Yet I've also become distraught with the regular classes - too many students don't have enough on the ball. Then there are a few students who do, but some are so alienated by what I gather has been their prior experience, anti-nurture if you will, that they've tuned out. My little corner of the world may be just that and the rest of the world may be quite different. But if not, somebody in the know should be screaming about this. That's what I'm trying to do with this post.
In that post I talked about two possible models of undergraduate education. The old model employed the grab-the-brass ring approach, in which elite students commanded a lot of attention and got a very good education, while the remaining students did not. The new model I called the nurturing approach, where even average students have access to a good education and the instructors they interact with treat them as serious students. The reason for moving from the old model to the new model was a consequence of how undergraduate tuition counts in the overall picture of university revenues. Undergraduate tuition now is a big deal where when I started it wasn't. While it is true that in-state tuition is much less than at a ritzy private university now, it is actually more, even after inflation adjustment, than what tuition at such a private university was when I started. So it takes a big bite out of a middle-class family's income. If the university is going to rely on undergraduate tuition for revenue it must deliver a decent education in return, for the typical student, not just for the top performers.
Now I'd like to mention several facts that have come to my attention since writing that post in 2013. Many students I'm currently teaching seem quite stressed out. This is partly due to their being on the job market and going through the process of interviewing with recruiters and/or their making preparation for graduate/professional school. (And it may partly be due to their sensing in themselves a certain lack of competence for the new world they will be entering after they graduate.) I wrote about this, along with one possible solution for alleviating some of this stress, in my prior post called Should We Offer On-Campus Students Online Self-Paced Courses As A Scheduling Option? What I didn't mention in that post, though it should be evident, is that any mitigation taken to lessen student stress, whether this one or something else, will come with a price tag. So one wants to know how those resources might be obtained.
Next, regarding the leadership on campus, it seems more heavily STEM concentrated now than I can remember previously. Of course, STEM will always be quite important on campus. But there used to be more balance among the leadership than there is now. When I started with SCALE about 25 years ago, the Provost at the time was Larry Faulkner (Chemistry). And a soon to be Associate Provost who would have ed tech in his portfolio was Dave Liu (Computer Science). But the Associate Provost for undergraduate education was Susan Gonzo (English as an International Language) and that gave the overall approach some balance. Susan was also on the SCALE advisory committee and Dave Liu had a few folks who had accomplished quite a lot with ed tech tour some universities in Taiwan with him to showcase what we were doing. I was one of those who went on the trip. So I became reasonably closely connected to this leadership. Now the Provost is from Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education is a physicist, and I heard only last week that a new person has been hired for what might be considered the sequel to the Dave Liu position. She is a mathematician. In addition, the Director of CITL (the campus learning center) is a biologist. I don't know these people so don't want to comment on their individual talents, but I sense less connection with folks on campus outside of STEM.
Third, regarding the flow of funds, I am aware that there is a new budgeting model on campus for how tuition dollars track the students that pay this tuition. The payment per IU (what we at Illinois call a credit hour; it stands for instructional unit) is much greater under the new model than it was under the old. The new budgeting model applies to payments from the Provost's Office to the Dean's Office in the various colleges. In any such scheme, one should expect some funds to be retained by the level that is higher in the organization chart. So I've been told that the Provost's Office keeps the differential in tuition that international students pay. But for the in-state tuition, my understanding is that more of it now flows to the colleges than before, though I don't know the precise formula. We should also know, however, how the flow works from the Dean's Office to the Department Head's Office. Has the new model changed that flow as well? I heard last week that in LAS it has not, or to be more precise for LAS Social Science departments it has not. (In addition to Economics, Statistics should be lumped into Social Science for this purpose.)
Fourth, regarding enrollments, for the campus as a whole undergraduate IUs have grown about 10% over the last 10 years while undergraduate students have grown about 8% in that same period. But specifically within the Economics Department, when I wrote that piece on the business and ethical dilemmas back in 2013 the number of majors was somewhere in the range of 800-850. I learned last week that there are now 1100 majors. And that's in only a 6 year period. So the rate of growth in Economics majors is close to three times the rate of growth of students overall.
Last, the New York Times produced tables of family income distribution for students and how these students fared after college income-wise. This is the page for Illinois. (There is some weird programming at the top of the page, which makes it a little harder to access the rest of the content that is there.) The upshot is that Illinois, like many major public research universities, seems an engine for income redistribution - upward. In colloquial terms, it is welfare for families that live in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. In an idealistic conception of public universities, they provide opportunities for all and thus serve as great levelers of the income distribution. The data shows otherwise. One then wonders whether this perpetuates down onto the Campus and whether one should look at the STEM versus Social Science divide as a mirror of the divide in income distribution.
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I was tempted to write a bunch of recommendations about how the Campus should change, based on the above, but it occurred to me that not enough is known, on a drill-down level, to have an interesting and intelligent conversation about these matters. So the suggestions below are all about transparency - provide information that is publicly available with this drill down look. What follows are a bunch of suggestions in this regard.
Replicate the kind of information one can find in the Campus Profile, but do it on a department by department basis.
On Majors in the Department
- Report the 25th percentile and 75th percentile on standardized test scores.
- Redo the the New York Times table on family income distribution for each major.
- Report how many IUs are taught by tenure track faculty, specialized (teaching) faculty, and graduate students.
- Do this disaggregated for 100-level class, 200-level, classes, 300-level classes, and 400-level classes.
- Report how the IUs are distributed among these various levels for a student who graduates with that major.
- To get a handle on required classes that get closed out, report on day 10 enrollment numbers (the 10th day is the last day students can add a course without permission from the instructor) versus room size. If there is wait list information, report that as well. There needs to be a time series of this. Temporary (lasting for one semester) close outs are to be expected when demand for a particular major increases. Ongoing close outs are a different matter and deserve closer attention.
- Report on section size, for classes with only one section. Report on pooled section size for cross listed courses. For large lectures with discussion sections, report on both lecture size and discussion section size. Again do this disaggregated by course number.
- We need a time series on the faculty/majors ratio.
- We need a separate time series of this ratio for tenure track faculty and specialized faculty.
- Likewise we need a time series on the size of the doctoral student program and the tenure-track -faculty/doctoral students ratio.
- If there is a Professional Masters program in the department, we need similar information for it.
On Instructional Personnel Spending Per IU
This is the heart of the matter, but it will take some work in getting the necessary information and then putting it together correctly. One needs: instructor salaries, teaching loads, and percentage of appointment devoted to instruction. From this one can determine spending per course. One then divides that by credit hours times number of students enrolled. We would expect this number to rise by course number, with 100-level courses having the lowest spending per IU and 400-level courses having the highest spending per IU. Holding course level fixed, how does the number vary by major? Is it relatively flat or is there a significant gradient? My worst fear is that for 300-level and 400-level courses it is lower for Social Science majors than it is for STEM majors. But I don't know that; it's only a hunch. That's why it would be good to do such a study.
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We live in a world where data driven decision making is the new mantra. The university provides a lot of institutional data already, but it is too aggregated for the purposes of this piece. Further, while faculty salary information can be obtained, as far as I know it is never put together with faculty teaching information. If we wanted to tell students and their families how their tuition dollars are spent, we'd need to do this. So a case can be made for performing the above exercise as a way to educate the public on these matters.
I want to give a different argument here as well. Above I quoted my post from 2013 to say - too many of my students don't have enough on the ball. If that's not just my class but is actually happening broadly, what should be done about it?
In Engineering they have an attrition strategy (a weed out process). A good fraction of students who start as Engineering majors transfer out of the College of Engineering. Recently, I've become aware that Economics is one of those majors they transfer into. What should happen to these students then? Overall the campus doesn't want to follow an attrition strategy, especially if that means the student dropping out of the university entirely. Thus, there seem to me to be two possibilities on how to proceed. One would be letting the students slide through in spite of not having enough on the ball. The other would be to follow a nurturing approach and try very hard to get these students up to speed.
The Economics major is particularly odd in that most of the students really want to be in the College of Business, but lack the credentials to get in there. So Economics might be called the Business Lite degree. If it comes with reasonably well paying jobs at the other end of the tunnel, everyone can take a heads down approach and continue as we've been doing. But when fundamentals don't match up to the market price, there is a possibility of a bubble in the making. Bubbles tend to burst and at the most inconvenient times. This is why I think these matters are worthy of a closer look and why the campus, already in possession of much of the necessary data, should make substantial further effort to get the disaggregated view of how tuition pays for instruction at the undergraduate level.
This would be a project where lots of people would like to see the results.
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