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A Perfect Mess

Thanks to Rosie, our university librarian, for dropping this one on my desk. Authored by David F. Labaree in 2017, it details the history of post-secondary education in the United States. From its humble beginnings as a venue for the development of the clergy to a world class system of research universities.

Over this period of a couple of hundred years, the massification of the university, resulting in huge social opportunity gain has resulted in a rising cost to society. Undergraduate education is seen as almost universal now and in order to maintain the finances of the system, institutions are turning to increased graduate enrolment (particularly at the professional masters level) and international enrolment.

Continue reading “A Perfect Mess”

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Academic Metrics

Some hesitation here ……. it seems that there are two schools of thought. 1. You can only manage what you measure and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are essential for managing any business and universities are just a business. 2. Metrics cannot be sophisticated enough to manage a complex business like a university that is so dependent on a distributed organizational structure and the interaction between faculty, staff and students.

I sit somewhere between, we need to be very careful what we measure but we would be foolish not be measuring. So then the debate is what to measure? Continue reading “Academic Metrics”

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Learning Innovation

Over the last few months, I have spent quite some time reading, researching and visiting a number of institutions that claim some kind of academic innovation. In many cases, I was frustrated to find that the innovation touted in papers and conferences, in fact did not amount to much or in some cases had simply disappeared. So this is my list of things that I found interesting. Continue reading “Learning Innovation”

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Comparators and Competition

I am often asked about the kind of institutions that are similar to RRU and have struggled to name any in the past – so we have reverted to looking a local universities or on-line universities. Not a very sophisticated approach – so let’s think about this a bot more carefully.

Royal Roads U. is a special purpose university with an applied professional mandate, it charges premium tuition, is largely graduate and is small and unranked internationally. An attempt to search around these parameters is difficult if not impossible but I would point to a few comparators that might be at least worth thinking about. Continue reading “Comparators and Competition”

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The New Education

In this very recent book, Cathy Davison argues that post-secondary education is in need of a significant shake up. So add this book to the many other calling for educational reform.  What makes this book at least slightly different is that the author certainly has the experience to make this claim and its somewhat optimistic tone. She writes two particularly compelling chapters on technophobia and technophilia. In the former she shows several examples of how avoiding technology use in the classroom can limit the active learning possibilities for students. In the latter she warns that the use of technology needs to be anchored in grounded academic thinking while at the same time tossing a few bricks at the for-profits with a serious nod towards the work of Tressie Cottom in “Lower Ed”.

She calls for a lowering in the cost of education and the revision of pedagogy to more active and experiential learning. This I have heard many times before but still remain unconvinced that the strategies presented in this work offer a particularly viable and sustainable path forward. Some time is spent on the firing of Alexander Coward for not conforming to traditional Berkley standards and trying new ways of assessment – she is clearly not a fan of standard testing or grades. I have to agree with the former, standard testing is not a particularly helpful educational technique but I am less sure about eliminating grades (yet!).

The most disappointing for me was the last chapter titled “the future of learning”  unfortunately there was little meat, other than some interesting work that Georgetown U is doing that I am not sure was particularly scalable.

If you looking for a book to get you more motivated to try new techniques and abandon standard testing that provides the evidence to do it – then this is it. If you are looking for an answer for the problems and issues facing post-secondary education, then this is not it …. oh and when you find that please let me know.

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How Big?

We have had a lot of discussion about how big our university should be. It is an interesting question but not easy to get any kind of definitive answer. It is said that small universities are more intimate, have smaller class sizes and care for the students; larger institutions have more depth, more research but are impersonal. Of course, these are all generalizations and probably not true, students can have a great experience at any size university.

Is class size an issue? Interestingly, it appears that the effect is greatest for very small classes and very large classes and not for the class sizes between, the drop in performance is also greatest for the top-performing students. A graduate student moving from a class of 10 to 150 can be expected to suffer a loss of 50% of the overall variation in exam marks the student gets in all her courses. (ref) Of course, there are many proven techniques for dealing with large class sizes.

But back to overall university size and a surprising paucity of information. In 1973 a paper published by Sutherland seems to suggest that the optimum size for efficiency is 5,000 – 15,000 students. (Sutherland, G. (1973). Is There an Optimum Size for a University? Minerva, 11(1), 53-78. ).

Another paper suggests that efficiency simply improves with size. (Bonaccorsi, A., Daraio, C., Räty, T., & Simar, L. (2007). Efficiency and university size: Discipline-wise evidence from European universities.)

Another suggests that universities that are under 10,000 students offer a better sense of community. (Lounsbury, J. W., & DeNeui, D. (1996). Collegiate psychological sense of community in relation to size of college/university and extroversion. Journal of Community Psychology, 24(4), 381-394.)

An interesting recent study looking at European universities during the significant European Union alignment of post-secondary education found that universities less than 3,500 were most easily able to adapt to change. (Schubert, Torben, and Guoliang Yang. “Institutional change and the optimal size of universities.” Scientometrics 108.3 (2016): 1129-1153.)

All that leaves me the sense that around 5,000 students you should be able to preserve a sense of community and culture, be reasonably efficient and be nimble enough to rapidly respond to change.

I recently spent a few days at Arizona State University, arguably one of the most innovative universities in the world right now. It is a very large university, around 85,000 students depending on who you ask, which probably makes it one of the largest universities around. As part of its reinvention, the disciplines as departments were eliminated and the whole structure reimagined around the creation of 17 themed and interdisciplinary colleges with names such as The New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences or the College of Integrative Sciences. While they all have somewhat different sizes, the average size is about 5,000. Each Dean of a college is empowered to be entrepreneurial and create new programs within a framework of principles.

Maybe 5,000 is the right number.

 

 

 

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The Mission Statement

On  a recent visit to San Francisco Bay area, I had the opportunity to visit some very innovative labs that were designed by Johnson and Johnson. While the labs were interesting, what galvanized my attention was the Johnson and Johnson Credo on a plaque on one of walls. I read it carefully and was (perhaps naively) stunned that a private sector company would come up with this in 1943 and were still working to live by it now.

Here it is: Continue reading “The Mission Statement”

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The Future of University Credentials

This is a great book by Sean Gallagher, the Chief Strategy Officer for Northeastern University’s Global Network. It is easy to read and well written and researched. If offers an historic overview of university credentialing and an up-to-date look (2016) at the current state of the game.

The book confirms that the university credential is alive and well, HR leaders and recruiters still use the bachelors or masters degree as the number one indicator of competence, despite increasing amounts of rhetoric to the contrary. Continue reading “The Future of University Credentials”