Funding numbers, not education
by Miki SaxonBy CandidProf, who teaches physics and astronomy at a state university, shares his thoughts and experiences teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday—anonymously because that’s the only way he can be truly candid. Read all of CandidProf here.It’s all about the numbers. Sadly, that is how many college administrators see the students: as numbers.
The college has an enrollment figure. In my state, one of the key measures that they are now implementing to rate college performance is the increase in enrollment figures.
For a long time, as a public institution, we have been funded by how many students are enrolled, so the administration has been actively recruiting students. It has not mattered whether or not the students are ready for college. That was not important. It did not matter if they had the skills to succeed. That was not important. Whether or not they enrolled was important, not whether or not they learned anything while here, nor even if they passed any of their classes.
Another key measure for the state is in access of college to minorities and Hispanics. We are advertising in Spanish. The college’s web site can be viewed in Spanish. The registration can be done in Spanish. But all of the classes are in English.
Students who don’t know English are up a creek. They have little hope of passing the classes once they get here. No matter. They enrolled, they were counted by the state, and that was all that mattered.
Going hand-in-hand with enrollment is retention. College administrators go to conferences with other college administrators, and they all talk about retention policies.
The idea is that getting students to enroll is not sufficient. They want them to enroll again next semester. So, if they flunk out, then they won’t be enrolling again.
The first strategy used by many colleges is to simply change the rules on what constitutes flunking out. When I was a student, a single F or D, or too many C’s, was sufficient to get a student put on academic probation. If you repeated a bad semester, then you were placed on academic suspension. That wasn’t meant so much as punishment, but rather to give you time to reassess your educational goals and strategies. I never had to go through that, but I knew some students who did.
Now, you can fail a class every semester, and have a whole semester of D’s and C’s, and keep that up for semester after semester. A depressing number of our students graduate with a GPA of less than 2.0. But the students keep signing up for classes and that is all that counts.
The next step in retention is to put pressure on faculty to give higher grades. After all, the administrators reason that if students get too many poor grades, they might get discouraged and drop out. If they drop out, then they won’t be registering for classes and that means, of course, that there will be less state funding for the college. So faculty are encouraged not to grade too harshly and to give higher grades.
This has been going on in the K-12 education for years, but it is now becoming more common in colleges. I have a number of colleagues who are teaching in a climate of that sort. Many faculty just give up and quit upholding standards. They just give out grades. The students don’t learn. We have a few part time faculty here who do that, too, because that is expected at other places in the area where they teach part time.
But students who take the classes of a faculty member who just gives out grades without the students learning seldom do well in the follow-up classes.
Worse, this strategy makes a college degree pretty much worthless.
Holding to standards is hard, particularly when others don’t hold to those standards.
Holding to standards is hard when funding is tied to numbers that can be improved by relaxing those standards.
But an effective leader will hold standards, even if it is the hard thing to do.
I see this getting worse. My state is now looking to change the funding formula for its public colleges and universities. Rather than giving money for the number of students enrolled at the beginning of the semester, they are looking to fund the number of students enrolled at the end of the semester.
That changes things. It means that simply getting students to sign up is not enough. Now, we need to keep them in the class all semester. It is pretty obvious that there will be extreme pressure on faculty to limit the students dropping.
That means making the classes easier.
That means giving up on tough and difficult standards and setting the bar as low as possible to make it easy for students to pass without ever having to do anything.
That means giving up on teaching.
And this is what is coming down the pike from state legislatures all over the country. They have done this sort of thing in K-12 education, making a high school diploma pretty much worthless.
Now they are working to make an undergraduate college degree worthless as well.
A lot of faculty are planning on retiring when these changes are made. I have a few years to go until retirement, and I am not looking forward to what I see in our future.
Your comments—priceless
March 5th, 2009 at 5:33 am
[…] towards grade inflation, combined with federal, state and local governments’ focus on funding numbers as opposed to learning, perhaps there is a more useful use of […]