Bo Knows College
Posted: September 28th, 2012 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 2 Comments »
My friend Bo is a professor in Amsterdam. Back in the day, he taught at Taft High School in the Bronx.
He writes:
Given the massive costs of kids dropping out without degrees, or taking way way way too long to finish, why can’t we find ways to re-create versions of high-dosage tutoring in higher education—at least for the truly disadvantaged who make it there?
For obvious reasons, I offer loads of this to my PhD students, a bit of it to my thesis writing MA students (although often in small groups), and virtually none to my countless BA students.
The average kid from a high poverty neighborhood/poorly educated family who makes it to Univ of Amsterdam gets very close to ZERO tutoring. (This was only true in the past until they got to the a BA thesis stage but, alas, BA theses no longer exist because — you guessed it — the one on one tutoring was “too expensive”).
We hold out this goal of ‘getting into college’ on both sides of the Atlantic. You found the ultimate way to make it happen for disadvantaged kids, based largely on new versions of this ancient situation. Then, they arrive, and at least on my side of the pond, we forget everything you taught us. They get a bit of mentoring (at best icing on the cake, at worst stigmatizing because framed in terms of them being ‘ethnic minorities’ even though they are native born in most cases) but they get almost none of what should be the foundation.
Big picture:
1. Colleges have become way more expensive over many years.
2. Most of this expense is not adding professors (high level teachers) or tutors/academic help (lower-level teachers, if you will). Instead, huge growth in number of administrators and nice gyms.
3. Now cost pressure is beginning to hit universities from online providers. This will only accelerate.
One day question will be do you want your econ degree from Assumption College or from Stanford Online at a third of the price? And like with online dating, once people get used to the idea of online education, the skepticism will decline.
4. Brick and mortar colleges that don’t have top brands — Tier 2, 3, 4, 5 schools — will need to create a new value proposition to get students to buy their product.
High dosage tutoring for college students may be one of those things.
Last week Robert Pondiscio and I were chatting about the nature of college help.
Very specifically, I think colleges typically offer many types of academic support, but miss a biggie. Typically they offer:
a. Essay writing help.
b. Problem-solving help for courses that have problem sets — math, sci, econ, engineering, etc.
c. Research help. Navigating the web, libraries, etc.
d. “Knowledge clarification” help. Don’t understand a key idea? Office hours.
What isn’t offered? Reading help.
Specifically, reading with dense non-fiction. You can get someone to sit next to you for an hour and just grind through calculus problems with you. But typically nobody thinks to get equivalent help to grind through “Intro To Archaeology” textbook.
Remember, for a typical college student, that sort of reading is challenging — lots of new ideas and terms — but manageable.
Even for a gritty student, but who has a lower vocabulary, that type of reading is really tough. I.e., if you run into one new word in a sentence, you can figure it out. If you run into 3 new words, you can’t. If you run into an occasional new word, you can look it up. If several, and you look them up, it slows down the process so much you lose the main idea of the passage.
I’m surprised that colleges offer many types of academic help, but not the type that is probably most needed by struggling students: dense non-fiction reading help that is sort of equivalent in “feel” to math and science help that colleges do offer.
Entrepreneurs out there: maybe there’s a market for you. I don’t know what the marginal profit is for a college on each student they retain. Maybe none. I.e., soph flunks out? No prob, don’t expend resources, cuz you can replace with another frosh, and hold total capacity constant.
But if there’s a financial interest for colleges in getting more students to ultimately graduate, or at least a political interest because of Arne Duncan push for more transparency on completion data, then an opt-in high-dosage non-fiction reading tutoring program might be something they’d pay for….particularly if they can add it to a tuition bill.
I agree that (most) colleges maybe shouldn’t be in the business of remediation. Other than some community colleges, it’s really not their area of expertise.
The SAT, while a highly flawed test, is likely as predictive as it is because of the reading sections. That is, kids with larger, more flexible vocabularies and the ability to read little passages about science, art, philosophy, and excerpts from literature (both current and much older) and answer questions about them ARE likely to enter college able to digest an introductory college textbook.
Maybe what’s needed is some sort of “prep year” for students who don’t have those skills yet or whose experience and exposure hasn’t been broad enough to give them all of the background knowledge that may be assumed.
That year, whether offered by a private school, a community college, an arm of a larger university or in a public school could develop those skills. It could also help kids to know whether they really want to go to college and give them a year to work part-time and save up money or to take one college course to practice the time management and asking for help skills they will need later.
With the average college graduation rate in this country hovering around 50%, this is a huge issue. Some companies that address student retention in colleges and universities do exist. One I worked for, called InsideTrack, did a great job of increasing retention and graduation rates for its client schools, by anywhere from 5 to 20 percent. And yes, it did raise the bottom line for the schools as well. By how much depended on which school- a private, campus-based university’s profit is increased much more substantially for each additional student retained than say, an online program, despite the lower overhead. But that depended on the tuition costs, which compounded over the number of years retained.
One thing that we discovered at InsideTrack as we collected data on the subject of why students did not persist, was that the answer was rarely that students could not handle the academic work. It was more often the other factors like finances, outside commitments (like work or family) or even health that got in the way of continuing education.
The approach InsideTrack takes is to proactively coach students (all of the students in an incoming class, not just those who could be identified as at-risk) through those various challenges before they become so overwhelming that they lead the student to drop out. There is a focus on incoming freshmen, because that is when a student is most likely to drop out, but also continued support provided beyond that, because while a soph. can’t be replaced , that is still two or more years of lost income for the school.