Confessions of a Community College Dean

If credits are available for free, what will colleges sell?

This year, for the first time, we made new student orientation mandatory. By “mandatory,” I mean that a new student who doesn’t attend any of the orientation sessions would get his schedule dropped. (Obviously, we had to run a whole bunch of sessions on different days and times, so we did.) People on campus keep commenting on how unusually smooth the first few days of class have been.

As regular readers know, I’ve carried on a bit of a crusade against the credit hour for a while now. The credit hour is a time-based measure that essentially forces colleges to measure outputs entirely in terms of inputs, thereby defeating any productivity gain. Combine that with Baumol’s cost disease -- by which sectors whose productivity rises more slowly than the average are doomed to higher real costs over time -- and higher education is in a tough spot.

A few months ago, Dahlia Lithwick had a charming piece in Slate about two kinds of Muppets: Order Muppets and Chaos Muppets. She suggested that most people fall into one of the two camps. The Order Muppets -- Kermit, Bert, Scooter, Sam the Eagle -- are concerned with keeping the show running. The Chaos Muppets -- Cookie Monster, Ernie, Gonzo, Animal -- are a bit more, well, demonstrative. They bring energy, and entropy.

This year, for the first time since leaving grad school, I’d love to hear students on campus seriously discuss the election outside of class.

Richard Florida and Bill Bishop, in their different ways, have pointed out the increased geographic clustering of the educated/creative classes. Broadly speaking, the creative classes tend to cluster in urban areas near oceans, leaving the vast middle “hollowing out,” as Richard Longworth put it.

How do you sell the idea of liberal arts to an 18 year old? Admittedly, the question scans differently at different institutions. At the snooty/exclusive liberal arts colleges, the sale has already been made. At a community college in a non-affluent area -- my beat -- the issue is a little trickier.

I spend a fairly alarming amount of my time these days on grant-related projects. Each is worthy in its own way, of course, but they have certain limitations in common.