Copy
In attempting to emulate the concierge-like career services model at selective universities, regional publics and community colleges are creating a job mirage and contributing to alumni anger.
View on Web

from
 

CLOSING THE GAP

The direction of travel in closing the skills gap.
 
A Lid For Every Pot
Yale Daily News report reveals the university has nearly as many administrators as undergraduates, by Philip Mousavizadeh.
 
In 2003, when 5,307 undergraduate students studied on campus, the University employed 3,500 administrators and managers. In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on student enrollment, only 600 more students were living and studying at Yale, yet the number of administrators had risen by more than 1,500 — a nearly 45 percent hike… “Yale’s proliferation of administrators, I think, reflects a reluctance on the part of its leadership to lead,” Gaddis wrote in an email to the News… “I think we don’t yet have a Vice President for the rights of the left-handed, but I haven’t checked this month,” Brisman wrote. READ MORE


A New Leader For Strada
Stephen Moret announced as new CEO of Strada, the leading nonprofit at the intersection of higher education and employment.
 
He comes to Strada from the Virginia Economic Development Partnership (VEDP), where he has served as president and CEO since January 2017. He previously served as president and CEO of the Louisiana State University Foundation, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Economic Development (LED), and chief executive of the Baton Rouge Area Chamber. READ MORE


Test-Optional Is A Blunt Instrument
Diverse Issues in Higher Education op-ed on how eliminating the SAT and ACT in college admissions may not help diverse and low-income students, by Anne Kim.
 
Emphasizing extracurriculars, for instance, would heavily favor affluent students whose parents can afford to pay for sports, music lessons and unpaid internships in exotic locales. College admissions officers also say that “grades in college prep courses” and “strength of curriculum” are among the top three factors they consider in making admissions decisions, according to a 2019 survey by the National Association for College Admissions Counseling. This, too, tilts the field toward wealthier students. READ MORE


Occupational Licensing Is A Blunt Instrument
L.A. Times coverage of bitter battle over California State License Board decision to require solar companies to use certified electricians for battery installations, by Sammy Roth.
 
The idea… was first proposed by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the National Electrical Contractors Assn., whose member companies hire IBEW workers… “We can’t comply with this. People will go out of business,” said Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar and Storage Assn. “Prices will go up, and we’ll lose the ability to meet customer demand for clean energy.”… You’re probably wondering whether batteries really can be safety hazards. The answer: “Yes, but...” Yes, but 60,000 residential batteries have been installed in California, and nobody can cite a single example of a serious safety incident. READ MORE


Fraud Rankings Racket
Philadelphia Inquirer report on trial of Temple University Business School Dean for submitting false data to U.S. News, by Susan Snyder and Jeremy Roebuck.
 
If he is convicted, Porat, 74, could be headed to prison for up to 25 years on the most serious charge… National education experts say the case is perhaps the first time that a university administrator has faced criminal prosecution for misrepresentations in the high-stakes battle for college rankings dominance… The management style of Porat, who remains a tenured professor at Temple, earning about $300,000 a year despite his ouster as dean, is also likely to be front and center with several prosecution witnesses expected to testify that Porat was obsessed with rankings and bullied employees to achieve results. READ MORE


Fraud, Waste, And Abuse
EdSource article on California community colleges disbursing aid to fake students, by Michael Burke.
 
The scammers typically start by enrolling at a college using “either stolen identities or by recruiting individuals who provide their personal information in exchange for a cut of the financial aid proceeds. They then apply for financial aid in the student’s name via the FAFSA process”… Some districts, such as the Los Rios Community College District based in Sacramento, are currently only classifying the findings as “suspected” fraud because, according to district spokesman Gabe Ross, the fraud only becomes confirmed “when a perpetrator is convicted or reaches a plea agreement through the federal investigation and adjudication process.”… Ross said the Los Rios district has identified 1,508 incidents of suspected financial aid fraud… The scam attempts are coming at a time when the community colleges are flush with cash from three federal Covid relief packages. The colleges have been awareded about $4 billion in relief aid, about $1.6 billion of which is being targeted to students. READ MORE


Fraud, Waste, Abuse, And Blackmail
USA Today report on how Chegg cheating can lead to extortion, by Chris Quintana.
 
An apparent good Samaritan had bad news for math professor Juan Gutiérrez: One of his students cheated on an exam. The person, who identified himself as an incoming graduate student in the USA, said he helped an undergraduate on a test after the two connected online. The emailer said he worked for Chegg, a website that sells itself as a one-stop shop for collegians who need help with their studies… “It pains me to see students taking undue advantage of the pandemic situation to boost their GPA without putting any effort,” the emailer told Gutiérrez. Gutiérrez snapped into action and got in touch with his student, who complicated the narrative. Days earlier, the Texas student said, he had received an email threatening to disclose he had used Chegg to fraudulently complete his coursework unless he paid off the person via PayPal. “I have sources everywhere and understand you have an exam coming up," the threatening email read. "It will be a shame if something happened regarding the score." READ MORE


Enabling Fraud, Waste, And Abuse
InsideARM report on U.S. Department of Education decision to give up on collection tactics because “a softer and more frequent touch” is apparently all that’s needed to collect student loans, by Stephanie Eidelman.
 
The Department of Education private debt collection contract is over. Large companies, small companies, all of them. According to sources, during a meeting that was held yesterday with the remaining Private Collection Agencies (PCAs), all accounts were recalled and contracts were terminated…. [But] the practice of providing customer service is quite different from the knowledge, practice, and regulations associated with collecting defaulted debt… Those in the industry can tell you that no matter how friendly they are, consumers with past-due debt do not flock to their creditors looking to settle up, make arrangements, or generally be communicative. READ MORE


 
Gap Letter

Volume III, #24

Alumni Look Back In Anger

 

“He’s the angriest man you’ll ever meet. He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup.”
- Noel Gallagher of Oasis, on his brother Liam


About 75 years before the epic struggle between the brothers Gallagher – including Liam responding to Noel’s soup-slur by posting a video of eating soup with a fork, culminating in Liam’s inspired one-word tweet, POTATO, captioning a photo of Noel’s remarkably potato-like head – there was class struggle. One of the leaders of that struggle was Leon Trotsky. Trotsky was exiled countless times. At the height of World War I, he was deported from France to Spain, then Spain to the U.S. So in early 1917, just months ahead of the October Revolution, Trotsky spent 10 weeks living in the Bronx, writing encomia to revolution for a Russian-language socialist newspaper and the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward. Trotsky ate his meals at a nearby Jewish dairy restaurant. In an attempt to inspire the waiters to protest their working conditions, Trotsky refused to tip. So the waiters spilled hot soup on him.

Inequality is at the root of much rancor. It’s as true for Trotsky and Oasis (while one Gallagher wrote historic songs, the other was an historic drunk and perhaps root and tuber identifier) as it is for contemporary America where inequality and social and political instability seem highly correlated. The rich keep getting richer while problems keep piling up.

Nowhere is inequality rising faster than in higher education, formerly a safety valve for inequality, currently a stopped-up sink. Rich colleges and universities are getting richer faster in terms of the metrics that are most easily measured and therefore matter most to trustees: endowments and applications. The largest endowments all grew over 30% last year (Harvard 34%, Yale 41%, Cornell 42%, Penn 42%, Dartmouth 47%, UVa 50%, Brown 52%, MIT 56%, Duke 56%, Wash U. 65%). Not coincidentally, applications to these elite schools were also way up (Harvard 42%, Yale 33%, MIT, 66%, UCLA 28%).

Meanwhile, endowment-less institutions – community colleges and regional publics – have seen unprecedented enrollment declines. Since the fall of 2019, community college enrollments are down 14%. Some schools have seen declines of over 30%. Regional publics aren’t faring much better. Last year nearly 3 out of 4 regional publics experienced enrollment declines, with some (Texas Southern, Harris-Stowe State in Missouri) down over 20%. Few have seen enrollment bounce back this fall. Last week Mikhail Zinshteyn pointed out declines at 20 of the 24 Cal State campuses including over 1,000 students at each of Cal State Fullerton, Chico, and East Bay.

Just as Covid has prompted soul searching among the gainfully employed (the Great Resignation), among those who haven’t (yet or successfully) launched careers, it’s prompted job searching. This means two things: (1) in classic postsecondary countercyclical style, prospective students are opportunistically opting for work instead of school; and (2) the bar for enrolling and paying tuition is now much higher. So here’s the new normal: non-selective schools like regional publics and community colleges are in big trouble if they can’t demonstrate employment outcomes discernably superior to jobs currently there for the taking.

While rich postsecondary institutions revel in endowment and application wealth and take comfort in self-selection-driven employment outcomes (i.e., the most talented, motivated, and all too often wealthy and connected students were never not going to get good jobs), administrators at non-elite schools Half the World Away are starting to think about finding career services on the campus map in order to look into this “employment outcomes” thing.

What they’ll find is uglier than Noel Gallagher’s potato head. Right before Covid, the Charter School Growth Fund partnered with Bain to conduct a heretofore unreleased survey of 1,000 young alumni (average age 24) who attended charter high schools like KIPP and Achievement First, 90% of whom subsequently attended college. For those with the good fortune to go on to selective universities, career services had a positive effect on employment outcomes; students who availed themselves of career services reported a 5% bump in employment at graduation. However, at non-selective schools, the opposite was true. The 2019 Bain CSGF alumni survey found that 83% of respondents who did not use career services at non-selective schools were employed upon graduation. But for those who walked into career services, only 66% found jobs. In career services, students hit a wall (and not a Wonderwall).

There are two possible explanations for this counterintuitive result. The first is, again, self-selection: Supersonic students on track to land a job don’t need career services; students who need help are often starting from square one. But the second is that career services at non-selective colleges and universities doesn’t work, particularly for the first-generation and underrepresented minorities who matriculate from charter schools.


***


Selective schools have a surfeit of quality employers, most of whom (pre-Covid and presumably post) are physically on campus for information sessions and interviews, and most of whom have alumni involved in the recruitment process. Here, career services can achieve some measure of Morning Glory by providing concierge-like services, assisting and matching graduating students to employers.

Non-selective schools have none of the above. At non-selective schools, career services software platforms – Handshake, Symplicity, GradLeaders, or 12Twenty – list thousands of employers and hundreds of thousands of jobs. You know where else you’ll find those same employers and jobs? The Internet. On these career services digital platforms, the responsiveness of employers to non-selective graduates is less like a concierge experience than what they’d face anyway coming in from the Internet’s digital cold, attempting to bypass imposing and typically impassable applicant tracking system gates.

In such an environment, a concierge-Champagne-Supernova-type approach doesn’t work. It’s like a guest asking a hotel concierge to obtain a restaurant reservation when nearby restaurants only take reservations online, no times are listed, and no one’s going to pick up the phone when they see the name of the hotel on caller ID. The 2019 Bain CSGF alumni survey quotes a graduate from the University of North Texas: “We have an online system that gets you access to job openings…it is helpful when it comes to finding lab opportunities and internships, but I would rather have a person to person conversation.”

When there are no actual people from actual employers on the other end – when there’s no one to Talk Tonight – career services ends up looking more like a workforce board. Workforce boards are infamous for posting jobs from employers candidates don’t want and attracting candidates employers don’t want. In attempting to emulate the concierge-like career services model pioneered at selective universities (classic higher education mistake – we know what excellence looks like, let’s do it the same way), regional publics and community colleges are creating a job mirage and contributing to alumni underemployment and anger.


***


How can non-elite schools catch up? By working harder to create opportunities for becoming. Colleges and universities are in the business of helping students become. And becoming is not only about what students can do. As demonstrated by continued dramatic employment disparities by race and class, too often it has very little to do with what they can do. Becoming is more correlated to opportunity. And playing a limited graduate/absentee-employer matching function doesn’t create much in the way of opportunity.

Non-selective colleges and universities can turn things around by refraining from playing the same game as selective schools. In order to increase employment opportunities for graduates, they should play a different game. Cut out the concierges, stop relying on online platforms, and try one or more of the following, presented in order of degree of difficulty:

1) Service providers
Avenica, a University Ventures company, specializes in identifying and contracting with employers with lots of good entry-level jobs. Once Avenica has real employers on the hook (with clients willing to pick up the phone), it screens, matches, and trains candidates for specific opportunities. In addition, in order to reduce hiring friction, Avenica offers an eval-to-hire option for employers where Avenica acts as the employer of record until employers are convinced.

2) Work-integrated learning
New marketplaces connecting school and work like Riipen (an Achieve portfolio company) allow faculty to incorporate projects from employers directly into coursework, typically as capstone projects. By completing real work for real employers, students can impress and connect with real hiring managers. That’s a textbook definition of creating opportunity.

3) Distributed career services
What’s more likely to create opportunity for students: a cloistered career services office with 4-5 full-time professionals, or distributing responsibility to 400-500 faculty? Opportunity is a result of finding the right person in the right place at the right time and it’s often a numbers game. As Wake Forest’s Andy Chan has suggested, the answer is to put the onus on departments and faculty. Faculty should be responsible for (and evaluated on) building and maintaining field-specific employer networks. How many students at selective schools got their start as a result of a faculty introduction? That’s how the CIA was built.

While the bureaucratic reflex at career services might resist this burden shifting for fear of job loss, the central function should be refocused on supporting faculty to create and extend their networks so they can help students cut through the digital clutter and be seen and considered by employers. And if these networks fail, Some Might Say devolving responsibility to faculty minimally establishes new coaches, mentors, and cheerleaders who will increase job search persistence, giving opportunity the chance to strike.

So when University of Hawaii proposes limiting tenure to faculty “engaged in direct instruction consisting of active engagement with students,” and declares that faculty need to “benefit students” and “shall engage in service inside the university,” I’m more than willing to Roll With It. It’s belated recognition that while Nobel prizes and citations merit a shaka, what’s more important for the people of Hawaii is ensuring universities once again become an engine of socioeconomic mobility. Faculty who are great at helping students get good jobs may be just as valuable as world-class researchers. Recognizing and rewarding this value-added could help attract more practitioners to campus. Conversely, faculty unwilling or unable to stretch beyond a purely academic comfort zone should consider switching to a profession that doesn't involve daily interaction with students whose primary concern is return on tuition investment and employment.

Fitzgerald supposedly told Hemingway, “the rich are different from you and me.” When it comes to rich schools like Columbia, to Hemingway’s response, “yes, they have more money,” we must add “so they can afford to organize career services in a way that’s antiquated and quaint.” And so Sally can’t wait. If non-selective schools want to Live Forever, they’ll begin taking a different approach to helping graduates get good jobs. Otherwise they’re liable to end up in the soup.

Tweet Tweet
Share Share
Forward Forward


Ryan Craig is the author of College Disrupted and A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College. He is Managing Director at Achieve Partners, which is engineering the future of learning and earning.

Follow Ryan on Twitter: @ryancraigap  


Copyright © 2021 c/o Achieve Partners, All rights reserved.