The Conversation

Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation, Higher Education

Confessions of a MOOC professor: three things I learned and two things I worry about

John Covach, University of Rochester

We have heard a lot of talk about MOOCs, or massive online open courses, over the last couple of years. On the plus side, MOOCs often draw enormous enrollments and are easy to sign up for and use; all you need, it seems, is an Internet connection and an interest to learn.

On the down side, they have significant attrition rates – about 90 percent of those enrolled never complete a course – and, according to their most alarmist critics, these courses may even threaten the jobs of college professors nationwide.

Indeed, despite the large dropout rate, MOOCs certainly end up serving a significant number of students. If the initial enrollment in a MOOC is 40,000 and only 4,000 actually complete the course, that’s still a lot of students compared to a traditional classroom. A professor teaching four courses a year in classes with 30 students each would have to teach for more than 33 years to reach 4,000 students.

It’s true that if these courses ever caught on across the culture in a fundamental way, as many have been predicting, they could significantly transform higher education.

Amid all the kerfuffle, and based on having taught several courses for Coursera over the past two years (and more than 250,000 students worldwide), I have learned a few things that cause me to both hope and worry about the future of higher education as we have known it for the last several decades.

The three things I learned

  • MOOC students are mostly older than college students

Roughly two-thirds of my students have been over the age of 25. Admittedly, I teach courses on the history of rock music, which might tend to attract older students. But my numbers are not much different from Coursera’s numbers generally.

When we think about college courses, we assume the students are age 18-24, since that’s the usual age at which one gets an undergraduate degree. There are a significant number of people out there, however, who are interested in continuing to learn later in life.

Students who take MOOC courses tend to be older and are mostly international.
Mathieu Plourde, CC BY

Continuing education courses at colleges and universities have served that public to a certain degree, but it is clear that there is more demand among older students than many might have suspected. Given the chance to learn according to their own schedule and location, many find this option very attractive.

  • MOOC students are mostly international and already college-educated

Only about a third of my students live in the United States. The rest come from more than 150 countries around the world. This percentage of international students is consistent with other Coursera MOOCs.

Interestingly, a majority have already earned at least a bachelor’s degree, with a significant number also holding a master’s or Ph.D. degree. While others are seeking skills that will help advance their careers, many of these students are learning simply for the fun of it.

Our surveys have shown that most are very satisfied with the courses – they are an older, well-educated and international cohort of students who believe in MOOCs.

  • MOOC culture is mostly a “free” culture

As with music on the web, MOOC students expect the courses to be free, or very close to it. If each of the 250,000 students who enrolled in my courses had to pay even a dollar for the course, the numbers would fall significantly – probably by as much as 90 percent.

Most people would be willing to pay only for the credential that the course offers. A course with no credential has got to be free if enrollment is going to be massive.

My courses offer a free option that provides students with a statement of completion they can print out. Many have expressed great pride in earning this modest credential: they post them on Facebook.

Two things I worry about

  • The flattening of expertise

In an online world that counts Wikipedia as a trusted resource, the expertise of the university professor can no longer be guaranteed to win the day. Scholars may argue that Wikipedia must be used with caution, but that’s not the way everyone else sees it.

Some of my students use Wikipedia and other online sources very effectively. The democratic access to information that digital technology facilitates flattens the hierarchy of expertise: a university professor’s claim to superior expertise is no longer unquestioned.

  • Alternative modes of awarding credentials

The rise of badges and certificates makes it possible for students to earn an alternative credential to university credits and degrees. Universities can argue all day long about whether or not an online course is equivalent to a traditional one, but if alternative credentials come to be acknowledged by employers as useful in assessing a candidate’s skills and preparation, and if students value them, this is in many ways a moot point.

And when older, more experienced students have a satisfactory experience with a MOOC, the validity of this form of learning and the credential it provides increases within the culture.

Finally, it is difficult to control the validity of such credentials outside of the United States. Just because some American employers may be wary of an online credential does not mean that all employers are.

  • The threat to colleges and universities

College and universities “sell” an education. The price they can charge for this product depends to a great extent on the fact that they have an almost exclusive ability to grant credentials, based partly on a culture that acknowledges that university faculty possess superior expertise.

How will the online transfer of knowledge change higher ed?
ashley cooper, CC BY

But if the culture embraces the idea that there are other valid sources of expertise, then universities are in for a severe downturn in business. This will not be the case in all areas of education, but it certainly will spell trouble in many of them.

We can no longer expect to be the only viable alternative for education and training. This is maybe not the end of college as much as the end of an educational monopoly.

Some colleges will fail.

What can be done?

Colleges and universities must work to secure their claim to superior expertise, not within the ivory tower but within the culture at large. MOOCs are very useful in spreading the word about the fantastic thinking and teaching that goes on inside of universities.

The public should know more about what we do – they need to be invited in. Schools also must make certain that the credentials they provide really are the best preparations for success, and, just as importantly, that they are perceived this way among the general public.

We also should stop thinking of higher education primarily in terms of American students between the ages of 18 and 24.

In a world that will surely introduce significant and substantial competition in many areas of education very soon, universities must act now.

Consider this: Napster, the online music store, was introduced in the year 1999. In the 16 years since, the music business has been transformed by file sharing in ways that have been quick and deep. Nobody could have predicted it then.

Higher education must be sure it is not the same kind of victim of change. Let us not fiddle while Rome burns.

The Conversation

John Covach, Director, Institute for Popular Music, University of Rochester

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Matthew Lynch published in Higher Education, International Education

How competing for students will transform universities

Duncan Bentley, Victoria University

Historically, universities were privileged institutions for the “intelligent elite”, almost exclusively male communities, where great thinkers lived and worked and passed on their wisdom to fellow scholars and their students. Imagine Oxford, Harvard and the University of Melbourne before 1960.

Today, universities remain institutions in which groups of scholars contribute to the world’s knowledge and pass it on through teaching and exchanging ideas with the wider community. The difference is they try much harder to serve as many people as they can.

Institutions of distinction

The power of the university community is that it has never been bound to an institution or a country. Many academics and their students are more closely tied to their colleagues across the world in their own discipline than to an academic across the corridor in another field.

Demand tends to follow prestige.
Aleksandar Todorovic / Shutterstock.com

Traditionally, groups of scholars have banded together to compete in the race for new knowledge. They have not based their work on their institutional affiliation.

Universities, on the other hand, bundle their best groups together and claim a reputation. This has been the major driver of distinction and competition for universities and is reflected in the different world rankings.

Reinforcing this approach to competition is that student demand continues to follow elite status in the different rankings. This means that countries building their university systems are increasingly entering the “brain race”. Elite scholars are attracting lucrative incentives and contracts, similar to elite sport.

New competition

In Australia, competition will continue to transform universities. Australia has followed the world in democratising university education. The last 50 years has also seen a significant increase in the scope of degrees offered, particularly as universities have incorporated training for the growing number of professions.

Uncapping of places following the Bradley Review of higher education led to a significant growth in demand and university revenue. As the rate of growth has slowed, universities have sought to maintain revenue by trying to attract different types of students using a range of delivery methods.

While different university groupings exist, it is difficult to see much difference other than in positions on the research rankings. Many universities have regional presence. All universities are trying to “innovate” and this includes different levels of online delivery. All universities are working internationally.

Many universities were, until relatively recently, polytechnics or technical colleges and the pecking order among universities and therefore the demand from students largely reflects the research rankings, which favour the established elite.

The student experience: a new way universities compete
Nils Versemann / Shutterstock.com

Newer universities are therefore trying to re-invent the student experience and to develop links with industry and specialised degrees to generate the revenue they need to maintain their relative positions. Revenue pressure has increased as international student demand remains inconsistent and government funding for domestic places does not maintain pace with university ambitions.

New competition is also entering the field. TAFEs and private providers don’t need to research and they get more money for degrees than they can get from vocational qualifications. Degrees are also normally longer, which provides a more secure revenue stream from each student recruited. New entrants make more money too, as they generally have a lower cost structure than universities.

Add to this the fact that some 87% of the workforce in Australia is employed in the services sector, where a bachelor degree is increasingly becoming a base requirement for a job. It is an attractive market in which to operate.

Universities have responded by partnering with TAFEs and private providers to access markets or improve their productivity in ways they cannot achieve on their own. It makes sense to provide curriculum, quality assurance and a degree for a fee, and let the TAFE or private provider focus on teaching students who might not otherwise have gone to university. The results are often as good or better for the student. It provides a new revenue stream for both parties.

Specialise to succeed

As growth in demand for universities slows, particularly outside Queensland and Western Australia, competition for students will heat up. The lowest tier of universities will have to focus on only highly specialist areas of research, simply for lack of funding.

All universities are likely to look to improve their productivity so that they have sufficient funds to maintain their world-leading research. Those who succeed will be those that get rid of unnecessary costs and drive new opportunities to increase their revenue.

How will competition develop? Increasingly, universities and higher education providers will follow the example of the scholars in a global market. They will specialise in what they do well and partner with anyone who is like-minded and can help them compete effectively in their race for achievement. For most universities their goal will remain excellence in teaching and learning and research for the betterment of humanity.

Competition will continue to transform universities. Some may lose the battle and fail, while others may partner to achieve higher rankings. The real winners are likely to be the students – and the elite scholars and teachers.

The Conversation is running a series on “What are universities for?” looking at the place of universities in Australia, why they exist, who they serve, and how this is changing over time. Read other articles in the series here.

The Conversation

Duncan Bentley, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Victoria University

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Matthew Lynch published in Policy & Reform, Teachers

Explainer: what is all the fuss about the Common Core?

Ken Libby, University of Colorado

When it comes to US public education, few topics engender such heated debate as a new set of maths and English standards for school children known as the Common Core.

Since the final standards were released in 2010, they have been adopted by 44 states and the District of Columbia. This marks a departure from the long history in the US of leaving most educational standards up to the whims of states and local school districts, resulting in different standards in every state for kindergarten to grade 12.

The Common Core counts supporters and critics in both of the two major US political parties. This makes the conversation about the standards quite messy and interesting – especially given the upcoming congressional elections in November.

Fighting ‘ObamaCore’

Although moderate conservatives generally favour the Common Core, those further to the right, like the Tea Party, portray the new standards as inappropriate meddling by the federal government. Some engage in wild conspiracy theories, and attack the standards as part of a broader anti-public school agenda.

The fight over the US’s recent changes to healthcare policy, Affordable Care Act (sometimes referred to as “ObamaCare”), provides a way for some conservative activists to jump into the Common Core fray by claiming the new standards are the educational equivalent (“ObamaCore”). It’s a poor comparison, but permits easy entry into the debate for those with little substantive knowledge.

Left-leaning critics cite concerns about the potential for private companies (such as publishing group Pearson) to profit from the Common Core as a reason for rejecting the new standards.

Criticism of the standards is coming in all shapes and sizes.
amerigus/WWYD , CC BY

There are also concerns as to whether the standards for early elementary students are developmentally inappropriate. Others dismiss the new standards as a solution to a problem that does not exist, or a band-aid for much bigger problems, like the high child poverty rate in the US.

Some critics of the Common Core view it as further cementing the use (and misuse) of standardised testing in American schools.

State-driven testing

In addition to the new standards, two consortia of states – Smarter Balanced and the Partnership for Assessment and Readiness for College and Careers – have been working to develop tests tied to the standards. However, some states, such as Kansas, have opted to develop their own assessments.

These new and ostensibly better assessments created by the two consortia may provide some real advantages compared to previous tests. However, early trials of assessments tied to the Common Core indicate up to 70% of students in New York may not receive a passing mark given the more challenging nature of the standards. While that may well paint a reasonably accurate picture of how many students can truly meet the new standards, it is a politically tenuous position to maintain.

Supporters, on the other hand, claim the standards are more challenging than previous state standards (and they are, at least for most states). They also say that the standards will better prepare students for college-level work, and create a more level playing field for children across the country.

The shift to the Common Core comes as states pursue several other policy changes, including teacher evaluations based in part on student progress on standardised tests. These new evaluations attempt to use statistical models to calculate a measure of teacher quality based on how much a teacher’s students improve their performance on standardised tests, usually controlling for a host of other variables.

What teachers think

Pursuing both the new Common Core standards and teacher evaluations at the same time is worrying, especially if teachers and schools are not adequately prepared to help students reach the goals of the new standards.

While teachers generally support the common core, they also express reservations about implementation. A poll conducted in July 2013 by the largest teachers union, the National Education Association (NEA), indicated that teachers wanted more time to collaborate with colleagues about the new standards, updated resources, and enhanced technology for the classroom.

With each state and school district responsible for implementation, the degree to which teachers feel supported (or not) varies greatly. Heads of both the NEA and the second largest teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, have expressed concerns about Common Core implementation in recent months.

Personally, I do not consider myself a strong supporter of the common core. Nor am I an opponent. Although some critics make wild charges and engage in conspiracy theories, there are certainly legitimate concerns about the changes.

Implementation seems rushed in far too many places, leaving teachers and students inadequately prepared for the shift. If equity across the country were truly a concern, we would talk about how states do an exceedingly poor job of financing schools equitably, giving fewer resources to districts populated with low-income students and racial minorities. We would also tackle the inequitable distribution of teachers and various out-of-school factors – poverty, residential segregation, inequality and racism.

With more states shifting to the new standards and assessments in the coming year, the Common Core will likely remain an important issue in US public education and political debate. The standards themselves are rarely discussed – in large part because the biggest concerns are about related (and perhaps intertwined) issues like testing, teacher evaluations, and implementation.

The Conversation

Ken Libby, PhD student studying educational foundations, policy and practice, University of Colorado

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Matthew Lynch published in Parental Involvement, Policy & Reform, Teachers

How schools can help immigrant children to thrive

Jan Germen Janmaat, UCL Institute of Education

In view of the large influx of refugees from Syria and the growing concern about their integration in European societies, the launch of a new report on immigrant children in education systems could not be more timely.

The report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), noted reassuringly that there was no relation between the amount of immigrants in a country’s education system and a decline in education standards. It’s as if the OECD were pre-empting criticism from populist anti-immigrant politicians that the influx of Syrian refugees will be a disruption to western societies, and in particular a drain on schools.

The main focus of the report is actually on the performance gap between children of immigrant background and their non-immigrant peers and what schools can do to close it. Although the achievement gap has closed across the OECD – by a semester between 2003 and 2012 – on average, immigrant students still perform worse than their peers. The OECD gives some quite explicit advice to politicians if they are serious about enhancing the performance of these children: provide additional language instruction, arrange early childhood education, prevent segregation, don’t force them to repeat grades and eliminate the early streaming (also known as tracking) of children into different ability groups.

While the first two recommendations are uncontroversial, the last suggestion is politically sensitive as there are quite a few states who practice and cherish the tracking or streaming of children. In Germany, the Netherlands and Austria, different tracks coincide with different kinds of schools, while in England, ability grouping is organised within schools in what is called setting.

Provocatively the report said: “While ability grouping, grade repetition and tracking are harmful for all students, immigrant students are more likely to be affected by these practices.“ This is likely to raise some eyebrows, particularly among political parties advocating early tracking such as the Christian Democrats in Germany and the Conservatives in the UK.

Many education researchers have stressed that early tracking only reinforces achievement gaps, not only between immigrant and non-immigrant children but also between children of different social backgrounds. As early as 1974, the French sociologist Raymond Boudon noted that the more tracks a system has and the earlier these tracks start to branch out, the greater the inequality in educational performance and the more difficult it will be for children of modest backgrounds, including many immigrants, to do well in school. In this sense the OECD can be said to be a late convert to the cause of late selection – or comprehensive education as it is more widely known.

The report also noted that early tracking on the basis of ability amounts to social and ethnic sorting and so only adds to school social and ethnic segregation, which is an observation widely shared in academia.

Segregation and achievement

Segregation is also mentioned by the OECD as another factor contributing to the performance gap. This is based on the idea that large concentrations of immigrant children give rise to peer influences that reduce performance, irrespective of the individual social and ethnic background of children. In other words, when immigrant children are surrounded by peers of the same background in school, they are doubly disadvantaged, both in terms of their own background and in terms of the backgrounds of their classmates.

Language lessons for refugee children in Germany.
Ole Spata/EPA

In mixed settings, by contrast, they should be able to learn from their more privileged peers. Desegregated schools can thus help to compensate for the effect of family disadvantage. Again this theory is not new. In 1966 a famous report by American sociologist James Coleman noted that it makes a great difference who you go to school with. This report greatly reinforced the desegregation campaign that was set in motion by the 1954 Brown vs Board of Education US Supreme Court ruling declaring that de jure segregation was “inherently unequal” and therefore unconstitutional.

What’s best for immigrant children

There is more controversy among researchers, however, about whether segregation enhances achievement gaps. In 2005, American researchers Russell Rumberger and Gregory Palardy noted that when it comes to student achievement, the social composition of schools matters much more than the racial composition. Taking a closer look at social composition they found that several school characteristics, including teacher expectations of children, the amount of homework that students do, and the number of rigorous courses that students take, explain all of the effect of social composition.

This would imply that in theory immigrant children can perform just as well in segregated schools, provided they are exposed to the very same curriculum and teaching input as their peers in mixed schools. The question, however, is whether equalising these resources across schools can be achieved in practice – as they are so inextricably bound up with the social and ethnic mix of schools.

The OECD report deserves praise for letting the data speak and ignoring possible political pressures to revise the policy messages emanating from its findings on what works to close the achievement gap. It does not deal, however, with two relevant questions of quite a different nature: namely whether the policies it recommends can be adopted in the same way in countries with different educational cultures and whether they will produce the same results across the board. This debate – a hot topic among researchers – so far remains unresolved.

The Conversation

Jan Germen Janmaat, Reader in Comparative Social Science, Department of Lifelong and Comparative Education, UCL Institute of Education

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Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation, HBCU's, Higher Education

Can schools punish students for off-campus, online speech?

Clay Calvert, University of Florida

In January 2014, Reid Sagehorn, a student at Rogers High School in Minnesota, jokingly tweeted “actually yeah” in response to a question about whether he had made out with one of his high school teachers.

The public school, acting on the tweet, suspended him for seven weeks. Sagehorn, a member of the National Honor Society, fought the suspension in a federal court, claiming the actions of school officials violated his First Amendment right to free speech.

Did the school have the right to punish him for his off-campus expression? It turns out – no.

In August 2015, a federal judge rejected the school officials’ motion to have the case dismissed. After all, the court found that Sagehorn made the post while away from campus, during nonschool hours, without using the school’s computers. And last month Sagehorn collected a settlement of more than US$400,000.

Sadly, Reid Sagehorn’s case is not unique. For at least the past 15 years, schools across the nation have engaged in Orwellian overreaches into the homes and bedrooms of students to punish them for their off-campus, online expression regarding classmates, teachers and administrators.

Despite the bevy of cases, the issue of whether schools can punish students for off-campus, online speech remains unresolved.

Cases where school kids were suspended

For instance, in April 2015, a federal court in Oregon considered a case called Burge v Colton School District 53 in which an eighth grader was suspended from his public middle school based upon out-of-school comments he posted on his personal Facebook page.

And in September 2014, a federal court in New York considered a case called Bradford v Norwich City School District in which a public high school student was suspended “based on a text-message conversation he had with another student regarding a third student while outside of school.”

Judge Glenn Suddaby observed in Bradford that “the Supreme Court has yet to speak on the scope of a school’s authority to discipline a student for speech that does not occur on school grounds or at a school-sponsored event.”

Silence from the Supreme Court

Indeed, a key problem here is that the US Supreme Court has never ruled in a case involving the off-campus speech rights of students in the digital era.

Public school students do possess First Amendment speech rights, although those rights are not the same as those of adults in nonschool settings.

A case in point is the Supreme Court’s famous 1969 proclamation in Tinker v Des Moines Independent Community School District that students do not
“shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

A key problem has been the silence of the Supreme Court on free speech rights of students.
Jeff Kubina, CC BY-SA

In this case, a divided court upheld the right of students to wear to school black armbands emblazoned with peace signs as a form of political protest against the war in Vietnam. The majority reasoned that such speech could be stopped only if school officials had actual facts to believe it would lead to a substantial and material disruption of the educational atmosphere.

But Tinker was an on-campus speech case. And although the Supreme Court has considered three more student speech cases since Tinker, none involved either off-campus or digital expression.

A chance to resolve the issue

Schools today are trying to exert their authority far beyond the schoolhouse gate. Some courts have allowed these efforts and others have rejected them, but now the Supreme Court has a prime opportunity to resolve the matter in a case called Bell v Itawamba County School Board.

In January 2011, a Mississippi high school student, Taylor Bell, was suspended from Itawamba Agricultural High School after he posted, while away from campus during nonschool hours, a homemade rap video to Facebook and YouTube.

In the video, Bell criticizes in no uncertain terms two male teachers for their alleged sexual harassment of minor female students. A version of rap that describes the resulting controversy is available online.

In August 2015, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit narrowly ruled that high school officials in Mississippi did not violate the First Amendment speech rights of Bell when they punished him for posting the video because it allegedly threatened two teachers.

In a ruling against Taylor Bell, the Fifth Circuit majority concluded that the rule from the Tinker case applies to off-campus speech:

when a student intentionally directs at the school community speech reasonably understood by school officials to threaten, harass, and intimidate a teacher, even when such speech originated, and was disseminated, off-campus without the use of school resources.

One of the judges in the case, James Dennis, writing in dissent, ripped into the majority for broadly proclaiming “that a public school board is constitutionally empowered to punish a student whistleblower for his purely off-campus Internet speech publicizing a matter of public concern.”

Judge Dennis stressed that the rule from Tinker, which requires school officials to reasonably predict a substantial and material disruption will be caused by speech before it can be stopped, does not apply to off-campus speech cases.

Why the Supreme Court should hear the Taylor Bell case

Some minors inevitably will post and upload – while away from campus and using their own digital communication devices – allegedly disparaging, offensive or threatening messages and images about fellow students, teachers and school officials on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Snapchat.

The key question, then, is whether and to what extent public schools, consistent with the First Amendment, may discipline students for their off-campus speech.

In November 2015, Bell filed a petition with the US Supreme Court asking it to hear his case.

As Bell’s attorneys argue, the court should take the case because whether or not Tinker applies to off-campus speech cases has “vexed school officials and courts across the country.”

In December, the organization I direct, the Marion B Brechner First Amendment Project, filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the court to take the case.

Briefs from the attorneys for the school are due January 20, and the court will decide whether to hear Bell later this spring.

The bottom line is this: public school students deserve the right to know, pre-posting and pre-texting, what their First Amendment rights are when they are away from campus.

They must, in other words, be given fair notice. The court should hear Bell to let them know precisely what their rights are. It is an issue not likely to go away soon.

The Conversation

Clay Calvert, Brechner Eminent Scholar in Mass Communication, University of Florida

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Matthew Lynch published in HBCU's, Higher Education

Fulfilling Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream: the role for higher education

Roland V. Anglin, Rutgers University Newark ; David D. Troutt, Rutgers University Newark ; Elise Boddie, Rutgers University Newark ; Nancy Cantor, Rutgers University Newark , and Peter Englot, Rutgers University Newark

Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote “Why We Can’t Wait” to dispel the notion that African Americans should be content to proceed on an incremental course toward full equality under the law and in the wider society. King observed,

Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse, and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.

Yet waiting and whispering, rather than raising their voices for genuine inclusion, is what many seem to expect of the children and grandchildren of King’s generation even today.

At stake is the perceived legitimacy of American institutions, not just educational but those that we educate for: the police, the courts, government, the media, cultural institutions, banks and so on. These institutions are under scrutiny over their failure to evoke trust and to show that they are visibly open to the public – especially those groups, who too often and for too long have been left out.

Arguably, we are not the “land of opportunity” for most first-generation, poor, black, brown, Native American, or immigrant children. Gaps in educational achievement persist, and at every level: from kindergarten through to the years after high school.

The label applied to so many immigrant youth, Dreamers, might well be adopted more broadly, capturing as it does both the aspiration and perhaps the unreality of educational opportunity for so many.

And the students are right to worry.

The question is: what role can our universities play so the dividing lines can be crossed?

‘Baked-in’ privilege

Consider some statistics from Essex County, New Jersey, where our city, Newark, a college town with over 50,000 students, is located:

  • 47.54 percent of black third graders attend schools that perform at the bottom 10 percent of schools in the state compared to 0.04 percent of white third graders.
  • About 4,000 high school students in the Newark Public Schools are “missing” during the school day, not in their seats; often labeled as “disconnected youth,” it would be better to consider them as youth connected to a pathway to prison.
  • Another 3,000 are off-course from graduating.
  • Only 36 percent of Newark residents have finished high school and only 17 percent hold any kind of post-secondary degree.

This story is not unique to Newark.

Economists such as Raj Chetty and his colleagues note that nationally “the consequences of the ‘birth lottery’ – the parents to whom a child is born – are larger today than in the past.”

We – the universities – are the ones sitting in the midst of these realities, facing the choice between being walled citadels that separate the privileged from the uninvited other or being welcoming hubs connecting young individuals with opportunity.

Universities’ responsibility

The uncomfortable truth is, that we, in some very real sense, have contributed to this winnowing of opportunity.

Chancellor Nancy Cantor speaking at the “Rally in Solidarity” organized by Rutgers Newark students in support of students at University of Missouri in November 2015.
Rutgers University Newark, Author provided

For too long, the traditional measures of student potential have relied on standardized – and therefore narrowly framed – merit selection processes, such as SAT and ACT scores.

These tests have been grossly inadequate, measuring only a narrow band of potential, while missing wide swaths of our talent pool whose excellence is not readily detected through the use of such “blunt” instruments.

They neglect whole communities whose students don’t have access to the test preparation industry, prompting legal theorist Lani Guinier to implore us to redefine the merit in meritocracy.

Intergenerational privilege is rooted in place – in the home values and tax base, the schools and transportation networks available to people because of where they are fortunate to live. Decades of white flight, suburbanization, the abandonment of urban centers and regressive housing policies have contributed to a pervasive disconnection across racial, ethnic and class lines.

This segregation has reinforced the corrosive effects of historical prejudice and biases that already divide society and make Americans, in effect, strangers to each other.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the social landscapes of university communities are just as divided.

Crossing boundaries

Diversity is growing explosively and redefining American society before our eyes.

Yet lines of class, gender, ethnicity and race continue to redraw themselves in dorm life, lunch tables and indeed the classroom.

Indeed, it is hard to erase them.

How do you cultivate connection to another person’s future and commitment to their success when you don’t live together in the same neighborhood, reside near each other in the same city or at least share some similar daily experiences such as rush hour on a crowded subway?

As higher educational institutions, we should be the place where dividing lines can be crossed. And that includes crossing the boundaries of our communities.

Our work in the city of Newark is just one illustration of crossing these boundaries.

Newark’s story

In this postindustrial city of 280,000 people, 29 percent of residents have incomes below the poverty line.

Newark’s social and economic challenges are common among cities that have lost their tax base and whose residents have fled to the suburbs since the 1960s. The resulting economic and racial segregation has produced structural inequalities in health, education and other public services.

Today, Newark, a proud, resilient city, is coming back from years of disinvestment. As an engaged “anchor institution”, we are partnering with the community on many fronts.

The future home of Express Newark – the historic Hahne Building
Rutgers University Newark, Author provided

We are investing in spaces for local artists and the community to collaborate, as we develop nearly 50,000 square feet in the iconic former Hahne & Company department story as an arts “collaboratory” – dubbed “Express Newark.”

We are working with small and midsized entrepreneurs and firms and taking an active role in helping Newark’s police address crime hotspots through data collection and analysis.

Organizations – public and private – have banded together in the Newark City of Learning Collaborative (NCLC) to raise the post-secondary attainment rate of residents of Newark to 25 percent by 2025.

For the higher education partners in NCLC like us, this means working with Newark Public Schools to help their students continue their education past high school, beginning in community colleges, the institutions where the vast majority of first generation students will have their first taste of higher education.

At Rutgers University – Newark, for example, we are providing tuition support to low-income residents of Newark and to any New Jersey community college transfer with an associate degree as of fall 2016.

We are recruiting these students based on assessments of leadership, grit and entrepreneurial skills – not just grades – into a residential Honors Living Learning Community (HLLC). In addition to gleaning information about applicants from the standard application form, the HLLC team engages with applicants in person and in groups to see how they collaborate with one another to solve problems. Their on-the-ground knowledge of urban life has much to contribute, as we see it, to the HLLC’s curriculum focus of “local citizenship in a global world.”

The first cohort of HLLC students
Rutgers University Newark, Author provided

Ashlee is one of the inaugural class. Born and raised in Newark, she speaks openly of “being a product of my environment…exposed to so much just by walking outside of
my house…[including] murder at the age of 12.” Her options, she says, were two: “conform to what’s going on in society or try to make a difference.” She is now a criminal justice major keenly interested in issues of social equality and inequality.

Academic ‘farm teams’

Rutgers-Newark is not alone in looking to build on the assets of this fresh talent pool for America.

There is an increasing number of so-called collective impact initiatives across the higher education landscape, including STRIVE, a nonprofit started in Cincinnati, and three large city-wide initiatives in Syracuse, Buffalo and Guilford County, North Carolina mounted by Say Yes to Education.

Collective impact projects like these can be taxing and messy, but by bringing so many different partners together – from education institutions to businesses and faith-based centers – to focus on enabling the talented next generation to thrive from school to college and beyond, we put a stake in the ground together for social justice. It’s admittedly still one step at a time, but one step in many places.

When higher education bands together to support and recruit talent from these regional hubs, it gives a new meaning to the notion of “farm teams.”. After all, if major league baseball can do it, why can’t higher education?

The impatient students protesting a sense of exclusion today have undeniable facts to support their argument. Our institutions, we believe, can help them overcome the barriers they, and others, face in their search for economic opportunity and a sense that they are valued.

How could anyone continue to “wait and whisper” while witnessing the enormous and cumulative effect of disparity unfold for another generation, with so many children never even getting to first base and some starting out on third?

The Conversation

Roland V. Anglin, Director, The Joseph C. Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies, Rutgers University Newark ; David D. Troutt, Professor of Law and Justice John J Francis Scholar, Rutgers University Newark ; Elise Boddie, Associate Professor of Law, Rutgers University Newark ; Nancy Cantor, Chancellor, Rutgers University Newark , and Peter Englot, Senior Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs, Rutgers University Newark

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Matthew Lynch published in Policy & Reform

Girls are kept out of science jobs by unhelpful stereotypes

Anna Zecharia, Imperial College London

The number of girls taking A-level physics has remained stagnant for the past 20 years or more, and the UK has the lowest proportion of female engineers in the EU. Progress on gender equality in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) is frustratingly slow.

And what’s even more worrying is that when questioned, Brits can’t think of current women scientists as role models. A recent YouGov poll of 3,000 people done for ScienceGrrl, a not-for-profit of which I am a director that advocates for more women in science careers, found one in ten named Isambard Kingdom Brunel – a male engineer – when asked to think of a famous women scientist. Only about half could actually name a female scientist and of those that did, 68% named Marie Curie, who died in 1934.

In a new report called Through Both Eyes also by ScienceGrrl, we set out the case for looking at the issue in light of the society we live in, and the legacy of inequalities between men and women.

Anyone more recent than Marie Curie?
Wikimedia Commons

Lack of progress isn’t due to a lack of attention or awareness. The Institute of Physics has compiled a series of comprehensive reports since 2004 and government frequently makes the economic case for diversity in science, technology, maths and engineering (STEM).

Deeply embedded cultural messages about women, attitudes, structures and norms manifest themselves as invisible hurdles that undermine girls’ participation and women’s progression in the workplace. These hurdles are invisible precisely because none of us knows what it looks like to live in an equal world.

Science capital in the family

We’ve explored what is known to propel somebody to choose a career in science. The literature is clear that there are three key factors. Liking STEM isn’t enough, it has to be relevant to a person’s interests and goals. They also need to feel confident they can succeed, and have access to “science capital” – the opportunity to gain knowledge and experience of STEM through personal networks.

People receive messages about themselves and the opportunities available to them from wider society, family and friends, the classroom and the workplace. We are all exposed to these messages and their balance is crucial to informing the choices we make.

Professor Louise Archer says her research shows it is: “harder for girls to balance or reconcile their interest in science with femininity” because STEM is seen to be for those who are “white, middle class, brainy and male”. A 2011 Ofsted report showed that by around 7-8 years old, girls and boys spoke about jobs as being “for men” or “for women”. Cordelia Fine, in her book Delusions of Gender suggests that children act as “gender detectives” from a much earlier age.

The “girls’ toys” that value physical perfection over adventure or intelligence, and the objectification of women in the media are just two examples of how the roles and capabilities of women are diminished in wider society.

Casual reliance on stereotypes leads to unconscious bias undermining all areas of girls’ lives. In STEM subjects, this is particularly true for confidence: girls perform worse in maths tests when their gender is made salient. This is known as “stereotype threat” – the phenomenon that performance can be impaired by awareness of lower expectations for your particular social group.

Stereotypes also affect expectations of those with influence in girls’ lives. Students get most of their careers advice from family members. But polling data from Engineers Week in 2013 showed that parents are steering their daughters away from careers in engineering, with 3% encouraging it as a career, compared to 12% for their sons.

Inspiring teachers

Progress will require a whole community approach. Schools also play an important role. Evidence from the Institute of Physics suggests that gender stereotypes undermine girls in the classroom.

But as Dr Vanessa Odgen, headteacher at Mulberry School for Girls, summarises: “girls’ uptake of science, technology and maths increases significantly when these subjects are taught by women who care passionately about STEM and when curriculum content promotes the achievements of women”. In short, when a whole school ethos means it is normal and expected for girls to succeed.

It is missing the point to say that girls aren’t “choosing” to study STEM. Many girls do not have real choice because of the low expectations placed on them and the lack of genuine opportunity. Girls are being kept out of rewarding careers.

We don’t need to change girls, we must place the responsibility on those with influence in our society. Showing the variety of directions STEM can lead, that it is creative and has social relevance it will appeal to a broader based talent pool, not just to more girls.

The Conversation

Anna Zecharia, Postdoctoral neuroscientist, Imperial College London

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Matthew Lynch published in HBCU's, Higher Education

College grads still earn a premium — if they can find a good job

Robert Reich, University of California, Berkeley

The early admissions deadlines for universities across the country have come and gone, and acceptance letters are on their way. But with the cost of a four-year college education rising an average of 5% a year, many students and parents are likely wondering whether the cost of a degree is worth it.

The simple answer is yes because people with degrees continue to earn far more than those without them. Last year, Americans with four-year college degrees earned on average 98% more per hour than people without them, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In the early 1980s, they earned 64% more.

But that’s only if the graduate can find a good job, which is no longer guaranteed.

Instead, almost half of new college graduates will likely end up spending at least a few years in jobs for which they are overqualified. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 46% of recent college graduates are now working in jobs that don’t require college degrees. That figure is about a third for all college graduates.

And the main reason a degree still demands a premium salary is that wages for non-grads are dropping. Employees choose college grads over non-grads on the assumption that more education is better, but as a result more of the latter are being pushed into ever more menial work, if they can find a job at all.

For years, I along with others argued that globalization and technological advances lift demand for well educated workers. But in 2000, the outsourcing of skilled jobs and advanced software reversed this trend.

First, millions of people in developing nations became far better educated, while the internet gave them an easy way to sell their abilities in advanced countries like the US, leading to ever more skilled work being outsourced to them.

Second, advanced software is taking over many tasks that had been done by well educated professionals – including data analysis, accounting, legal and engineering work, even some medical diagnoses.

As a result, the demand for well educated employees in the US seems to have peaked around 2000 and fallen since, even as the supply of such workers globally continues to grow.

That increase in supply even as demand drops is why the incomes of people who graduated after 2000 have barely risen. Indeed, the starting wages for graduates have dropped since then, 8.1% for women and 6.7% for men.

And that’s why a record number of well educated young adults are living at home with their parents.

The deeper problem is that while a college education is necessary to join the middle class, its share of the total economic pie continues to shrink, while that of the very top keeps growing.

An education is still worth the cost because without a degree young people can easily be left behind. But even with one, it’s hard to do much more than tread water. Some will make it into the top 1%, but the path keeps getting narrower and often requires the right connections.

Of course, going to college is not only about making a lot of money. An education gives our youth tools to lead full and purposeful lives.

It’s still worth paying for, but in such a perilous economy, young people and their parents should know the economics before they make such a large investment.

This is an adaptation of a post that appeared in November on Robert Reich’s blog.

The Conversation

Robert Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley

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Matthew Lynch published in HBCU's, Higher Education

What kind of university can help reduce poverty?

Tristan McCowan, UCL Institute of Education

For decades, development agencies have encouraged low and middle-income countries to focus their education spending on primary schools and basic vocational skills. They have considered that universities provide lower rates of return on public investment and benefit elites at the expense of the poor.

That is changing and it’s now acknowledged that strong higher education systems are also a vital piece in the puzzle of poverty reduction. Countries need well-trained professionals to staff public services, as well as technological innovators and researchers to tackle local and national development challenges. The debates on what the priorities should be after the Millennium Development Goals end in 2015 have shown a stronger endorsement for the role of universities.

However, higher education won’t have a real impact on countries’ development unless three key things take place. First, universities have to function together as part of a coherent system in the public interest. Second, access to higher education must be equitable and allow admission for talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Third, teaching, research and community engagement must address key local and national development needs.

But none of these three elements can be taken for granted given universities’ current direction of travel.

Two major global trends in higher education are challenging these assumptions: commercialisation and “unbundling” – the gradual breaking up of the traditional campus university. Commercialisation has affected all aspects of universities’ operations, from “cost-sharing” or the introduction of tuition fees, to providing consultancy for the private sector and commercial outsourcing of campus services. Given the squeeze on public funds for universities across the world, there are few places in which institutions are not being strongly encouraged to commercialise their activities.

“Unbundling” refers to the process through which the combination of functions of the traditional university are separated out, potentially leading to the disintegration of the institution as we know it, according to Pearson’s chief education advisor Michael Barber in the report An Avalanche is Coming.

The unity of teaching, research and public service – with its roots in Humboldt’s University of Berlin in 1810 and developed through the US Land Grant universities – is slowly being unravelled. Teaching-only institutions, employer-based degree programmes, the movement of research to private laboratories and consultancy firms, and particularly the emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are contributing to this trend.

The huge growth of distance education providers, such as the Indira Gandhi National Open University in India, has also contributed to challenging the notion of university as a physical location. There are also moves towards separating out the teaching and accreditation functions of the university, with skills “badges” now awarded by external agencies.

Proceed with caution

The implications of these trends for addressing development needs in the resource-constrained countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America need careful assessment. Evidence from the process of commercialisation has been mixed to say the least.

Liberalisation of higher education in Brazil from the 1990s led to an exponential growth in the private sector, now accounting for three quarters of enrolments, with nearly half of these in for-profit institutions. While undoubtedly having a positive impact on the expansion of access to university beyond just the most well-off in society, fees still put them out of the reach of many and there are widespread concerns about the quality of provision of these institutions. Profit incentives lead to a driving down of investment in academic staff and learning resources, and attempts at regulating the sector have had limited success.

Kenya, with a much smaller enrolment base and weaker public and private financial capacity than middle-income Brazil, has also witnessed its own form of commercialisation. Since the mid-1990s, state universities have introduced a parallel stream – admitting fee-paying students alongside the government-subsidised ones. In some institutions these parallel streams have spiralled out of control, reaching well over half of enrolments.

A tight squeeze at Kenyatta University library.
Book Aid International/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

While for Kenyan universities these are a welcome source of revenue in the context of scarcity of public funds, they have led to an intolerable strain on quality. Recruitment of new lecturers has lagged way behind the expansion of enrolments and institutional infrastructure cannot support the influx of students.

Don’t push efficiency too far

In contrast to commercialisation, which has been developing for decades, unbundling is still in its infancy and we have no clear examples of systems in which the process is fully under way – so to a large extent we are reliant on extrapolation from initial signals.

One implication of the unravelling of higher education systems is decreasing state leverage, with an obvious impact on the ability to regulate for equality of opportunity in admissions. The importance of cross-fertilisation between teaching and research – benefiting both students and staff – is widely recognised. MOOCs, often touted as a potential saviour for impoverished regions of the globe, have limited potential in contexts in which poor primary and secondary schooling has hampered young people’s ability to learn on their own.

One of the best-known contemporary initiatives in this area, the non-profit university Kepler in Rwanda, in fact shows a trend of what might be called “re-bundling”, providing face-to-face tuition and dormitory facilities to support students undertaking MOOCs.

So there is a worrying disjuncture between the hopeful vision of the potential of higher education held by development agencies, and the current trends for delivery endorsed by many of them. Bilateral and multilateral donors have shown strong support for new private sector providers and online distance education under the emblem of innovation.

Efficiency and affordability when pushed too far can undermine the raison d’être of the whole venture. If universities are to succeed in fostering both poverty reduction and development for the benefit of society, they must provide high-quality teaching and research in the public interest, and engage with local communities. Ultimately, it’s not just any higher education that will do.

The Conversation

Tristan McCowan, Reader in Education and International Development, UCL Institute of Education

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Matthew Lynch published in Parental Involvement, Policy & Reform, Teachers

Hard Evidence: at what age are children ready for school?

David Whitebread, University of Cambridge

When are children “ready” for school? There is much debate about when the transition between play-based pre-school and the start of “formal” schooling should begin. The trend in the UK primary school curriculum over recent decades has been towards an earlier start to formal instruction, and an erosion of learning through play.

But the evidence from international comparisons and psychological research of young children’s development all points to the advantages of a later start to formal instruction, particularly in relation to literacy.

Among the earliest in Europe

Children in England are admitted into reception classes in primary schools at age four; in many cases, if their birthdays are in the summer months, when they have only just turned four. This is in stark contrast to the vast majority of other European countries, many of which currently enjoy higher levels of educational achievement. In Europe, the most common school starting age is six, and even seven in some cases such as Finland.

European Commission. EURYDICE and EUROSTAT 2013. * Although education is not compulsory until six in Ireland, approx. 40% of four-year-olds and almost all five-year-olds are in publicly-funded primary schools.

From the moment children in England enter the reception class, the pressure is on for them to learn to read, write and do formal written maths. In many schools, children are identified as “behind” with reading before they would even have started school in many other countries. Now the government is introducing tests for four-year-olds soon after starting school.

There is no research evidence to support claims from government that “earlier is better”. By contrast, a considerable body of evidence clearly indicates the crucial importance of play in young children’s development, the value of an extended period of playful learning before the start of formal schooling, and the damaging consequences of starting the formal learning of literacy and numeracy too young.

Importance of play

A range of anthropological studies of children’s play in hunter-gatherer societies and other evolutionary psychology studies of play in the young of mammals have identified play as an adaptation which evolved in early human social groups, enabling humans to become powerful learners and problem-solvers.

Some neuroscientists’ research has supported this view of play as a central mechanism in learning. One book by Sergio and Vivien Pellis reviewed many other studies to show that playful activity leads to synaptic growth, particularly in the frontal cortex – the part of the brain responsible for all the uniquely human, higher mental functions.

A range of experimental psychology studies, including my own work, have consistently demonstrated the superior learning and motivation arising from playful as opposed to instructional approaches to learning in children.

There are two crucial processes which underpin this relationship. First, playful activity has been shown to support children’s early development of representational skills, which is fundamental to language use. One 2006 study by US academics James Christie and Kathleen Roskos, reviewed evidence that a playful approach to language learning offers the most powerful support for the early development of phonological and literacy skills.

Second, through all kinds of physical, social and constructional play, such as building with blocks or making models with household junk, children develop their skills of intellectual and emotional “self-regulation”. This helps them develop awareness of their own mental processes – skills that have been clearly demonstrated to be the key predictors of educational achievement and a range of other positive life outcomes.

Longer-term impacts

Within educational research, a number of longitudinal studies have provided evidence of long-term outcomes of play-based learning. A 2002 US study by Rebecca Marcon, for example, demonstrated that by the end of their sixth year in school, children whose pre-school model had been academically-directed achieved significantly lower marks in comparison to children who had attended child-initiated, play-based pre-school programmes.

A number of other studies have specifically addressed the issue of the length of pre-school play-based experience and the age at which children begin to be formally taught the skills of literacy and numeracy. In a 2004 longitudinal study of 3,000 children funded by the department of education itself, Oxford’s Kathy Sylva and colleagues showed that an extended period of high-quality, play-based pre-school education made a significant difference to academic learning and well-being through the primary school years. They found a particular advantage for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Studies in New Zealand comparing children who began formal literacy instruction at age five or age seven have shown that by the age of 11 there was no difference in reading ability level between the two groups. But the children who started at five developed less positive attitudes to reading, and showed poorer text comprehension than those children who had started later.

This evidence, directly addressing the consequences of the introduction of early formal schooling, combined with the evidence on the positive impact of extended playful experiences, raises important questions about the current direction of travel of early childhood education policy in England.

There is an equally substantial body of evidence concerning the worrying increase in stress and mental health problems among children in England and other countries where early childhood education is being increasingly formalised. It suggests there are strong links between these problems and a loss of playful experiences and increased achievement pressures. In the interests of children’s educational achievements and their emotional well-being, the UK government should take this evidence seriously.

Hard Evidence is a series of articles in which academics use research evidence to tackle the trickiest questions.

The Conversation

David Whitebread, Senior Lecturer in Psychology & Education, University of Cambridge

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