accountability – Innoeduvation

Assessing Assessment?

The appalling legacy of “assessment” goes on and on and on. This “frank discussion” at a recent WASC conference is a classic bit of “too little, too late.”

I’m someone keenly interested in the organizational aspects of higher education, especially in questions of how we know we are being as effective and as productive as the world needs us to be. But for most of my career I’ve watched millions of person-dollars squandered on misguided efforts to “document” and “measure” learning. Alongside that I’ve watched the erosion of the intellectual integrity of institutions and individuals as they winked and went through the motions of methods they knew (or should have known) were bogus and would never produce actionable, valid knowledge. We watched as individual faculty members sold their souls for small stipends or to keep on the good side of a dean who might have input into their tenure or promotion case. And those of us who dared to apply our professional training to point out the inanity of the methodological manure being sold to us endured being dressed down for not being team players or having our commitment to students questioned by arrogant small-minded assessment consultants.

A real underlying pathology exposed by the ongoing assessment debacle is the monopoly power of the accreditation agencies. For the last two decades they ranted about accountability in higher education – the one standard they would never have to meet. The hypocrisy of agencies like WASC being immune to serious criticism should be an embarrassment to people who care about higher education.

The simple move of forcing national education accreditation agencies to compete rather than allowing them to enjoy geography-based monopolies would do more for higher education than a thousand conference presentations from people who live off the problem rather than for its solution.

Managing the Wrong Problem

Originally published June 2017

We have a revenue problem, not a cost problem.

Imagine an educational institution that finds itself running a budget deficit – projected revenues just do not balance projected costs. It’s a very familiar scene in higher education in 2017.

And so what happens? The Board of Trustees says “balance that budget!” and the Administration hears “tighten your belt!”

Cost Cutting is Easy. Revenue Growth is Hard.

Why don’t we hear “strengthen your revenues”? The answer is pretty simple: cost cutting is easier work. Cutting costs means looking inward and relying on bureaucratic authority. One can tell one’s reports to cut costs by X% and then hold them accountable for results. They in turn tell their reports to do the same and wait for results. And the work is done by poring over budget reports and having meetings with PowerPoint slides full of numbers. The work flows down the bureaucracy. Bureaucracies are more comfortable when work flows down. This process is NOT rocket science.

On the other hand, to pay attention to and do something about revenues, people have to look outward, become informed about the outside world, take in new ideas, struggle to understand opportunities and communicate them to colleagues, do the very hard work of finding out what the world wants and telling the world what you can do. This IS rocket sciencey.

What Usually Happens

By my estimation, it’s easy for a college over the course of, say, two years to deploy thousands of hours of its best people’s time and creativity talking about how to nibble away at the margins of the expense side of its budget. A 20+ person budget committee will meet several times a month, C-suite folks and their staff will meet even more often, faculty meetings, committee meetings, and all-campus meetings are devoted to the task. Consultants are hired to crunch data, in-house people crunch the data again. It’s probably not too far off the mark to imagine the institution puts more energy into this than anything else during this time.

Because.What.We.Are.Good.At

It’s not surprising, though, because most institutions have a management team that has been selected on the basis of their ability to manage the status quo, to keep things running as they are (perhaps with modest expansion and growth). The “technology” of innovation, growth, expansion, rethinking business models, being entrepreneurial, leveraging resources, finding efficiency, building strategic platforms on which new revenue streams can grow, all of these are beyond their ken. It is easy to predict that we will put all our energy into saving and so very little into earning.

And when we DO turn our attention away from cost-cutting, the furthest we usually get is to devote ourselves to RETENTION. We tell ourselves that each retained student is $15k net tuition we have next year that we might have lost. Retention attention activates our missionary zeal and provides concrete focus for building programs and hiring staff. But we are inclined to measure neither the cost effectiveness of these efforts nor their fundamental limitedness – perfect retention will only ever get you back to the already anemic enrollment you started with. And when your best people are working on this, they are not working on growth.

There is No Smaller Right-Size

This is a very big problem. When most institutional energy and brainpower is devoted to cutting costs and stemming losses, very little is leftover for actual expansion of the revenue pie. Most colleges that are struggling will not achieve anything close to a sustainable business structure via cuts and retention. They have fundamental structural deficits related to their size and there is not a smaller size that works. All of the efforts at cost management and loss prevention are efforts at managing the wrong problem.

Ten Reflections from the Fall Semester

Notes from this semester. Each semester I jot down observations about organizational practices, usually inspired by events at my place of employment. Every now and then I try to distill them into advice for myself. Most are obvious, once articulated, but they come to notice, usually, because things happen just the other way round.

Always treat the people you work with as if they are smart; explain why you take a stand or make a decision in a manner that demonstrates that you know they are smart, critical, and open to persuasion by evidence and argument. Set high standards for yourself. Your institutional work should be at least as smart as your scholarly work.
- “it is better to be wrong than vague.” – Stinchcombe
- If smart people are opposed to your idea, ask them to explain why. And listen. Remember, your goal is to get it right, not to get it your way.
Do not put people in charge of cost cutting and budget reductions. Put them in charge of producing excellence within a budget constraint.
Make sure everyone is able to say how many Xs one student leaving represents. How much will it cost to do the thing that reduces the chance a student will get fed up with things?
If most of what a consultant tells you is what you want to hear (or already believe), fire her.
Don’t build/design system and policies around worst cases, least cooperative colleagues, people who just don’t get it, or individuals with extraordinarily hard luck situations. Do not let people who deal with “problem students” suggest or make rules/policy.
Be wise about what you must/should put up for a vote and what you should not. And if you don’t know how a vote will turn out, they are are not prepared to put it up for a vote. Do your homework, person by person.
If a top reason for implementing a new academic program is because there’s lots of interest among current students, pause. Those students are already at your school. What you want are new programs that are attractive to people who previously would not have given you a second look.
If you are really surprised by the reaction folks have to an announcement or decision then just start your analysis with the realization that YOU screwed up.
- Related: and don’t assume it was just about the messaging; you might actually be wrong and you should want to know whether that’s the case.
If you or someone else’s first impulse when asked to get something done is to form a committee, put someone else in charge of getting that thing done.
Persuade/teach folks that teams and committees in organizations are not representative democracies. The team does not want your opinions, feelings, experiences, or beliefs; it wants you enrich the team’s knowledge base by reporting on a part of the world you know something about. And that usually means going and finding out in a manner that is sensitive to your availability bias. In the research phase, team members are the sense organs of the team. Be a good sense organ not a jerking knee or pontificator or evangelist or nay sayer.

Tag: accountability