It’s summer and time to try something new.

 Digital Content

If you still think that your lectures are the only way students can discover new subjects or ideas, then try Google: type the titles of some of your lectures into Google and see what happens. (Try a search for video by using “videos” under the “more” tab.) Still looking?  Try searching for content within YouTube, Kahn Academy, OpenYale, Merlot, utubersity, or in Spanish at Utubersidad.  Open iTunes and look in the store for iTunesU.  If you want to create your own courses, start here.

Social Media
Maybe you can skip Facebook (if you are new here) and go directly to Twitter. Start by following me 🙂 and then search for folks talking about education.   If you want to know what other folks are saying about you, try Mention for daily updates on your cyberlife.

Video Conferencing and Streaming Video

Skype still works for free 1-1 video conferencing, but there is more.  Try Spreecast for multiple users or Join.me which allows up to 10 people to talk together for free and has even better screen sharing features (like zoom). Goober.com offers you up to 6 chats at once in HD and oovoo let’s you video chat with 12 friends (or students) at once. You’d be way cool.  For live streaming video, try Ustream

Google

Then there is the entire Google ecosystem. Google wants you to use their email and their Facebook equivalent (Google+). You can also share documents here–try a collaborative document in Google Docs. Google Hangouts also allows video conferencing and streaming.

Cool Media Stuff

If you really want to show off, try SketchUp 3D and learn to draw in 3D. This an intuitive 3D modeling program for stage design, sculpture, video and video game level design.

If you want to capture video from the web (to keep a treasured cat video or a famous speech from going away on YouTube & Facebook, maybe)  start with KeepVid. To capture files from DVDs or create clips for presentations, use Handbreak.

If you want a free alternative to photoshop, try Pixlr, a truly amazing online photo editor

As a dean, I have to make hard decisions every day. Since I often articulate the reason for the decision (see rule no 4) I figured I could actually write them down. I have no idea if any of these make sense in the corporate world: I’ve never worked there. But this is what I think works in a university setting.

All of these are proceeded by “when in doubt” or “normally” or “in most circumstances.” I am not foolish enough to believe there is no gray—in fact, the hardest decisions are the really gray ones. But I still find that these bring clarity to my academic decision making process.

1. Be Humane
Yes, this is always first. One, you will sleep better at night and two, I believe that loyalty is repaid most of the time. (And if not you still sleep better.)  When the organization is fundamentally just and fair, people will want to work there.

2. Be Strategic
Aligning even small decisions with strategic priorities helps me stay mission driven. Which choice will move the dial for the organization? Lots of things can make people  happy in the short term, but they don’t add up to much, other than a temporary happiness blip. There can be a penalty for breaking rules, but the procedures are there to support the mission, not the other way around.

3. Extend Trust
When this fails, it can be spectacular, but lack of trust is an enormous drag on an institution in terms of time, morale and most importantly risk. Micro management is an equally huge drain on everyone’s time and loyalty. People take fewer risks when they do not feel trusted, and we can’t afford to make our institutions any more risk averse than they already are.

4. Be Transparent
There are obviously times when this won’t work, but notice that those are the times when people get suspicious. (Ironically, this is usually when you have the most clear evidence you can’t reveal!) The more you can share data, concerns, mission, proposals, and ideas, the less inclined faculty will be to imagine you have a hidden agenda. This is another version of extending trust and it is especially important in a university.

5. Be Accountable
Accountability is the flip side of trust. Watching what you promise is very hard: nobody likes a dean who always says no. Learning how to encourage without breaking the bank is a difficult balance to manage. But admitting your mistakes goes beyond trust. Values matter and the more obvious and consistent they are, the more likely they are to be imitated and become part of the culture of the institution.

There are certainly more things I could add: encourage risk, look for efficiencies, seek integration, focus on the students, and find more money are all useful things to do. Sadly, most of the decisions I make and many of my days are not filled with big ideas. A colleague once told me that a dean gets hired to make good decisions about the small things. These decisions, however, will only be good, if they are connected to the strategic priorities, big ideas, a motivated work force and a positive culture.

Three new studies raise important questions about merit scholarships. Are they really based on merit? Are they advancing the mission of our institutions? Are they doing any good and to whom?

First this week came the hardly surprising news from Stanford Professor Sean Reardon that as the rich get richer, the educational advantage of having rich parents has grown to 40% more than it was 30 years ago. (Reardon, 2013, and in press) Comparing children from the 10th percentile (family income of $15,000) and the 90th percentile (family income of $165,000), Reardon found a 125-point gap on EACH 800-point SAT type test. (That is up from 90 points in 1980.) The black-white gap is only 70 points, so family income is now a much better predictor of children’s success in school than race. (Reardon, 2013)

Schools are getting an enormously disproportionate share of the blame: most of the gap is already apparent in kindergarten. This is plenty of evidence that the diminished health care, nutrition, family stability and fewer educational opportunities of poverty produce substantial cognitive and behavioral by the start of school (Duncan and Brooks-Gunn 1997, Taylor, Dearing, and McCartney 2004). It is equally well documented (and even less surprising) that these early gaps have long-term social, medical, financial, and, of course, education consequences. (Dearing E, Berry D, Zaslow M. 2006, Rouse, Brooks-Gunn, and McLanahan 2005 , Smeeding, T., Erikson, R., Jantti, M., eds. 2011, Waldfogel, J., Washbrook, E., 2011). It even appears that the educational achievement gap NARROWS during the school year, but then widens in the summer months (Murnane, R. & Duncan, G. in press). Yes, Virginia, sending your children to Harvard summer camp does increase their readiness for college.

We see the results of this in college enrollment. Bailey and Dynarski (2011) discovered “growing gaps between children from high- and low-income families in college entry, persistence, and graduation. Rates of college completion increased by only four percentage points for low-income cohorts born around 1980 relative to cohorts born in the early 1960s, but by 18 percentage points for corresponding cohorts who grew up in high-income families.”  (They also discovered that while there was virtually no achievement gap between boys and girls 30 years ago, there is now a substantial gap in every demographic group, but “the female advantage in educational attainment is largest in the top quartile of the income distribution.”

All together now: it’s about poverty, stupid.

As college faculty, we often complain about how our students are not prepared for college work, but are scholarships part of the solution or the problem? Have we, perhaps in our scholarly quest to make our institutions better, contributed to this problem? (Admissions is a related problem and I’ve tried to outline a different model in my proposal for a University of Potential.

1. We have recently learned from Stanford Professor Caroline Hoxby and Harvard Professor Christopher Avery that even very high achieving students from low-income families, largely do not apply to our most selective institutions. (Hoxby, and Avery, 2013) 78% of high achieving students from the top quartile of income attend selective colleges, but only 38% of the equally high achievers from the lowest quartile of family income apply. When these students apply, they are admitted, they pay less and graduate at high rates, but sadly, they often instead attend resource-poor two-year schools or non-selective four-year schools with catastrophic outcomes for everyone.  We are wasting talent.

Faculty too have long complained that our selective colleges were disproportionately full of the privileged, but Hoxby and Turner (2013) found we could greatly increase applications from low-income students by sending them 75 pages of material in October about selective colleges, college cost and a no-paperwork application fee waiver for about $6 per student.  This simple targeted mailing of information increased the admission (not just the application) to college of high achieving but low-income to college from 30% to 54%.

2. And yesterday another new report found that the shift of resources toward “merit” aid is making it harder for needy students to attend college. Some of this is discounting; as we all search for more tuition revenue, we are looking for students who can pay. We are looking for the right price point where someone will pay. If a merit scholarship convinces your parents to pay the rest of the tuition bill, it is really no different from a $2 off pizza coupon. This is what any for-profit retailer does.

As a faculty member, it is easy to see the appeal of academically stronger students (which in most cases, really means students who were better at high school—see above!) Through recruitment season, I constantly get requests for “just a little more money for this really good student.” It sounds laudable. Aren’t we just supporting our academic meritocracy? But is giving money to wealthy students with better preparation really improving your institution?

So before you plead for that next merit scholarship, read the May 8, 2013 report from the New American Foundation: Undermining Pell: How Colleges Compete for Wealthy Students and Leave the Low-Income Behind.

“Nearly two-thirds of the private institutions analyzed charge students from the lowest-income families, those making $30,000 or less annually, a net price of over $15,000 a year.” Find your school here:

“Besides the very richest colleges and some exceptional schools, nearly all private nonprofit colleges provide generous amounts of merit aid, often to the detriment of the low-income students they enroll… other fairly wealthy schools use their aid as a competitive weapon to try to rise up the ranks and break into the top echelon of schools, as defined by publications such as U.S. News.”

Giving merit scholarships to wealthy students hurts your poorest students. This was certainly not our aim, but are we (as faculty) at all complicit?

According to the US News rankings, better students make our institution better. Most of us graduated from more prestigious institutions than the ones that employ us (Fink, 1984), but those comparisons often blind us to the implications of our “Carnegie climbing” or our “Harvard envy.”  We all applaud when our institutions want to “get better” (i.e. become like the “better” institutions we remember so fondly) but few colleges can afford the strategies that Harvard employs. As the report states, very few of our most elite (i.e. largest endowment) private schools have truly become low cost for low-income students. (According to the New American Foundation report, Harvard, Cal Tech and Wash U have the lowest net cost, with a huge shout out to Amherst who keeps their net cost at $448 but has a whopping 22% of Pell grant students.) We can be forgiven for wanting our institutions to be financially stable by discounting the price for wealthy students, but is the desire for prestige really the same as making your university better? And if this desire for prestige and better students is hurting our neediest students, is there a conflict of mission?

3. It gets worse. Most of the schools in this report are actually trying to do BOTH things at once. We are searching both for students with higher SAT scores and for students who can pay. Thanks to Prof. Reardon, we now know that these will increasingly be the same students: as we discount our tuition for those with the highest test scores (who least need the discount) we also increase our need for those wealthy students with lower test scores who can pay. The implications of these two studies together is that our selective colleges will become even more selective, but for wealth.

We knew this all along, but it was harder to see. Now when you compare an “average” SAT of 1000 (verbal+math) of a poor student to that of a more privileged student with 1250 remember that difference is, on average, merely the result of family income. At most schools, a gap that wide can easily be the difference between admissible and “no way José.” That 1000 student will probably do less well in your freshmen course, and might also need some additional help, but what, after all is your real mission?

As Hoxby and Turner (2013) have demonstrated, the pool of high-achieving/low income students is not smaller: it is just invisible to our best institutions. We need collectively, to reach out to them. But if the New American data is correct (Burd, 2013) that won’t be enough: with a current net cost of $15,000 for a poor student (even after all of the Pell Grant and need-based aid) those students will go somewhere cheaper.

It is not enough for faculty to say, we want to look at more than SAT scores. As long as we continue to be seduced by students who will bring us prestige (rather than focusing on how we can improve the students we receive) we are perpetuating a system that is, in fact, not a meritocracy. Increasing your ranking or your Carnegie classification, might be a tactic, but it is not a mission. (I’ve also argued for the need for more distinct missions.)

Talent, intelligence and potential are spread evenly through all classes and races. If your institution does not reflect that spread of diversity in your region, then you are not recruiting the students with the most talent, intelligence and potential. We must find better ways to recognize potential and create pathways and funding models so that the highest achieving students from all income levels can attend our best institutions. We can and must do better.

PS. So while most colleges are taxing the poor to create greater subsidies for the rich, Cooper Union is trying to be the Robin Hood of higher education. It may not be what “college ends free tuition” sounds like, but it is really a way to end a subsidy for the wealthy. By setting tuition higher than it needed to and distributing it unequally (only to those who can afford to pay), Cooper joins a very elite club  of private schools (listed above) that are allowing the rich to subsidize the poor.

References
Bailey, M. J., Dynarski, S. M., (2011), Gains and Gaps: Changing Inequality in U.S. College Entry and Completion. National Bureu of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper No. 17633 http://www.nber.org/papers/w17633; Population Studies Center Research Report 11-746 http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/pubs/pdf/rr11-746.pdf also published as “Inequality of Postsecondary Education” in Murnane, R., Duncan, G. eds. (2011),

Burd, S. (2013). Undermining Pell: How Colleges Compete for Wealthy Students and Leave the Low-Income Behind. New American Foundation: http://education.newamerica.net/publications/policy/undermining_pell

Dearing E, Berry D, Zaslow M. (2006), Poverty during early childhood. In: McCartney K, Phillips DA, editors. Blackwell handbook of early childhood development. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Duncan, G.J., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (1997). Income effects across the life span: Integration and interpretation. In G.J. Duncan & J. Brooks-Gunn (Eds.) Consequences of growing up poor (pp. 596-610). New York, NY: Russell Sage.

Fink, D. L. (1984), “The First Year of College Teaching” in New Directions for Teaching and Learning, Kenneth E. Eble ed. (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass)

Hoxby, C. M., Avery, C. (2013). “The Missing ‘One-Offs’: The Hidden Supply of High-Achieving, Low Income Students,” National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper 18586 http://www.nber.org/papers/w18586

Hoxby, C., Turner. S., (2013). Expanding College Opportunities for High-Achieving, Low Income Students, Stanford Institute for Eocnomic Policy Research (SIEPR) Discussion Paper 12-014. http://siepr.stanford.edu/publicationsprofile/2555

Murnane, R., Duncan, G. eds. (in press), Social and Inequality and Economic Disadvantage. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

Murnane, R., Duncan, G. eds. (2011), Whither opportunity?: rising inequality, schools, and children’s life chances. New York/Chicago: Russell Sage Foundation/Spencer Foundation.

Reardon, S. F. (2013), “No Rich Child Left Behind,” New York Times, (April 27, 2013. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/no-rich-child-left-behind/ (accessed on May 8, 2013)

Reardon, S.F. (in press). “The widening socioeconomic status achievement gap: new evidence and possible explanations.” In Richard Murnane & Greg Duncan (Eds.), Social and Inequality and Economic Disadvantage. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. http://www.iga.ucdavis.edu/Research/EJS/conferences/spring-conference-2011/reardon%20SIED%20chapter%20jan%2031%202011.pdf

Rouse, C., Brooks-Gunn, J., McLanahan, S., eds.(2005). The Future of Children: School Readiness: Closing Racial and Ethnic Gaps. 15(1). Washington, DC: Brookings Press. http://www.brookings.edu/about/centers/ccf/foc

Taylor, B., Dearing, E., McCartney, K., (2004), “Incomes and outcomes in early childhood.” Journal of Human Resources. 39:980–1007.

Waldfogel, J., Washbrook, E. (2011). “Income-Related Gaps in School Readiness in the United States and the United Kingdom” in Smeeding, T., Erikson, R., Jantti, M., eds. (2011), Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting: The Comparative Study of Intergenerational Mobility Chicago: Russell Sage Foundation, p. 175-208.

While lots of us have tried “flipping” classrooms, some folks are more hesitant about MOOCs, but they are really the “flip” sides of the coin. (Sorry…)  Now we are learning that the combination can be a powerful one.

One of the chief criticisms of MOOCs is their tiny completion rate.   That assumes, however, that MOOCs–as stand alone courses–are meant to replace traditional courses, but they are not.  The audience for stand alone MOOCs are life-long learners who are very self-motivated or those who have no other access to higher education, and who are also who very self-motivated. The philanthropy that is fueling MOOCs is largely hoping to expand higher education–not drive smaller and regional universities out of business. (And the institutional support from MIT, Harvard and Stanford is about branding.  For them, and not for most of us, this is an opportunity to expand and enhance their worldwide reputations.)

For universities, the advantage of MOOCs is that they provide content.  At the moment, that content can be good, but the learning situation is often poor. Like most early filmmakers, most MOOCs consist of boring video version of live lecturers. As with early film versions of stage plays, filming a live event does not usually enhance it.  But filmmakers soon learned that films could do things that even live theater could not do, and a new genre was born.  So watch for the pedagogy of MOOCs to improve rapidly: video content does not have to be a professor at a chalkboard and soon it won’t be. Unlike a live lecture, videos and podcasts can teach to the many and not to the middle.  Most of us are limited to one language, one example, one analogy, and one mode of delivery at a time, but a playlist of 25 different types of explanations in different languages using different approaches to a single concept will be able to support the learning of different types of students simultaneously.

MOOCs will become better and more useful as the pedagogy improves, but unless you are really giving the most inspirational lectures, you might find that a flipped class that uses video lectures, perhaps from an edX MOOC at Harvard, allows you class time to do other things and provides for more engagement and more student learning.

San Jose State University has tried this experiment with three sections of an EdX course Circuits & Electronics.  Two of the classes met for conventional classes, but the third class used the online videos and then used class time for something else.   “The pass rates in the two conventional sections were 55 percent and 59 percent. In the “flipped” section with the edX videos, 91 percent of students passed.”   (Wired Campus Blog Chronicle of Higher Ed: California State U. System Will Expand MOOC Experiment, April 10, 2013, 3:34 pm By Steve Kolowich)

OK, so the key here is the “something else.” The heart of Teaching Naked, is that course design is going to matter more and more.  Just having students watch videos is not going to improve pass rates.  Having the time to engage students during those valuable and expensive hours in the classroom where the face to face experience means more than just watching a talking head is what is improving pass rates.   Some faculty assume that being “the guide on the side” is somehow a less compelling job than  being “the sage on the stage.” actually, it is the MUCH harder job. Delivering content is fairly easy.  Most of us could do better, but at research universities, most of us figured out we needed just to be good enough at it to get tenure.  Designing great courses and creating immediately interesting class activities is much more challenging, but it is also where the value of face to face education is.  It is also the only way to justify the enormously increased cost.

Flipping, if it is done well, won’t reduce instructional costs.  But if pass rates soar like they did in the test case, then it WILL reduce institutional costs, which could mean for better and more stable universities.  The hard part for faculty, and the reason we will need centers to help us, is because doing this well will be hard work.

San Jose State is creating a Center for Excellence in Adaptive and Blended Learning, where professors from the other Cal State universities will come to learn how to integrate edX materials into their classes.  Surprised?

Universities are like doctors that only accept well patients or gyms that require fitness for admission. If you need to lose weight, you should pick a gym that helps people lose weight: the real measure of institutional success should be the difference between input and output.

We expect university graduates to be successful, but that is hardly a measure of how much students have learned or how much the university has improved them. High school grades and the SAT may predict success in college, but mostly they demonstrate the previous achievements of applicants. Universities start with the students who have already demonstrated they are good at school, and then take credit when they continue to be successful academically. We are so certain of this, that our ranking systems (like the US News and World Report) rely almost entirely on measuring the competition for entrance.

As Americans, this idealized meritocracy sounds convincing. We believe that success is a result of hard work and is usually deserved. We assume that overweight people are somehow weak or lacking in ordinary will power. But our colleges are overwhelmingly populated with students from upper class suburbia and successful high schools: many private high schools graduate and send 100% of their students to college. If you can afford private school or to move to better school district, you can dramatically increase your child’s chances of entering an elite university. (79% of students born into the top income quartile in the U.S. obtain bachelor’s degrees, while only 11% of students from bottom-quartile families do.) A more academic high school, private tutors and multiple attempts at the SAT, all improve the individual students chance of college admission, but none of them measure potential.

We know from genetics that talent and potential are equally distributed among, races, genders and economic classes, so our system is wasting high amounts of talent. A college degree typically adds about $20,000 a year to an individual’s earning potential, and that benefit might be even larger for disadvantaged students. Unless you assume that Hispanic or Black students are less intelligent or lazy, their underrepresentation in higher education means we are not getting as much talent or potential as we could into our universities. Imagine the gain to the country if we selected students for college based upon those would benefit the most. In other words, it is fine to reward students who have done well in high school, but we also need a university that is willing to take on the challenge of measuring itself not by a single admission or graduation standard, but by the gains made while at the institution.

The success of your graduates, by itself, is not a measure of the efficacy of your institution or how much students have learned from you. Fit people tend to go the gym, so picking a gym full of bulging muscles is useless. You want a gym or a doctor with a track record of improving the health of its patrons. It is the difference between in and out that matters.

This is not a plea for open admission. Some schools should be open admission, but we also need an admission process somewhere that selects for potential. Again, free libraries are good, but they tend to attract people who can already read. Making all gyms free would initially just attract poorer, but still fit people. It would not affect our obesity problem. We also need special programs and a different approach to those who have been failed by public schools.

Ranking all colleges by graduation rates without factoring in the different missions and populations, therefore, is completely misleading. Not everyone can or wants to play in the highest stakes game, some doctors want to be podiatrists, not oncologists. But we need some doctors who will treat sick patients and we need at least a few well-supported universities who want to catapult underachieving students.

It might make business sense for a single insurance company to deny patients with pre-existing conditions, but it is catastrophic for society if they all do. It is fine for some universities to cater to the academically healthy, but we also need higher education hospitals to unleash the creativity, talent and intelligence hidden by underperforming inner-city school systems. The lack of mission and diversity in higher education is a drag on the innovation, growth and health of our society and even a drain on our economy.

The University of Potential would admit students not on how much they knew, but on how much they could learn. It would measure itself by how far students’ progress during the time in the institution. It would not have, nor expect, the same success that Stanford enjoys. It would have lower graduation rates and lower average SAT scores, but it would offer a second change to those willing to take it. It would transform society and improve our economy. It would also be intensely democratic and could help remake America, the land of opportunity, invention and potential once more.

Since I suggested that getting rid of grades might be the single easiest way to focus faculty attention on more meaningful assessment, I’ve been thinking about the alternatives.

One alternative is the Learning-Based Pricing proposed in Teaching Naked. No one needs a further incentive to get elective surgery: all you want is a result. If you are paying for this result, then you have an incentive to get that result as quickly and as painlessly as possible. The new outcomes-based health care models reward hospitals for the number of patients who don’t come back. As with school everyone SHOULD have an incentive to keep you from returning, but in both school and health care, the current financial model rewards the institution when the patient or student returns. (And schools that have improved advising or looked at schedules and funnels to get more students graduating sooner, have also had to deal with the loss of revenue.)

I still think the best alternative is meaningful assessment. What have students learned since they have been here? As part of the Bologna accords, degrees from most countries (where there are also no letter grades) now come with specific learning outcomes that are assessed before award of the degree.

I’ve also, however, been thinking about how gamification is being applied everywhere:  especially in business.

You can even gamify your life. Carnegie Mellon Professor Jesse Schell says that the combination of gamification and sensors will improve our life by giving us incentives to eat better and brush your teeth and maybe even ride the bus (because the government gives you points that can be used for tax credits if you ride the bus). Don’t think anyone will do things for points? Listen to his data about how much real money people spend to buy virtual money in Facebook games.

The idea is that people like points and they like winning. Gaining points becomes its own reward. They call them loyalty point or reward cards, but the rewards, are for you. You probably know some of those people who make a few airline extra trips in the fall, just to keep their travel perks. The Nissan Leaf comes with a video game CarWings  that puts drivers in competition with each other to see who can use the least amount of fuel when they drive. The Ford Focus designers teamed up with IDEO and Smart Design to create “EcoGuide,” on the dashboard: it is a game where you are rewarded for eco-friendly driving with a leaf and vine that grows. Hit the accelerator and it withers.  Gamificiation can change behaviors.

We are probably not ready for full gamification of higher education, but just for a minute, think of this alternative to grades: universities could separate learning points, from attendance points and civic points or social points. We know that being your fraternity president or doing volunteer work counts for something, but employers might quickly sort out how much. Grades currently include all sorts of things not related to learning: attendance, punctuality, participation, and the ability to follow directions, for example.

It is true that like grades, points would be an external incentive program, but historically, that is what has worked (and how we got here in the first place.) In 1909 Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell discovered that students were content with C grades and were hardly studying at all. He was also unhappy that the best and worst student ended up with the identical degree. Taking his cue from competitive athletics, he introduced both Latin honors and grading on a curve. While not a perfect solution, both had the desired effect, and student effort increased (See Christensen and Eyring, 2-12, p. 93)  It might work again.

I’d like to hear other alternatives!

Should universities be worrying about branding? Discuss.

It’s big news on college campuses that the CMO’s have arrived, but the outside world is wondering what took so long. The WSJ (“Marketing Pros: Big Brand on Campus,” Aug 15, 2012) is correct that budget cuts, rising tuition and more competition for students are leading to new branding efforts, but there is a much more fundamental problem.

The basic product is the same everywhere. Wherever you go it is the same 4-year 120-credit degrees with the same majors and the same brochures about personal growth, life-long memories and alumni connections. What’s to market? “We’re the same, only better!” This is an opportunity to start a new conversation about both value and distinctiveness. Maybe your dorms are better or your rock wall is higher, but which schools focus on job skills, or have a broader education? Maybe we offer a five year degree (with an entry year for high school dropouts) while you offer majors that no one else does. The marketing teams will have a hard time until we start to think more carefully about our individual missions and products.

Instead of all trying to be more like the residential leafy campuses with research programs (that trained most of our faculty) we might examine the needs of students in our local area. One of the main differentiators in higher education is location: even Ivy League schools have a higher local profile. State schools already have an in-state monopoly on tuition costs and we all tout our alumni networks, but for most of us, this is still mostly a regional benefit.

Such undifferentiated competition has not been good for students or universities. Just like any other organization, universities need a focused and unique mission. It is silly to all claim that we are more “excellent” than the next school and if we all continue to chase a ranking in the top 100 schools, we make the playing field very narrow. We don’t want all of our universities to be like Harvard.

Universities are already segmented by types of students and areas of content, especially in the arts and professional areas like nursing, or business. We have not seen as much segmentation for undergraduate science or pre-med, but we will. The new business model of the “long tail” suggests even more segmentation and more niche markets will emerge. In addition to specializing in content areas or even broad types of students (like commuter vs residential or part-time vs full-time), schools could focus on even smaller sub-categories.

One of the lessons of Borders is to leverage your assets. When Borders arrived, it had something the smaller independents did not have: inventory. As Amazon began to compete with Borders for inventory, Borders should have found some other way to stay vital that leveraged its other assets and market position. Borders had loyal customers who liked to visit. Instead of reducing staff and letting the stores get run-down, Borders should have done the opposite: give people more reasons to visit. Borders is gone, but many of the more idiosyncratic independent booksellers that once feared Borders survive. Universities will each need to find a niche.

There is a reason why there is only one Amazon: they are the best and cheapest at what they do. If you want to compete, you need to offer something better, unique or cheaper. Higher education has become too generic. With the same increasingly expensive products on every campus, we compete only through discounting. While online degrees won’t affect the best brands or appeal to the best students, they will carve into the market share in the middle. For those middle universities, a new culture of innovation and change will be required.

We’ve actually had plenty of marketing in higher education, but we call it athletics. When Georgetown won the NCAA Basketball tournament in 1984, it got a boost in applications, but so did George Washington University and George Mason University. Athletics budgets are large, but the marketing people will know that it would take even more money (or a bad news scandal) to buy the same media impact as a winning team.

Real marketing will be good for higher education. It is a chance to tell prospective students about what is different about your campus or your courses. It should stimulate a conversation on campuses about the unique mission of each institution.

This, however, is a pretty radical idea. As a faculty member, I recognize my own desire to be “left alone to teach what I want to teach and how I want to teach it–just bring me students.” To ask “what does the market need and what is unique about what we might provide?” is routine for other organizations. But it will be new for higher education.

Before we put a new label on our can, we had better stop and think about what we want in the can. This is an opportunity. Let’s think about what we do that is distinctive, but let’s also make sure we deliver as promised. What’s in your can?

This is a short blog version of my new article  “More Marketing, More Mission: How Technology is Driving the Branding of Higher Education—and Why that Might be Good For Us” that appears this month in Spectra, a Publication of the National Communications Association 49/1 (March, 2013) p. 11-13.

Almost everyone in higher education is now worried. There are new pressures for accountability, new online competition and now the sequester.  It also seems at last, as if the great tuition ramp is finally about to level off: we’ve brushed off concern from legislators for years, but with the economy still in neutral, parents are increasingly making college decisions based on net price. Look for smaller tuition increases and eventually even some tuition reductions. You might also recall that the baby boom is over and the number of high school applicants is declining in most states.

Still not worried? Republicans and Democrats can agree on almost nothing these days. Actually, they probably agree on absolutely nothing, except for one thing: higher education.

Yes, President Obama and Sen Mark Rubio agree on something: Washington gives out $175 billion a year on student grants, loans and tax breaks and both of them want to use that leverage to create more accountable and more affordable system. (WSJ Feb 20 Obama, Rubio Put Higher Education on Notice).

Many parents and students already use College Navigator, and now the White House has already introduced a new College Score Card.  It  has flaws, but external calls for accountability and transparency will only intensify.

Luckily for us, higher education legislation is not the most important issues in Washington right now.  At some point, however, perhaps before the midterm elections, both parties will want to find to find something they can get done and something that everyone in the country agrees upon. It is easy to assume that all of those ethical violations of for-profit schools did not tarnish the image of traditional not-for-profit colleges, but remember–all of thew were accredited. “Every bad thing you read about happened in an accredited institution,” says Kevin Carey, director of education policy at the nonpartisan New America Foundation.  Oh dear…

We will resist and it will not be futile. (No Jedi mind melds please.) We are a diverse and unwieldy system and we can still claim to be the best in the world. But in the end, there will be some new accreditation systems and new metrics for us to track. It would be very unlikely that higher education can really get out in front of this issue.  Radical innovation is in the DNA of most institutions, but with the coming disruption, it is the nimble who will mutate into something that can survive in the new climate.

Most successful organizations are careful to align key practices with the mission.
How do grades support our mission? If the goal of college is to open minds, facilitate change, explore new ideas and help students discover how to change their minds, then which bit of that is fostered by grades?

The arguments in support of grades are familiar, but perhaps their time has passed.

–Grades enforce standards. They might, but standards of what? If a grade signified how many times you had changed your mind during the semester, they might be more useful. The flip side of standards is that grades are a form of punishment: you FAIL. But grades are not a necessary evil: being a teacher does not mean you also have to be the enforcer.

–Grades help graduate schools or employers determine which students are most capable, know the most or worked hardest in college. Ick. If I wanted to be in the sorting business, I could work at the M&M factory. Sorting has indeed been an important part of school—we allow Ivy Leagues schools to sort the potential candidates for President of the United States, for example. (No other schools comes close to the 12 US Presidents who went to either Yale or Harvard. Only George W. Bush went to both!)  Now that we’ve had a Black President, I’m waiting for the community college President.

–Grades reward the best work. Maybe, but they also punish innovation, experimentation, creativity, and mostly failure, which is where we all learn the most. In Teaching Naked  I often suggest that grades need to be aligned with the learning goals, assignments, games and even discussion activities, but what if we just used the learning outcomes directly and measured what you had learned?

Even if grades are not bad, are they good? Do they HELP students learn and change?

But the best reason to eliminate grades comes from the amazing assessment guru Martin Sweidel,  (really our Assoc Dean for Administration at the Meadows School at SMU ). If we eliminated grades, then building a culture of meaningful assessment would be easy.
–Our confusion about assessment would vanish: assessment is about what students are learning. We confuse that with grades, which is often only a way to sort students according to which work we like the best.
–We would have to articulate the real standards, and these could align with our mission.
–We could drastically reassess work-load. One of the main complains about assessment is that we don’t have the time, because we are too busy grading. Imagine what could happen if we had that time to focus on learning and assessment of that learning?!?

Without grades, we would be free to align our time, activities, and classrooms around our mission: creating situations that demonstrate and give students permission to change their minds.

Without grades, we would need to rethink everything else we do. In one step, we would be free to think about what we want to accomplish.

Apparently we have Yale to thank for “grades” (descriptive and first recorded in 1785). There were lots of systems through the 19th century, including a 100 point scale used at Harvard in 1877, and a letter system shortly thereafter, but the descriptive (excellent, good, fair etc.), the letter (A-E) and the numerical (95-100 = A) were combined and adopted at Mount Holyoke in 1897. But like the SAT, these systems of sorting were designed to replace other systems of sorting, that focused on class, race or religion. Eliot, C. W. (1923). Harvard Memories. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. I appreciate that the SAT was a part of admissions reform with the goal of making college admissions more of a meritocracy, but maybe the days of sorting can be left behind?

Eliminating grades does not mean we eliminate standards or assessment. It might, in fact, increase both of those things, because we could align our teaching with our goals and not arbitrary need for grades at the end of each class.

We need reform in higher education. At the very least we need to see some bio-diversity—lots of different institutions trying different things. We can’t all survive with the same model anymore. At least SOME of us need to try eliminating grades. Who is with me? To the barricades!

“When we consider the practically universal use in all educational institutions of a system of marks, whether numbers or letters, to indicate scholastic attainment of the pupils or students in these institutions, and when we remember how very great stress is laid by teachers and pupils alike upon these marks as real measures or indicators of attainment, we can but be astonished at the blind faith that has been felt in the reliability of the marking system. School administrators have been using with confidence an absolutely uncalibrated instrument.”
Finkelstein, I. E. (1913). The marking system in theory and practice. Educational Psychology Monographs 10.