January 5, 2010 « The Three-Year Degree (Part II) »
This multi-part Executive Briefing on the Three-year Degree was prepared exclusively for university-level senior decision-makers. The writing assumes progressive organizational experience leading to a senior position in a college or university setting.
Part I of this Executive Briefing assessed the current situation. Part II continues this assessment with key points of consideration in adopting such degrees.
Facilitating the Transition to Three Years
A three-year bachelor's degree is possible and, for some programs and students, the two-year degree is possible. In both cases, done right, efficiency and aggregate quality will be improved over that of many current four-year baccalaureates.
Talking Points
Following are a few considerations for leading the discussion toward the three year baccalaureate.
- Notwithstanding our intellectual appreciation, there is little practical appreciation of the fact that higher education is no longer the small number of niche markets it was 100 or even 50 years ago. It is a mass meta-market made up of dozens of distinct markets, each having its own needs and optimal systems for delivery and management.
- It is unhelpful to rhapsodize about the good old days of the college experience. If such days ever existed, those markets now represent a fraction of today's large and still growing markets.
- Almost half of college students are adults, most are working and have families and professional responsibilities. For them, ivy, dormitories, swimming pools, and student union buildings are irrelevant and, more than likely, intrusive. The 35-year-old married employee needs efficient education that happens quickly and improves his professional capabilities.
- In earlier, slower times, the transformation of the abstract and disconnected knowledge learned in the classroom into the integrated proficiencies in the workplace was a journey taken on the job, usually in the first two to three years. Few enjoy that luxury today, especially those who are already working and who are seeking additional education to address specific challenges they face or hope to face in the workplace.
- With few exceptions, learning environments can be optimized (where 'optimal' includes elements of economies of learning and transferability to the target application environment) through the application of knowledge and generalizations derived from modern learning sciences:
- The conditions for an optimal educational environment are not a property of higher education in general, a university, a department, or even a course.
- The conditions for an optimal educational environment are determined at the intersection of the material to be learned, those who will facilitate that learning, and those who will learn. This means that optimality must be constructed for each distinct environment, not derived from culture, nostalgia, habit, or cant.
- The optimality of which we are speaking must be created by the application of findings from modern learning sciences, not the antiquity of the professorial guild, a body that resists most forms of change and teaches in large measure the same way its great-great grand-professors taught. Borrowing a phrase from Michael Scriven, it is treasonous for a professor to dismiss or ignore modern learning sciences in 2010. It was not so in 1910 when very little was known about optimizing learning, and little of what was known could be applied with any certainty.
- To achieve results superior to those of the typical four-year degree, the three-year degree must exploit modern learning sciences to achieve the following:
- Authenticity - In learning objectives, activities, and assessments
- Compression - Measured in time to proficiency
- Horizontal Learning - Measured in inter-learner dispersion of proficiency
- It is also helpful to understand the special importance of authenticity in teaching and measuring learning for adult students who are already building careers for themselves.
- The working adult and professional markets want their learning objectives, activities, and assessments to mirror the ways they demonstrate proficiency in the workplace or their profession.
- Managers never ask employees to imagine they are the CEO at Chrysler, nor do they assess what employees know with invalid multiple-choice or essay examinations.
- Competent managers judge employees' proficiencies by observing the behavior and results of work teams, their ability to give focused briefings (oral and written), and their ability to solve problems related to their position in the organization.
- Bringing realistic learning processes and assessments into the classroom compresses learning and accelerates eagerness to learn more and more deeply. There is no pedagogically sound excuse for the way we teach or evaluate student performance. There is a preference among the professoriate to assess lower-order knowledge with multiple-choice items whereas authentic projects can be designed that subsume this lower-order knowledge in the process of assessing higher-order proficiencies. Projects of this kind integrate learning activities with assessment.
- Create better assessment instruments and processes. In the study we conducted, more than 50% of a few hundred faculty-constructed assessments failed to meet minimum acceptable measurement science standards. Colleagues at ETS socialized this same number when they hired professors to write draft items for special projects. (These were individuals who liked to write items and believed they were good at it.) If the professor were being graded on his ability to create a valid "test" he would have failed. The multiple-choice tests we examined contained a high proportion of items that discriminated negatively (poor students were most likely to answer the question correctly therefore the overall test would be more valid without the item) or contained multiple positive discrimination answers (question added no value to the test). Essay examinations fared no better, although for different technical reasons (usually low reliability). The most problematic flaw however was that few of the assessments could be classified as being authentic in the way known to accelerate learning, retention, and motivation to progress to higher levels.
- Bring the incessant and self-serving whining about academic 'rigor' and 'quality' to an end. The posture is not only unattractive and hypocritical, it is a lie. Notwithstanding degrees for which there are external proficiency benchmarks, only a handful of the nation’s colleges and universities conduct scientifically sound integrated assessments of learning processes, outcomes, and impact, including student goal attainment. Of these few institutions, perhaps 10% use the information systematically as decision-support to improve quality, efficiency, etc. The rest of the schools conform to Ted Manning's observations by producing copious claims to vague notions of quality they can’t prove, and don’t understand very well.
- Replace the unsound, unprovable, and largely irrelevant notions of rigor and quality with the understanding that modern definitions of quality derive from the construct "Suitability to Purpose"—but whose purpose? Most economists would argue that the customer’s purpose is central and dominant. Higher education, on the other hand, discounts the student as a customer and derives its notions of quality from professorial purposes, which are often at variance with those of the customer. The purpose I suggest as a starting place is as follows:
Optimize the learning experience for the student in accordance with his specific goals. (Recalling: 'optimize' means shortest time and fewest resources to proficiency for desired goals.)
Compared to What?
Some stakeholders need to be reminded of the fundamental question in program evaluation:
How does the proposed change compare to the current condition?
The not too well kept secret is that many four-year degrees take five, six, or occasionally seven years to complete. Many colleges, especially public universities, are so poorly managed that classes are not available when students need them. Worse still, this problem is of little concern to the college system. Students are too low in the list of considerations.
If Heeding the Learning Sciences Isn't a Good Enough Reason
Contemplate the significance of the growth rate of the for-profits. Whereas the for-profits captured less than 1% of market share 10 years ago, today it is more than 10% and growing faster than ever.
Why is the growth rate of the for-profits relevant to this issue? If the state and independent schools fail to offer the shorter time to degrees that a large and growing number of students, parents, and families desire, the for-profits will, in time (and that time is the present), leave those institutions clinging to the 4-7 year degree with a client base consisting largely of negative margin students the for-profits don’t want.
Finally, contemplate the affordability crisis in higher education. As reported in the New York Times in December 2008, between 1982 and 2008, the costs of higher education increased over 400 per cent while taxpayer income increased slightly over 120 per cent. Even absent the current economic crisis, middle class families already had hit the higher education affordability wall. In an economy where three-quarters of productivity derives from intellectual systems and processes, efficient and affordable higher education plays an elemental role in future economic performance. Even in time of fiscal crisis, U.S. higher education is neither efficient nor affordable. In 2009, the year of a major recession, the aggregate costs of higher education continued on their historical course, outstripping the CPI by about 4 percentage points. By most estimates, the three-year degree can reduce aggregate costs from 15 to 27 percent.
A Distinctive Time for Leadership
It is time to end the irrational commitment to the sanctity of 48 months. It is time to encourage all forms of rational experimentation to serve students with higher quality education in time frames better suited to their needs. It is time to save parents money. It is time to consider the economy and middle-class access.
None of this experimentation should advance blindly. It is also time to insist that new programs contain the right kinds of metrics to ensure that stated goals are achieved and improvement is a continuous process.
Robert W. Tucker is President and CEO of InterEd, Inc.
He can be reached through this forum.
The expression of other views by leaders in higher education is welcomed.
Reader Comments (7)
Are there some good examples of the 3-year degree out there? What evidence do they have so far that the outcomes are similar?
I do not doubt that student assessment can be much improved.
A while after I stopped teaching, I ran into a former student of mine that complained about his own performance on tests in a class given by a former colleague (multiple-choice item exams).
Later, I saw the student again, and asked him how it was going. The student reported that he had a talk with the instructor and was given some test-taking tips. The student was now satisfied with the results, apparently having improved his test taking.
I was shocked that his improvement had nothing to do with course itself or its content! Apparently, students were being tested on their test taking skills, not their mastery of the course content.
This brief story suggests that there may be such a thing as "authentic assessment," as well as authentic teaching.
The kinds of tests and exams that were just described are fraudulent, because they purport to do one thing, but in actuality they accomplish something else entirely. The gap between the two is enormous, and worth labeling an "accountability gap" in higher education.
And while some tips about creating "authentic" assessment measures can be found in today's article, I think that it needs to be treated as its own topic.
I am also somewhat suspicious of relying on the findings of 'learning sciences', since it is apparently a small academic movement confined to particular Schools and Colleges of Education. That is, its sociological profile is indicative of the professionalizing agenda of teacher education (see: David F. Labaree, The Trouble with Ed School, Yale (2004) on the 'status improvement strategy' of the Holmes Group).
But, as I said up-front, I strongly agree that student assessment stands in need of improvement. It may sound strange to post-modern ears, but the first item that needs to be addressed is the moral problem involved with improper testing. I don't think that authentic student assessment (as opposed to inauthentic student assesssment) can be separated from this moral problem, and that both must be addressed together -- somehow.
To McGhee: When I think of the learning sciences, I don't think of the pedagogical experts at the education schools, although they are doing some really good work, especially in the learning and technology programs such as at Indiana, etc. I think more of the psychological and neurological sciences, some sociological sciences, and especially the new hybrid disciplines. For most things to be learned in higher education, the generalizations from the sciences seem to support various forms of horizontal or engaged learning ("horizontal" is Tucker's term; I first heard this used by him in a 1986 CAEL meeting in San Francisco), structured realistic activities, and other kinds of authenticity in teaching, including assessment, which is a logical and moral component of teaching.
McGhee raises a really interesting issue in pointing out the moral shortfall in most assessment. Is there a legal dimension as well? What might happen if a litigious student secured the raw test data from some of his courses and was able to prove that the grades assigned (inter- and intra-student) were scientifically invalid? For many tens of thousands of courses taught across the nation, this would not be difficult to do. Unfortunately, it may be the threat of lawsuits -- not the good and right reasons -- that causes reform in assessment. Sad for education but an untapped windfall for class action lawyers!
As for authenticity, it seems to me that the good and right reasons are obvious, at least in the applied disciplines. What excuse do we have for failing to create activities and assessments that imitate the professional world in which the student is or will want to be involved and successful. How many employment situations require employees to demonstrate their competence by writing a certain number of pages or answering "None of the Above" to a poorly worded question. It is just as easy in the long run to construct activities and assessments that are of the same overall kind that students will experience in the workplace. In doing this, the assessments carry a new kind of validity that is independent of the more technical forms; the assessment is realistic as practice, even if it is less than perfect in terms of discrimination, etc. As Tucker and McGhee say, it is shameful and more to give an invalid multiple choice test in a class where the professor is earning a living teaching how to engage validly as a scientist. What hypocrisy!
Franken asked: "What might happen if a litigious student secured the raw test data from some of his courses and was able to prove that the grades assigned (inter- and intra-student) were scientifically invalid? For many tens of thousands of courses taught across the nation, this would not be difficult to do."
This gave me a chuckle. Then I read it again. I seem to recall a dissertation on applying malpractice to higher ed. Malpractice was the legal theory regarding standing, the first step to being heard in court.
In the dissertation, the use of the term "due care" was pivotal, as I recall, but since it is a term of art, enormous latitude is given to institutions in the courts under this theory. In fact, this is another instance were such schools could and do hide behind their accreditation, using it as a shield against legal liability. (If they are accredited, it is assumed that they exercise "due care" in the classroom.)
Another legal approach, using the False Claims Act (FCA), can be extremely lucrative for the successful whistleblower, but they rarely win. The FCA says that in receiving federal money regarding which an institution knowingly and with intent issues false claims, commits fraud. For profit institutions have gotten hit with this, but, here again, public schools are immune. I guess the reasoning is that because public schools are, in effect, the government, they cannot be sued for defrauding the government. [The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that whistleblowers cannot bring cases against states or state-owned entities. Vermont Agency of Natural Resources v. United States ex rel. Stevens, 529 U.S. 765, 120 S.Ct. 1858, 146 L.Ed.2d 836 (2000).] Go figure.
But to return to multiple-choice item construction, however poorly written or well written they are, there is another another point that needs to be addressed: fairness. That is, "Was that a fair question to ask this student in this particular instructional context?" How do we know that the content assessed is the content that was covered by the teacher? Assessment (of/on) material NOT covered is as much a problem as poorly constructed test questions.
What options can ensure this kind of "fairness," I wonder, without being unduly intrusive?
One of the clear challenges that face University presidents and other senior leaders will be the courage to envision new ways in which to construct the college experience; one that promotes learning and creates new value for the student. In order for University leaders to successfully meet these challenges it will require a willingness on the part of leaders to examine old and long held assumptions regarding historical administrative practices such as credit hours and student seat time. Rather a focus on learning, competency attainment and demonstration should drive how we design and deliver courses/modules.
It is this later point that underpins Southern New Hampshire Universities Three Year degree program. Like Professor Seidman, I have spent the last fourteen years designing, teaching, and assessing the program’s efficacy. With ten years worth of data and the highly supportive independent reviews by three different accreditation agencies we have a model that works and can be replicated at other institutions. Unlike Zemsky, I believe the movement of three year degree programs will be more likely seen at small private colleges who face increasing pressure to compete for an ever decreasing pool of traditional aged college students.
M. Bradley, SNHU
Theoretically, I agree with the need for something other than multiple choice tests to assess learning. However, the reality for most of us who are part-time faculty - and we are a growing number - is that there is not the time nor the support for what Dr. Tucker proposes. I get no reward for putting in more time, but actually see my hourly rate decline. If higher ed really wants to serve its students it needs to address the dismal way it treats part-time faculty.
We agree with JJW's general position but would offer one additional consideration.
To a certain extent, the time-on-task required for various assessment options varies more in terms of where, in the instruction process, the time is required than it varies in the absolute. Authentic assessments, wherein activities and assessments are integrated largely on the workload of the students and student learning teams, do take time to develop. Once developed, they tend to return time on the backside in that evaluation rubrics are quickly and easily completed, leaving no other grading work. We won't go so far as to say they require less time than copying a multiple-choice text out of an instructor's manual. However, when combined with their benefits (student engagement, faculty reward in the teaching process, high learning and generalization rates), they are an attractive, even compelling, option.
This said, there is no excuse for failing to provide adequate resources to part-time faculties.
- staff