More firefighters seek college degrees

Strength, courage and a high school diploma used to be enough for firefighters, but increasingly firefighters are earning college degrees to advance in their jobs, reports Inside Higher Ed. Community colleges and for-profit institutions are creating fire safety programs, usually leading to an associate degree.  Chiefs typically have a bachelor’s degree, sometimes with a master’s or even a doctorate.

Fire departments, it seems, are on board with the Obama administration-led completion agenda. Yet some high-profile critics of those goals argue that many professions don’t require degrees, and that police officers, medical assistants or firefighters might be better off not taking on college debt.

While some firefighters earn college degrees, others earn a series of technical certifications.

More firefighters are professionals, rather than volunteers, these days.

The professionalization of the industry has increased specialized education needs. So has an increased reliance on fire departments for emergency medical services and the recent need for firefighters to be trained in anti-terrorism and homeland security practices. As a result, more firefighters hold related credentials, like EMS certificates or paramedic degrees.

Online education makes it possible for firefighters to earn degrees while working irregular shifts.

WGU challenges for-profits

Western Governors University — an accredited, low-cost, nonprofit online university — is The College For-profits Should Fear, writes John Gravois in the  Washington Monthly. Designed for working adults, WGU costs less than $6,000 a year, while tuition at for-profit universities averages $15,600.

WGU degrees are based on competency, not on “seat time,” so students can move at their own pace.

By gathering information from employers, industry experts, and academics, Western Governors formulates a detailed, institution- wide sense of what every graduate of a given degree program needs to know. Then they work backward from there, defining what every student who has taken a given course needs to know. As they go, they design assessments—tests—of all those competencies. “Essentially,” says Kevin Kinser, a professor of education at the State University of New York at Albany, “they’re creating a bar exam for each point along the way that leads to a degree.”

. . . At the beginning of a course, students are given a test called a “pre-assessment.” Then they have a conversation with their mentor—a kind of personal coach assigned to each student for the duration of their degree program—to discuss which concepts in the course they already grasp, which they still need to master, and how to go about closing the gap. The students are then offered a broad set of “learning resources”—a drab phrase, sure, but no more so than “crowded lecture hall”—that may include videos, textbooks, online simulations, conversations with a WGU course mentor (an expert in the subject matter who is on call to answer questions), or even tutors in the student’s hometown.

Students pay $6,000 for as many courses as they can finish in two semesters.  The average student is able to complete a bachelor’s degree in two and a half years for about $15,000.

Traditional-age students don’t do well in WGU’s online, competency-based program, but the model works for adults with some college and work experience. The average student is 36 years old, the same as in University of Phoenix’s online programs.

WGU offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education, business, information technology and health professions, mainly nursing. The model works well for professions with a proficiency test, such as the nursing certification exam or the Praxis for teachers, Gravois writes. For example, Ray Shawn McKinnon, a former pastor hoping for a business career, will have to pass the national human resources management certification exam to earn his MBA in human resources.

In an online education sector plagued by accusations of low quality, Western Governors can show that its degrees are backstopped by the official guardians of various professions. (It also helps that WGU students tend to score higher than the national average on such professional exams.)

WGU’s six-year graduation rate — calculated by the feds only for first-time, full-time students — is only 22 percent, the same as the for-profit average.  WGU estimates 40 percent of all students, including part-timers and those returning to college, complete a degree.  Those rates look back to 2004, when WGU’s program was weaker, writes Gravois. This year, 77 percent of first-year students returned for a second year, “higher than the national average at both for-profits and traditional schools.”

As the for-profit colleges report shrinking enrollments, WGU’s enrollment is growing by 30 percent a year.  Indiana has made WGU a state university, which means students can qualify for state aid. Washington, Texas, California and Arizona and other states may follow suit.

CC grad earns high school diploma

This month, Spencer La Favor, 17, will earn his high school diploma. He already has a college degree from Taft Community College,  reports the Southwest Bakersfield News. He started taking college classes in his freshman year at Independence High.

“I would take three online classes at Taft Community College. Then I’d go to school and take advanced-placement classes in English and history and honors chemistry. It was pretty rough,” Spencer said.

Spencer expects to complete a degree in political science and business at Cal State Bakersfield in a year-and-a-half.

CCs do more with less

Community college leaders say they’re trying to educate more students with less money, according to a Campus Computing Project survey released at the meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges in New Orleans.

Sixty-nine percent of community college presidents and district chancellors reported higher enrollment and 58 percent reported cuts in their operating budgets, notes Inside Higher Ed.

In his keynote address Saturday, AACC President Walter Bumphus said community colleges should speak “with one voice” and refuse to be “timid” when seeking funding.

Enrollment growth at community colleges appears to be slowing, the survey revealed. Fewer colleges report rapid growth.

 As for the financial picture, midyear budget cuts are becoming less common as the economic recovery continues. Thirty-one percent of community colleges reported them this year, compared to 54 percent last year and 61 percent in 2009. The average midyear cut also declined from 7 percent last year to 5 percent this year.

Eighty-two percent of community college presidents reported rising online enrollment.

“Student demand rather than efforts to reduce instructional costs clearly drives the gains in online enrollments in community colleges,” explained Kenneth C. Green, director of the Campus Computing Project.

The merits of for-profit colleges

Consider The Merits of For-profit Colleges, writes Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor at Teachers College of Columbia, in the New York Times.

For-profit colleges ensure that needy students receive the aid for which they’re eligible, unlike many public colleges, Scott-Clayton notes.

Data from the Education Department show that nearly 88 percent of full-time low-income students at private for-profit colleges received a Pell Grant, compared with 61 percent of similar students at community colleges and 76 percent at public four-year colleges.

In addition, for-profit institutions have pioneered online education, potentially a “disruptive innovation” that could transform higher education.

. . .  for-profit institutions, facing the pressures of a competitive market and unburdened by decades (or centuries) of accumulated bureaucracies and multiplying missions, have stronger incentives and greater flexibility to innovate than traditional universities.

Critics have raised legitimate questions about for-profit colleges’ recruitment practices, program quality and benefits for students, she writes, but “these questions should be answered for all college students, not just the small fraction at for-profit schools.”

ACE protests seat-time credit rule

The Education Department’s definition of a credit hour — one hour in class and two hours studying — should be rescinded, charges the American Council on Education in a letter (pdf) to Secretary Arne Duncan signed by representatives of 72 organizations.

With this language, the Department of Education has federalized a basic academic concept and, at the same time, developed a complex, ambiguous and unworkable definition.

. . . with little evidence of a problem and no evidence that Congress wants the federal government to intervene in this area, the department intends to use accreditors to extend federal authority over academic decision-making on local campuses.

The federal definition measures “seat time,” ACE complains. In addition, colleges and universities are supposed to come up with ways to measure innovative learning models, such as online classes or service learning, but that’s where “ambiguous” and “unworkable” come in.

Complying with the new rule will be time-consuming and burdensome, ACE argues.

The Education Department hopes to prevent institutions from offering inflated credits to keep students eligible for federal loans.

Via Washington Monthly’s College Guide.

Disrupting college

Online education is a “disrupting innovation” that will transform higher education, argues paper by the Innosight Institute and the Center for American Progress.

Online learning can enable learning to happen in a variety of contexts, locations, and times; it allows for a transformation of curriculum and learning.

. . . This emerging disruptive innovation also allows for an escape from the policies that focus on credit hours and seat time to one that ties progression to competency and mastery. Online learning courses can easily embed actionable assessments and allow students to accelerate past concepts and skills they understand and have mastered and instead focus their time where they most need help at the level most appropriate for them. Time is naturally a variable in online learning, so these courses can instead hold outcomes constant—and outcomes will be a more appropriate measure for judging students and institutions.

Old policies will not apply, according to Innosight.

How to raise graduation rates

To increase graduation rates, community colleges should streamline student decision-making processes, revise online education models to facilitate course completion and favor college-wide reform over small-scale interventions. These are findings from three working papers released this week by the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University.  This is only the first installment of the Assessment of Evidence Series.

Community colleges need to engage in broad institutional reform, said CCRC director Thomas Bailey.

“Successful stand-alone programs in isolation will not do enough to improve outcomes for large numbers of students. Strategies must work in concert across the institution, and faculty need to be at the center of sustained, college-wide efforts to improve student success.”

Redesigning community colleges for completion: Lessons from research on high-performance organizations by Davis Jenkins outlines steps community colleges can take to improve student learning and progression.

In The shapeless river: Does a lack of structure inhibit students’ progress at community colleges?, Judith Scott-Clayton highlights several promising programs that help students navigate college options and make good choices.

Online learning: Does it help low-income and underprepared students? concludes that online learning is flexible and convenient, but completion rates are low for community college students. Shanna Jaggars suggests ways to improve online learning access and success rates.

Measure or perish

Measure or Perish, writes Kevin Carey of Education Sector in The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Our higher-education system “refuses to consistently measure how much students learn,” Carey writes.

As a result, students have trouble transferring credits.

Credit devaluation, which wastes enormous amounts of time, money, and credentialed learning every year, is rooted in mistrust. Because colleges don’t know what students in other colleges learned, they’re reluctant to give foreign courses their imprimaturs.

It’s easy to exploit the federal financial-aid system for profit by inflating credits. In an attempt to stop this, the U.S. Education Department proposes to use classroom time to define the number of credits a class is worth.

Nearly a third of all college students took online courses last year. Why would anyone define credits in terms of seat time when, increasingly, there are no seats and no fixed learning time? Because they have no other basis for doing so.

Without a way to tell how much students are learning, higher education quality is defined by U.S. News & World Report, Carey writes.

Faculty cultures and incentive regimes that systematically devalue teaching in favor of research are allowed to persist because there is no basis for fixing them and no irrefutable evidence of how much students are being shortchanged.

Academics resist measuring learning, seeing possible assessments “as either gross violations of institutional autonomy or as so crude and imperfect that they require further refinement and study, lasting approximately forever,” Carey writes.

Meanwhile, accreditation has lost credibility. The U.S. Education Department’s “gainful employment” regulations for career colleges defines learning in “purely economic terms, comparing students’ postgraduate earnings with their debt.” How long before that spreads from vocational programs to the rest of higher education?

New psychometric instruments will puncture “the myth that everyone with a college degree actually learned something,” Carey predicts.

The real debate shouldn’t be about whether we need a measuring stick for higher education. We need a debate about who gets to design the stick, who owns it, and who decides how it will be used. If higher education has the courage to take responsibility for honestly assessing student learning and for publishing the results, the measuring stick will be a tool. If it doesn’t, the stick could easily become a weapon. The time for making that choice is drawing to a close.

I think online learning is going to change higher education dramatically. Brick-and-mortar colleges will serve a purpose for 18- to 22-year-old students who can afford the college experience. Many, many adults will want to take a test to prove what they’ve learned in online classes, in independent study or through life experience.  We’ll need very good tests to make that work.

Online students lack computer skills

Online learning is a convenient way for adults to learn new job skills. But first some have to learn how to use a computer, said to a speaker at the Sloan Consortium International Conference on Online Learning in Florida last week. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Colleges are trying to bring people up to speed with basic computing classes that focus on material as simple as explaining the function of a mouse, says Saundra W. Williams, senior vice president and chief of technology and workforce development for the North Carolina Community College System.

Even young students often lack computer skills, say instructors in the comments.