Reconsidering Elitism in Public Education

The core argument in this piece is that we should expand elite offerings at public schools and public universities as a way to enhance social welfare and address the issues that ail us in education.

What does this mean in plain English?

I'll try to illustrate with a few examples.  The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is the flagship university of the U of I system and is generally regarded at the best public university in the state of Illinois.  Illinois State, in Bloomington-Normal, is a good university but is less prestigious.  What I'm arguing is that some students who ended up at ISU should instead be attending the U of I.

Similarly, within the Urbana-Champaign campus some colleges are considered elite and are more restrictive regarding admission, while other colleges are more accepting.  Since I teach economics, which is in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and many of the students I teach would have preferred to be in the Gies College of Business, what I'm arguing is that some of these econ students should actually be admitted to Gies, by an amount that is more than a mere drop in the bucket.  The increased numbers should be on the order of 50% to 100% of current enrollments. And I mean this to be a sustained plan over at least a decade, maybe longer, enough time to evaluate the impact of such a change.  In this piece I want to argue for why this is apt to be a change for the better.

Then, let's face it, there is elitism in public high schools and middles schools, elementary schools too.  This goes under the name tracking, or honors programs, or gifted programs, or some other labeling that makes the students in such programs seem to be the elite.

I am arguing to make the elite student more abundant, as a policy matter, thereby lessening the value in the distinction of being designated an elite student.  I hope to explain why this would be helpful in addressing key issues in education and why public institutions, in particular, should feel obligated to proceed along these lines.  From a social-welfare point of view, the same argument applies to non-profit but private educational organizations.  However, I believe it will take substantial coercion of such institutions to achieve this end.  So I will focus in this piece on public institutions, because the argument is easier to make in this case. If that argument succeeds in convincing readers, the private educational organizations can be taken on then.

On the other hand, I'm not arguing to treat all students as perfectly equal, which some might consider the ideal.  I believe that treating students as completely equal, irrespective of student intellectual and emotive capacity at any fixed time, is impossible.  To ignore student differentials when they are evident, purely in the name of equality, would be self-defeating.  So, while the temptation to be a purist on this is definitely there, that's not where we're headed.  Later in this essay, I will argue for why some apparent elitism is necessary.  What I would like to see, whether this is possible or not is to be argued thoroughly, is for all students to count in the social welfare function that determines how public education goes about things.  It seems to me now that non-elite students are ignored.  That's what needs to change - dramatically.

* * * * *

With this, I'm trying for two different things in this piece.  One is an explanation for why the mental health issues among current college students are so acute.  This requires an explanation of causality.  In this part, the current post is a sequel to my previous one, about students embracing the creative attitude on their own.  Here we're considering what in the academic environment might be changed to make for substantial improvement in student mental health.

The other is why the system doesn't have auto-corrects that are built in which would remedy the immediate issue, at least eventually.  It doesn't seem there is an immediate remedy.  Why is that?

So, I'm hoping that this piece will get others to pose these questions as well.   But I also want to note, those who are managing the elite units in public education have an incentive to leave well enough alone.  I don't want to get into combat with such folks.  My objective is more modest here.  I merely want to get such folks to ask - is there something that can be done to better the situation overall.

Then, further, I surely don't mean this piece as the last word on the matter.  Rather, I mean it as a beginning of an investigation as to what institutions might do, together, to ameliorate the issue.

* * * * *

I'd like to begin this section with a little jargon from economics, which I think will be helpful in framing the issues.  An economic rent is a payment to a factor of production in excess of what is needed to elicit its supply.  The concept was first developed by David Ricardo, who was concerned that the landed gentry would earn rents from tenant farmers and thereby suck out valuable resources from the economy that otherwise might be invested in productive activities. Rent seeking is competition done where the prize at the end of the tunnel is an economic rent.  The rent seeking, if itself otherwise not productive, dissipates the surplus from the economic rent.

Now let's consider a different notion from economics, product differentiation.  To keep things simple economists talk about vertical product differentiation, in which case the products differ in quality where everyone can agree which product is of higher quality and which of lower quality, and then they talk about horizontal quality, where the products are different but people will disagree as to which they prefer.  Vertical product differentiation is often associated with what is called second degree price discrimination (menu pricing) where the seller offers the buyer a variety of choices.  The most expensive is associated with the highest quality.  Seating on airplanes conforms with this approach - first class is better than coach and it is more expensive to fly first class.  Conversely if you are buying a particular model car of a certain year, car color acts to differentiate one car from another, but there is no price differential based on color.  Vehicle color is an example of horizontal differentiation.

Still a different economics notion is efficient risk absorption.  The standard example is buying insurance against some potential significant downside risk.  The insurance company, through diversification from offering many similar policies with independent risks, is better able to absorb the risk than the insured.  Indeed, that is necessary for the insurance market to work.  Yet there are limits to efficient risk absorption when the insured can impact the likelihood of the loss or the magnitude of the loss, should loss occur, and where lessening the risk is costly for the insured.  So it is well understood that the insured must still bear some of the risk, via deductibles, co-payments, and the like.  And sometimes there is absolutely no market for insuring certain risks because this moral hazard is simply too great to enable a market to function.  In particular, when a student enters college, the student can't purchase earned income insurance to cover income risk in the labor market that the student will experience after graduation. So the student and/or the student's family bears that particular risk entirely. Students whose families are reasonably well off can partially diversify this risk with holding other financial assets.  Other students, whose families are of more modest means, bear the full brunt of this risk.

Now a bit of an aside.  When I started working as an assistant professor, in fall 1980, there was debate going on about whether a college education was a public good, in which case the tuition should be paid for by the state and funded from tax revenues or if, instead, college education was a private good, so tuition should be paid for by the student and/or the student's family.  One can agree there is a mixture of the two but then disagree about the relative importance of each component.  Milton Friedman famously took the position that college education was primarily a private good.  Indeed, at public universities the share of the cost of education borne by the state has declined over this time period, which suggests that the private good view of college education has increasing credence with the electorate.  Nevertheless, there remains a popular view that college education should provide a path for upward mobility,  thereby justifying need-based scholarships.  But at what volume are these offered and how much upward mobility is actually generated?  Bernie Sanders popularized the notion of free college as a way to get at this matter.  Yet community colleges have always been a lower tuition alternative, at least for the first two years of college.  Elite public education needs to be factored into this discussion.  Does free college merely end up being the lower quality version of some second degree price-discrimination approach to tuition? Further, if there is a threshold family income above which the student isn't qualified for free college, let us note that the family will bear the income risk.  On middle income families, that can be quite a burden.

Thus an argument can be made that some other party should bear that income risk.   Some years ago I wrote a speculative post on employer pay for college, reasoning that the future employer could better bear the risk, and then would extract what was paid in tuition by lower wages to the new graduate over some pre-specified period of time. A similar argument could be made that the Federal government pay for college and then have the graduate face higher taxes over a period of time.  If the student could commit to living within the state after graduation, it could be state government that does this.  The difference between this approach and the current approach with student loans is that the amount actually paid back would vary with future income, not just with the amount of tuition paid.  This strikes me as the right way to manage the issue, but might never happen because there is no champion to advocate for it and it could end up a political football.

Let me turn to the next economics issue, which is related.  Capitalism features income inequality.  To illustrate, there is a well known story about when a reporter asked Babe Ruth how come he was paid more than the President of the United States.  The Babe responded, "I had a better year."  The story illustrates that we associate higher earnings with higher performance and, as I mentioned, that's a feature of the system, not a bug.  However, there is now a growing consensus that income inequality has been growing over the past 40 years and the consequences have been extremely pernicious.  You hear that in the expression "the hollowing out of the middle class."  The causes for this increase in income inequality are many and varied.  I will list a few of them: income tax rates have become less progressive, manufacturing went into decline, labor unions lost their power, greater lobbying and increased campaign contributions occurred so the rich could lock in rents that had been previously generated, less enforcement of antitrust law, etc.  There is a growing consensus that we should start having the pendulum swing in the other direction.  I believe, and this may be controversial, that public education should be part of this effort in reducing income inequality.  To do this, assuming that on average, the future earnings of elite students are higher than the future earnings of ordinary students, this means there should be earnings compression.  How would that happen?  One possible way is for public education, across the board, to embrace a more progressive tax system.  This may not be the best way to achieve the result.  I would welcome others who can think through a better alternative.  But, I want to note here, that elite public education may now be encouraging increases in income inequality.  Elite public education therefore needs to take a look at itself to see if the charge sticks.

Let's move on to the last economics idea to be considered here.  This is the notion of sector-specific hyperinflation, sustained price increases in a sector at a rate that is higher than the general inflation rate.  This has happened in healthcare.  It's also happened with elite higher education, and here I'm including private non-profits as well as public colleges.  Full tuition at these places has experienced hyperinflation over the past 40 years. One measure of how elite these colleges are is their selectivity in admissions.  Highly selective colleges have excess demand for the slots they are to fill.  (There is a substantial measurement issue with how much excess demand there actually is as many elite students apply to multiple colleges for admission and, to my knowledge, these students don't provide their rankings among those colleges as to which is the most preferred, the next most preferred, etc. But that there is excess demand seems unmistakable.)  The excess demand persists because the supply of slots at these elite colleges doesn't grow.  That supply is fixed to generate a predetermined quality of education, which, ironically, is determined to a large extent by the quality of the new admits.  (Though I'm no great fan of standardized testing, the scores can be used as a way to measure the quality of the new admits.)  Hyperinflation is the result under chronic excess demand.  If this much of the fundamentals we can agree upon, and if leadership in higher education overall has some responsibility on keeping costs under control, then expanding the slots at elite colleges and within elite programs is a rational management strategy.  The additional students who fill these slots will have to come from somewhere; a good number of them will likely be students who otherwise would attend a non-elite college.

* * * * *

Here will be a brief bit on teaching to the student rather than simply teaching the subject.  The best example I have of this, which I believe worked pretty well at the time, was the SRA reading program we had in elementary school.  Students differed by the speed at which they read and the comprehension they showed in what they read.  The students were put into different categories, color coded, that were sorted in vertical fashion, so they could receive instruction according to their current reading level.  They would demonstrate mastery at that level and then advance to the next level.  This is in accord with current views of developing expertise by deliberate practice.  In my school, when the class did SRA, students changed where they sat so that all the students working on the same color level were in the same row of seats.  And the sorting of students progressed from one level to the next.  So kids could see who the better readers were and who the worse readers were.  I don't know if that was necessary as part of SRA or if it simply was easier for the teacher to manage the students that way.  In any event, teaching that does target where the student is currently along a trajectory of growth invariably invites students to make comparisons between themselves and other students.   Of course, the teacher does this too when assigning grades

Not all instruction can be done via self-study as with SRA.  Sometimes the teacher must teach the class as a whole.  Which student does the teacher target with this instruction?  Will it be the elite students who always raise their hands while the more ordinary students who keep quiet?  How does the instructor get greater participation from the ordinary students?  This is the argument for tracking, that makes learning better for all the students as there is less variation of student quality within each class.

But there can be lock-in with tracking so once on the fast track the student stays there, regardless of seeming performance, and likewise, once in the slow track the student stays there, possibly by not trying very hard with the learning.  In this the elite students can start to believe it is an entitlement, rather than a temporary solution.

There is then the reality that schools are now measured by standardized test performance and elite students then become valued commodities, since they enhance (some) school performance measures.  Further, if transferring to another school is an option, the school then has some reason to accommodate the elite student, to preclude that outcome.  Parental pressure on the school surely matters here.  So, some tracking seems inevitable that is beyond the amount that benefits all students.  The issue is whether that can be limited whereas now it appears to be off the charts.

* * * * *

Now I want to start to put the pieces together.  The idea that getting an education is at least partly rent seeking has been with us for a very long time.  I found this commercial of Abe Lincoln going to an employment agency looking for a job - you ain't going nowhere without that sheepskin, fella - which was on TV when I still was in high school.  And I can certainly remember students who were referred to as grade grubbers, both when I was in high school and when I was in college.  (Pre-med students had a bad reputation that way.)  So it wasn't just the degree, it was the GPA too, or so it seemed. 

The thing is, students can go about their schooling in different ways.  My preferred way is for students to embrace the creative attitude, as I discussed in the previous post, do that intensively, and then get the good GPA as a byproduct from that.  In this way the student will learn to direct the learning and that will tend to produce good mental health.  (I want to be clear that this is not foolproof.  Bob Seeger's phrase - the awkward teenage blues - are still possible even with students who have embraced the creative attitude - so mental health issues can emerge from that.)  But, let's agree that many students go about things differently - even good and conscientious students.  I wrote about this in a post called, Why does memorization persist as the primary way college students study to prepare for exams? The quick and dirty answer to that question is that many students are not confident in their own ability to learn deeply, so they try for a different method that still is apt to produce reasonably good results as far as achieving a good score on the exam.  They are doing this to get the approval of others, mainly parents and teachers.  They do not learn to direct their own learning this way and the approach is far less nurturing regarding their own mental health.  If they have other activities, hanging out with friends or pursuing some hobby deeply, they can self-nurture that way.  This requires free time outside of school, however.

Now, let's do a longitudinal comparison between when I graduated from high school, 1972, and high school graduates now.  The incentive to treat school as rent seeking is far greater, given the increased income inequality and the greater income return to elite education.  Purely on those grounds, the Amy Chua tiger mom approach to parenting makes sense, perhaps starting when the kid is in grade school, because of the big investment that elite college education now is.  But this pushing comes not just with concern for the kid's GPA.  It also includes orchestrating the kid's extracurricular activities.  So the kid is fully (I would say over) programmed and the kid is not a driver of any of this, except perhaps by choosing not to rebel against the parent exercising control.  Early on, pleasing the parent might make the kid happy too.  Eventually, however, the kid will find no identity of one's own and no way to learn even what the kid wants for himself or herself.  This is quite bad for the kid's mental health.  For example, see Hanna Rosin's piece The Silicon Valley Suicides.

Many of these kids obsess about their GPAs, but actually fail to learn important life lessons as a consequence.  See Adam Grant's opinion piece, What Straight-A Students Get Wrong.  Then the argument is to save these students from themselves, reduce the incentive for rent seeking.  Depreciating the value of the credential, both the degree and the GPA, would be helpful here.  Further, if colleges did this then the same notion can be pushed down to the high schools, and so forth.

However, if only one college did this while the rest continued with business as usual, or one academic program did this but elsewhere it didn't happen, then the likely outcome would be an out migration of elite students to go elsewhere and a decline in the revenues that the innovating unit can garner.  With regard to elite public universities, in particular, one might not see the out migration of in-state students, because of the large tuition differential with comparable alternatives, but one is apt to see a decline in out-of-state students or international students, who pay much higher tuition rates.  Therefore, to embrace the recommended solution at scale would require the bulk of elite public institutions to do likewise.

* * * * *

Keeping the previous paragraph in mind, I want to again look at these sort of decisions from the perspective of a single elite college within a larger public university.  I base what I have to say here on the four years where I was an Associate Dean in the College of Business (2006-2010) where there was a weekly meeting of other A-Deans and Department Heads.   Part of this period overlaps with the start of the Great Recession, which may have made everyone even more mercenary than they otherwise would be.  During this time period, the college got campus approval for students to pay a college-specific surcharge, in addition to the base tuition that all students pay. This may have further impacted my impression as I observe the following.

The way a high selective academic unit operates in determining the number of students to admit is very much like the standard textbook model of the monopolist that sets a uniform price when facing a downward sloping demand curve.  The standard result is that such pricing maximizes the producer surplus for the monopolist, but there is a loss in social surplus as compared to the alternative where the good is supplied in a competitive market.  This loss of social surplus is not a concern to the monopolist, but it is a concern to a planner who wants to maximize the social welfare.  (Note that if the monopolist can practice first degree (perfect) price discrimination, there is no loss of social surplus, but that textbook ideal is typically not feasible.)  So the argument is that the next larger containing unit, in this case that's the Urbana-Champaign campus, should be like the social planner and encourage more students to be admitted to the College of Business.  That would be welfare improving.

But under the approach to these decisions I was aware of when I was an Associate Dean (I'm guessing this is still true now, though I don't know that for a fact) each college gets to determine the desired number of new admits.  (Managing the yield on acceptances is a tricky matter, which I don't want to get into here. We will focus on the admit decision only, implicitly assuming that we can invert the yield function so to determine the number of new students.)   It would thus require a major change in campus culture to move the admit decisions for each college to the Provost's Office.

Likewise, the admit decision for the campus as a whole is determined by the campus, but by a similar argument that admit decision should instead revert to the U of I System or perhaps even to the Board of Higher Education in Illinois.   One might hope that individual units would be good citizens and thus could retain decision making power over admission after receiving edicts from above about what the ultimate goal is.  Keeping the decisions local can be argued because actual supply of instruction will be much better understood at the local level.  Yet, if my experience is still relevant on this, when money is especially tight, the incentive to behave as a monopolist is especially strong.  Counting on the good citizenship of each local unit may then be wishful thinking.

* * * * *

I want to conclude here.  With that, I will briefly talk about my motivation for writing this piece.  While I have tried to take an arm's length and analytical approach in giving my argument, I'm really quite emotional about the issue of student mental health, as I've had several students last fall who were at varying levels of going over the deep end.  One, whom I gave an Absent from Final grade to and who in middle January seemed to be making up the coursework she missed in the fall, suddenly stopped doing the remainder of the work and I haven't heard from her since.  I sent her an email about a week ago to find out what's up but got no response.  Under the circumstances, that's really all I can do.

Kids like this, and there are quite a few of them, still matter.  I was able to help some others get through the course.  Higher Ed is responding to the crisis by talking about the shortage of mental healthcare professionals on campus.  That's an issue, but it is not the issue.  The issue is us and making how we go about things more humane, and more educative at the same time.  When will we wake up to see the need to do that?

Is Now an Apt Time for College Students to Embrace The Creative Attitude?

Before getting to the question in my title, I'd like to encourage readers to have a go at The Admirable Crichton, a play by J.M. Barrie, the same person who wrote Peter Pan. The story is about a class-based society with a strict pecking order, where a group of them is then shipwrecked, after which both the priorities of group members and the pecking order changes dramatically, only for them to be rescued near the end and returned to the way things were, but then with the memory of what things were like when they were stranded on the island.  It is comedy/mild satire, so pretty easy reading.  It is also, perhaps, a good reflection on our present circumstance, where the physical distancing owing to the coronavirus feels like being shipwrecked.  When we do return to the new normal, how much of what we are experiencing now will matter in shaping that?  This play let's us consider an analogous situation to work things through, which might be very helpful in considering the present.  (I found the rendering of the play at the Project Gutenberg site hard to read because there are no margins nor line spaces between paragraphs.  So I pasted it into Word, which I found easier to read: Act I, Act II, and Acts III & IV.)

Then let me note that while this essay is aimed at students who are currently in college, it might apply equally as well to high school students, and to college graduates who have recently joined the ranks of the unemployed. In what I write I will focus on current college students, but I hope it is not too difficult for others to translate the message to their own circumstance. 

The Creative Attitude is an essay by Maslow, well worth the read, and perhaps multiple reads.  (I made a Word version of the article because the PDF version which is available from Proquest has a very light font that's hard to read.)  I am going to appropriate Maslow's meaning for my own purposes. (I have sketched my own path toward the creative attitude in this post.)  First, it means being completely absorbed in the present activity, so much so that everything else fades into the background.  Second, this absorption is active, not passive.  Being hypnotized is not what we're talking about here, nor is vegging out.  Third, the creative attitude becomes a part of one's personal philosophy, so it is something to strive for in as many situations as possible.  Most people can describe some circumstance that produces complete absorption for them.  But then it is the particular environment, it would seem, that induces the state of absorption.  (For many college students, playing video games achieves this effect.)  Armed with the creative attitude, the individual can become absorbed in many different environments and it is the individual's fascination with the environment that drives the absorption.  Fourth, this becomes something that the individual wants to do, in advance.   Experiences of complete absorption are enjoyable, in retrospect, though while going through them the complete absorption precludes making a determination then and there of whether it is enjoyable.  It is this retrospective preference for experiences of complete absorption, that provides the motive for embracing the creative attitude.

Note that so far I haven't said a word about the product that the creative attitude produces - a work of art, a musical composition, innovative computer code, an essay such as this blog post, etc.  Maslow points out that we should separate out the initial conception of the idea for creation from the hard work that follows to deliver a completed product.  That hard work requires additional factors, particularly mastery of technique and then determination to see it through.  Maslow didn't concern himself with these additional factors in the linked essay, nor will I do so here.  This means you can be displaying the creative attitude as a member of the audience to a performance, or by listening to a wonderful piece of music, or by reading a good book, provided that you are completely absorbed in the activity at hand rather than having your mind wander while doing it.  Indeed, it is my belief that developing the reading habit is the best way to eventually embrace the creative attitude.

Conversely, you can be doing tasks autonomously while your mind is focused on something else - developing the concept of your idea.  Donald Murray calls this prewriting.  It is where the bulk of the effort lies, even if it happens while you are doing the dishes, driving to go shopping, or folding the laundry. For me, it is producing an internal narrative that I can buy into.   Contrary to Murray's labeling, however, I find that the prewriting and writing intersperse, though there might be quite a long period of earlier thinking that is needed before any writing is produced.  After that initial period I typically don't compose a complete essay at one sitting.  I might write a paragraph or two, then get stuck.  That begats another round of prewriting.  I should also note that now I write longer pieces than when I first started with this blog.  Then I was writing a post every day and for the most part did compose them at one sitting.  That no loner suits me, both in terms of time allocated to the activity and regarding my temperament now.  Then I wanted to get the piece out and be done with it.  Now I want to touch all the bases.  So my approach has changed over the years.  But, I think it useful to have a less linear view of the creative process.  It's better to envision it as a cycle that renews itself than as a line segment with fixed starting point and ending point.

Having provided some sense of what we mean by the creative attitude, we can now consider why students should embrace it and why it is timely to do so.

Maslow likens the creative attitude to self-actualization, being all we can be, and he likens complete absorption to a peak experience.  Presumably, the more frequently a person has peak experiences the more mentally healthy the person will be.  It is well known now that many college students are not mentally healthy, they are experiencing anxiety and depression.  Indeed, there has been a crisis in higher education regarding student mental health that existed before anyone heard of the coronavirus.  Now, many others are also experiencing anxiety and depression, as graphically illustrated in this recent piece by David Brooks.  Does it matter what the cause of anxiety and depression is?  I think so and I will try to elaborate on that in a bit.  But first I'll make the broad strokes reasons for an embrace of the creative attitude.  It is something an individual can do for himself or herself in an attempt to improve mental outlook and to develop a better sense of resiliency.

Maslow, though he is writing in the early 1960s, quite a long time ago, laments the pace of change of knowledge and that in order to keep up the individual must embrace the creative attitude to continually learn new approaches and be exposed to new ideas.  Nowadays, we'd use different jargon - learning to learn, self-teaching, and lifelong learning.  In this sense, Maslow views the creative attitude as a necessary precursor to self-teaching.  In so doing we equate creativity and learning.  This equation is not perfect, as there are still some things learned by rote, e.g., home address, phone number, and birthday.  But the rote learning is limited to those things that require spitting the knowledge back out exactly the same way it was learned. In contrast, learning something that can be used in a context other than where it was originally learned, what is termed transfer, does require creativity, so in that case the equation is more exact. Thus, a second reason for embracing the creative attitude is to become a better lifelong learner and thereby be better able to handle the curves that life throws at us.

Now I think it worthwhile to ask, has the student already embraced the creative attitude?  If not, why not? About a dozen years ago I wrote a post called PLAs Please, which focused on student self-directed learning and enrichment outside of school (so it counted both reading interesting books and magazines and going to stimulating movies and concert performances).  When I was in high school, some kids did that and indeed much of what they knew was learned outside of school, not in it. Further, this was not done as a credentialing activity but rather to satisfy the interests of the students.  I didn't have the terminology, the creative attitude, at the time of writing that post, but if I did I would have argued that this is the way for a student to develop it.  More recently, those who are high academic achievers but who don't embrace the creative attitude are termed Excellent Sheep, by William Deresiewicz.  Sheep are members of the flock; they don't lead the flock. The derision in the term stems because the students have opted out of directing their own learning and left that task to others - parents and teachers.  Thereby, they lose all sense of intrinsic motivation.  This framing places the onus on the students.  No doubt parents and possibly teachers as well share some of the blame by not encouraging students to be more self-directed in their learning.

In looking at the possible reasons for selecting one path or the other, let's sort them by cultural reasons, on the one hand, and self-protection against failure reasons, on the other.  I'm very wary of cultural stereotypes, and propagating those. But yesterday I had a Zoom call with some of my extended family, where my siblings and I were cracking jokes throughout, but my cousin from Denmark and another cousin from Florida, on the other side of the family, said they don't have conversations like this very often.  Why not?  So I am biased to associate Reform Judaism with comedic humor - we all want to be some semblance of Groucho Marx.  On the flip side, I wrote a piece for Inside Higher Ed called The Student's Dilemma, based on a discussion group I had with three former students of mine, each an international student from East Asia, where it was evident that their high school education abhorred not following the pre-arranged script for their learning.  So, I think it futile to ignore these cultural differences, some of which stifle creativity.

The self-protection against failure is harder, as we all fail at one time or another, but some of us are not so scarred from it that we require self-protection thereafter.  Further, as somebody who will admit to being phobic in many areas, fear of heights and fear of dogs two of the more obvious ones, I want to observe that some of my fears are based purely on my own experiences, while others are more concerned with a social context that was beyond my control.  There is ordinary nervousness - stage fright - that can be present because others can observe our performance, rather than because our prior performance was inadequate.  Indeed, our prior good performance might make the stage fright all the worse, as now we feel it necessary to get above the bar that we ourselves set previously.  Self-protection, in the form of getting off the stage, can happen even if the others never ridiculed prior performance.  It is protection against the future threat that it might happen.  (A nerd who knows he is not hip, when with others who value being hip, may feel extremely uncomfortable even if those others have never indicated there is some problem.)

In this context embracing the creative attitude is taking on some risk, so moving away from the safety play, because the consequences from the safety play have proved intolerable.  This may then be seen as an act of rebellion. But really, it will be an individual trying to assert control of the circumstance rather than abiding by what others say should be done, because what others say hasn't worked.

In the wake of the coronavirus, the motivation is different.  The labor market for new grads is likely to be very soft. I wish I had more data on this from my former students.  In the absence of that, I'm guessing that many students who are graduating this semester, even those who were previously offered a job, will end up unemployed after graduation.  This is because the economy is tanking overall, not because their own performance is substandard. These students have experienced a huge capital loss on the human capital they have acquired and on the various credentials they have amassed, as early poor performance in the labor market is apt to have significant negative impact on earnings into the future.  These are the big investments the students have made in their lives up to this point.  The vast majority of these students won't have diversified this investment.  So the loss is real and it is devastating.

I don't want to claim expertise about how people regard large financial losses versus how people deal with the grief from loss of a loved one.  But with the latter we associate five stages of grief.  Depression is the fourth stage and acceptance is the fifth stage.  If such a parallel makes sense, the embrace of the creative attitude should wait at least till the first three stages have passed.  Indeed, the need for the embrace won't be felt until that has happened.  Recalling how I dealt with the death of my mother and then the disposition of her estate in late 2012 and then much of 2013, I think there is a blur between depression and acceptance, at least there was for me. As the embrace of the creative attitude is likely to take quite a bit of time even after it has been initiated, waiting for the depression to conclude by itself is probably waiting too long.  But each student who goes through the embrace must opt in for themselves.  So they get to determine when it should happen.

* * * * *

In this section I want to talk about impediments to embracing the creative attitude and possible reasons not to do it.  This is my truth in advertising section of the essay.  Really, I mean it to temper early idealism so the students who do embrace the creative attitude have a better sense of what they are getting into.

First, students will need to devote a significant chunk of time each day for an extended period of time (I'm guessing that would be about 2 - 3 months).  Do they have that much time available?  Or are they already obligated with care for loved ones, being a full-time student, doing telecommuting work, or possibly other obligations.  Squeezing out more hours in the day by planning to sleep less is not an answer.  Lack of sleep makes us dull (and also can amplify the depression).   There is also coming to grips with this requirement as in the circumstance prior to the coronavirus, where instructor expectations (in a normative sense) of how much time should be devoted to a course are typically quoted as 3 hours per week for every credit hour per course.  In contrast, students are apt to put in much less time than that, closer to 1 hour per week for each credit hour per course.  So students may be impatient about the requisite time commitment, as they won't have prior experience as to why this is necessary.  But that is because they largely haven't experienced learning things in a deep way.  The creative attitude facilitates that sort of learning.

Second, many students are hooked on multiprocessing as the way to get things done.  Multiprocessing is anathema to the creative attitude, which requires complete absorption in one thing.   Can the student give up multiprocessing for a good chunk of the day, possibly by being away from laptop, tablet, and phone?   How will the student prevent their own cheating on a prior commitment to do just that?  On the flip side, one might ask whether student mental health would improve without embrace of the creative attitude, merely by going offline like this as an ongoing matter.  My own experience with this recently is a sense of addiction to being connected that is hard to combat.  When I'm reading a novel in a paper book, rather than on my Kindle, deliberately chosen to address this issue, I still frequently crave looking at my phone. On occasion, when what I'm reading truly is drawing me in, this craving goes away.  But not everything I read satisfies this requirement.  So this is a struggle for me.  I'm guessing it will be an even greater struggle for the students.

Third, there is how to deal with fear of failure.  Many students have this fear with respect to their regular schoolwork.  They often "manage" the fear by procrastinating, not initiating doing the work till very close to the deadline, so providing a ready excuse for a mediocre performance.  On the plus side, the embrace of the creative attitude is possible to achieve with only the student aware of the student's performance.  As much of the fear of failure concerns looking stupid in the eyes of others, that can be avoided.  Yet sometimes we are our own harshest critic and self-criticism must be confronted squarely.  There is a need to persevere in spite of that.

Fourth, particularly for students with ADHD or some other learning disability, the program I will suggest in the next section may be inappropriate for them.  There is a delightful Ted Talk, Do schools kill creativity, given by Sir Ken Robinson.  He points out that some students crave motion, so, for example, dance can be considered creative expression.  And it may be to become an active listener the student must physically act out what the student is hearing.  I don't want to deny this possibility.  I simply want to note that I don't seem to have this need for motion, so can't readily suggest how it should manifest.  Students who do have this need then may be thwarted by a program that doesn't acknowledge the need.  Something else will be necessary as a substitute.

Last, for students who have been experiencing depression even before the coronavirus, there is a need to make themselves an object of study (as will be explained in the next section).  But self-examination of this sort might initially lead to self-loathing.  For a person already experiencing depression, this might push the person over the edge and make the person suicidal.  As this can be anticipated, there are mitigations that can be taken which reduce the likelihood of going over the deep end.  The student should be made aware of these beforehand and then make a judgment about whether proceeding is worth the risk.

* * * * *

I'm going to suggest a three-pronged program for embrace of the creative attitude.  This program is aimed at students who were already experiencing depression before the pandemic.  Those students who were doing reasonably well emotionally before the pandemic might focus on just the first two prongs.  I want to note that these prongs need not be mutually orthogonal.  One might support another.  That's for the individual student to decide.   The prongs are:

1. Practice of complete absorption as a reader or as a member of the audience. 
2. Practice of complete absorption in self-expression that produces some sort of product.
3. An examination of self that aims at producing a personal philosophy that the student can live with.

With each of these, I think it is worth keeping in mind the notion of deliberate practice, which is aimed at producing personal growth.   Ultimately, that is the goal.  Initially, however, taking on things that the student expects to find interesting may be the more urgent objective.  How to feed that interest is the question to address.

For example, if it is agreed that the first prong will be devoted to reading, then the student might ask whether there is something that the student read, either as part of school or as pleasure reading, which held the student's interest.  Might the author(s) of that piece have written other pieces that the student might then read?  Alternatively, are there other pieces of the same genre written by others that might interest the student.   Then there is the question, does the student have any friend or classmate who also wants to engage in reading this way?  Might they form a reading group to choose the readings and discuss them, with the social connection part of what supplies the motivation to sustain the effort.  Still a different way to pick something is to consider a movie that the student liked.  Is there a book or short story on which the movie was based?  Might that then be tried?  Not everything that is tried will be compelling.  But if the students finds nothing compelling, the sense of complete absorption will not be attained. 

In addition to doing the daily reading, I think it would be good to do some record keeping about how long the student stayed at it and how close to complete absorption the student became, as well as any other thoughts that occur about the experience.  I'm well aware that monitoring of this sort can impact the experience itself, so detract from the complete absorption.  I would try then to monitor by recall later in the day or the day after, not immediately after the session.  Recall may be imperfect.  That's okay.  One cares about these measurements longitudinally, so after a month or so the student can get some sense of whether improvement is happening or not.  Precision of any one particular measurement is not the issue.

Regarding the second prong, one real reason for doing this is that various matters may be weighing heavily on the student, both personal and in the external world, and it would be good for the student to express these concerns in some way, so they don't simply continue to go around inside the students head.  This might be done by keeping a written journal or, if writing is difficult, then making voice recordings of the student's current concerns.  For a little while, say two weeks or so, that should be the extent of it, simply giving voice to what the student has already been thinking.

If I'm like these students in some ways, then it will be natural to read these journal entries or listen to the voice recordings.  Part of that is simply to reacquaint the student with the concerns.  But then the student might also do this with a more critical eye.  Did the student tell the full story or were certain key ideas omitted?  Was there a logic to the ordering of the ideas or does it read more like a stream of consciousness?  Quality-wise, how does this product compare with what the student has been reading for the first prong?  As the student will be a novice writer, it is reasonable to expect that the student can see ways where the quality of what is produced can be improved.  Two possible ways this may occur are first, to produce a second draft of what has already been produced and second, to be more effortful in the production of new journal entries.  With regard to the latter, the student should discover the need for prewriting as part of that increase in effort.

The student may find at this point that with the prewriting itself time consuming, it is necessary to produce pieces with less frequency or only do the actual writing as a paragraph at a time, with it taking several days to produce a full piece of writing.  The bigger issue than the quality of what is produced is whether the creative activity itself is engaging for student.  In other words, is there intrinsic motivation for doing the activity?

There is then an issue of whether what is being written is too personal to share with anyone else or if the student wants to have other eyeballs on the work.  I would advise a student who is experiencing depression to err on the side of caution here, for fear that negative external feedback will be quite damaging.  Nevertheless, if there is a good friend whom the student can trust and if the student has put in substantial effort in producing the work, getting the friend's reaction to it might be a natural thing to do. Positive external feedback can be a spur to do more of this sort of thing.  Sometimes even negative feedback can be such a spur.

The ultimate goal here is not to produce another writer.  It is to develop a strong sense of the need for prewriting and with that to realize that something analogous is necessary in any episode of self-teaching.  In other words, it is to get the student to understand what needs to happen in order to achieve deep learning.  It is also to come to terms with whether such deep learning can happen as the student is completely absorbed in the activity and to get a sense of when effort that is not completely absorbing is also necessary. 

If the student can find complete absorption in pursuit of the first two prongs, the student will have discovered the power of intrinsic motivation. This simple observation gets us to consider the third prong.

Someone who is experiencing depression will want a way out, to learn to live within the person's own skin.  This means understanding what the person wants, devoting a significant amount of energy to that, having reasonable expectations about achieving goals, and learning how to give oneself a break when coming up short on those goals.  But there must also be a looking backward in time as to what came before that caused the depression.

In general, depression results because the person feels trapped in a situation not of their liking, with no sense of agency how to get out of the situation, and quite possibly no view of an alternative that would be more to their liking. This might be coupled with a strong sense of anger at others who seem responsible for creating the situation.  This can be anger at parents, anger at schools, and anger at themselves for having allowed this to happen.  It may be all the harder to deal with this now, because the student may have very well moved back in with the parents as part of the the social distancing that their college imposed, and this living arrangement might be expected to persist for quite some time, especially if jobs after graduation remain difficult to come by.  So the challenge will be a daunting one and it might take some time for the student to simultaneously take control over many life decisions while making sufficient peace with parents that everyone in the family can live together under one roof.

If in pursuit of the first two prongs the student does indeed make a bow to intrinsic motivation, yet in the look back the student realizes that all motivation was externally provided - getting good grades and building a good resume - the student will begin to see that certain myths had been propagated and the student had bought into them, hook, line, and sinker. In subsequently rejecting those myths various ideas about money will surely emerge.  Parents, who may have acted out of the best interests for their child without realizing the torture they were creating in the process, undoubtedly were concerned about the financial well being of the child after graduating from college.  All the extrinsic motivation emerged to address that as the underlying goal.  The reality in the current macroeconomics as a consequence of the pandemic, is that it may be impossible now to ensure financial well being for the student if and when something approximating normalcy is achieved after the pandemic fades into the past.

Yet the student will need to ask whether this goal of financial well being after graduation, to be pursued no matter what, was sensible prior to the pandemic, or if the parents projected their own fears onto their child in a way that prevented the child from developing as a full human being.  Further, the parents' excuse surely will be something like - all the other parents were doing the same thing for their kids, so they didn't have a choice in the matter.   Will they come to understand what they have done?  Will they then express regret for it?  If they do that, can the student forgive the parents for not truly trusting the child to direct matters according to the child's own inclinations?

To go from being an excellent sheep to being an adult who is capable of driving one's own life choices will surely take more than two or three months.  What I believe can be achieved in that comparatively short period of time is for the student to identify wanting to go down that path and feeling somewhat confident that self-teaching in the future, based on both need as dictated by the labor market and by inclination as driven by the student's interest, can be functional and sufficient to keep the student's head above water.  Self-confidence doesn't just happen.  It must be earned.  And it is not earned by pleasing others.  It happens as a byproduct of pleasing oneself.

* * * * *

An argument that has been going around for some time, Hanna Rosin's piece The Overprotected Kid was my first time reading about it though I surely was aware of it earlier, is that parents in trying to provide a safe environment for their children inadvertently blocked the children in learning life lessons for themselves.  They grew up being more brittle.  The widespread depression among college students now is evidence of that brittleness. That much of the argument I agree with.

Some are arguing, in addition, that these college kids need to experience hardship which they must navigate on their own.  That is the only way they will learn the requisite life lessons.  I think that's is cruel and unnecessary, especially given that evident hardships they will face nonetheless as a consequence of the recession we invariably are experiencing now and likely will be experiencing for quite some time to come. An alternative is to focus directly on the learning of the college kids and encourage them to embrace the creative attitude.  It has a decent chance of being effective without the need for additional undo hardship, which will surely now push many of them over the deep end.  Do we really want that?  I, for one, surely don't.

Screen Test

My mind has stores of information, and for me now it is fascinating to witness recall of a particular bit, and then to speculate why I accessed that particular bit of information.  This morning's example is the old TV show, Romper Room.  The following is taken from the Wikipedia entry.

American television franchises and syndications

Romper Room was a rare case of a series being both franchised and syndicated, so local affiliates—Los Angeles and New York being prime examples—could produce their own versions of the show instead of airing the national telecast. For some time, local shows all over the world used the same script but with local children; some affiliates, starting with KWEX-TV in San Antonio, translated the scripts into Spanish for local airings.[1] Kids would be on waiting lists for years (sometimes before birth) to be on the show.[citation needed] It was called "an actual kindergarten". Originally filmed in Baltimore from its inception in 1953, Romper Room eventually moved its broadcast facilities to Chicago[when?] and then moved back to Baltimore in 1981. 

Two thoughts initially provoked this recollection and then I'll try to connect those to a third idea, to illustrate current relevance.   Informally, we've had online education for quite some time, with TV the source of the programming, and the kid shows we watched were a mixture of entertainment and education.  I grew up before Sesame Street came into existence.  Romper Room was the predecessor for my generation.  It's incredibly interesting to me to read about the mixed model, with both franchises and syndication (of a nationalized script for the show).  This really makes you wonder.  

The other initial thought is that we had some formal education via TV in elementary school.   I started first grade in 1960, P.S. 31, and President Kennedy came into office in the middle of the school year.  I switched schools to a new school for second grade, P.S. 203.  The TV programming I'm referring to happened either in fourth, fifth, or sixth grades and possibly in all of them (my memory is not that sharp on this point).  By then LBJ was President.  The thought was that while our teachers were good at teaching the three R's, they were deficient at teaching science.  So, instead, we watched a program aired on WNYC for our science instruction.   If you think of screen sizes for TVs back then (21" maybe was the biggest) it is hard to imagine a classroom with about 30 kids all watching the show at the same time.  Yet somehow we managed.   Perhaps this exposure was supplemented by pieces we read from the Weekly Reader or Junior Scholastic and maybe SRA had some essays that were science based.  My memory is not strong enough to know if that happened or not.  I also want to note here that while we were drilled somewhat, with Mrs. Stone in 5th grade everyday we had 5 minutes of multiplication quizzes on the times table through 12 x 12, and for spelling the pre-test on Monday followed by the re-test on Friday was common across the grades, we also had a fair amount of time in school to explore on our own.  This started through individualized reading, perhaps in 2nd grade, and some kids doing activities that other kids weren't doing, such as painting on an easel in a corner at the back of the classroom, where there was enough space for a few kids only.   The point here is that the TV science show was just one part of this mosaic, not a full diet of TV education only.

Now, let me tie this to the present and focus on college education, not K-12.   As long as instruction was face-to-face courses, that in the catalog looked pretty much identical from one campus to the next, would be taught independently.  The only coordination across such courses will happen if the courses use the same textbook and ancillary materials.   Now I will assert, without too much evidence other than the feedback I get from my own students, that in many of these classes lecture is featured and the students view their main job during lecture to produce reasonable lecture notes, which they will subsequently memorize and expect some part of that will have to be reproduced on the exams that are part of the course.

Once going online however, one might reasonably ask:  can't one person deliver the lecture that students are getting, rather than have the effort in preparing and delivering the lecture replicated from one campus to the next?  Of course, this same thinking is what spawned the MOOC craze earlier in the decade.  Higher Ed has a more sanguine view of MOOCs now, part of the education landscape, but surely not the entire solution. So what, if anything, will be learned from this experience where all classes have been put online out of necessity?

As complaints about the quality of instruction accumulate, partially because of technical/access issues, but mainly because so many instructors are inexperienced in teaching this way, it should occur to educators that we don't really know about the quality of instruction in many if not most of the face-to-face offerings that were being taught until the need for social distancing emerged.  So, I hope that one good thing coming out of this experience is creating a need to consider the quality of the on-ground offerings and then inquiring about what might be done to raise the quality of instruction.

I want to sketch the quality issue along two different dimensions.  The first is about whether we are teaching the right stuff.  In a blog post I wrote a decade ago called Excise The Textbook, I argued that too often we're not teaching the right stuff.  Students aren't learning how to apply what they are being taught to analyze novel situations based on theory they are learning (in education jargon, this is called transfer).  Memorization doesn't help with this.  But far too many students see getting a good grade in the course as the main goal.  Consequently, the instructors who teach them are under a good deal of pressure to meet the student expectations, which results in a lot of teaching to the test, confirming that memorization can produce good results grade-wise.  My conjecture is that this is happening on a broad scale.   The current experience may then encourage campus administrators to evaluate courses for whether this is indeed the case and then consider what might be done about it the evaluation confirms my conjecture.

The second dimension is about student multiprocessing, which might be thought of as a hedging strategy regarding how students go about their coursework.  In this case the risk is that the subject matter might not be interesting and/or that mastering the material will take more time than the student is willing to devote to the subject.   In a recent post about teaching online, I described the issue this way:

If You Build It Will They Come?

This question, of course, also comes up in face-to-face teaching.  Here I want to point out the limited efficacy of monitoring.  Even if an instructor takes attendance in class, a student can very well be there, but not be all there.  When electronic devices are allowed, the student's head might be in that.  If there are windows in the classroom, the student might be staring outside.  When doing the analog online, clicks can be measured as can how long a video window is kept open with the video playing.  But whether the student is paying attention really can't be monitored.

To encourage student behavior that is more committed to the coursework, incentives need to be provided.  In that post I argued for a certain type of carrot - moving away from lecture and instead have two instructors discuss the issues in a video chat, kind of like a TV talk show. Then, possibly doing something similar with the instructor and a small group of students in the class.   Experimenting with this sort of thing is probably quite limited now, given how just-in-time the move to online has been.  But maybe this is where we are heading in the not too distant future.

If students persist in their multiprocessing, so are only skimming the required readings and only watching short segments of the course videos, how can that produce high quality learning?  The treatment for this will need to be drastic.  Changing the pedagogy in one class only won't achieve the desired result.  But before we get there, we might want to simply measure how much of this is happening at present.  Getting analytic data on this (for the videos, and perhaps for the reading when there is an eTextbook) would be a good first step in this direction.

What we might learn is apt to be disillusioning.  But it seems clear the first step is to understand what's going on now.  Improvements in quality of instruction can't happen without such understanding.

Thoughts on Bridging the Social Distance in Online Learning and Ideas Related to Doing That

Before getting to the substance of the post, I want to note that the premise is based on the assumption that universities will be offering totally online classes again this summer and on into the fall, possibly in spring 2021 as well.  Even if the curve does finally flatten, with the limited testing that is currently available and looks to be available in the near future, we literally will have no idea of the number of asymptomatic carriers of the coronavirus, and thus will have no way to determine the health risks involved in a return to face-to-face instruction until a vaccine is made widely available.  If anything, this piece by Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post makes the forecast about staying with online instruction seem all the more likely.   Clearly, now what's being done in online instruction is purely a reaction to an emergency situation.  Starting with this summer, however, there will be some lead time in which to anticipate the instruction will be online.  So it makes sense to ask what improvements can be made, rather quickly, so the quality of instruction rises.

My focus here is on undergraduate instruction only and to keep matters simple I will only consider classes that are taught as lecture-discussion, in moderately sized classrooms, or where the lecture is in one section taught in a large auditorium and the discussion is in a different section, typically taught by a TA.  I want to begin with the following ideas, which you might call learning principles, or stylized facts about learning, or imperatives to take into account when making modifications to how a course is taught.

• Every Learner Must Express Their Own Formative Thinking - How such expression occurs might very well vary from person to person.  One would expect that extroverts would do this in conversation with others while introverts might have purely an internal conversation, but then perhaps express the thinking through some creative activity.  For example, I write blog posts as "think alouds" to work through some issue.  If I've hit my mark, it helps others to think through those issues for themselves. Also note that sometimes people behave against type - extroverts may engage in deep reflection for expressing their thinking while introverts may engage in thoughtful conversation with others. 


• The Shy Student Problem - Many students are reluctant to speak up in the face-to-face classroom.  They won't raise their hand even when they have a question to ask.  Likewise, they won't raise their hand when the instructor poses a question to the class.  Some of these students genuinely prefer to listen to their classmates and to the instructor, rather than contribute to the discussion themselves.  Many of these students are afraid of looking stupid in front of the instructor and their classmates, so sometimes the preference for listening is a dodge to conceal this fear.  This is not new.  I learned about it in spring-summer 1996 when Cheryl Bullock and I interviewed many SCALE faculty.  Addressing the shy student problem was the primary reason that most of these instructors were willing to try going online. Of course,  there have been many factors since then which impact how students now behave in the face-to-face classroom.  If my own recent teaching experience is any indicator, the issue is more acute now than it was in the mid to late 1990s. 


• People Tend To Be More Open When Typing On A Screen - This too is not new. Absent the facial cues, it is easier to think of what to say because there won't be quick feedback about saying the wrong thing.  This is why one approach to the shy student problem is to have students do writing online of some sort. 


• Students Tend To Be More Open With Others Their Own Age - These kids, on the path to adulthood, live in a hierarchical world.  Those in authority, mainly parents and teachers, are older than them, and learning to please the authority figure may mean denying oneself of true motivations and feelings.  It is easier to express those sometimes hidden thoughts with peers, who likely are thinking along similar lines.  Further, there are generational/cultural differences based on common experience (think about music or online games) that encourages communication within generations and blocks communication across generations.


• The Most Basic Pedagogy Is Imitation Of Expert Performance - We refer to it as the master-apprentice model or, more colloquially, as monkey-see monkey-do.  Indeed, much of what caring instructors aspire to do is provide a good model for their students.  Yet sometimes instructors who are experts in their fields are blind to obstacles that novice learners face.  Those who are somewhat experienced yet still novice might be better teachers this way because they have a better sense of what someone new to the subject is going through. 


• Is The Innovation Specific To Online Or Can It Also Be Deployed Face-To-Face? Nobody knows now when instruction will return to what it was or if that will happen.  Expectations about that will vary.  If an instructor is to make changes in how the course is taught, thinking of that as a kind of investment, the instructor would like to get good return on that effort.  It stands to reason that modifications which can be deployed either online or face-to-face are more likely to elicit greater instructor response.  

The core idea is to resurrect the notion of Inward Looking Service Learning (INSL), where more experienced students provide service to the university by helping other students who are less experienced, and conceiving of that as both a productive activity, meaning the inexperienced students really do benefit from receiving the help, and an educative activity for the experienced students, where it falls into the category - learning by teaching.  In the first year of this blog I became enamored with this idea and thought then that the university should embrace it fully.  Near the end of this post I will critique my own thinking then, so while I still think this is a good idea, it is no panacea, especially if not accompanied by other modifications to supplement it. But I first want to articulate the idea on how it might be implemented at the individual course level, which is described in the second of seven posts on INSL. The experienced students would serve as peer-mentors in a course they had already taken.

The idea included taking a very old concept, the study group, which typically would be formed by some of the current students themselves, with it being an opt in for those who became study group members, and making the following modification.  The instructor would break up the class into study groups where each student enrolled in the class would be assigned to some group. Each group would also be assigned a peer-mentor, who would serve as the group leader.  Each study group would meet online in synchronous fashion,  with the agenda for the group meeting being determined by the course work that needed to be covered during the session. The peer-mentor would encourage participation by all group members, address outside-the-group meeting, if a particular member seemed to be struggling more than a little bit, and try to keep the group on track so the meeting remains functional, although in the current circumstances it might be appropriate to allocate some time to other diversions as people who are abiding by the social distancing requirements might need some non-academic interactions with other people that are purely fun/social or are expressing their fears about whether society will rebound fully or not.

The instructor, in turn, would serve as a mentor of the peer-mentors, by having an online session with them where they could share their experiences and where the suggested agenda for the the next group meeting would be proposed.  The instructor might also arrange to visit with individual groups, perhaps for a fraction of the full group meeting, just to get a sense of how things are going and to demonstrate to the students that the instructor has an interest in how students are learning with this approach.  (In large lecture classes, it is the graduate student TA who would perform this function.)  Otherwise, instructor produced content would be delivered to students asynchronously and students would review that content as well as complete any assignments that were due between group meetings.  So those meetings would partially be for taking a reflective look at the work the students had already done and partially for getting the students ready for what would come next.

One would want to evaluate whether the approach works for students in the class.  Will they find it a boon, have true personal contact with a peer-mentor who can help them learn?  Or will they see it as a way for the instructor to become even more distant than happens in the usual mode of instruction?  It only makes sense to perpetuate the practice if most of the students are in the former situation.  One also has to consider how the peer-mentors benefit from the arrangement. As I mentioned previously, there is real learning for them from doing this work, which might be categorized as learning communication skills and learning leadership skills, as well as possibly learning the subject matter of the course in a deeper way than they had during the time they were students in the class.  There is an issue about getting college credit for this learning.  If there were an institutional embrace of the practice, that would have be to addressed in a systematic fashion.  In the current situation credit might be given in an ad hoc manner, letting the peer-mentors receive independent study credit, possibly using the peer-mentoring as a gateway for the instructor to actually supervise independent study projects that the peer-mentors do.  But if too much of that is deemed necessary, it will be self-defeating, because it will up the instructor workload beyond what is reasonable.

What is clear is that the peer-mentors need to be paid, perhaps on an hourly basis, or maybe via tuition reductions that are granted to such students.  So, one needs to ask where the money will come from to make such payments.  In the INSL posts from 15 years ago, I went through some effort to show how an institutional embrace could be made self-financing. Here we don't have that, so something else is needed.   And now I will make reference to my previous post, where a worry was expressed about graduating seniors entering the job market at this impossible time.  If the university had the wherewithal to do this, should it encourage these students to defer graduation till after the health risk has passed?   My sense of things is that this is a sufficient emergency situation to warrant spending down the university endowment substantially and to really lean on major donors (the ones who have buildings named after them) to provide additional funding for hiring undergraduate students.  One might also lean on well-paid faculty and staff to make contributions to the university. Without this, the idea is a non-starter.  With it, you can then ask, just how much of this sort of thing can we do?

I promised a critique of the INSL approach and I want to offer that, tie it in with what came previously, and then close.  I came up with INSL because in the late 1990s and early 2000s I used undergraduate TAs in my intermediate microeconomics course (they held online office hours) and got reasonably good results from that practice  In turn, I adopted that approach from some instructors in Engineering who had been using undergraduate peer-mentors well before I started to do it.  This leads to the first critique.

• Innovators and Early Adopters among the instructors make the innovation shine.  The same innovation when deployed by majority instructors can seem rather dull.  This is my conclusion from the main innovation I oversaw as the Director of the Center for Educational Technologies, when the innovation was getting a traditional class and giving it an online component, so the class became Web enhanced.  The traditional way of overcoming this issue is by having the majority instructor receive professional development support from campus, college, or departmental providers.  But that doesn't scale well and/or is a slow way to get interesting adaptations of the innovation.  The issue is whether in the current tough situation we find ourselves whether there is some way to quick start the learning of the majority instructors, so they behave more like early adopters in this instance. I don't have an answer for that here, but it is worth thinking about. 

A second issue concerns the prior attitudes towards group work.  The majority of students are not neutral on the matter.

• Diligent students will report on prior group projects that there are other students who free ride on the efforts of the group and don't do their fair share of the work.   I have heard this sufficiently often when I query students about this that I take it to be the norm on campus.  Particularly galling here is when the group shares a common grade for the project.  If there were individualized grading then the free riding wouldn't seem as much as an issue to the diligent students.  In our context, however, it would be the peer-mentors who assigned the individualized grades.  Do we want to advocate for undergraduates to do that?  A flip issue here would happen if there is no direct grading for the study group at all.  Would the diligent students see the group as productive regarding their own performance in class on the work they do that does get assessed?   If so, they would participate vigorously.  If not, however, the study group might degenerate entirely.   Holding the study group together so all members participate and the discussions are valued by group members might be putting a very large burden on the peer-mentors.  What can help them be up to that burden?

A third issue concerns group meetings held online and that students may be more distracted when online than in face-to-face meetings.

• Students are in the habit of multiprocessing when online.  The multiprocessing counteracts student engagement and thus lessens the quality of the group meeting.  Among the related issues that need to be worked through here are: (a) should group meetings be by video chat, audio chat, or text chat?  (b) should a group member be designated to take minutes of the meeting and thereby be absolved from much participation in the discussion?  and (c) does it matter what device students use for these group meetings, smartphone or laptop?  I do want to note that meetings can be recorded and recordings can be shared with the instructor, if necessary.  So if a student is under performing during the meeting, the peer-mentor can note this, share the recording of the meeting with the instructor and leave it to the instructor to deal with the student.  This is an example of the typical monitor/punish approach to labor shirking.  One wonders if there is an alternative approach that emphasizes carrots rather than sticks, so taps into student intrinsic motivation.  If this alternative does exist is that due to the subject matter of the course or to the pedagogic method?  There needs to be some unpacking in answering those questions. 

Now let me wrap up.  The Webinar approach to online classes is one that leaves most students as anonymous members of the audience, even when text chat is enabled and questions can be posed there.  Most instructors can't manage their own presentation and the text chat flow at the same time.  They will generally favor their own presentation and the online session will then not be very interactive.  So this post considers an alternative where students are in study groups and interact there.  The student groups are led by peer-mentors who have taken the course previously.  This has a lot of upside potential to engage students in the class.  Whether that upside will be realized, however, remains an issue.  In ordinary circumstances, one would do pilot offerings with the approach to learn what does encourage the upside to become the reality and how to avoid some of the pitfalls that can be anticipated in advance.  At present I'd like to see larger than a pilot offering, driven by those instructors who understand creative things need to be done very soon to address the quality of instruction issue.   Trying anything new entails taking on some risks.  If the risks are understood, mitigations can be taken to lessen them, if not to eliminate them outright.

Should students slated to graduate this spring delay that indefinitely?

I'm not in the know here.  I'm just thinking aloud.  Are companies that have made job offers to students already still honoring those?  Are students who have yet to get an offer in jeopardy that no offers will be forthcoming, indeed no interviews for jobs will happen as well.  What should students do in this circumstance?

And what should the university do to help such students in this very frightening time?

We might want to appropriate the acronym ABD and redefine it as All But Degree.  In the current circumstance, which I would term an emergency, students who are ABD might then become partly grad students and partly undergrad help employees - NOT SUBSTITUTES FOR GRAD TAS - but rather, in addition, to help make the online instruction more personal.  This might happen in the summer or fall semesters.  If the crisis has largely passed by the spring, they would graduate then.   The year between when they were scheduled to graduate and when they actually graduate would be something of a twilight zone.

If there's a better answer here, I'm all ears. 

Reconsidering the Notion of Acceptable Risk

I found this opinion piece by David L. Katz provocative.  As I understand, the data so far show that mortality risk for people who test positive for Covid19 is low for people under 60, and then it rises, so that very senior citizens are at extreme risk, while those in their mid 60s like me are at risk, but it is still very likely that such people will survive the illness.  The piece argues that we should should target the at risk population for social distance practices.  The rest of the population should interact, let the disease spread, but acquire herd immunity as a consequence, which would ultimately defeat the disease.  This was a new argument for me and I'm still trying to process it, which is why I'm writing this post.

So, first, there is the question about the news we are hearing and other possible news we are not hearing. We seem to be overwhelmed with stories about those just tested who show infection.  When it is a public persona, that might be enough information.  But otherwise, is age of the person reported as well?  What of the prior health of the person?  Does that get reported too?  Conversely, we don't seem to be getting any news about people who were tested positive a month ago or even earlier than that who got sick, but then recovered and are more or less normal now.  Nor have we heard about when such a person is no longer contagious.  My conclusion, based on the availability heuristic, is that we are overplaying the risk from being infected, so most of us won't be able to entertain the argument in the Times opinion piece, as it goes against too much of what we believe to be true.

Then there is, how we as individuals as well as how we as members of organizations deal with risk, when the downside can be measured in money terms rather than in illness which might lead to death.  Here the perception of liability matters and that liability is tied to whether due precaution has been taken.  The decision making apparatus often drives to a solution that minimizes liability without caring about the potential upside risk, which conceivably could provide substantial benefit in the event it is realized. In other words, a full cost-benefit analysis might sometimes be consistent with absorbing liability, but organizations don't go that route out of fear of the downside risk.  In this, I'm thinking of my days as the main ed tech guy at Illinois, where the learning management system (we called it Illinois Compass) offered up the solution to risk of violations of copyright (an instructor using somebody else's materials without getting their permission first) and student privacy (a student's membership in a particular class is protected information that should not be made available to outsiders without the student's permission).  So closed container systems, which the lms exemplifies, became the vogue, irrespective of whether they encouraged deep learning by the students or not.  I have since come to view that what the lms does should be much more limited and that much of the online instruction should be done out in the open.  That better promotes learning.  But I feel like a voice in the wilderness on that one.

Finally, there is the issue of whether it is better to endure the downside risk rather than to try to avoid it, so as to lessen the fear of future such risks and make the person more resilient.  Here I'm thinking of pieces like What Straight-A Students Get Wrong by Adam Grant and The Overprotected Kid by Hanna Rosin. Getting bumps and bruises along the way is part of being a robust child.  Once in a while it will be worse than that.  Should parents protect the child against that downside risk?  Nowadays that seems the norm.  Yet we have a large fraction of college students who are having serious mental health issues.  Surely there is some linkage between the two.

Right now it seems to be younger people who are violating the restrictions of social distancing.  If they are living with older parent or their grandparents, that indeed might be problematic.  But if they are living on their own or with roommates their own age, maybe these violations will in the end be our salvation, as a species.

I'm no epidemiologist.  And I'm in the at-risk group.  But as an economist, seeing all these stories about how medical masks and virus testing are in very limited supply, I can make a reasonable case that in addition to hoping for dramatic increases in supply, we almost surely should be doing things to limit demand.  Yet I'm wondering whether our trying to be responsible precludes that.  It's something that needs to be thought through.

Student Created Content and Open Courseware

This is a kind of followup to my previous post, where I argued that instructors will need to exploit division of labor of some sort in getting their courses online.  But I want to take a different angle here - using students as producers of instructional content.

To make this a sensible solution there needs to be some forecast for how long online instruction will remain an across-the-board activity.  If we are to rely only on official pronouncements, those go only as far as the current spring semester.  What about in the summer and then the fall and perhaps even next spring?  I have not read about student internships/jobs for this summer but I'm guessing that a good number of them have been cancelled or will be cancelled and the prospect of students finding other work will be nil.  Indeed, this may be true even for those who graduate after the spring semester.  I want to repeat that I'm simply guessing here.  I have no information on this point.  But if the speculation is on the mark, then the demand for courses may be much larger than usual, as taking them would be a way to accelerate time to graduation or adding additional qualifications post graduation, and the students' opportunity cost of time will be remarkably low in this instance.  Further, if a vaccine is only first available during the spring 2021 semester, and its date of availability won't be known in advance, then this situation will persist into that semester.

Admittedly, the situation might be different for incoming first-year students, who opt for community college alternatives as a way to avoid paying higher tuition.  (That the university might itself offer tuition discounts while in this totally online phase is an interesting possibility, but I won't consider it here.  Perhaps I will write a subsequent post on that.)  There is complexity in this because if a student doesn't enroll at the university in the fall does the student retain a place at the university to be exercised when face-to face instruction resumes?  I haven't seen this matter discussed yet.  I'm sure it will come to the fore soon enough.

While many instructors will be scrambling this spring to get their courses online, the forward thinking among them will start to consider the possibility of division of labor.  If other alternatives don't avail themselves then these instructors might very well consider redesigning course assignments and course projects so that what students produce could potentially be deployed as instructional materials in the subsequent semester.  Pedagogically, this would be an instance of - you really learn something well when you have to teach it to others.  So the teaching idea would be that students would learn some aspect of the course deeply, enough so they can teach fellow students on that topic.  Indeed, 20 years ago, I had thought this sort of thing would have become a big deal and was fully integrated into the instructional process.

Such integration has not yet happened and, to be blunt, if students are producing course materials that are productive, in that the instructor does use them in a subsequent offering of the class, then this is work and the students should get paid for doing such work.   But the instructor won't have funds to pay the students and, indeed, if the approach required student payments it would not work. So I'd like to ask what it would take for the students to be willing to donate their creations as gifts to other students who might use them in the future.  That is the issue addressed here.

My belief is that this requires creating an ethos where all students donate such creations willingly. Such an ethos would be greatly facilitated if the instructor also donated course materials that the instructor created.  If this actually were to happen, then the creators would be interested in how the materials were subsequently utilized.  One of the motives that would drive the willingness to share is a sense that others will utilize the materials and get something out of them.

Based on my own experience, there can be two different types of sharing.  One you might call planned sharing, which would be with students who take the same course from the instructor in the future.  It's the planned sharing that would drive changing the class assignments in this way to produce useful instructional materials. But there is another type of sharing that might very well happen, which I would call serendipitous sharing.  Others, students and instructors elsewhere, find the content available online and access it.  Then the normal social media rating scheme of likes and dislikes directs these users to content they'd likely be interested in.

For the serendipitous use to happen two things must be done.  First, the content must be publicly available.  If it is in a closed container that precludes such use a priori.  Some years back I experimented with putting some of my content at archive.org. (This included an experiment where I read my blog posts aloud, so they could be podcast.)  There was some serendipitous viewing, but only a modest amount.   I also have a profarvan channel at YouTube.   While some of the videos there have hits of the same order as the stuff at archive.org, there are other videos with 2 orders of magnitude greater hits than the archive.org stuff.  Admittedly, this is a small sample on which to draw conclusions.  But it is my belief that if one wants to promote serendipitous use of instructional content, then put it where users are likely to find it.  That matters, a lot.

Should serendipitous use count much (or at all) in making these decisions?   I will speculate here as I don't believe my past experience speaks to the question well for a few reasons.  I have not tried to share student created content publicly.  So I don't know whether there would be much serendipitous use of such content.  At present the use of this sort that I get is from students who are taking the course elsewhere, where they are finding their own course materials inadequate for some reason, so are looking to supplement them online.   I have only a little experience of other instructors adopting my content for their course.  The question then is whether instructors would do that if the material was available at scale.  Roughly 15 years ago there was intense interest in the Merlot Project, which aimed at promoting such reuse, via peer review of the instructional materials.  I wonder who uses Merlot nowadays.  I surely don't.

What I might do now, instead, is have my students screen some externally produced content and let them rate it.  The stuff that gets a rating of at least as good as the stuff in our class, with this coming from several students in the course, I would then look at and consider deploying the next time I taught.  If instructors at other institutions did likewise, this would give a mechanism through which quality content, whether produced by instructors or by students, gets redeployed for what I've been terming serendipitous use. Were such a process in place, then serendipitous content should count.

There is then a chicken and egg problem that needs to be solved.  There must be a sufficient volume of publicly available content already out there for this sort of serendipitous use to manifest.  My view is to be idealistic at present.  Make the stuff publicly available and findable now, in the hope of jump starting this process down the road.  This makes sense even if we return to on ground instruction eventually, as long as such instruction has a substantial online component thereafter. At the individual instructor level, I buy this argument.

At the institution level, it's a different matter, of which there are two main concerns, copyright ownership and the possibility of diluting the university brand.   If the university puts in real and substantial resources in producing online content, the copyright is likely held by the university.  The examples I've been giving above don't feature university contribution of that sort.  Then there is the question of why students would pay big bucks tuition at a well known university when they can get all the same content online for free.  In response, I'm reminded of the line from Good Will Hunting:

“You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”

Nevertheless, this sentiment might not be very reassuring to institutions that have been struggling to identify recurring sources of revenue.  Surely, they don't want to shoot themselves in the foot, if they can avoid it.  So they are very unlikely to go all in on sharing of online instructional content.  Yet, if you asked whether such sharing would be publicly beneficial,  I think a strong argument can be made that it would be, at least if the serendipitous sharing I discussed above would become a reality in this case.  Institutions need to come to grips with this argument, maybe not immediately, but soon.  And they need to work through as well, how the benefits from instruction are not the same as the value of the online materials used in instruction.  I'm not saying this will be easy, but it is necessary to consider this and come up with a reasonable response.