As part of his attempt to address California’s $11.2 billion budget deficit, Governor Schwarzenegger has proposed cutting about 10% from higher education.  For California community colleges, that means cutting 10% of funding at a time when enrollment has increased 10%.

Spreading the pain is an especially bad idea in this case because community colleges already receive considerably less funding than four-year institutions while serving considerably more students.

Community colleges serve almost three quarters of public undergraduate students in California.  Meanwhile, the California State University system serves under 20%, and the prestigious University of California serves under 10%.  Yet CSU gets twice the public funding that community colleges do, and UC gets three times the funding.

When unemployment rises and the economy worsens, lots of people return to school with the hope of improving their chances of future economic security. For many, that means improving their basic skills and/or pursuing career or technical education.  The first place they turn is to community colleges, where admission is less restrictive than at four-year institutions and costs are lower.

In spite of the controversial high school exit exam requirement, California high schools are still graduating many young people who do not have job-ready English-language, reading, writing, or math skills.  Community colleges are the only institutions prepared to seriously address this basic-skills problem.

Community colleges also serve adults who want to improve their job skills or train for a new career.  Earning a four-year degree may not be on their radar.  Yet people seeking improved job skills have higher community college course completion rates than people seeking degrees.

In difficult economic times, public funding will achieve more at the community college level than it will at the four-year college or university level.  At a time like this, community college is the worst place to cut higher education funding.

Most of us know people who “always knew” that they wanted to be teachers, doctors, lawyers, scientists, pilots, firefighters, nurses, veterinarians, actors.  They kept their eyes focused on that goal from a young age, and they went over, around, or through obstacles to make it happen.  If people like this can find the resources to get the advanced education they need right after high school, then college is where they belong.

Most of us, however, are less clear about what career we want to pursue.  If we go straight to college, we may change majors three or four times or just major in what we’ve always done best in order to get it over with.  It may take us five, six, or seven years to finish, as debt accumulates.  We may just give up and drop out.  We may try again and again and drop out again and again, each time feeling more like a failure.

We might have been better off just earning money for a few years while we got used to adulthood and the real world of work.  (Notice I’m not advocating that young adults hang around freeloading.)

Some people simply can’t afford to do anything but go straight to work after high school.  And some people are just not interested in spending anymore time in school.

Whatever a person’s reason for not going straight to college after high school, no one should be made to feel guilty about it.  No one should be made to feel like a failure.  The place for higher education in some people’s lives is when they are 24 or 27.  Or 45.  Or 60.

When I was teaching college, my favorite classes were the ones with students who had not come straight from high school.  These were the students with interesting ideas and experiences to share.  They knew why they were in college, and they were motivated.  Usually, they were hungry to learn.

Yes, it is harder to go to college when you have adult responsibilities.  But you will probably get a lot more out of it.

In some people’s lives, the right place for higher education—not just training, but exposure to abstract ideas and advanced cognitive skills—is immediately after high school.   In my experience, though, most 18 year olds aren’t ready to benefit from that kind of education.

Acquiring a degree is commonly confused with getting an education.

We have created a situation in the U.S. in which employers often require college degrees because they don’t trust the public secondary education system to produce workplace-ready employees.  At the same time, a college degree is widely recognized to be a marker of social class, and this encourages people to use college for class mobility.

These two features of a college degree—that it is both a minimum job requirement and a ticket to the middle class—have undermined the quality of higher education by forcing it to accommodate students who have no interest in learning beyond what they need to earn a living.

I can’t fault them for wanting to earn a living.

Consider Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. (Wikipedia provides a reasonable overview.)  This hierarchy is represented by a pyramid whose base is Physiological Needs such as air, water, food, and sleep.  When those needs are met, an individual can move up to the next level and think about Safety Needs like living in a safe place and having job security. An individual who is safe and secure can begin to care about Social Needs such as friends, relationships, a sense of community.

Maslow posited that only when those needs are met does the individual care about Esteem Needs like status, recognition, achievement. At the top of the pyramid, Maslow placed Self-Actualization.  He argued that you can fulfill your highest potential only if your lower needs are met.

Not everyone agrees that this is a complete analysis of human needs or even that human needs can be placed in a hierarchy.  But it can be a useful tool nonetheless. I had some students in college humanities classes who were dealing with hunger, illness, or homelessness while going to college in the hopes of getting a decent job with decent health benefits.  It didn’t surprise me that they had a hard time caring about a task such as analyzing imagery in Faulkner’s “Dry September.”

Despite the often-heard claim that the U.S. needs more people with college educations, the economy doesn’t need educated people as much as it needs people trained to do certain kinds of work and encouraged to have certain kinds of social class aspirations.  That is because the desire for more things and more experiences is the major driver of a market economy.  Most people will be happy with their education if it allows them to earn a living that will ensure their place in the middle class.

Higher education in the U.S. does a better job of graduating good producers and consumers than in graduating informed, thoughtful citizens.  Berkowitz (see previous posts) argues that college students are not getting the kind of education they need to be good citizens of a democracy.

The same argument is made by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), which tested about 14,000 freshman and seniors at 50 colleges and universities on their knowledge in fields ISI considered necessary for enlightened citizenship. Sixty multiple-choice questions measured students’ knowledge in America’s history, government, international relations, and market economy.

According to ISI,  “Seniors, on average, failed all four subjects, and their overall average score was 53.2%.”   Seniors did no better than freshmen, and occasionally did worse.  ISI also notes, “When measured by the civic knowledge students had gained during college, the most prestigious schools were the worst performers.”

ISI calls on colleges to correct this situation.  But the truth is that many college students are just not at a stage in their lives where they care about citizenship.  You can expose an impatient 20-year-old to higher level cognitive skills and subject matter outside his or her major, but you can’t force that student to acquire any more skills or knowledge than are necessary to earn a passing grade.

That is why we can’t identify the proper place of higher education without considering its place in the life of the individual.

Liberal arts colleges and universities can be snooty about the quality of education they provide, but they don’t necessarily do a very good job either.

In my last post, I referred to an article by Peter Berkowitz in the December 2006 & January 2007 issue of Policy Review.  In the article, titled “Liberal Education, Then and Now,”  Berkowitz compares the ideal university education described by John Stuart Mill to today’s typical university education.  He says that contemporary liberal arts colleges and universities don’t agree about the “core knowledge and defining qualities of an educated person.”  Therefore, students do not acquire a “common intellectual foundation.”  He asks

So what if universities, for lack of a standard, are unable to say whether their graduates are well-educated?  A college degree remains a hot commodity, a ticket of entry to valuable social networks, a signal to employers that graduates have achieved a certain proficiency in manipulating concepts, performing computations, and getting along with peers.  If universities continue to offer parents a good return on investment, donors a pleasant place to practice philanthropy, professors good research opportunities, and students a convivial four years in which to get ready for their careers, why not leave well enough alone?

Berkowitz’s answer: “A university that fails to teach students sound mental habits and to acquaint them with enduring ideas handicaps its graduates for both public and private life.”

Berkowitz has his own ideas about what studies would produce an educated person, and his suggestions go beyond the usual general education breadth requirements.  He particularly objects to professors pushing narrow ideological agendas.  He says that “universities that purport to provide a liberal education will be failing in their mission unless their graduates, progressives and conservatives alike, prove capable of sympathetically understanding the positions of the political party to which they do not belong and discerning what is true and enduring in the beliefs of their partisan opponents.”

By this standard, even some of the leading figures in our political life appear not to be very well educated.

When suicidal Muslim fanatics flew airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, taking thousands of people with them to their deaths, most Americans were satisfied with seeing this as simply mindless, inexplicable evil.  It was certainly evil, but it was neither mindless nor inexplicable.  However, the efforts of some educated, thoughtful people to understand and explain 9/11 were widely viewed in America as unpatriotic, even equivalent to treason.

Americans’ willing ignorance about the culture and geo-politics of the Middle East made it easy for the Bush Administration to frame the invasion of Iraq as retribution for the terrorist attacks of September 2001.  Seven years later, after thousands of lives have been sacrificed and billions of dollars have been spent on the Iraq War, little progress has been made in bringing to justice the men responsible for 9/11.  Understanding what motivated them, without excusing it, would have led to the development of much more effective and efficient strategies for disabling al-Qaeda.

The December 2006 & January 2007 issue of Policy Review (a publication of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution), includes an article by Peter Berkowitz titled “Liberal Education, Then and Now.”  Berkowitz explores the ideas of 19th century British philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill regarding the purpose of a university and compares those ideas to today’s typical university education.

Here is Berkowitz paraphrasing, then quoting, Mill: “Liberal education is the civic education, or education for citizenship, proper to liberal democracy because it aims to form a human being fit for freedom:

The proper business of a University is . . . not to tell us from authority what we ought to believe, and make us accept the belief as a duty, but to give us information and training, and help us to form our own belief in a manner worthy of intelligent beings, who seek for truth at all hazards, and demand to know all the difficulties, in order that they may be better qualified to find, or recognize, the most satisfactory mode of resolving them.

Would Americans be better educated for citizenship if they all went to college?  Not necessarily.   Despite a widespread belief that we need to send more young people to college, many Americans deeply distrust and resist the kind of education Mill advocates.  Also, Berkowitz argues that colleges and universities are not doing a very good job of providing this ideal of a liberal education.  I’ll explore his argument further in another post.

Years ago when I was doing training in the workplace, I learned a useful distinction between education and training.  I learned that education is understanding and interpreting information, whereas training is using that understanding to do something.

Training makes appropriate use of the behaviorist model of learning I discussed in the last post.

Much of what we call education is actually training.  People who go to school to be dental hygienists, medical billers, network administrators, payroll clerks, corrections officers, construction managers, fashion merchandisers, or administrative assistants are being trained to do something.  (So are people who go to school to be doctors.)

Some private post-secondary schools that have training as their main goal now throw in liberal arts classes like Humanities and Environmental Science to qualify them to grant degrees.  In my experience, this just annoys the students, who often feel like the victims of a bait-and-switch scheme.  They are glad to have the degree but have no interest in paying extra money for studies that don’t move them toward getting a job.

And what is wrong with wanting to get a job?  Not a thing.

Most young people in the U.S. long for independence, and as a culture, we encourage that.   They want to earn money to buy things and experiences.  There is plenty of evidence that although they probably need specialized training, they may not need a four-year degree to get a good job.

So by all means let us train them to be financially independent.  But let’s stop telling them or ourselves that what we are doing is educating them.

What we are doing is preparing them to be producers and giving them the means to be good consumers and taxpayers.  We are preparing them to function as part of the economy.

Mid-level workers in most fields have had the experience of having to record and report everything they do in a given period of time, for the purpose of being evaluated. How many cold calls did you make in an hour? How many customers did you see? How many forms did you process? How many absent students did you talk to? Computers make it easy to collect and process this kind of data, and they appear to provide an objective means of judging productivity.

The problem, of course, as anyone who has been evaluated this way knows, is that the method fails to capture many of the behaviors that result in actual productivity, like the extra time you spent with one particular customer or one particular student. This is a management technique that reduces every task to its least creative, most routine parts.

Some of the most important work in the world cannot be easily quantified, and that is true of education too. The part that can be quantified is knowledge of data and facts. We have standardized tests for that. But it is hard to objectively test higher level cognitive skills like analysis, synthesis, or evaluation.

Surfing the web the other night for information about constructivism, I stumbled on a blog by a young teacher with whom I instantly identified. This teacher was frustrated by the requirement to teach to objectives using the behaviorist model of learning.

My guess is that anyone who has gone through teacher training in the last 15 years has had to design lessons around SWBAT: the “Student Will Be Able To” formula. It involves breaking the thing to be learned into a series of measurable behaviors. A whole vocabulary of active verbs describes these behaviors: the Student Will Be Able To name, to identify, to explain, to select, to use, to list. But one verb you absolutely may not use in an SWBAT lesson plan is “understand.”

That is because, as the blogger noted, “Understanding is not measurable. Behavior, however, is.”

With older students, especially at the college level, an advantage of SWBAT lesson plans is that they reduce arguments about grades because they reduce arguments about correctness. When only measurable, right or wrong behaviors are assessed, there is little chance for a student to complain, “My answer isn’t wrong. You just don’t agree with me.”

Because it works best at the lowest level of cognitive skills, SWBAT is not very useful for producing what I have defined as an educated person. But it is ideal for training. See my next post.

I used to ask my career college students to define an educated person. (To read some of their answers, see “Defining an educated person,” my posting for May 5). I wasn’t looking for a formal definition of “educated,” and I had no answer in mind when I asked the question. But if I want to put higher education in its place, I need to be clear about what I think education is and what I think it ought to do.

So here is a formal definition: Education is a field of human endeavor concerned with the acquisition of cognitive skills necessary for independent intellectual and moral (behavioral) functioning. Educating children develops emotional and physical skills as well, but in general, higher education assumes that students have already gone through those developmental stages.

Because education is a cultural endeavor, it will also give students a framework within which to understand nature and human interaction. This means that when I teach a child to add and subtract, I do it in part by referring to the mercantile system in which that child will ultimately need to use arithmetic. When I teach the scientific method as a skill for dealing with the natural world, I assume at the same time that the natural world operates according to scientific principles.

It might be possible to limit education to only those principles that have no cultural implications, but it would not be very useful. Furthermore, teaching that gives students no skills for dealing constructively with the world outside their own culture (such as the teaching we hear of Afghan boys receiving in madrassas) does not fit my definition of education.

Ideally, education exposes students to a variety of ideas without telling them what to think. Education is concerned with the mechanics of thinking about ideas, with questioning, comparing, and using trial and error to arrive at solutions. In Bloom’s Taxonomy of learning, knowledge—recall of data or information—is just the beginning level. Beyond mere knowledge lie comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and finally, evaluation.

The idea that acquiring knowledge equates to getting educated reflects the consumerist bias of American culture. The consequence of this idea is we have a lot of people running around with college degrees who are not really educated at all.

Because of the Amethyst Initiative, we now know that the amethyst is the gem that the Greeks believed kept people from getting intoxicated. (I assume we mean the ancient Greeks, here, and since the ancient Greeks had elaborate religious ceremonies in which they worshipped Dionysus by getting intoxicated and otherwise abandoning themselves, I wonder how much use amethysts actually got.)

About 100 U.S. college presidents have signed the Amethyst Initiative calling for reconsideration of the legal drinking age. They argue that the present drinking age encourages binge drinking.

Well something certainly encourages binge drinking by adolescents and young adults. But if rebellion is the explanation, then we ought to get rid of age minimums altogether. Otherwise, following the same logic, lowering the legal drinking age to 18 will just create more alcohol abuse among 16 year olds or preteens. Getting rid of the minimum drinking age isn’t as radical as it seems; many countries around the world regulate the age for purchase of alcohol but not the age for consuming it.

Lots of kids go away to college looking forward to partying without parental supervision; getting a degree is just a good excuse. It is understandable that colleges don’t want to add policing that partying to all their other responsibilities. But will kids stop getting drunk just because it is legal? I doubt it.

Young people are inclined to do stupid and risky things, and binge drinking is just one of them. What is revealing is that college campuses have become the locus of so much binge drinking. Traditional college campuses are incubators for people getting ready to be adults, and in our culture, a major feature of adulthood is self-medication with drugs and alcohol. If college students drink more than working adults do, it is probably because they have fewer responsibilities demanding their time and attention.

I live in a wine-growing region where the economy relies heavily on a product that makes a lot of people intoxicated. You can say all the sophisticated things you want to about the taste of wine; it wouldn’t be as popular if that taste didn’t come with a buzz. We need to stop talking about legal drinking ages altogether and ask what it is about American culture that makes so many people want to get drunk.

Students should be wary of any school that offers them all or most of their coursework via computer. Lots of skills can be taught online, but we should not deceive ourselves that this is a high quality educational alternative.

There are advantages to online course delivery. The instructor can post readings and direct students to a wide variety of very current material. Students can perform a series of discrete tasks and get immediate feedback and reinforcement—in effect, operant conditioning. When I choose the right Spanish sentence to go with the picture in Rosetta Stone, a nice little bell tells me so; a different bell tells me when I’m wrong. Educational software can deliver and grade objective quizzes and tests, the kind where true/false, multiple choice, or short answer questions test a student’s memory of facts and data.

It can also be very convenient for the student to complete coursework without ever leaving home, at any time of day or night. But getting help or feedback from the instructor when you need it can be difficult or impossible. And anyone who has participated in a discussion board for an online course knows that it bears little resemblance to a real class discussion.

(Of course, there are media like Skype that allow you to see the person you are talking to electronically. I talk to my daughter in Mexico using Skype. It is pretty good, but it is still a poor substitute for her physical presence.)

Meanwhile, the real benefit of online courses is for the school itself. A school saves the costs associated with a physical facility—what has come to be called “bricks and mortar”—and may take advantage of online courses to overload instructors with more students than they can reasonably respond to.

In 2001, Mother Jones magazine published an article by Eyal Press and Jennifer Washburn called “Digital Diplomas.” The authors explored the inadequacies of online coursework from the standpoint of learning, and they pointed to the dangers of joint ventures between for-profit, commercial producers of online educational materials and tax-exempt educational institutions.

One quote in that article has stuck with me. The authors quoted an LA Times op-ed article by Teresa Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh: “[In] the future, traditional colleges will train a select group of students in critical thinking and problem solving, ‘while mass universities will deploy distance learning to deliver low-cost content. . . necessary to turn working-class students into performers for low- and mid-level jobs in the global economy.’”

And there we have it: bricks and mortar for the elites, e-learning for the masses.

Communications theorists say that in any face-to-face communication, only 7% of the message is conveyed by words. The other 93% is conveyed nonverbally, through media like gestures, facial expression, and intonation.

If this percentage seems exaggerated, consider a situation where you ask someone, “How are you?” and the person answers, “Fine.” Imagine how many different ways that word “Fine” could be spoken. The speaker could sound genuinely happy, or resigned, or sarcastic, or tired, or angry. Imagine the possible expressions on the speaker’s face.

Suppose you ask, “How are you?” and the person who answers “Fine” immediately starts to cry. Do you trust the word you heard?

In fact, if what we hear a person say doesn’t agree with that person’s nonverbal behavior, we believe the nonverbal behavior.

We are so used to communicating using electronic media that we forget how much information we miss when we aren’t in the physical presence of the person we are talking to. Email and text messaging are full of messages that were meant to be harmless but that offended the recipient. The words arrived without the padding of gesture and tone of voice.

This is why for all the praise accorded online learning, it is a poor substitute for sitting in a classroom with other students and an instructor, experiencing the dynamics of human interaction and getting face-to-face feedback. I’m having a lot of fun right now using Rosetta Stone to study Spanish on my computer, but when I used my newly-learned words to ask my friend Esther, “¿Cómo está su hija?” I still couldn’t understand her reply.  The software can’t provide a real person saying something unpredictable.

When traditional instructors oppose online learning—and many do—it isn’t just because they are worried about their jobs. It is because they understand the limitations of the medium better than do the entrepreneurs selling online courses.