Well, at spouse’s institution (a middling SLAC), they simply don’t have the resources to do so. It’s unfortunate. The profs try to make up for the lack of resources at the expense of their own time, money, and health.
Quite a few publics have gone in this direction, and I’m eager to see who follows suit.
I wish it was as simple as faculty just deciding they want to do this and making it happen. But we’ve known for ages that the best way to improve education across the board is to hire highly qualified teachers (and social workers and other student support staff) and pay them good salaries to spend lots of time with each student. Somehow, that doesn’t seem to happen in a lot of places.
I used NAEP assessment to illustrate that a large portion of high school graduates aren’t ready for college, whether that portion is really about 75% or not, by their definition of proficiency, is immaterial.
Could you name a few measurable assessments you like?
I am a prof at a med school, in a department that has both clinical and basic research scientists. I work with some med students, yes. But I mostly work with PhD students, post-docs, and undergrads. Many of whom do not have stellar undergrad grades. It is a misconception that it is hard to get into most STEM PhD programs. And yes, they are all fully funded.
I have worked at SLACs and R1 and R2 institutions. I’m currently at an R1 institution. “Helping students succeed” is absolutely a huge part of my job. Maybe not at the undergrad level as much right now, but certainly holistically, and at the individual level of the trainees I work with. I am on committees that aim to do this at the department and institutional level as well. I still manage to have an excellent research and publishing output. The profs that are only focused on their research productivity tend to not be the best colleagues.
Even in an R1, there is a diversity of teaching roles. There are many R1 profs who are primarily focused on teaching, and some of their research output is centered on pedagogy. When I was at a SLAC, nearly my entire job was “helping students succeed”.
Yep, yep, yep. I agree. One of the problems is that some struggling students don’t even know that they should do this.
Your points about how to define and help a “struggling student” are important.
It would seem a lot of the recent increases in the price of higher education is attributed to the hiring of various support staff, so many of those staff should already be in place. Universities make their own decisions on which staff and teachers to hire, and could change the mix if they wish.
Tuition at many private schools is approaching $60k annually. I dont think there is much support for increases to provide more student services, so schools will have to reorient their existing budgets to do so.
Perhaps what is relevant is whether the definition of “college ready” happens to be exactly what “NAEP proficient” is (or if it falls lower like “NAEP basic” or higher like “NAEP advanced”).
But there is also another question: if someone is not “proficient” in reading and math for college, will their skills be “proficient” enough for the better other career paths that some here are suggesting for those who should not be allowed to go to college after failing the test that determines whether they are “proficient”? After all, trades people, law enforcement, military service members, etc. need to be able to read and understand instructions, laws, codes, etc. in order to do their jobs well. Many health care professions do not require bachelor’s degrees – you’d better hope that they understand decimal points and place value so that you do not get orders of magnitude more or less of some medication.
Ooh, you hit a VERY important point here, right on the head. You’ll notice I was careful to say “student support staff” rather than just “staff” or “administrators”.
I suspect that you are correct (and I think there’s supporting data somewhere) that administrative bloat has contributed to rising education cost, without improving outcomes.
Faculty HATE the bloated administrations and often feel like they are at odds with the administration. There is a class of administrator that does not seem to exist in service of improving student learning or support. They just create more Vice Deans of Whatever and pay themselves high salaries while the actual faculty and students are strapped for resources. This is such a well-known problem amongst faculty that there’s a parody twitter account with over 100K followers called “Associate Vice Deans” with the handle @ass_deans. The profile pic is Dolores Umbridge
I make a distinction between those administrators and staff that actually HELP the students and faculty. At spouse’s institution, they laid off the professional academic advisors (who were phenomenal and worth 4x what they were being paid) and dumped all the advising on the already busy faculty who are qualified but too busy to do the best job. Meanwhile, I KNOW there’s administrators who do very little useful work and get paid for it.
No one needs to take what NAEP defines as given. All the NAEP assessment questions (not just the sample questions) and how they’re scored are available online, so anyone can make her/his own determination whether NAEP’s definitions are meaningful and what levels of basic proficiency on those assessments a college student should have.
The NAEC definition of proficiency does not equate to college readiness. It could be that college ready students are 95%, 50% or 5% “proficient” depending on where they draw the line. 75% is meaningless, and 25% would be meaningless too.
When it is not being distorted or misrepresented, I “like” the NAEC. Beyond that, my “likes and dislikes” aren’t really the topic of the thread, are they?
Well, multiple people just nominated spouse for chair of faculty senate, unprompted. Spouse does NOT want to do it but is going to fall on the sword because they know it’s important and they can make a difference. Someone has to do it. The problems with student success are not the fault of most faculty, who are dedicated, diligent, and care very much about making changes. They can only do so much between teaching and trying to battle administration.
I agree and thank spouse for his service. I do not think it is the faculty’s job to address student unpreparedness. Surely that can be accomplished by those not in possession of a doctorate.
You would think that, but the rise of the professional administrator class has not produced overall good changes at universities (in my opinion).
Low-level professional admins are awesome, such as those at the department level, and/or anyone interacting with students directly. Once you climb the ranks and you aren’t interacting with students, or even faculty very much, that’s when things get especially hinky.
At the high levels, admins who have previously been faculty tend to be better than those who have not been. Those that have not taught and/or are not in daily contact with students and profs often lose sight of the core mission of the institution and do not serve the school well. The worst deans I’ve had have been those that sucked at their faculty jobs and failed upward.
This IMO really gets to the heart of the matter. If a certain segment of students will not approach faculty for help, then it makes no difference whether faculty are available or not. As is seen in the nytimes article on UT, it is oftentimes this sort of roadblock that is holding students back from succeeding academically, and not necessarily lack of academic preparation.
ETA: response meant to be directed at the comments of @ColdWombat and @Blossom.
I’m not even sure I understand what this means, but I am pretty I’m not trying to force anyone to do anything.
The nytimes article discussed a number of simple and seemingly cost effective interventions which greatly enhanced the at-risk students’ probability of overcoming these types of obstacles. Seems to have worked pretty well at UT Austin
I think the difficulty that I am having with this thread has a lot to do with my own bugaboos, pet peeves, and biases.
When I read the questions about whether we are “sending too many unprepared/underprepared students to college,” I hear the question as an attack on students for being too _____. You can insert whatever adjective you’d like, unintelligent, lazy, entitled, apathetic, insecure, whatever. I also hear under the question, a statement about those ____ kids being less deserving of college admission than some other group of students that are perceived as more qualified. Again, you can choose what word to insert. So despite the issue of qualifications not being stated explicitly, I tend to read the question as a condemnation and a continuation of other threads that I have read here that make fairly sweeping claims about the qualified vs. unqualified or those deserving of an acceptance letter vs. those underserving.
However, if I am being honest with myself, no one has actually written the above in this thread anyway. Thus, my replies have been mostly about my long-past experiences and as well as my personal fears for my own children. In other words, rather than reading generously and openly, I keep making unfair assumptions.
So if the question is really about whether there are students matriculating to college who are not ready to thrive there, then I am sure the answer is of course there are. However, I think the reasons are quite varied including but not limited to academic under preparedness, immaturity, mental health issues, culture shock, financial stress, lack of family support, and even some problematic and discriminatory professors and instructors.
And if the follow up to that question is how can we better ensure that all students arriving at college are able to thrive, it seems clear to me that the answer lies in both what K-12 institutions are doing (and not doing) and what colleges are doing (and not doing) to teach students. The article about UT was very interesting to me because it is not written from the perspective that Vanessa didn’t belong at UT Austin because while the reason for struggling varies from student to student, I also think the reasons vary pretty widely among types of colleges. I don’t think the problem is usually that the admissions offices are admitting the wrong students or there is a mismatch between a student’s potential and the rigor of the college.
While I am sure that there are students who would be better served by either delaying college or not going at all, in my experience those are not the majority of students who struggle in college. Nor do I think most struggling students are attending colleges too rigorous for them. Furthermore, I firmly believe that if a college or university admits a student, then the institution has an obligation to make sure that it really has the programs and support systems in place to help the student succeed. I think that schools that use a sink or swim model of education are either 1) just making a money grab for their students’ tuition and student loan dollars or 2) really not set up to serve a student body that faces a different set of challenges than students of thirty or forty years ago. Since I’d rather give most schools the benefit of the doubt by assuming their goal is not about squeezing tuition dollars out of kids that are doomed to failure; instead, I mostly believe that with additional knowledge and better practices, many colleges could and should be better at helping their students. Making that statement is not discounting the ways that K-12 education could also do a better job.
Reorient- great idea. So who goes- the nutritional staff who have to meet with the students who are gluten free/gluten avoidant (i.e. don’t have celiac but freak out if there is cross contamination at the waffle bar), the paralegals who have to collect the documentation every time a drunk frat kid falls off a roof (where he shouldn’t have been, that’s why there are bars on the windows) and the parents are suing the university for… gosh knows, the compliance team who work with ALL the lab researchers to make sure that “no mice were harmed in the course of developing this life saving drug” because without that compliance team, PETA is going to picket the provost’s house and make death threats against the president, or the risk management experts who have to explain to the Study Abroad participants that Medivac is not optional… if your doctor overseas says “Take her home”, you go home, you can’t call Mom and Dad and complain that the mean insurance people are making you miss your Oktoberfest trip.
Who goes?
I agree with you conceptually- support staff should be there to support student learning and student outcomes. But the reality on college campuses today is that we reap what we sow. And we’ve sown a consumerist, “I get what I want because I paid for it” mentality, which is probably the most litigious society on the planet.
And that costs money. Lots and lots of money. No parent will tolerate hearing 'Your kid was an idiot and did something stupid". No. It’s the college’s fault for not… preventing stupid drunken escapades? No kid will tolerate hearing “If you have adopted a paleo diet, it’s on your to figure out how to get your nutritional needs met. We label everything- you need to crunch the numbers”. And the biggest line item- health care-- students and parents expect concierge level care (nobody wants to hear “for your particular, chronic problem we suggest finding a specialist in the nearest city”). NO. 24/7 access.
I have a friend whose kid broke a leg playing hockey at a small college (not an athlete- just a weekend warrior) and they were LIVID that the Health Services med team packed him off to an ER at a close-by medical center. He was seen by an orthopedist, got excellent care- but somehow the parents are furious that in addition to managing flu, common cold, strep, unwanted pregnancies and STD’s, the medical team at the college center did not feel confident in their abilities to moonlight as an orthopedic surgeon. yes- and they escalated their whining up the chain…
And don’t get me started on the people who send a kid at-risk for a recurrence of anorexia, or with a severe anxiety disorder who don’t understand why their kid has to wait three days to get an appointment with a psychiatrist. “They should hire more doctors”.
You just can’t make this stuff up. And the costs of all these people on the payroll- ginormous. So who goes in order to “reorient” towards reading, writing and 'rithmetic???
Quite agree with you, @blossom. And since those demanding parents are more likely to be full-pay than the parents of struggling students, one should expect schools will cater more towards paleo diets than remediation.
Several posters repeat the article’s claim that all this academic support can be provided cheaply, but I havent seen any evidence of that. UT has spent tens of millions of dollars providing such support. Small classes cost more money. Staff to follow up with students cost money, as does tutoring, social workers, etc. UT has a big incentive to do so-it cant control the students it accepts, and must deal with whoever it gets from the top 6% of high school students who are auto-admits. It also has a giant endowment to help. Most schools don’t, so while I am glad UT can address it, what about the other 3,999 colleges?
UT had no option to address the weaker-skilled students in any other way, but that does not mean its way is the best or most efficient
There is a third possibility: many such schools are budget constrained broad access state universities that do not have the budget for enhanced student services. They may be more accessible to students who face various challenges (academic and non-academic) but are often poorly resourced (compared to state flagships and the even more money-abundant wealthy private schools) to offer even low cost cost-effective services that improve student success.
For example, http://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/search1ba.aspx?institutionid=227757,228459,228778 compares a wealthy private school, a state flagship, and a non-flagship public. Click the “Funding and Faculty” tab to see what each spends per student. It certainly looks like the school where the students are likely to benefit most from additional student services is the one with the smallest budget and can spend less on that.
