Honors of Inequality, Part VIII

“For the latter challenge, the National Research Council’s (NRC) statement on scientific research on education expects no less: the research process itself is “highly contested territory,” often producing equivocal and non-durable results, explored via multiple methodologies, and clarified in periodic “syntheses of research findings…” (2) Understandably, the organization and integration of offices of institutional research as full participants in the advancement of scientific research on higher education has been subject to fits and starts, reversals, and ruptures like any other scientific enterprise. Nonetheless, institutional research remains vital, actualized and clarified as a social science in its praxis, and whether fully articulated or not in the literature. The NRC notes, “Every scientific inquiry is linked, either implicitly or explicitly, to some overarching theory or conceptual framework that guides the investigation.”(3) The assertion is no less true of institutional research than any other scientific enterprise. The second step for institutional research as a social science, therefore, is to move from implicit engagements of theory to explicit statements of theory that re-discover the principles which engendered the formation of the original offices and evidence the accumulation of knowledge from their operations – the search for a paradigm of institutional research as social science.” Search for a Paradigm, Part I, Sept 4, 2015.

Three Missions of Higher Education and the Priority of Student Success

Thomas Jefferson’s insight on the social state of democracies demands that the scientific study of inequality and higher education perform both basic and applied research to discover methods to enhance inequality arising from individuals’ virtue and talent while mitigating the “mischievous ingredient” of inequality derived from individuals’ wealth and birth. With the priority of student success, a democratic ecology of higher education must embrace the complexity of upholding individual freedom and social justice together or lose both. Fundamentally, an ecology of higher education for a self-governing commonwealth strives to achieve a certain level of accountability for student success in order to sustain the democratic social state as a whole.

An accountability quotient (A^q) for an ecology of higher education provides a measure for students who received and students who did not receive the necessary social resources for student success. While the resource-based formula for student success indicates that each student has a probability of success equal to 1.0, or 100% likely given the resources, the derivative formulas make no such assumptions about the effectiveness of institutions nor the accountability for a state or national ecology of higher education. In short, the potential for complete effectiveness or full accountability in higher education is likely akin to the potential for full employment — in short, there exist historical precedents in every social state where the maximum effectiveness of institutions and the optimal accountability for an ecology of higher education falls short of universal student success.^[1]

There are several reasons for a democratic social state to accept less than full accountability (A^q < 1.0) from an ecology of higher education. We will consider two such conditions.

First, an ecology of higher education may not make available the social resources necessary to deliver student success to each and every student in its domain. That is not to say that higher education can be studied as a perpetual state of scarcity as in market economies. In Social Resource Theory, the resource classes of Love (sense of belonging), Information (instruction), and Services (academic support) are not depleted by the consumption of students — in other words, not all social resource transactions are zero-sum or economic transactions. Higher education, however, is not a charitable enterprise in which practitioners (faculty, administration, and staff) distribute Love, Information, and Services freely. Many higher education practitioners derive economic well-being (and other social resources) from institutions and institutional expenditures (Money) must be considered in the overall accountability of an ecology of higher education.

In addition, there may be conditions in which social resource exchanges involving a particular class of non-monetary resources become inefficient, while the resources for that class may not be plentiful enough to maintain the highest level of exchange efficiency. The common debates over class size or student-to-faculty ratios suggest social resource transactions entailing Information (instruction) become inefficient when the number of students reach a certain threshold. If there are too few faculty to maintain an efficient exchange of Information with students at an institution or in an ecology, then one or more students will fail to receive the resources necessary for student success. Alternatively, educational technology routinely holds out the promise that efficient exchanges of Information between faculty and students may be maintained at higher and higher thresholds of class size (MOOCs being the gold standard of exchange efficiency).

In short, the premise that all students will be successful given the necessary resources in no way implies that all necessary resources are given in an ecology of higher education.

A second reason that an ecology of higher education may not attain full accountability for the success of its students stems from the three missions of higher education: the extension, replication, and dissemination of knowledge. The ecology of higher education must husband and allocate its resources in a manner that funds research to acquire more knowledge (extension) and to meet the demands for knowledge by various sectors in the social state (dissemination). In effect, mission priorities may diminish accountability for student success in order to advance the efficacy of research and/or the interests of social agents (market, government, etc.) that are dependent on the ecology of higher education.

As noted in Part VII, student success as generally discussed in higher education pertains specifically to the replication of knowledge as determined by institutions of higher education. Typically, replication of knowledge is an exchange of social resources between institutions and students wherein student success is signified by the initial college credential: an associate’s or bachelor’s degree.

In contrast, many critics of higher education seem willfully to conflate the replication of knowledge with the dissemination of knowledge. An institution may perform admirably on measures of student success (replication) while falling short on measures of job placement or career fulfillment (dissemination). This happens because the exchange of social resources between institutions of higher education and students differs from the exchange of social resources between the ecology of higher education and other sectors of the social state.

Job placement rates after college and the perceived relevance of academic programs to future professional careers measure the dissemination of knowledge from the ecology of higher education to the social state. Many factors may contribute to the misalignment of higher education and employment markets, but few commentators seriously explore what full employment for college graduates may be. Most college students attend an institution in their local state or regional market, but those local labor markets may change quite rapidly due to the influence of the global economy. Students who subsequently choose not to leave their local markets for career opportunities in their fields of study confound the potential for full employment among college graduates.

More troubling, college graduate job placement surveys do not measure such factors for full employment. Associations that assume responsibility for the study of recent college graduate employment rates — filling the vacuum created by the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) and the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) — fail to follow standards set by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (U.S.) or international standards from bodies such as Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the International Labor Office (ILO), or the Statistical Office of the European Communities (Eurostat). As a consequence, unprofessional and unscientific surveys of college student employment and unemployment rates further mistake job placement (knowledge dissemination) and student success (knowledge replication) as the same outcome for higher education — while fueling false expectations for the full employment of college graduates.

Similarly, advocates for competency-based education and “badges” tend to elevate the interests of external agents over the interests of students in the ecology of higher education. Essentially, competency badges signify tasks that outside agents in the social state favor from higher education — or, largely, what employers favor from college graduates in the labor market. The ability to complete a task indicates a certain level of procedural capacity for the application of knowledge created by higher education. In this respect, competency badges facilitate the dissemination of knowledge from the ecology of higher education to other sectors of the social state that apply the knowledge of higher education to other domains of social resource exchanges. In essence, a competency “badge” does not signify the higher education of the student, per se, but rather signals the functional aptitude of the student to perform a routine task derived from higher education.

Competency for the application of knowledge derived from higher education, thus, is not a proxy for mastery of the knowledge of higher education. The knowledge acquired by higher education need not change at the same rate as the application of knowledge derived from higher education. In this respect, the fervor for competency-based “badges” merely signifies the demand by market agents to identify and acquire college graduates who can apply the knowledge of higher education to the narrow interests of a business firm without costly training. The application of higher education in businesses or associations, nonetheless, changes as fast as the industries or professional markets change. The dissemination of higher education in the form of competencies thus always lags behind demand, contributing to the persistent perception that colleges and universities fall short in student success (replication).

In fact, competency badges merely signify 1) a prioritization of dissemination (market agencies) over replication (student success) and 2) the redistribution of training costs from professional markets to an ecology of higher education. The priority of dissemination thus may deplete social resources available for the priority of student success in order to subsidize the private sector or other interests.

In contrast, the mission to extend the knowledge of higher education also may run contrary to the mission to replicate the knowledge of higher education. Institutional policies and practices to educate honors students at all costs by the institution more or less reflect the priority of knowledge extension over knowledge replication at an institution. Moreover, it is not necessary that the institution be a direct contributor to the extension of higher education knowledge. A liberal arts college need only graduate members from the “talented tenth” of each high school graduate cohort who score 1300+ on the SAT and who presumably have more than a 50% chance to contribute to the “scientific or social advancement” of the social state by completing a Ph.D. program.

Unlike the the social forces of dissemination, the instrumentalization of undergraduate programs to serve the extension of knowledge in higher education originates directly from the ecology of higher education. Institutional policies and the standards of academic professions that implore faculty and Ph.D. recipients to “publish or perish” encapsulate the priority of knowledge extension in an ecology of higher education. In research publications, as in undergraduate and Ph.D. programs, a “talented tenth” of individuals dominate the mission of higher education to extend the boundaries of knowledge: “[I]nstitutional reward and promotion structures have always been focused on research achievements… And academic prestige has always come almost exclusively from research.” In short, institutions dedicate a share of institutional resources to the research elite among the academic elite.

The professional aspirations of the research elite in academe, however, is often a symptom of the priority of knowledge extension in the broader ecology of higher education. At the national level, geopolitical competition between nation-states influences the allocation of resources when governments fund research programs that aim to strengthen the national security or global economic strength. Scientific research during the Cold War represents an example of a ecology of higher education focused on the extension of knowledge in service to a national political agenda. The national imperative of the United States to find and educate individuals capable of academic research discoveries in defense of democracy generally outweighed the civic imperative to provide higher education to the populace more broadly.

Today, across the globe, national and state governments focus more on the role of higher education as engines of economic growth and social stability. State government policies such as performance funding that favors professional program development at institutions and state incentives to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) students continue to influence the curriculum at higher education institutions. In this manner, research and discovery remain a priority of the ecology of higher education in the U.S. and elsewhere, but with an emphasis on innovation and entrepreneurialism for the marketplace. In addition, collaborative efforts between higher education and industry to develop and transfer technology to the business sector create pressure for institutions to recruit and retain undergraduate students who are most capable of assuming future roles as graduate research assistants to faculty and industry. Extolled as the virtue of basic research or disinterested science, the vested interests in the extension of knowledge through academic research and discovery often takes priority over replication and dissemination in an ecology of higher education.

To generalize, then, an ecology of higher education is accountable for the success of its students, but also for the broader demands to disseminate knowledge to other sectors in the social state and for scholarly research resulting in innovations that fuel the engines of national and/or economic prosperity. In other words, the sustainability of an ecology of higher education must be measured by three quotients: an accountability quotient (A^q), a dissemination quotient (D^q), and an ingenuity quotient ((I^q).^[2] An ecology of higher education remains sustainable as long as all three missions interact to form a complementary set of policies to advance the acquisition of knowledge by the social state.

A quotient to measure dissemination and ingenuity in an ecology of higher education falls outside the purposes of our essays to consider the connections between inequality and higher education. The significant point herein is that a sustainable ecology of higher may not be accountable for the success of each and every student due to contingencies in the social state to advance the three missions of higher education. The general population of a democracy accepts a level of accountability from an ecology of higher education that falls short of universal student success in exchange for the redistribution of knowledge from higher education to other sectors of the social state and for the creation of knowledge that holds promise for lasting or future prosperity in the social state. Therefore, an ecology of higher education need only be accountable for a level of access and opportunity to the citizenry in a democratic social state that sustains the threefold mission of higher education.

In the final analysis, we then note, many vested interests in an ecology of higher education will work against the priority of student success by redistributing social resources from replication to the extension or dissemination of knowledge. For instance, the demographic segments of a social state who secure privileges from higher education due to wealth and birth reasonably may seek to artificially restrict the availability of social resources in order to diminish competition from individuals who are able to secure the privileges of higher education with nothing more than personal talent and virtue. As a second example, an industry in the market sector may collude to transfer the costs for employee training from individual firms to the ecology of higher education by demanding reforms that institutionalize the proliferation of “competency” badges. Lastly, an institution of higher education may allocate student tuition revenue to the research programs of prized faculty members rather than to the students who paid tuition for a college education.

In practice, social resources have been allocated to the three missions of an ecology of higher education according to historical conditions and priorities in the social state — be they international, national, regional, or institutional in origin. Particularly, in a democracy, social resource allocations to higher education are highly subject to political and cultural circumstances. As a consequence, the priority of student success is not always what it appears to be, or what many claim, both inside and outside an ecology of higher education. A formula for student success and a standardized accountability quotient (A^q) for an ecology of higher education, to this end, are important first steps to establish more rigorous research and more transparent discoveries for what works in higher education.

Conclude with Part IX…..