on campus—or of incessant spikes in tuition.
“It’s almost Orwellian,” said Vedder. “They’ll say, ‘We’ll save money if we centralize.’ Then they hire a provost or associate provost or an assistant business manager in charge of shared services, and then that person hires an assistant, and you end up with more people than you started with.”
In higher education, “Everyone now is a chief,” he said. “And there are a lot fewer Indians.”
This story was prepared by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news center based at Boston University and WGBH Radio/TV.

Thoughtful piece on accountability in higher education. -Angela

Matthew Lynch, Ed.D. Become a fan Author of The Call to Teach and editor of The Edvocate, www.theedadvocate.org

Diverse Conversations: What's Next for Higher Education?

Posted: 08/16/2014 9:05 pm EDT Updated: 4 hours ago

 

 

Recognizing the trends of higher education is important for those of us who are involved in it on a professional level. But what are the trends?

Today, I'm speaking with Ryan Evely Gildersleeve who is Associate Professor of Higher Education at Morgridge College of Education at University of Denver.

Q: First off, let's talk about some of the general trends. How would you describe the trends of higher education now?

A: Money, money, money. Colleges and universities are now commodities and trades. As such, questions need to change and any or all trends must be understood not only in how they might fit within and reinforce this conception of higher education but also how they challenge it. It's a strange relationship, certainly. To marketize knowledge and commodify education are in many ways at odds with how we've understood the role of the university over time, but it's here. And with it, new forms of accountability, new demands on performance, and new measures of quality. These three trends form a trifecta of imperatives in public and political interest in higher education today. But it also presents new opportunities - and refocuses attentions on some opportunities that have always been there, but were perhaps neglected. In refashioning institutions, we have the chance to determine new purposes and modes of operations. These are values decisions. Our colleges and universities reflect and produce our values as a society. With big data, rapid technology shifts, and globalized capitalism, it's radical change now. It's subjecting the university to the market, wholesale - not piecemeal.

It would be a mistake, however, to equate higher education with business. Colleges and universities are not businesses. They are social institutions that perform a social good, as well as bestow private goods onto individuals. The marketization and commodification trend seeks to make money for various people through these social and private goods. But the thing that makes a college or university the powerful and inspiring institution that it is - that's knowledge. And while capitalist society can find a way to capitalize pretty much anything, that doesn't necessarily mean the generative activities of knowledge production and dissemination need to be organized as a business. To do so would more than likely truncate knowledge - it would minimize its impact and standardize its form. Part of what makes knowledge such an attractive commodity is its expansiveness, its diversity, its plurality and all the possibilities that follow suit. Rather, the activities of knowledge production and dissemination probably need something less linear, more dynamic, and dare I say, more democratic than business.

Q: Of these trends, which, do you think, is the most important? The one that people should principally pay attention to?

A: Accountability captures most of the sub-trends through which everyday people in academe have the most opportunity to shape their futures - and the future of higher education. Accountability as an imperative is already here, but what it looks like and how it gets operationalized is still up for grabs. Various states have some tentative plans that are starting to make in-roads, although these accountability regimes tend to be short-term and tied to specific temporal goals of enrollment or attainment. For example, Colorado's master plan sets forward a college completion goal of having 66% of Coloradans with a degree or certificate by 2025. This is in-line with some of the federal government's ideas around accountability, such as President Obama's 2020 goal for being the most credentialed country in the world.

Still, no one is really sure what performance measures are best or most appropriate for higher education. That probably has something to do with the moment of higher education's history we are crafting right now. It took a long time, but then all of a sudden it was made dramatically clear - higher education is the number one way to populate the workforce with knowledge-focused jobs and fuel the economy with consumers. It's easy to abscond or at least obscure the knowledge imperative of higher education when we think about it only in relation to the knowledge economy. Today, most universities operationalize the knowledge imperative into research, teaching, and service - three distinct yet overlapping modes of scholarship. The knowledge imperative requires resources too easily hidden from the strict production of degrees. And yet, degrees are the most obvious commodity that colleges and universities can sell.

It's tricky, because degrees are different than most commodities. They are symbolic of student and faculty labor that hopefully generated a broad (in the case of the liberal arts) or specific (in the case of professional programs) expertise. That labor constitutes knowledge. And knowledge isn't fixed. It's malleable. But the market seeks to make it static and standardized. Moreover, knowledge has as much to do with process as it does with content - knowledge involves synthesis, analysis, and creativity, regardless of the field of study.

Put plainly, a degree is not like a baseball bat. Sports stores can sell a baseball bat to anyone. A college degree must be earned through the generative activity of a higher education. Whereas, sports stores would never say you must obtain a 300 batting average before they'd sell you a baseball bat, colleges require students to perform above average over a period of about four years before they will bestow a degree.

Beyond this simple accounting of how a college degree is a tough thing to commodify and measure/assess productively (i.e., without absconding the knowledge imperative), it's important to recognize our systems of higher education in the U.S. are so diverse that a single nationalized version of accountability won't make much sense. It would be like having one regulating body for the minor leagues of baseball, the apprentice programs in dance, and keeping track of the number of moons orbiting Jupiter. How does one group take responsibility for holding each activity accountable? It can't. But a small collection of dynamic accountability efforts might provide a whole new venue for talking about and documenting the significance of our systems of higher education in society. It might look more like various portfolios of assessment rather than a scorecard or ranking system.

Any accountability systems we might adopt should incorporate group, organizational, and social metrics, in addition to more traditional individual measurements (e.g., graduation rates). The problem with individual measurements alone is that a college education, being based on knowledge, is not solely an individual endeavor. Knowledge, requires learning, which requires collaboration. Doing so could potentially help revive focus on the knowledge imperative of higher education - moving beyond the linear interpretation of what colleges and universities "produce."

Cue the faculty and administration.

Q: Why is it important for higher education professionals to pay attention to these trends? What benefits do we derive from being attentive?

A: If faculty and administrators don't take seats at the table where these decisions are being made and the problems are being figured out, then we really are claiming space as cogs in a machine - and that's not what most faculty came to the profession desiring. Most of us, I believe, want to take the knowledge imperative of our profession seriously. To do so, we need to configure systems of accountability that help illustrate the importance of our work.

Q: How can we use these trends, then? What strategies do you recommend for not only staying up to date with trends but making sure that they work for you, that you are prepared for them?
A: Faculty can demand seats at the accountability table (as should the public!). This can be difficult, because the commodification of education means we should all be spending most of our time on revenue generating activities - enrollments, external funding for research, etc. But I think engaging in active governance is something we can't resign to managers and external voices alone. And right now - in this historical moment for higher education - shared governance still has some political cache. Faculty can still bring an institution to a stand still, without fear of losing their livelihoods. Shared governance also means staying up to date on what's happening within and across our fields - fields of study, fields of education, fields of public investment. We need to think deeply about the ways that our labor - the labor of the knowledge imperative - is unique compared to other labor.

Q: Finally, what do you think is likely to happen in higher education in the future? Do you think the current trends are likely to sustain themselves?

A: I see no end to the commodification of education or the marketization of knowledge. Too many and too powerful economies now rely on it. The relationship between higher education and the economy has changed fundamentally, and with that change comes new questions that the public are expecting higher education to be able to answer. Accountability regimes are expanding in scope and scale. Now is the time to seize the opportunity to use these trends in order to configure the kind of social institution we want our colleges and universities to constitute.

Academics and higher education professionals don't need to agree with the new economic imperatives of higher education or with the maturation of accountability regimes. But we certainly need to accept the responsibility of sustaining the knowledge imperative that undergirds our generative activity. And we need to recognize the weight of that responsibility as we choose how to engage with the design, adoption, execution, and critique of the accountability systems that will help define what the institution stands for and what it can produce as values of a democratic society.
We would like to thank Ryan for taking the time to sit down and talk with us.
This interview originally appeared on www.diverseeducation.com

Follow Matthew Lynch, Ed.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/lynch39083

More:

Diverse Conversations

This Blogger's Books and Other Items from...