$10k Higher Ed: Part II

What’s a “diploma?” Background While something called a “diploma” was handed to Roman soldiers upon discharge (an image of that document is what appears at the top of last Monday’s piece on this subject, BTW), the notion of a credential for completing a course of education can be traced to Medieval times when the earliest universities would provide those who finished their studies (usually in classical languages and religious texts) with a “sheepskin” literally made from the skin of a sheep (quelle coincidence!) Since I tend to lose people when the conversation turns to history even faster than they flee when it turns to philosophy, let’s fast forward to the 20th century when the modernization of every aspect of society (from agriculture to industry to transportation and business) required more and more experts trained to work in professions that never before existed. In the US (which led the world in both agricultural and industrial production as the 19th century turned into the 20th) the need for “skilled labor” within newly emerging management and engineering classes led to the rapid expansion of college and university systems churning out ever-increasing numbers of college-educated specialists. And with this dynamic, a tug of war intensified between the self-perception of colleges and universities (which saw themselves as the embodiment of a tradition that could be traced back to Galileo and Socrates) and the reality of higher education as the means to ready people for the workforce. All of the trends I discussed in the last newsletter (including the massive growth of education measured in number institutions built, students enrolled or dollars spent) can be traced back to an assumption which developed during the tumultuous 19th and 20th centuries that said education was the solution to any stated societal challenge or ill. And many (if not most) of the controversies surrounding higher education up to the present day derive from how this assumption plays out in a marketplace defined by vocationalism, entrepreneurship and snobbery. For-Profit Colleges That Chronicle piece begins by talking about the fraught relationship between the academy and the labor market. And the for-profit college system was created – and rapidly expanded – to fill a need for specific work-related educational programs that elite colleges were not providing. For-profits tend to play the role of villains in any debate over the economy of education. But if you talk to people involved with this industry, they point out (correctly) that they are taking on students that fancy-pants colleges have chosen to exclude through the highly-selective admissions process they boast about, and educating those students in subjects professors at elite colleges don’t care to teach. Now they are educating these students within the context of for-profit operations that involve charging what the market will bear and trimming costs in order to reach desired margins of profitability, a spreadsheet-based approach to schooling that strikes a discordant note with most people involved with the supposedly altruistic mission of educating the young. But just as for-profit publishers have served as convenient punching bags when the skyrocketing cost of education comes under political scrutiny, so too for-profit schools tend to get dinged for raising prices as fast as their non-profit counterparts. You’ve seen this same for- vs. non-profit dynamic play out in the world of MOOCs where privately held startups like Coursera and Udacity are looked at with suspicion while non-profits like edX are given a pass (or use their non-profit status to contrast themselves with competitors). But just as Harvard became a multi-billion dollar organization by doing many of the things multi-billion dollar private companies do (such as raise prices while cutting costs), any MOOC provider – like any college or university – needs lots and lots of money to stay afloat. And the price of running a major university today includes cutting paychecks to professors and administrators who expect to be paid like corporate executives, building stylish buildings named after rich people, keeping lawns manicured and students (who today expect comfortable dorm rooms, fancy facilities, and tasty, healthy meals) happy. Again turning to that Chronicle piece, one of the ways “non-profit” schools have pulled in the revenue needed to pay for everything administrators, professors and students on campus want is to create new “products” – like freshly minted Master’s Degree programs – that come with high price tags (funded, like everything else we’ve been talking about, with a combination of parental savings, government dollars and public and private loans). While I’ve avoided entering debates over public funding of education, it needs to be noted that the massive expansion of higher education could not have taken place without substantial investment of resources at both the state and federal level by leaders of all political stripes ready to demonstrate their commitment to education by keeping the money spigot open year after year after year. And while different members of the educational class like to point at the other guy for wasting the taxpayer dollar (by expanding the number of debt-laden students they accept into their programs or raising prices at twice the rate of inflation), the fact remains that the entire inflationary spiral in higher education could not have taken place without billions in government spending underwriting more billions (if not trillions) in educational loans. The $10,000 Degree The debate over MOOCs as a substitute for expensive residential college that turned white hot last year needs to be seen in the context of “fixes” (quick or otherwise) proposed over the years to solve the problem of the skyrocketing cost of higher education. And while my Degree of Freedom experience demonstrated that a purely MOOC-based alternative to residential college is not for everyone (indicating that MOOCs alone are unlikely to serve as a substitute for traditional degree programs), there is no denying that any trillion-dollar business enterprise (which is what education has become) is going to resist any alternative that might disrupt lucrative (if ultimately fragile) business models. Other proposed alternatives that turned out to be intriguing sideshows include things like the Thiel Fellowship or Uncollege – programs designed specifically for students looking to skip college entirely in order to pursue education through entrepreneurship and life experience. Not that these programs are unrewarding to those involved with them. But like the Silicon Valley culture from which such radical experiments emerged, programs like Uncollege derive from (and are underwritten by) a high-tech-startup-fueled optimism and are not likely to scale beyond a fortunate but atypical few. One of the more interesting broad-based proposals I heard about while attending a recent conference at Tufts University was the $10,000 degree introduced by Texas Governor Rick Perry in 2011. Unlike Thiel or Uncollege (or even MOOCs), the $10,000 degree was a challenge thrown down by the political leader of a state (i.e., one of the guys responsible for writing the checks supporting a billion dollar state education system). And while many laughed off the concept (especially when Perry became a candidate for President), some schools decided to take him up on his challenge to see if a college degree worth of schooling could still be delivered for the highly affordable sum of just $2500 per year. Now keep in mind that we are not talking about an education that costs $100,000 to deliver subsidized down to $10K (something certain lucky scholarship-underwritten kids enjoy today), but rather something that can reasonably be called a college education delivered for a total of ten grand. And if you look at some of the experiments various state and community colleges tried that would lower costs to that level, it’s clear that mixing the creative awarding of credit, leveraging unused capacity and online learning tools can drive down the cost of a degree substantially. But looking through these options from a non-accounting perspective (especially programs in which students are completing their high school and college degrees in parallel), it’s not entirely clear that such experiments can scale to meet the needs of more than a small number of industrious students eager to pay less to possess a sheepskin. And while it’s worthwhile expanding the number of ways such enterprising students can achieve their goals, some of the schemes being tried in Texas remind me of that contortionist I used to watch on TV who was forever squeezing himself into impossibly small boxes. These $10,000 degree experiments remain interesting, however, because they demonstrate that a college degree does not have to cost $75,000 or $150,000 or $250,000+ just because that is what people continue to pay to obtain one. And while I’m pretty sure that $10,000 will never cut it as the “real” price/cost for a higher ed program that would be acceptable to broad numbers of student and parents, some of the long-overdue cost and pricing experimentation going on at the edges of the academy might finally shake loose an alternative or two that eager political leaders and/or educational entrepreneurs can help bring to the mainstream. But if such alternatives come into being, what might their price tag ultimately be? (Or, putting it in another way, what is the “true cost” of a college education?). Well if you look at this analysis of the cost of a home vs. a car vs. college as a percent of family income, if college costs had risen at the same rate as housing, a degree (at least one from U Penn) would cost around $15,500 per year, or roughly $60 grand in total (write me if you want to know how I performed that calculation). And this number, while not as appealing as the $10K BA, strikes me as a reasonable target worth considering. Stay tuned to Monday editions of the Degree of Freedom blog and this newsletter for further thoughts on how we might get there.

$10k BA

A first-of-its-kind program will allow students to get an online bachelor's degree in health care management or communication for $10,000 through Southern New Hampshire University's College for America, which is expanding its competency-based program for working adults beyond associate's degree. The program is offered through employers and has no traditional classes or grades; rather, students work at their own pace and are evaluated for their competency in different skill areas (in this case, 240 of them). “This is the most remarkably priced college degree in the country, and the truth is that the price is the least remarkable thing about it,” SNHU President Paul LeBlanc said in a statement. “What draws students and employers is the promise of mastering competencies they can immediately apply in their workplace. The price is just our way to make it accessible as widely as possible.”

Politically Neutral Common Core Support

When the Common Core is described using politically neutral language, support among voters grows to a two-thirds majority, according to survey results released today by the Collaborative for Student Success. Additionally, a majority of Republican primary voters at 59 percent and a majority of swing voters at 66 percent approve of the standards when they’re described as “a set of standards in math and English which state what a child should know in both subjects by the end of each grade of school they complete. Common Core set expectations for what students should be able to achieve and compare schools from state to state." But four in 10 voters don’t know what the standards are, the survey shows. About a third of GOP primary voters have never heard of the standards. Among GOP primary voters who have heard or read about the standards, about a third support them while 41 percent oppose them.

Economist: inBloom

Big data and education

Withered inBloom

Apr 30th 2014, 17:41by K.N.C.

A FEW years ago a group of American educators got together to talk about a common problem. School systems were being swamped by data—like every other sector of the economy. And like other industries, they had no idea how to respond. But unlike businesses, most schools aren’t competitors. So they looked at how they could team up to solve their problems.

They created a computer system to store data in a secure, common format that gave the schools complete control over what data they collected, how it was used and with whom that data was shared. In a nod to transparency and civic responsibility, the software was open source. A non-profit organisation was formed to run it, backed with $100m from the Gates and Carnegie foundations. A blue-ribbon board of directors was formed, mainly educators but also Bob Wise, a former governor from West Virginia.

And so inBloom was born. But on April 21st, less than two years later, the group announced it is shutting down.

Why the flame out? After being warmly embraced by school districts in America, inBloom saw them pull out after parents and privacy advocates heard about the plans and feared for student privacy.

InBloom is one of the first major big-data casualties—a victim of exaggerated fears and a misunderstanding about the technology. Rather than a diabolical plot to sell student data to the highest bidder (as it was often mischaracterised by critics and in the press), inBloom was meant to be a solution to the problem of data in education. And it was also a clever way to enable the use of data to improve learning and teaching.
It is worth bearing in mind that schools have been keeping electronic records for decades. In the 1983 film “War Games,” Matthew Broderick plays a fun-loving geek who, to impress a girl, changes her biology grade from an F to an A after breaking into the school’s computer system (watch film clip here).

But managing the technology is a struggle for schools: how to store, process and provide access to the data—not just student grades, but things like attendance, disciplinary actions, sports activities, medical records and so on. The data are often in different databases, incompatible formats and require different passwords. As a result, the data are not used effectively. For example, by aggregating them one might find that a certain teacher is particularly good with certain students (say, shy boys or rowdy girls) and organise schedules so that they teach those pupils. And the data are difficult to access (by a parent, for instance) or share (if a student transfers schools).

InBloom solved these woes, by providing a service for schools to store and set controls for their data—in the same way a computer operating system lets users store their content and chose their software to access those files.

Yet inBloom was grossly unprepared for the backlash against its technology. Instead of fighting critics directly, they left it to their customers—the school districts—to educate parents and make the case. This was a miscalculation, since it was easier for those facing the criticisms to retreat rather than walk further out on a limb.

This is a pity. It will put a brake on attempts to use big data to improve education (which The Economist has discussed here and here and here and here). Worse, inBloom’s collapse will probably cast a chill over other promising entrepreneurs and tech-philanthropists who want to solve similar problems in other industries. For example, shouldn’t we have an inBloom for health care, so patient records can be easily accessed by qualified caregivers? The best way to lower the costs and improve the quality of medical service is by the effective use of data. But after inBloom’s beating, who would take the risk? (Indeed, the British government recently delayed plans for an inBloom-like health-care data platform after a public outcry.)
Among the lessons inBloom’s leadership take from the experience is the need to better communicate the benefits of using data. “We thought they were clear and obvious,” says Iwan Streichenberger, inBloom’s chief executive (pictured above with Bill Gates). Moreover, society’s approach to privacy needs to change. Just as society made progress on the environment when the thinking shifted from the “negative” to the “positive”—from imposing fines to promoting a company’s green credentials—so too must we shift our thinking about privacy.

Despite inBloom’s closure, the system may survive. It is an open-source project and several school systems still use it. So there’s a glimmer of hope that it can quietly continue to evolve. InBloom hit the wall not because it had the wrong idea, but one that was ahead of its time. It failed to overcome privacy fears that, although not groundless, were exaggerated and fixable. Whenever a timid ignorance obstructs progress, the loss is all of ours. 

EdWeek: InBloom's Collapse Shines Spotlight on Data-Sharing Challenges

InBloom's Collapse Shines Spotlight on Data-Sharing Challenges

By Benjamin Herold

With the rapid demise of the controversial data-management company inBloom, the daunting technical hurdles that have foiled efforts to bring streamlined, high-tech uses of student information to public school classrooms are once again front and center.

And now, experts say, the states and districts hoping to expand their use of student data must also contend with heightened public concerns about privacy and security, a thicket of ed-tech vendors vying to control individual slices of the fragmented education market, and a vocal group of advocates vehemently opposed to the brand of technology-driven education that inBloom came to embody.

“I think there’s a real lack of clarity within the K-12 sector right now about how outside parties should access student data, and how easily they’re able to share it,” said Douglas A. Levin, the executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association, or SETDA, based in Glen Burnie, Md. “The problems inBloom sought to fix haven’t gone away, but now we’re back to having a variety of competing technical standards, with a variety of competing platforms and middlemen trying to address the issues.”

Founded with $100 million in support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, inBloom aimed to serve as a single, secure repository for the student data now collected by districts and stored across numerous disconnected systems. (Gates and Carnegie have also provided grant support for Education Week’s coverage of business and innovation.)

InBloom also promised to help districts more easily share that information with the growing array of vendors offering software and apps to schools. In the process, it hoped to shake up existing public-private relationships within the education sector, spurring improvements in both classroom practice and product development by bringing order to the chaotic, inefficient system for using student data that is now in place.

Confident in its mission, the Atlanta-based nonprofit made an audacious public launch—replete with parties, indie rock bands, and breathless presentations about the future of “personalized learning”—in March 2013, at the annual South by Southwest education conference in Austin, Texas.

Thirteen months later, following a series of high-profile departures by state and district partners, inBloom announced it will “wind down” operations.

“We have realized that this concept is still new, and building public acceptance for the solution will require more time and resources than anyone could have anticipated,” wrote Iwan Streichenberger, the company’s CEO, in an April 21 letter to supporters.

Practical Problems

Before its freefall, proponents had argued that inBloom would help clean up the inconsistent rules, definitions, and technical standards that now govern how districts and their vendors store, access, and share student data.

In practical terms, said Mr. Levin of SETDA, the current lack of “interoperability” between different software systems means that schools and districts too often must manually download student information from their various discrete software systems, manually organize the data in spreadsheets, and manually upload the data to vendors—a tedious, unsecured process that can take weeks.

Worse, districts must repeat such routines each time they select a new vendor. And there’s no guarantee that the data-transfer process that works with one vendor will also work with another.

For proponents, then, inBloom’s solution was a potential game-changer, on three levels.

First, the company aimed to holistically address the problem: It promised not only to build the infrastructure that would allow districts’ and vendors’ software to securely and efficiently talk to each other, but also to host the student data itself, removing from districts’ plate the challenging and expensive work of managing secure data servers and cleaning and organizing student information according to consistent standards.

In addition, the computer code that powered inBloom’s tools was public. Open-source proponents, including Mr. Levin, argued that such an approach might drive down costs and weaken vendors’ ability to lock states and districts into particular products.

And, at least initially, many were also intrigued by the scope of inBloom’s ambition. Buoyed by its lavish philanthropic support, the company aimed from its inception to offer a central hub and data-sharing infrastructure for states, districts, and vendors across the country, creating a single platform and set of specifications that could replace the hodgepodge of nonstandard “pipes” and connections currently available.

Even as he announced that inBloom was shutting down, Mr. Streichenberger defended the company’s grand strategy.

“[Our] solution can provide a high-impact and cost-effective service to every school district across the country, enabling teachers to more easily tailor education to students’ individual learning needs,” he wrote.

Not everyone was taken with inBloom’s vision, however, especially the part that involved the nonprofit company’s assumption of responsibility for storing as many as 400 pieces of information—including sensitive disciplinary and health records—per child.

Critics—and even some proponents of robust use of educational data—also questioned the wisdom of attempting to drop such a large data infrastructure, seemingly overnight, into an education system that remains primarily local in nature.

“It doesn’t feel like the right thing for this marketplace,” said Robert J. Moore, the founder of Overland Park, Kan.-based ed-tech consulting firm RJM Strategies and the author of a recent data-privacy “toolkit” for educators. “These kinds of efforts need to start small and work their way through the system.”

Mr. Moore and others also pointed out that many critics attacked inBloom, in large part, because of the support it received from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a lightning rod for criticism from some public-education advocates.

“There is a bit of truth in that,” said Leonie Haimson, a New York City-based parent activist who led the push to get New York state officials to sever ties with inBloom, “We oppose the technocratic vision of the future being imposed top-down by Bill Gates and other billionaires.“

For-Profit Alternatives

With inBloom now essentially out of the picture, some educational data-use proponents are now turning their attention to a handful of smaller, for-profit companies that have been quietly taking the kind of bottom-up approach Mr. Moore described.

One example is Clever, a San Francisco-based startup that now connects 20,000 schools in the United States with about 100 educational software and app developers. Rather than attempt a comprehensive solution to all the data-related challenges those districts and vendors face, said CEO Tyler Bosmeny, his company aims only to perform a single, narrow function involving a very limited slice of student information.

“Clever makes it easier for schools to create and manage student accounts for all the different learning software they use,” he said, and the only data exchanged between schools and vendors are class rosters.

Clever itself does not store or warehouse any of that information, Mr. Bosmeny stressed, adding pointedly that “we are literally nothing like inBloom.”

Other groups are attempting to fix other pieces of the problem, or are offering more comprehensive solutions that are geared only toward their own products and partners.

Mr. Levin of SETDA called it ironic that parents and advocates’ fight to take down inBloom will likely open the door for more private, for-profit players to control how student information is stored, accessed, and shared.

But Ms. Haimson, the New York City activist, said the battle over inBloom was just the first in what promises to be a much larger fight over the growth of data-mining technologies and “personalized learning” efforts in public schools.

“Parents want to limit access to personal data, not facilitate it,” Ms. Haimson said.

“I was unaware of the scope of the problem before inBloom popped up, but I know my involvement in this issue is going to continue.”

White House weighs in on Student Data Privacy

Privacy laws protecting student data are outdated and must be modernized, a White House review has concluded.
The report on the promise and perils of ‘big data’, released this afternoon, notes that “much of the software that supports online learning tools and courses is provided by for-profit firms. This raises complicated questions about who owns the data streams coming off online education platforms and how they can be used.”
The primary student privacy law, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, was written before the Internet came into being. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, meant to safeguard children under 13, was written before the explosion in smartphone and tablet technology. Applying those laws in the modern context “can create unique challenges,” according to the report. The vast volume of data collected in an educational context by for-profit companies “could be used to build an invasive consumer profile of [students] once they become adults,” the report warns.
John Podesta, the White House counselor who led the review, called on the Education Department to prevent such abuse by developing new frameworks to “ensure that data collected in schools is used for educational purposes.”
Updating student privacy protections could be done largely through the regulatory process or executive orders, without involving Congress, Podesta said. But, he added, “people may conclude … that basic educational privacy laws could use some tweaks.”

Jim Steyer, a children’s privacy advocate and the CEO of Common Sense Media, applauded the report for addressing the concerns of students and parents. “Today's report is a major statement from the White House that as the internet continues to become a source of learning, innovation and economic growth, the privacy and security of our nation's kids will be a national priority,” Steyer said.

State spending on higher education remains well below pre-recession levels

State spending on higher education remains well below pre-recession levels and some states have kept the cuts coming, according to a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Every state except Alaska and North Dakota spends less per student than before the recession hit, the report says. State higher education spending is down about 23 percent, amounting to just a little over $2,000 per student.
Louisiana, North Carolina, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming made the deepest cuts this year, the report says. Per student spending in Louisiana is down by more than 40 percent while tuition increased.
Thirty-seven states cut per-student funding by more than 20 percent and nine states cut per-student funding by more than one-third.
“The large funding cuts have led to both steep tuition increases and spending cuts that may diminish the quality of education available to students at a time when a highly educated workforce is more crucial than ever to the nation’s economic future,” the report says.

Florida, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Montana and Washington have all increased higher education funding over the last school year, though spending is still less than before the recession.