Breakthrough Changes at Kaplan University

Sometimes there are special moments when you are very proud of where you work and the people you work with. This was such a week for me.

After more than six years of work, from conceptualization to development to implementation, Kaplan University has unveiled its three-way approach to competency assessment. This revised approach gives each learner evidence of their achievement in course outcomes, general education competencies (i.e. critical thinking, writing, etc.), and behavioral proficiencies that track the abilities that employers say make the difference between struggling on the job and being ready to work on Day 1. Combined with the modularization of its entire curriculum, the assessment of prior experiential learning, and the resources of the Open College at Kaplan University (OC@KU), this creates a better fit between the needs of the learner and our content.

This adds up to an overall redefinition of what “meeting the needs of the learner” actually means. From a curricular standpoint, Kaplan is now able to wrap its resources around the learner’s needs instead of asking the learner to adjust to the college’s programs. As Kevin Carey points out in his recent book, “The End of College,” we are entering a period of mass personalization where responding to the learner’s needs can lie at the heart of the educational endeavor. By giving learners the evidence that employers need and want to see, we are meeting their needs in a new dimension, linking explicit evidence of their knowledge and ability to standards that employers value.

This integrated approach to competency assessment also mines each learning experience far more thoroughly for value, extracting and measuring all three kinds of learning instead of just the traditional course outcomes. This has significant implications for reducing the time and cost of attaining a certificate or a degree. When Provost Dr. Betty Vandenbosch announced this new approach, she was heralding Kaplan’s emergence as one of only a few leaders on this new frontier of how we “do” higher education. And with the pride of the moment comes our responsibility to do it well and continually improve our understanding and capacity to do it better.

Read the Paul Fain article “Profit and Competency” for more information on this new approach.

“Belling the Cat” of Investments in Higher Education

In their provocative new publication “Rich Schools, Poor Students: Tapping Large University Endowments to Improve Student Outcomes,” Jorge Klor de Alva and Mark Schneider painstakingly document yet another of the ways that the overall higher education investment in America favors the well-to-do – both institutions and students alike. By combining the property tax benefits as well as the inviolate status of large endowments, Klor de Alva and Schneider raise the issue of indirect public subsidies, putting them on the table along with the myriad other subsidies, including tuition, state and federal appropriations, and financial aid.

The findings are, frankly more extreme than I would have imagined. Over $100,000 per student at Princeton (my alma mater) with $50,000+ totals at the other leading non-profit, elite institutions. The authors then elaborate on who attends those institutions from a needs-based vantage point. Not unsurprisingly, although their numbers have improved, Pell-eligible students still constitute small minorities of the student populations at these institutions. The net effect is a huge cross-subsidy to everyone else and their families.

As a solution, the authors propose an excise tax on the largest endowments, scaled to the size of the endowment, while continuing to protect the deductions that go to donors, thus preserving that advantage. And they suggest that the proceeds go to improved student services (and hopefully improved outcomes) at institutions that serve a majority of low income learners. This might be called a “robin hood” approach by some; but I think of it as a progressive move to put our money where our societal and educational challenges, rural and urban, lie.

As author and professor Jeffrey Selingo reports, some people might well disagree with Klor de Alva and Schneider’s solutions to the problem, either the excise tax or how its proceeds would be used. And some people might argue against the whole proposition, citing the disruption it would cause these premier teaching and research institutions.

The simple fact of revealing the extent of the hidden subsidies for the 100 wealthiest colleges and universities, however, and asking whether this was really the intent of the policy makers when they were put in place, is long overdue. My study of the origins of these policies suggests no such intent. The institutions were deemed a social good, as were churches and other community institutions and given a pass on property taxes. The same gentle treatment was applied to endowments with the “misunderstanding” that they actually reduced the demand for public support by helping keep non-profit private institutions solvent.

As the run-up in tuition and costs has underscored in the last 20 years, the traditional equation is no longer working. I might suggest a different “fix” with the money raised by the excise tax, whatever its rate. Why not put the money – with a negotiated base allocation for each state that favors smaller, rural, and poorer states – in a trust fund to be allocated annually to the Governor of each state for re-allocation “from the bottom up” to the operating budgets of community and state colleges?

No matter what, the political and policy communities, not to mention the institutions that serve marginalized students and their families, owe Klor de Alva and Schneider great thanks for “belling the cat” of this extraordinary cross subsidy and the unintended inequity it represents.

OC@KU Wins 2015 Open Education Award for Excellence!

It is supremely satisfying to see great work recognized by a respected third party. This week, that happened to the Open College at Kaplan University (OC@KU) when the global Open Education Consortium (OEC) awarded us a 2015 Open Education Award for Excellence and named us as an “Outstanding Site” for open education resources.

By recognizing our website, OEC is calling attention to the “whole” of what we are doing and the integrated nature of our work. OC@KU is a new type of institution, one which wraps its resources around the needs of the learner. We emphasize using free and open resources to maximize breadth and quality while keeping our offerings affordable. To quote the subtitle of Kevin Carey’s recently released book, The End of College, we aim to be “The University of Everywhere,” meeting learners at their point of need and supporting them to reach the destinations they desire.

The OEC’s recognition of this team’s quality work is timely and deeply appreciated. After spending two years developing all aspects of OC@KU, the honors go to our outstanding team, including IT, Marketing, Operations, and the entire Academic Advising team, led by Susan Huggins, Donald Whipple, Carlos Fernandez, and Drew Ross.

For the full list of award recipients, visit http://www.oeconsortium.org/2015/03/open-education-consortium-announces-2015-winners-of-open-education-awards-for-excellence/.

The University of Everywhere

KevinCarey's March 5th NYT article is right on the money. Carey asserts that college as we know it will be seriously challenged when free and affordable learning resources are coupled with excellent and valid assessments of learning that are equally affordable. This adds up to very affordable, well-documented evidence of learning that will trump current transcripts and time spent in college with academic and career-relevant information that can be expanded on throughout life and through multiple careers. (For the complete discussion, see Carey's book, “TheEnd of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University ofEverywhere," Riverhead Books, 2015.)

As Carey says, the “future of learning and the University of Everywhere” is here to stay, and at Open College at Kaplan University (OC@KU), our team has been working towards just this future. Led by Drew Ross, Susan Huggins, and myself, OC@KU already has the elements of that university in play.

With OC@KU, learners can

• Build a portfolio of all prior formal, informal, and experiential learning at no cost and without the commitment of enrolling until they want the portfolio assessed. This reduces time and expense toward earning a degree, respecting the learning already accomplished.
• Take our free open courses and have access to course assessments for $100, also without enrolling.
• Access the free Career Journey program, which provides excellent career advice with data drawn from the LinkedIn economic database.
• Enroll in the accredited Bachelors of Professional Studies (BSPR) degree program for $195/month, which includes the assessment of their prior learning portfolio, design of an Individualized Learning Plan, ongoing academic mentoring, and access to free and open resources to fulfill the requirements of their competency-based degree program.

As members of the higher education community, we have a responsibility to make sure that everyone who wants access to learning, has it. As I reflect on Carey’s article, I am pleased to see that OC@KU is on the right track with adapting to the changing landscape of higher education. At OC@KU, we acknowledge that the future is now and we are proud to provide learners with the opportunity to take advantage of it today.

A PISA for Higher Education: The OECD Disruption

In a deliberate and thoughtful article in The Upshot (a New York Times blog) Kevin Carey has once and for all defined the costs and consequences associated with the way we “rank” colleges in the United States and globally. Using first-time data from new OECD research called the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), Carey builds a careful analysis that exposes a glaring and dangerous problem with the way we determine quality in higher education.

Carey’s main point is that unlike K-12, where we are compared internationally on what our students actually know and are able to do (PISA Report from OECD), in higher education we rank colleges and universities based on perceived status. Whether it is the US News and World Report rankings, or President Obama himself in his State of the Union message, the reference to US higher education as “the best in the world” refers to our top institutions, not the entire enterprise. Carey goes on to point out that our relatively poor performance with regards to adult learners (up to age 29) has dire economic and social implications as we look towards an increasingly competitive global marketplace in the years ahead.

He is quite right. But this OECD disruption underscores another big problem as well. Yes, like the fearsome Wizard of Oz being unmasked as the little man behind the curtain, we are brought down to earth with this data. But stopping there brings up the next issue: the OECD research exposes the fact that we do not currently have good data or appropriate comparisons among institutional types and sectors that fully represent the diversity within our student populations and the extent to which we succeed with them.

The proposals for college rankings that we have seen either perpetuate the old “Wizard of Oz” approach or fail to assess college and learner performance by institutional category or learners’ risk factors to achieve an “apples to apples” comparison. In fact, they penalize institutions that serve marginalized and low-income learners — the very people with which we need to have more success.

That failure, in turn, leads to the deeper and more significant inability to know how effective our institutions are and what it will take to improve their effectiveness with the students they are electing to serve.

Instead of a reasoned discussion about improvement, we continue to be treated to a spectacle that more closely approximates a mud-wrestling match with multiple teams. Thank you OECD and Kevin Carey for framing the reasons why the discussion about quality in American higher education needs to be re-framed.

The DoE’s Regulatory Double Standard: Who’s Next?

This Week @Inside Higher Ed is a superb new weekly radio show hosted by Inside Higher Education with IHE founder Doug Lederman and moderator Casey Green as regular participants. On Friday, June 27^th, invited guests William Durdan and Ann Kirschner contributed to a very thoughtful discussion about the Corinthian closure.

Two new and extremely important implications of the closure came through to me as I listened to the conversation (linked here for your convenience). The first was the issue of a demonstrable double standard being exercised by the Department of Education (DoE) which has singled out, almost entirely, the for-profit sector for separate and unequal regulatory treatment. You see it with Gainful employment and 90:10 rules and it is proposed once again in the treatment of VA benefits as non-government money — Never mind that a benefit is earned and ought to be used at the discretion of its owner.

But the act of closing one institution poses another question: Are there other institutions with similarly dire problems that should be closed? The discussants raised the current example of City College of San Francisco, the bankrupt and perennially unstable community college in San Francisco that is on governance, financial, and regulatory life-support.  Yet after years of public discussion and failed rescue attempts, the DoE has not suggested that the college should be closed. Would they dare use the argument that there wouldn’t be anywhere else for those students to go? If they did, that would be further evidence of a double standard. There are many private institutions that would be ready to step in.

The second implication is more of a political and contextual observation. There was, as I heard it, a general consensus that the DoE was not going to stop this wrong-headed approach of trying to regulate its way to quality (see my earlier post “You Can’t Regulate Your Way to Excellence”). Indeed, the consensus on This Week seemed to indicate that, increasingly, non-profit institutions ranging from community colleges to private colleges are worried that the department’s overreach with institutions that are part of the Association of Private Schools, Colleges, and Universities (APSCU) will now be extended to them, beginning with rankings, extending to new state regulatory mandates, and finally including the regulatory regimes listed above. I have heard this concern at meetings, in hushed whispers or over a drink after the meeting was adjourned. But as with the issue of an operating double standard discussed above, I have never heard it discussed in a public forum as accepted truth by mainstream leaders in higher education. Now, beginning with this broadcast, the issue is in the mainstream. As the double standard is extended to include more types of institutions, who will be next?

Who Stands for the Students?

What will happen to the 70,000+ students who will be left in the lurch by Corinthian’s closing? This is a great time to do an independent evaluation and case study to see where they go and what they do, real time.

Much has been written about the DoE’s decision to close Corinthian Colleges. Some misguided observers have praised the decision as long-overdue and evidence that no college is “too big to fail.” No for-profit accredited college, that is.

In this blog and the next, I will examine Corinthian’s closing from two perspectives: the students who are left in the lurch with their dreams denied or deferred through no fault of their own; and the extraordinary double standard operating within the DoE that has been revealed by this decision.

You can compare and contrast the different colleges within Corinthian as Larry Barton (former president of Heald College) did in his article “Heald College closure is an education in tragedy”. The article supports a common sense implication that a more surgical approach might have spared some colleges and thereby spared some students. Root out the “bad actors” within Corinthian, if any exist.

But the DoE has not done that. Why? Because they operate with a fallacious assumption that has been touted as fact in their defense of gainful employment and other regulatory attacks on the private sector. The fallacious assumption is this: these students can, should, and will be absorbed by preferable non-profit institutions, community and state colleges among them.

This assumption is seriously flawed for several reasons:

1. Geography/Technology: Some of these students were attending Corinthian College because it was more convenient.
2. Course of Study: Some students found the right course of study at a price they could afford.
3. Choice: Some students chose Corinthian because their local community college was full, or wait-listed, or they had had bad experiences there.

The California example of 2002 when the tech bubble burst is instructive. As appropriations were reduced and the applicant pool grew, community colleges and the state universities could not and did not absorb the burgeoning demand. Time to graduation grew longer and longer. Wait lists for popular or required courses grew longer and longer. And in the end, students suffered the consequences of the legislative decisions to reduce funding and restrict access.

Where is the evidence that state legislatures and Governors will behave any differently to save Corinthian students cut adrift by this DoE decision? The truth is they are on their own.

Inadvertently, the DoE has created an ideal opportunity for a research and case study of what happens when institutions are closed by governmental action. Who will do the research? The Lumina Foundation? The Gates Foundation?  I hope I am wrong, but with learners’ futures at stake, we need the data.