Honors of Inequality, Part VI

“More profoundly, Tyrrell entertained no illusion about the particularity of an institution of higher education, “the center of confluence for many social forces.” In Tyrrell’s nascent theory, the institution is most definitely not an object, a prison house of institutional research, but a field that unites cultural and material phenomena at the intersection of past, present, and future: “Into its [an institution’s] human and physical networks are swept all known human history as well as the turbulent discoveries of the moment, and from these dynamic networks of interaction flow the hypotheses that help shape tomorrow.” In contradistinction to the black hole of particularity assumed by each individual college or university, Tyrrell proposes a theory of higher education institutions in terms that squarely place them in the domain of generalizable knowledge and envision how institutional research offices may adopt a program, or portfolio of research, for “the manipulation of events so as to attain ever-evolving objectives.” Institutional Research’s Metropolis, July 5, 2015.

The Center of Confluence for Many Social Forces

The ideological divide between the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) and the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) sadly seems to originate in the prejudice of one scholar. Paul L. Dressel co-wrote the first definitive Handbook of Institutional Research and the first research program for Higher Education as a Field of Study, as well as contributed to the formation of both associations. In a collaborative effort with like-minded faculty and institutional researchers, Dressel consciously penned research programs that segregated higher education programs and offices of institutional research. To date, his preconceptions to “distinguish” scholarship and institutional research remain unchallenged, and mostly unnoticed, by the leadership of both professions during the past forty years.

Theory-adverse data science vendors operate within the same paradigm of higher education scholarship and institutional research. As a result, the most glowing reviews for a vended student success platform uneasily calls attention to the inability of independent observers to perceive the difference between “data science” and “common sense.” In short, data science vendors fail to offer more than “‘ordinary knowledge’… about ‘what works’ in higher education,” to use language from ASHE President Laura W. Perna in her address at the 2015 Conference. Data science vendors of student success have recast the dominant paradigm for higher education in a for-profit package, and to-date the unimaginative “insights” coming out of data science do not differ appreciably from what we already know from prior research, scholarly or institutional.

No doubt, data science vendors of guarded proprietary solutions may profitably replace the role of the office of institutional research, but the fundamental barrier to understanding inequality in student outcomes and higher education will continue to be operative: the severe lack of generalizeable knowledge about student success derived from reliable and valid social scientific research.

As we noted last year, prior to Paul L. Dressel’s ideology, early scholars did not distinguish strongly between higher education scholarship and institutional research. In 1962, Philip H. Tyrrell of the Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, represented the best sentiments of the synergy between the two research agencies.^[1] He defined institutional research as the “methodological study… of a college or university… [that] includes not only traditional data gathering, processes, and interpretation and the study of operational procedures, but also it includes those activities usually called ‘education research,’ a term whose many acceptable definitions all pre-suppose disciplined, scholarly inquiry into the processes of teaching and learning.” In this respect, institutional research enlarged upon the research programs and topics of inquiry prevalent in education research at that time: “there is not a spectrum of institutional research; there are spectra.”

Tyrell also envisioned the office of institutional research as “a microcosm that facilitates, through its special kind of research, the activities of the macrocosmic, purposeful, life-liberating assembly of scholars…” He knew that institutional researchers’ conceptualization for the role of their offices determined the research performed by the profession. His vision for institutional research therefore endeavored to connect institutional research to larger networks and forces. “[W]ith this image of itself… [institutional research] both serves and is part of the intellectual community… in the study and implementation of findings concerning an institution’s human and physical networks, e.g., in networks of characteristics which facilitate or impede individual or collective creativity.” While recognizing that institutional research is normally conducted at discrete institutions, Tyrrell profoundly positions institutions of higher education at “the center of confluence for many social forces” and shows institutional research offices to be uniquely qualified to study those larger forces.

Contrary to Dressel, then, Tyrrell elevates the institution as a center of inquiry for the study of political, economic, and social forces (or “problems,” per ASHE) in higher education. In fact, Tyrrell enlarges upon institutions as the center of confluence to include the intersection of past, present, and future: “Into its [an institution’s] human and physical networks are swept all known human history as well as the turbulent discoveries of the moment…” In this respect, institutions — individually and collectively — are valid sites for the study of what works in higher education. Although Tyrrell’s pregnant notions as for research program on the confluence of social forces at higher education institutions lost traction in the years subsequent to the formation of the AIR, institutional research technology and standards under external pressures have progressed in a manner consistent with Tyrrell’s research program. Seemingly, a vision and paradigm for institutional research is all that remains before IR offices can be organized into a very large array to study “the center of confluence,” akin to radio telescopes.

Image 1 | Very Large Array of Radio Telescopes

On the other side of the ideological divide, ASHE and scholars of higher education have progressed toward Tyrrell’s vision of higher education under the pressure “to matter” or to demonstrate relevance to higher education policy and practices. In 2012, ASHE released a report advocating an “ecological model” as a potential framework for studying college readiness.^[2] Citing human ecology theory, the ASHE release recommends ecology theory as “a development systems model… [that] provides a way of addressing college readiness by focusing on multiple, integrated, interactions of people, organizations, systems, culture, and time” (p. ix). In an effort to heighten higher education scholarship, the ecological model of college readiness encompasses the older concept of “academic preparedness” but also entails broader “practical knowledge” of college life and the progressive development of self-efficacy by students. Echoing the premise of confluence, the ecological model provides a framework to classify the systems of force operating on undergraduate students at their colleges and universities, ranging from microsystems to macrosystems of social forces (See Figure 3, p. 92, in the publication for a graphical representation).

Nonetheless, ASHE’s Ecology of College Readiness needlessly conflates the college readiness paradigm with an ecological framework for the study of higher education. In the “Executive Summary,” the authors claim, “The leading cause for [a pronounced and widening socioeconomic gap in college access and success in the United States] is a lack of college readiness: the multidimensional set of skills, traits, habits, and knowledge that student need to enter and succeed in college” (vii). Like much of the college readiness literature, the ecological framework advanced by ASHE rhetorically frames college access and success as the students’ responsibility. As the release states clearly, “‘College readiness’ refers to a student’s capacity…,” and focuses on students’ preparedness “to succeed in college” (1). As we discussed, failure to succeed appears to be a lack of college readiness that originates in social sites external to higher education. Though acknowledging that “individuals and environments are inseparably intertwined” in the ecological framework, the “ecology of college readiness” refracts the ineffectiveness of institutions to educate college students as a question about the lack of college readiness among college students.

Thus, despite recognizing higher education as a center of confluence for many social forces, ASHE’s ideological commitment to the paradigm of “college readiness” deflects attention from scholarly and institutional research on what is most accurately called, “the ecology of higher education.”

The American Council on Education (ACE), an organization representing the nation’s college presidents, and National Association of System Heads (NASH), an organization representing the system heads of the states’ public universities, both recently signaled the desire for more research on the intersection of resources and students success (NASH is discussed in Part IV). In its series of reports on Evolving Higher Education Business Models, ACE reports: “What’s needed are structural models that describe how resources are applied to particular activities in sufficient detail to allow in-depth understanding of what’s being done at what cost, and “what-if analysis” of what might be done to effect improvements.” Aiming at the “‘black box’ of institution spending decisions,” ACE calls for “greater transparency” on the costs and contributions of institutional activities “toward student success.”^[3] ACE’s and NASH’s emphasis on expenditures rather than revenue or college readiness re-positions student success as a responsibility of the institutions and, at least partially, the outcome of resource allocations to educate students.

Transparency for activity-based costing may support the financial responsibility of college presidents, but the linkage of cost transparency to student success necessarily invites more rigorous research on what works for institutional effectiveness. Cost analysis across an institution in a manner consistent with academic program review will reveal that every institution has pockets of resource impoverishment and resource enrichment on campus. A student-level record of academic and non-academic resource allocations will show the substantial inequality in support and services offered to each student by the institution. A closer scrutiny of the relationship between resource allocations and student success then may provide better insight into the mechanisms in higher education that introduce external economic forces of inequality onto campus. More beneficially, study of the relationships between academic resources and student success may be studied both within and between institutions in order to illuminate how resource allocations at similar and different types of institutions sustain systemic inequality.

The ecology of higher education, however, encompasses much more than the micro- and macro-economics of higher education. Students often direct their recent activism to address the many social and political forces at work at institutions of higher education. In a peculiar sense, student activism is leveling a critique at the willful disregard among higher education scholars for the study and understanding for how institutions directly participate in the social forces of the larger world. A student in the linked article astutely notes, regarding the receptivity to progress by her institution:

“The way that universities espouse a certain rhetoric of progressiveness and then those same universities repress social change and repress students on campus is very much connected… It’s also about holding our institutions accountable for the ideals they espouse all the time to us…. Why is it the university that tells us we have the power to make the world a better place, but those same people running the university are so shocked the students would actually try to hold them accountable to those ideals they tell us about all the time?”

College students vaguely sense that academic ideals about studying the intersection of inequality and higher education no longer apply when the objects of investigation are the institutional systems of inequality at work on college campuses. And, then, when student activism warrants investigation of institutionalized markers of inequality, colleges and universities leaders may determine that such mechanisms for producing inequality (or reminders of inequality) are features that uphold the “vital educational imperative” of the institution.

Simply put, the ecology of higher education entails far more than an ecology of college readiness. The institutional effectiveness of a college or university at creating student success is not simply derivative of the average “academic preparedness” for success among students. Higher education institutions are the center of confluence for many social forces. College and universities convert those social forces into differential economic and non-economic resources afforded to (or collected from) each discrete student, often based on the perceived college readiness of the students to obtain resources (or, “merit awards”). As ACE and NASH suggest, institutions’ allocation of resources to activities or interventions for students likely determines student success to a large degree. Furthermore, institutional allocations of resources are not the result of discrete choices that are unique to each institution. Resource allocations are articulations of institutional systems of student instruction and support with the larger ecology of higher education, both nationally and globally.

Despite the important interventions by ACE and NASH, a theoretical framework to conceptualize and study institutional resource flows as the confluence of many social forces at institutions of higher education will prove lacking as long as higher education scholars and institutional researchers ignore the paramount influence of institutions on the connections between inequality and higher education.

Continue to Part VII…