The "Make Me Smart" Question

One of my favorite podcasts, “Make Me Smart” with Kai Ryssdal and Molly Wood, has a recurring bit in which they ask a guest the “make me smart question.” The question is “what’s something you thought you knew but discovered you were wrong about?” The answers can be revealing, even if unintentionally; when one tech guru answered that “it turns out that a pony is just a small horse,” I knew this was not a reflective person.

I thought of the “make me smart” question in reading The Chronicle’s collection of reflections on the impact of the coronavirus on higher ed. I’m familiar enough with a majority of the authors to see that in every case in which I know the author’s work, the virus confirmed their priors. Nobody seemed to rethink anything; the standard response was along the lines of “my long-held view is vindicated yet again!”

That’s not necessarily bad, of course. Some of their priors were likely correct. Hell, I share some of them. But it was frustrating that a global pandemic forcing the shutdown of campuses across the country, and probably leading to dramatic restructuring when state tax revenues come in low, generated no new perspectives.

I’ll start. I thought I knew that recessions were good for community colleges. Historically, they have been. When employment goes down, enrollments go up. Part of that is the reduced opportunity cost during recessions: when the alternative to school is unemployment, school (with financial aid) looks pretty good. But opportunity cost is only part of the picture. When family resources take a hit, families that would normally have sent Ashley off to the University of Somewhere Else will sometimes take a second, more appreciative look at Local Community College; all of a sudden, the more affordable tuition becomes a lot more compelling. And that’s exactly what happened during the Great Recession and the last several recessions before it.

This one may be different, though.

The arguments from “opportunity cost” and “diminished family resources” still hold. If anything, they may be getting stronger. But the cause and shape of this recession are different, and it’s unclear what that will mean for community college enrollments. If people are afraid to go where other people are, for fear of contagion, then classrooms become less appealing. If people believe, correctly or incorrectly, that a second wave of contagion will interrupt the fall semester, I could see many of them deciding to postpone or skip it.

In other words, in this case, the positive effect of students choosing the lower-cost provider may be offset by the negative effect of students choosing not to be students at all.

The other variable is the weight of federal, as opposed to state and local, funding. We’ve already taken a cut from the state in light of anticipated reductions in sales tax revenues. It’s probably not the last. At the same time, we’re getting a boost from the feds. Something similar, if less abrupt, happened in 2009, when ARRA (federal stimulus) funding came along with state-level cuts. We don’t yet know how the various levels will balance, but I’m concerned.

On the positive side, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how quickly we’ve been able to move to remote learning and service provision. If you had asked me in January how well it would have gone, I would have predicted something much worse. I’m glad to have been wrong about that.

People across the college, and at our sister colleges, have really stepped up.

Going first doesn’t imply going last, so I’ll put it to my wise and worldly readers. What’s something that you thought you knew but discovered you were wrong about?