Holiday Party

Community college faculty blast tenure proposal

Community college faculty blast tenure proposal

By Denise-Marie Ordway, Orlando Sentinel

8:22 PM EST, November 29, 2012

Dozens of faculty members from across Florida gathered at Seminole State College on Thursday to oppose a state plan that would make it harder for community-college professors to earn and keep their tenure.

For more than two hours, faculty and representatives from the Association of Florida Colleges took turns pointing out what they saw as problems with the proposal, which the state Board of Education will vote on in early 2013.

Many stressed that changes are not needed because colleges already have strong procedures to determine which professors are good enough to earn and maintain tenure.

State officials, seeking more accountability for public educators, are considering making professors wait an extra two years to request tenure and requiring them to meet performance metrics that focus on such things as student success and employer feedback. Tenured professors would be reviewed at least every three years.

"This rule seeks to disrupt a high-performing college system," said Ed Mitchell, executive director of the statewide faculty union. "This rule change seeks to fix a problem that does not exist."

Some professors argued the plan would scare away talented faculty when community colleges are building their bachelor's degree programs. Some raised concern about evaluations based on student success, considering many factors affect how well students perform in classes and what jobs they get after graduating.

"It's going to be connected back to me even if it [the problem] could be the Federal Reserve Bank or they picked the wrong major," said Valencia College professor Jack Chambless.

Randy Hanna, chancellor of the Florida College System, called the discussion "productive" and said it will help officials fine-tune the plan.

from Dana Summers at the Sentinel

 

By Dana Summers

Orlando Sentinel

State may toughen rules for community-college professors

State may toughen rules for community-college professors

By Denise-Marie Ordway and Kathleen Haughney, Orlando Sentinel

Life for thousands of community-college professors in Florida could be changing drastically as the state considers making it tougher for them to earn and maintain tenure.

This afternoon, state officials will discuss the changes they plan to make to rules governing employment contracts for professors at Florida's 28 community colleges. The State Board of Education is expected to consider the changes early next year.

The public hearing will be from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Heathrow campus of Seminole State College.

Under the new rules, it would take longer for a professor to earn tenure — at least five years instead of three. The proposal also would require tenure-seeking faculty to meet a series of performance metrics that include feedback from students and employers.

And once professors earn tenure, they would undergo intensive reviews every three years. College administrators would focus on student success, looking into factors such as job placement and whether students do well in subsequent courses.

The changes, sharply criticized by faculty, are another move by state leaders who say they want to increase accountability among public educators.

Colleges and universities statewide are being pushed to boost their graduation and job-placement rates to show taxpayers that higher education is worth their investment.

Last year, a committee of Florida lawmakers sought to abolish tenure altogether in community colleges so administrators would have more control over their personnel and to make it easier to get rid of low-performing employees.

Though that effort failed, the Legislature succeeded in 2011 in eliminating tenure for new teachers in elementary, middle and high schools.

Tom Auxter, president of the statewide faculty union, United Faculty of Florida, blasted the community-college proposal, calling it an effort by Republican leaders to cheapen education by having colleges rely more on temporary instructors instead of skilled but more expensive professors.

He argued that making tenure tougher to obtain would prompt the best professors to leave.

"This is just a political way to destabilize the jobs of quite a few people in order to have replacements for them fast," Auxter said. "It's a way to have cheap labor. It has nothing to do with quality."

But state leaders said they want to ensure community colleges' standards are consistent, especially considering the rising importance of these institutions in providing the state with college graduates. Most community colleges now offer bachelor's degrees.

Randy Hanna, chancellor of the Florida College System, stressed that, although the proposal would require tenure-seeking professors to meet certain criteria, colleges would have flexibility in terms of how heavily each piece of information would weigh in an employee's evaluation.

He said the tenure rule needed to be revised. It had not been reviewed in at least 20 years.

"I think it's a way to ensure that local [trustee] boards and presidents and faculty are working together in a process that will provide for accountability and still make sure the decisions are made at that local level," Hanna said.

Today's workshop on "continuing" contracts for full-time, tenured professors — as opposed to contracts that must be renewed every few months or annually for many other faculty — is the second one held this year on the proposal.

Hanna said revisions were developed based on feedback from college presidents, lawmakers, faculty and the Governor's Office. But Michael Brawer, executive director of the Association of Florida Colleges, said he plans to voice concern about a provision in the most recent version that had not been present in another version that the association had agreed upon.

The earlier version did not include one of the most controversial provisions, which calls for creating an evaluation system that would require students and employers to reflect on the education that students received from individual instructors.

That part, Brawer said, presents substantial logistical challenges and is giving many college administrators "heartburn" — because they are not sure how it can be done fairly.

Valencia College President Sandy Shugart said he appreciates that state officials are trying to ensure rigor in all the colleges' tenure processes. But he said some changes are "too prescriptive."

For example, the plan suggests using the salaries of graduates to help gauge professor quality, Shugart said.

"You can't assign that to a particular faculty member because that student has had 20 or 30 faculty members," Shugart said.

Pricing Out the Humanities

Pricing Out the Humanities

November 26, 2012 - 3:00am

By

Colleen Flaherty

History professors at the University of Florida think their courses are plenty valuable, but they don't want them to be among the most expensive. And they are organizing to protest a gubernatorial task force's recommendation to charge more for majors without an immediate job payoff -- a recommendation that the historians fear could discourage enrollments.

History professors have organized a petition against one of the more controversial recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on State Higher Education Reform: differential tuition that could be punitive to the humanities. They've garnered more than 1,300 names in a week, including those from places far beyond the Sunshine State.

"We, the undersigned faculty, have dedicated our careers to the common good of the State of Florida," the petition reads. "We believe that the institutional goals of our universities are not in conflict with state goals. We also know a great deal about the vital connection between higher education and a responsible and productive citizenry; in fact, this connection is at the very center of our profession. We trust that Governor Scott will recognize the pressing need for meaningful faculty input into future deliberations concerning the future of higher education in the State of Florida."

Quoting the task force's language on differential tuition, petition co-creator Norman Goda said, “The theory is that students in ‘non-strategic majors,’ by paying higher tuition, will help subsidize students in the ‘strategic’ majors, thus creating a greater demand for the targeted programs and more graduates from these programs, as well.”

Established in May by Governor Rick Scott, a Republican who has said he wants to run Florida’s education system more like a business, the task force includes legislators, businesspeople and educators appointed by various parties. It finalized its recommendations earlier this month. The governor is now reviewing the report, which divides reform into three different but interlinked areas: accountability, funding and governance.

Recommendations for accountability include a call for more metrics to determine university success and performance, while those for governance include allowing the state university system’s Board of Governors more control over funding (currently the state legislature holds much of that control). Funding recommendations call for non-uniform tuition among the state’s 12 universities and a further look into differential tuition among degree programs.

Although several models for differential tuition exist in higher education, the model endorsed by the task force would aim to hold in-state tuition rates for “high-skill, high-wage, high-demand (market determined strategic demand) degree programs” steady for at least three years, making them potentially more attractive to students than other majors. Although the task force report doesn’t officially recommend strategic majors, it names several possible categories previously identified by the Florida university system’s Board of Governors, including 111 in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM); 28 programs in globalization; and 21 in the health professions. (Such degree programs currently account for 37 percent of degrees granted within the system, with a 21 percent increase during the past four years). Core humanities disciplines did not make the list.

Task force chairman Dale Brill, Florida Chamber Foundation president and Scott’s appointee to the group, said the recommendations were based on “logic,” rather than research into which degree programs have proven to be the most beneficial to individual students and state economies. Defining “strategic” and “non-strategic” programs ultimately will be the work of the state legislature, he said.

“The task force tried to identify innovative approaches to spreading limited resources to drive maximum benefit to the system,” Brill said. “Up until now, in that system, that money is invested evenly across the board with very little attention paid toward getting maximum return on that investment” for the 104 million taxpayers contributing to it.

Brill said he wondered why humanities professors felt targeted by a plan to improve the university funding system, which would improve the university system overall.

“If you improve the system without worrying about the professors in the system, in the end the system has more resources to invest,” he said.

But Lillian Guerra, one of Goda’s history colleagues at the University of Florida and a petition co-creator, said the task force plan lays the foundation for second-class degrees. Departments receive funding based on how many students enroll in courses, she said, so decreased humanities enrollment would lead to less funding for the department.

Damage to the department would damage the university overall, she added. “In the short term, I think we run the risk of demolishing our prestige as an institution, when so much of the institution’s prestige has been anchored in liberal arts.”

Goda said that in the long run, differential tuition could mean a less “richly educated” workforce. Students in strategic majors also could suffer from lack of a well-rounded education – something he said makes them “truly adaptable and employable over the course of their lives.”

Robert Townsend, deputy director of the American Historical Association, said the professional association was making its members aware of the Florida professors’ petition.

“I think there’s general agreement that it would not be helpful or positive for the history discipline,” he said of differential tuition, adding that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker recently announced he’s making similar forays into reforming state higher education.

In his Nov. 16 announcement, Walker said funding for technical technical colleges and the University of Wisconsin System must be linked to performance. "In higher education, that means not only degrees, but are young people getting degrees in jobs that are open and needed today, not just the jobs that the universities want to give us, or degrees that people want to give us?"

Townsend said despite the recent trend toward more seemingly job-oriented degrees, which isn’t uncommon during slow economic periods, a history degree holds enduring value.

“There’s plenty of evidence that history as a major sets people up for a lot of different careers,” he said, including business. “You’re trained to think critically and use evidence and write about it. There are [bosses] who prefer that to those who are trained to do that narrowly, to think only about numbers, rather than about numbers in wider aspects and making use of them.”

According to a Georgetown University study based on 2010 Census data, recent history majors (ages 22-26) have a 10.2 percent unemployment rate, while more experienced history graduates without an advanced degree fare better at 5.8 percent unemployment. Overall, 9.4 percent of recent humanities and liberal arts graduates and 6.1 percent of their more experienced counterparts are unemployed. By comparison, 7.7 percent of recent life and physical science graduates are unemployed, as are 4.7 percent of older grads; in computers and mathematics, the rates were 8.2 percent and 5.6 percent, respectively.

While the study does show a link between STEM and other strategic degrees and lower unemployment, it cautions that "occupations that are closely aligned with occupations can misfire." Because of the decline in construction, for example, recent architecture graduates have the highest rate of unemployment, 13.9 percent. By contrast, education, business, health care and the professional services have been relatively stable employers of recent graduates with related majors.

Science advocates also have opposed the Blue Ribbon proposal. Shirley Malcom, head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Directorate for Education and Human Resources Programs, called differential tuition “a difficult call.” But ultimately, she said, it pits different areas of an institution against each other, “where we as STEM people need the rest of the knowledge that is resident in the rest of the institution.”

Malcom argued for other ways to promote STEM, such as direct scholarships.

Student groups also have opposed the recommendation. José R. Soto, co-president of University of Florida Graduate Assistants United, helped organize a recent joint-press conference on the recommendations, along with the Gainesville Area Students for a Democratic Society, and is helping plan a rally before the university’s Board of Trustees meeting next week.

The doctoral candidate, who recently defended his dissertation in applied economics, said differential tuition could create a kind of brain drain away from Florida higher education, in which the state’s “best and brightest” qualifying for scholarships out of state leave to ensure a top-notch education. Additionally, Soto said, trying to forecast the job market to determine which degrees will be most lucrative in the future is misguided. “Any economist will tell you one of the hardest things you can do is predict the market; if you take it farther than a [certain period of time] in unknown territory.”

It’s unclear exactly when the recommendations could be considered by the Florida legislature, or which, if any, Scott will endorse. A spokeswoman said Scott “has made it clear he thinks Florida’s colleges and universities need to be affordable for the families of our state.” But the governor -- in-much discussed remarks last year about anthropology -- has seemed skeptical of the value of a number of liberal arts disciplines.

William Proctor, a task force and departing state House member who serves as chancellor of Flagler College in St. Augustine, said, “It may be premature to try to size that up. It won’t even get into committee hearings until [next year].” He also noted that while there was interest in differential tuition among his former colleagues, changes to higher education funding remain controversial in Florida. In April, Scott vetoed a bill that would have allowed the school’s top research institutions – Florida State University and the University of Florida – to raise tuition.

Proctor also noted that the task force’s final report only recommends holding strategic degree tuition steady for a period of at least three years, while other differential tuition models could be adapted later. Even within the task force, he said, there was discussion as to whether to charge more for STEM and other strategic degrees because they can be more expensive for the university. (Schools throughout the country already have adopted that model, especially for degrees in engineering and business).

Still, Guerra, who specializes in Latin American history, said the proposals are disturbing seen through the lens of history.  “The Cuban state in the [1960s and 1970s] began to promote technical fields and the hard sciences because those are the fields believed to generate wealth for the collective aspiration, as opposed to an individual meditation on ideas.”

Liberal arts skills a good fit for jobs

Liberal arts skills a good fit for jobs

By Donal O'Shea, special to the Times
Donal O'SheaTampa Bay Times In Print: Sunday, November 25, 2012

What skills do employers value most in judging their new hires? Strong verbal communication, a solid work ethic, teamwork, analytical ability and initiative, according to a report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers. This nearly exactly matches the skill set of students with degrees in the liberal arts.

This fact is worth keeping top of mind when judging the value of a college degree — and, in particular, a college major — in this tough economic environment. The New York Times has documented how over the past five years the weak U.S. economy has brought jobless and underemployment rates for recent college graduates across the country to an all-time high. And the Tampa Bay Times recently concluded a series on the difficulties faced by three New College of Florida students as they searched for jobs in the first six months after graduation. While no college president likes to see students from his or her institution struggling as they begin their careers, the challenges faced by those three students are not unique to New College, and I want to thank Times staffer Lane DeGregory for raising an important issue facing our society.

Some argue that the high rate of unemployment among recent graduates results from the types of degrees being offered at the undergraduate level both by large research institutions and by small liberal arts colleges like New College. According to this thinking, if more students pursued degrees in job-ready fields like education, accounting and engineering, they would be able to find work more easily.

While there is some evidence to support the notion that graduates with vocationally oriented degrees have an easier time than their peers in finding employment directly out of college, the unemployment numbers among those groups are still too high. Furthermore, there is little evidence to suggest that such degrees retain their economic advantage over time. The highest wage earning fields in the country — medicine, law, scientific and business management and computer technology — generally require advanced degrees.

Given the reality of the current economy, helping students find employment after graduation requires plenty of hard work, not only on the part of the students seeking jobs but on the part of our colleges and universities and the business community as well. At New College, we are attempting to do our part by placing greater emphasis on career counseling services and better aligning those services with student and academic life on campus. We also are redoubling our efforts to reach out to the business community to bring more recruiters to campus and to develop internships for students while they are in school so they can gain workplace skills that will be to their advantage after graduation. In talking with college presidents from around the state and across the country, I know that we are not alone in these efforts targeted at helping our students achieve employment success, regardless of the career paths they choose.

But we need to work harder with the business community to get them to take a chance on hiring these bright young men and women who can help build their businesses for years to come. Acclaimed marketing consultant Robert Goldfarb, author of What's Stopping Me from Getting Ahead?, put it well in a New York Times article headlined "How to Bridge the Hiring Gap": "At one time employers recruited liberal arts graduates whose broad education shaped an inquiring mind and the ability to evaluate conflicting points of view." The merit of such hiring practices is on display in many Fortune 500 board rooms today, where liberal arts graduates make up more than 15 percent of all CEOs. Yet, in recent years, companies have drifted away from this practice, turning instead to hiring only graduates who have immediately accessible skills. While such practices may make sense on the surface, Goldfarb thinks they are a mistake. "I've found many broadly educated employees to be quicker than technical staff members to develop the intuition that's crucial on a work floor where gray — not black or white — is the dominant color," he states.

Because of the recent articles in the Tampa Bay Times, we were immediately contacted by a high-tech firm in the state that was excited to learn about the quality and skills of our graduates. They opened their door for interviews. It was a hopeful sign and one that we hope to interest other businesses in as well. Such partnerships and opportunities are an essential component in determining the long-term success of our young college graduates.

Donal O'Shea is president of New College of Florida. He wrote this exclusively for the Tampa Bay Times.

Tuition plan is a major mistake

Tuition plan is a major mistake

Steering college students toward a degree based on their bankbook is not only wrong, but also would further separate post-secondary institutions from delivering top quality programs, no matter what the major might be.

Another education task force, which was put into motion by Florida Gov. Rick Scott, is proposing a tuition freeze for students majoring in high-demand fields, such as engineering and biology, while those whose passions might be tied to a different profession, let’s say journalism, will pay more for their education. The reasoning, according to state officials, is the lower cost should provide a greater incentive for students to enter the fields where there is need.

This is backward-thinking. If the state wants to look at differential tuition, then the premium fields should demand the highest price tag because the future financial reward will be greater.

The task force also is sending a very disturbing message. Are officials saying that an engineer or doctor is more important to a productive society than an elementary school teacher? We hope not. It becomes even more irrational to think that an education task force wants to financially penalize someone whose interest is to build the educational foundation of a young child who may one day become the engineer benefiting from a discounted college degree.

We understand the importance of directing students to jobs that are in demand based on the science, technology, engineering and math profile. We know companies are searching for top-quality men and women who race out of college well-prepared to take over these highly skilled positions. Good doctors, engineers, technology experts will always be in high demand and command the biggest bucks because of the preciseness of the work they need to perform.

Education experts at the recent The News-Press education summit highlighted the importance of universities working with the business community, both locally and globally, to develop students ready to drive the workforce to new heights, and nothing should deter that mission.

The point was made that two students could be sitting in the same classroom, elbow to elbow, one paying less for their education and the other more, based on their major. Is one more important than the other based on a career path that may bring them more money? No. Career accomplishments are not always measured by the size of one’s paycheck, but in the value of the work produced and the skills acquired that enables that person to make a difference. The elementary school teacher who fights to keep pace with changing economic conditions, but manages to positively influence a young student’s life, leaves a far greater mark than one who manages to put in time at a high-paying job, but has little to show for that big paycheck at the end of the day.

There also is the issue of changing demand. What if these high-demand fields fill up and other fields that may not make the list of premium majors now, but may one day have an employment shortage. Will universities adjust tuition to meet those needs?

There are schools, such as Cornell University, who take the more understandable approach, by charging higher tuition in fields that typically offer higher pay. It just makes sense. If you want the premium job, you should be willing to pay the premium price for that education.

Every student deserves a premium education at a cost that does not discriminate or keep someone from following their heart and choosing a lower-paying field because they do not want to pay higher tuition. It is an unbalanced educational philosophy.

Universities should be more focused on making sure a student is prepared for the workforce and ready for life, not on a price chart.

There is growing concern over escalating tuition costs, and we understand how important it is to make sure any student who wants to continue their educational studies can do so without going bankrupt.

Statewide, there are 188 baccalaureate programs offered in the high-demand fields, or approximately 37 percent of all majors. That means a majority of the students want to follow another career path. They should be able to do so without facing higher tuition payments.

Let’s get back to educating students, not picking favorites.