Just a couple of things:
In my last post, I quoted Frederick Buechner’s thoughts on calling—that it’s “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
And then I asked, “At what point do we acknowledge that the world’s deep hunger has met our deep gladness in a way that is unsustainable, that exhausts us?”
As I said, I’ve been thinking about this exhaustion in the context of teaching, advising, and mentoring. I’m sure I’ve mentioned here before that I have a very low teaching load—a 2/1 (meaning I teach two courses in the fall, one in the spring), and that’s technically an overload because of various pilot programs in which I’ve participated, and because I coordinate the department’s internship program. There have been many times when I haven’t taken course releases, or I could technically have been on a 0/-1. I didn’t think it would look good to have such a low teaching load pre-tenure, so I taught extra courses.
I also had been cautioned by my mentoring committee that I needed to cut back on my service responsibilities. I was, we all acknowledged, headed toward burnout with too much service and overload teaching–and not enough time for research and writing. My calendar was full. Plus, my take-home pay hasn’t been enough to make ends meet. It’s been very stressful. Because I’m an exceptionally high-functioning depressive with a perhaps overdeveloped sense of commitment to others, it’s likely very few of my colleagues or friends noticed I spent much of 2014 in a depressive fog.
Fang knows otherwise.
As longtime readers know, I’ve gone through several rounds of interviews for excellent opportunities in California—program coordinator and director jobs—but none of them worked out. So when a similar position opened up here at Boise State back in September, I applied for it.
Today I signed the offer letter.
On February 2, I’ll be the director of the university’s Instructional Design and Educational Assessment (IDEA) Shop and associate director of its Center for Teaching and Learning. According to the job ad, my primary responsibilities include:
I’ll manage a terrific team of instructional designers who help faculty teach more thoughtfully, often with technology. I’m looking forward to being part of a regular team again.
The job pays more than an assistant professorship does, and it’s a 12-month position, so I’ll finally be bringing in a salary on which we can live. And if my tenure application goes through—it’s with the provost now, having passed departmental and college-level reviews—I get to keep tenure and can exercise retreat rights into the History department or into a comparable professional position, depending on circumstances at the time.
I’m excited to get started.
I.
I inhabit a lot of different social and cultural worlds, and sometimes the adjacency of posts on Facebook is stunning. I can’t share tonight’s example because a lot of people might misunderstand my motivation for highlighting it. I will say this: as someone with a diverse circle of Facebook friends, I have the privilege of listening in on conversations that a lot of people don’t get to hear.
As a progressive, I get to eavesdrop on the conversations of my (often profoundly) conservative friends. As an atheist, I get glimpses of the perspectives of my pastor friends. As a white person, I get to listen in on conversations about the struggles and fears of my friends of color. Tonight, reading two Facebook posts and their ensuing comment streams side-by-side, I saw worlds colliding. One friend’s circle occupies a cultural context that lets its members clearly see the collision; the other friend’s circle does not, and might even deny that their worlds are colliding. It’s stunning, really, especially since, when worlds collide, neither world survives.
Hug your kids or the people you love tonight, and know that people you might see as very unlike you are doing the exact same thing.
II.
Elsewhere in my Facebook stream, a friend shared his pastor’s comparing having a call—by which she meant knowing what you are alive to do—with being pregnant with Christ. He wrote, “Your call in the world, the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need, is the same role as being Mary or Elizabeth.”
The post was an explicit invitation to ponder, and another friend alluded to Frederick Buechner’s quote, from Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC, that “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
But what do we do when we sense so much deep hunger? And if we’re fortunate enough to feel deep gladness in a number of ways?
III.
It might seem odd for a depressive to admit to deep gladness, but there it is.
IV.
At what point do we acknowledge that the world’s deep hunger has met our deep gladness in a way that is unsustainable, that exhausts us?
I’ve been thinking about this in the context of teaching, of advising and mentoring. It’s a labor of love–and I mean that in a literal way, not in the way the cliché often gets used. Which is to say: I don’t mean that it’s work I do because I love it; rather, it is work that requires love.
It’s exhausting.
V.
I passed a couple of hours earlier this week talking with two friends–one a coworker, one a grad student–for whom being Christian is not only at the core of their identity, it is their primary identity. They were both stunned to learn I am not a believer–or, not a believer in any conventional sense–and we had a wide-ranging conversation that moved from them probing me about my failure to believe to me trying to understand the nuanced differences between their denominational commitments and perspectives.
I love talking with people whom I admire but with whom I disagree profoundly about important things. Such conversations are how we grow.
VI.
That’s part of why I haven’t been writing in these parts for several weeks. I’ve been having amazing conversations about religion, education, technology, parenting, marriage, humanities, citizenship, librarianship, and the past. The conversations have taken me back to reading poetry, as well as new nonfiction and fiction. And, of course, to research, old and new.
I’m learning so much, but this semester has been a time of listening and quiet reflection rather than writing. I’ll be using my voice again in 2015.
Until then, I’m wishing you all the best for the holidays and the new year.
I found myself in a meeting on Friday with several science faculty, and I had the opportunity to share with them what I’m doing in my Digital History course this semester. When I mentioned in particular that my students were mapping the neighborhood’s irrigation ditches, an engineering professor asked me how they were doing that. I said I had a student minoring in GIS and she’d likely in the end use Google Maps or maybe even Illustrator just to indicate where the water flows through the neighborhood and where it disappears underground.
She clarified her question. “No. . . How do you get your students to do things you haven’t taught them to do? If we ask our students to do something new, they say they can’t do it because we haven’t yet taught them how to do it.”
I pointed out that history, and the humanities more generally, provided students with plenty of opportunities to take initiative in research and communication, and that we tried to cultivate independent thinking in our students. Plus, I try to model this spirit of inquiry in the classroom. I pointed out (once again) that I’m a history professor without any degrees in history, and I’m a technologist without any formal training in that field. I’ve decided to eschew impostor syndrome in favor of openly making up my projects and career as I go along.
The professors seemed a bit flabbergasted. Maybe they hadn’t ever considered the humanities as anything other than courses that taught students grammar and asked them to read a lot.
For me, job #1 is ensuring students are critical and creative thinkers who can use technology thoughtfully so they can both tackle big problems and make a living. I don’t understand how anyone could enjoy—or even think it was morally defensible—to teach a course that didn’t inspire students to stretch themselves, that required them merely to learn content or basic skills. If your students don’t get past “comprehension” in Bloom’s Taxonomy, you’re doing it wrong. Students need to get to synthesis, evaluation, and creation in as many class meetings as possible.
In light of this discovery that the university apparently is producing STEM students who lack initiative and intellectual curiosity, I’ve just suggested it fund an interdisciplinary project that would bring some of this humanities secret sauce to STEM students. Here’s a smidgeon from my response to a CFP aimed at gauging faculty interest in new, interdisciplinary projects:
a) Project description – provide a short description of your project idea
Students need more opportunities to practice solving problems across disciplines, and Idahoans often need low-cost solutions to the challenges they face. My years in the classroom have taught me that humanities students (and especially history students), if given the right tools, support, and encouragement, are both persistent and creative researchers and makers. They seek out new knowledge, teach themselves and each other skills, and work together collaboratively with little complaint or friction. I’d like to bring this “humanities secret sauce” to students across the disciplines, as I’ve heard from faculty that their students don’t always demonstrate this initiative and ability to learn new things—or synthesize their knowledge and skills—outside the classroom.
Accordingly, I propose creating the Curiosity Shop, a place where the Boise State community, as well as everyday Idahoans, can bring persistent issues or problems, and students can—working alongside these individuals—address these challenges using research, experimentation, and communication. The atmosphere of the Curiosity Shop will be permeated with curiosity, deep inquiry, empathy, creativity, improvisation, and perseverance. Working in multidisciplinary teams, students will learn to prioritize challenges, research possible interventions, and then propose, fund, implement, iterate, and evaluate their solutions.
b) What are the broad research questions?
Here’s hoping the appropriate committee bites. Our students can change the world if we let them.
Years ago, when I was working in academic technology and faculty development, I teamed up with a group of extraordinary women—Laura Blankenship, Barbara Sawhill, Barbara Ganley, and Martha Burtis—to present in various ed tech venues about a phenomenon we termed Fear 2.0, the constellation of fear-mongering around the use of social media in higher education, student-created media shared publicly, and born-digital, non-peer-reviewed scholarship.
Recently, I’ve been thinking again about fear.
Several weeks ago, a friend told me that when she heard several loud booming noises on her block, she retreated to the basement, opened her gun safe, retrieved her handgun, and began loading magazines in the dark, lining them up just under the windowsill, all while peering through the mini-blinds to scout for threats.
Two senior colleagues whom I also consider good friends reminded me that I should be careful what I post on social media, particularly when it’s about Boise State. (So did my mother, repeatedly, though she has never been on social media to see what I post.)
Every few weeks at his Taekwondo studio, along with Taekwondo techniques and forms, my son learns a new self-defense method to geared explicitly to protect him against strangers who mean him harm.
A month ago, two older women tried to make me feel anxious about dressing appropriately for a job interview for a relatively senior, high-profile position.
Another friend told me it takes several days for her to open readers’ reports on the articles she has submitted to academic journals. She fears the commenters will be abusive (as they sometimes are; in fact, just this week I received feedback on an article from three readers, all of whom offered great suggestions for revision, but one of whom couched it in the form of ad hominem attacks).
The common thread here, of course, is anxiety, paranoia, and fear.
I’m not going to say I don’t feel fear.
Reading the #YesAllWomen thread on Twitter last week, I was reminded that as a woman, I live an imperiled existence relative to men.
And of course, as a parent, as one therapist pointed out to me, it’s normal to always feel “a low-level terror.”
Plus, even my work duties can inspire fear. For example, this week I have to provide the names of eight potential external reviewers for my tenure case. The very thought gives me palpitations, as my work is deeply interdisciplinary and I’ve neither focused my publishing in traditional journals nor have I shopped around a book manuscript.
To list particular scholars for my tenure case is to constitute a new tribe rather than to delineate an existing subfield to which I belong. And that’s a frightening thing, as I’m asking these people I’ve never met to say Yes, this is an established scholarly community and yes, Leslie belongs, even though that community (which must comprise only tenured faculty, not alt-ac folks or museum professionals) does not in fact exist in any form these people would recognize. In fact, the people on my list might never have heard of one another, so diverse are my interests and publications.
But there are other options.
I returned last week from the Berkshire Conference on Women’s History. There, I reconnected with Cathy Kudlick, a mentor and former colleague who embodies (for me, at least) fearlessness, who in turn introduced me to the absolutely amazing Katherine Ott, a deeply generous and insightful soul who also struck me as fearless.
In talking with Katherine, I was reminded of my Fear 2.0 days, and I expressed to her the belief that, though I may be on the job market now or in the future, I’m at a point in my life where I worry very little about what people will think of what I say on my blog or in social media. Rather, I want to be relatively transparent; I don’t want to work for or with anyone who would reject me outright because of what I write here. Katherine made clear that was an obvious conclusion, but it’s taken me a while to get here.
Thank you, digital world, for making it easy for folks to discern that I am not the right person for them—and conversely, for me to discern that they might not be the best colleagues for me.
Once again I’m at an inflection point.
The last few years have been full of them.
I interviewed a month ago for a terrific staff position at a phenomenal institution, and I felt I nailed the campus interview, really connecting with the students and faculty—but at this point I’m guessing the job has been offered to someone else.
At about that same time, I realized my antidepressant had stopped working. It’s not a big deal in the long run; it happens, and I know intellectually how to deal with it, even if emotionally I feel like a wreck. I am fortunate, as I’ve said before here, to be an exceptionally high-functioning depressive, so I was able to show up for work and get things done; doing so just took more energy than usual.
But the combination of high (a strong interview) and low (transitioning to a new antidepressant) kicked me back into a deeply self-reflective mode in which I asked myself, yet again, what I really want to do with my life.
Today is my 39th birthday, you see, and I’m finally feeling that time is not unlimited—nor is my energy.
The answer? Beyond being able to support my family—a dicey proposition at best at the moment—I want to be in a place where I can be professionally fearless, where I can admit I’m still learning, where no one is going to try (even with my own best interests in mind) to shame me or frighten me into silence.
Also, about that supporting-my-family thing: I want to shift my perspective.
I’ve been helping a family member with a job application this week, and the application requires a salary history. Twenty-four years ago, this woman, working as an entry-level public high school administrator, was making 10% more than I earn today.
If I have one fear, it’s financial insolvency. I have expressed my concerns about salary and cost of living to a few colleagues, and while many of my junior colleagues understand exactly what the challenge is in living on my salary, a senior colleague recently pointed out to me that (more than 10 years ago) another colleague (whose life context is entirely different from mine) managed to make the salary work with two kids instead of one.
I don’t need that kind of comparison and subtle shaming.
I don’t need to be told it’s more expensive to live in California than it is in Idaho. Because here’s the deal: it was cheaper to live in Davis than it is to live in Boise. Really. No one believes me, but my bank statements don’t lie.
I especially don’t need people who own houses to tell me my rent is unreasonable (it’s not), when they haven’t looked at rental prices in a decade or more.
And yes, I realize some parts of California are exceptionally expensive places to live. Salaries in those cities also often are commensurate with the cost of living, unlike my salary here.
Confessing about professing
I admit it: I take a good deal of pride in being able to say I’m a professor. I love being called “professor.” I’ve worked toward this title my entire adult life. And many of the people I’ve most admired over the past 20 years have been my professors. To be counted among them is a joy. To give it up would cause me great sadness.
Yet I’m not yet convinced the profession is sustainable for me, either financially or emotionally.
I really had hoped that by the time I turn 40, I would be able to support my family without fear of not being able to pay the bills. That’s looking less likely with each passing year because of career choices I’ve made and because of a lack of state and public support for higher education, especially here in Idaho.
Dancing with fear
Seth Godin emphasizes that the process of building a professional life and forging an individual identity requires a good deal of dancing with fear. He’s absolutely right, and since my internship with Seth last summer, I’ve been more serious than ever about identifying points of resistance and dancing with the fears that underlie that resistance.
For me at this moment, this dance is about balancing progress toward tenure (playing the game) with a desire to experiment in new fields (breaking the rules), about bringing home a paycheck while also seeking more remunerative work, whether that be a different job or launching a freelance/consulting endeavor that I hope will provide me with a comfortable income—all while living in a context (academia) where I’m supposed to do the work because I love it (which I do), because I’m supposed to eschew material reward because only the uncultured value money.
I want to be fearless professionally, but there it is, laid bare:
I’m so tired of the fear that comes with living paycheck to paycheck.
I’m weary of the fear-mongering around work I enjoy but which other people deem professionally risky.
I want to do new, exciting things, but sometimes doing them—thanks to an academic culture that rewards conformity over risk—jeopardizes my ability to put food on the table.
Still, I’m off-contract in the summer. Summer is, then, the best time to embrace fearlessness, to break new ground, to embrace the advice a spectral James Joyce gave to Seamus Heaney:
Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,
so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget.
You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.
For more reasons than I could adequately explain here, I’ve been thinking even more often than usual about the value of a liberal arts education in our understanding of the world and the ways we ought to engage with it. As Jeremy Hunsinger has written,
Coming to know, as the primary process of knowledge, is a mobile, communal and material effort, and it engages people, places, and things, through our memories and practices tied to the histories of knowledges, its fluxes, and its futures.
The liberal arts are about engagement with ideas, places, and people. To be frank, in my experience, people educated in the liberal arts tend to be more interesting than those with a more vocational education, and they take delight in details and phenomena that others might not even notice.
What does a liberal arts understanding look like when deployed in our everyday lives? Here are a few examples from my experience.
Understanding that landscape architecture transcends Sunset magazine. It’s being able to look at a public space and ascertain for whom it was designed and why, how it might have changed over time, and whose values it represents. . .and both taking pleasure in this analysis and knowing such interpretation is important for all kinds of reasons.
Looking at a chart published by a major news organization and redesigning it so it conveys information more clearly and to less partisan ends.
After seeing someone on Facebook mention being able to hold two opposing thoughts in her mind at the same time, musing on Keats and negative capability and wondering how the concept might be useful in understanding Idaho politics.
Seeing an allusion to the “Draw a Scientist” activity and understanding the confluence of historical events and cultural beliefs and values that has led to our narrow understanding of who qualifies as a scientist—and knowing where to find and how to interpret the research being done on the best ways to combat this stereotype.
When besieged by an enthusiastic evangelical Christian who kept stuffing tiny comic-panel tracts into my hand, I used my understanding of the culture and geography from which she emerged to steer her away from proselytizing to me and toward mutual understanding. Whenever I run into her now, she seems genuinely happy to see me and doesn’t try to save my soul in any explicit way.
Watching pretty much any segment of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart or The Colbert Report, and being at once dismayed and delighted by what I see and hear in its coverage of the countless hypocrisies in U.S. political life and media representations.
Watching, as I am now from my perch on the fourth floor of the university library, a Canada goose floating on the moderately swift current of a river that flows between the university and a large public park, and mentally mapping the confluence of events that made the moment possible, the mind piecing together a quilt whose pieces include but are not limited to the Army Corps of Engineers, water rights legislation in the western U.S., climate change, treaties governing migratory wildlife, the pastoral aesthetic, and municipal recreation priorities. . . but also having empathy for the goose, for it must be a fun ride.
I’ve found that people with a quality liberal arts education tend to be lifelong learners, participating in both formal and informal learning opportunities and indulging in a good deal of autodidactism.
In short, viewing the world through a liberal arts lens is delightful, and I’m so grateful for my time at Grinnell College, which informed my years afterward studying literature, writing, and culture.
Of course, one need not attend an elite liberal arts college to acquire one, but it’s clear it’s getting harder to pursue the liberal arts at regional public universities.
What about you? If you have a broad-based liberal arts education in the humanities, arts, and sciences, how do you find it influencing the way you view or experience the world?
Usually when Fang‘s birthday rolls around, we’re ready to duck and cover, as April 19 and 20 are two of those days when crazy people are wont to do and say stupid and dangerous things.
Strangely, though, this year Fang is doing the opposite of ducking and covering—he’s been doing amazing work, running around Boise and its environs with a camera and an assortment of lenses. His work keeps getting better, and as his confidence in his work grows, it’s reflected elsewhere in his life as well.
It’s no secret that our time in Idaho has been rough on each member of my family in different ways, but it’s been especially tough on Fang, as he’s been working from home and is disinclined to use my network to find friends. This year, however, he’s been connecting with people in a really meaningful way, and it’s a joy to see him with and hear him talk about his friends. (Deep gratitude to those folks. You know who you are.)
Fang also does more than his share of parenting and serves as an amazing role model for the boy. Fang and Lucas are wired so similarly that they understand each other in ways I’ll never fully comprehend. For Fang’s work in forging that connection, I’m so thankful.
Thank you, Sweetie, for all you do, and for being who you are (I know it’s neither easy nor simple). Here’s to another interesting and love-filled year. Happy birthday!
As, of course, a random bulleted list:
What’s on your mind these days?
The headline at the NPR site says it all: “Idaho Universities Must Decide Which Programs Matter Most.” Not surprisingly, then, at this year’s welcome address, Boise State President Bob Kustra emphasized the role of analytics in the process of program prioritization. My college’s dean also emphasized metrics and analytics in the college-wide meeting that week.
My head began to hurt. I’m a humanist. I’m not terribly comfortable with numbers, and I don’t like it when things that should be evaluated qualitatively are transformed into numbers.
Still, I felt I needed to educate myself about university metrics, and particularly about my university’s metrics. I went digging. I found, once again, that numbers are slippery, particularly when we’re talking about “costs” (what counts toward the cost? what doesn’t?), and not at all easy to interpret. Despite these liabilities, numbers are persuasive, and they can be marshaled to tell stories, factual or not, true or not. Often they are, to borrow a word from Stephen Colbert, truthy, in that they “cherry pick” numbers that seem to back up our gut feelings.
I know many of my fellow public university faculty are, like me, in an allegedly data-driven boat navigating the waters of a (real or fabricated) budget crisis. I’ve also discovered, locally and elsewhere, that despite a plethora of internal and external sources that provide university data, many faculty and even administrators remain unaware of the actual metrics of their universities; they’re believing spin and myth rather than looking at the data themselves.
I thought, then, I would highlight a few of the places where faculty, staff, students, and other stakeholders can find university metrics. Chances are your university has a data warehouse for employees, but even if you don’t have access to it, there are plenty of external places to find data.
As a model, I’ll share some metrics and findings from my own university that I think are important, but that may get overlooked in our discussions during program prioritization. I’m sharing these numbers because they emerge from a familiar context for me. While some of them may seem damning, I’m not highlighting them to reveal corruption or the failure of any one individual, office, or program.
That said, taken collectively, as you will see, these data can tell a story about priorities—if you’re open to hearing that kind of narrative.
I encourage you to follow along with my steps and discover some information about the colleges or universities of which you are an employee, student, parent or spouse of a student, donor, or community member.
But first, three caveats:
1. I’m a humanist, not a social scientist or mathematician, so I won’t be doing any fancy statistical analysis—rather, we’ll be relying on some basic arithmetic.
2. I know all institutions and organizations “cherry pick” data to tell a particular story, and I suspect that some universities go through the program prioritization process with an end goal in mind. They collect only the data that matter to the story they want to tell, manipulate the data, and interpret it in ways that confirm their top administrators’ perspective. I, of course, have my biases and priorities, too.
3. In every case here, I’m working with the latest reported data rather than the raw data or queries from an internal data warehouse. Some numbers may be slightly out of date, and of course a university’s self-reported data, as one reader reminds me, must be taken with a grain of salt, but I’m unaware of any major shifts locally in the numbers I’m discussing, though I have heard rumors our six-year graduation rate is on the rise.
Governing bodies in higher ed, as well as state funding agencies, are, of course, all about graduation rates, retention rates, and career outcomes. The last of these is perhaps hardest to capture, though student loan default rates can give us a glimpse of success or failure in the workforce. Fortunately, the first two are relatively easy to track, especially if you adhere to a relatively narrow definition of “graduation rate.” Let’s take a look at them.
Graduation rates
One goldmine of student information is the IPEDS Data Center, which anyone can access at the National Center for Education Statistics website. IPEDS allows you to examine individual institutions’ metrics, as well as compare institutions. If you poke around the site for a while, you’ll also find some interesting projections, like this one estimating the numbers of U.S. high school graduates, by race/ethnicity, through 2021, and some useful tables and figures, including this list of tables about financial aid. If you’re more stats-savvy than I am, you can download data sets and play with them in the software of your choice. (Prospective students looking for the right college “fit” should access the data via the NCES College Navigator.)
I’m always surprised that more faculty at my institution are unaware of Boise State’s four-year graduation rate. Here’s Boise State’s graduation rate data from IPEDS:
That’s a screen capture I took when I first conceived of this post a few months ago. Sadly, the most recent data available shows a 3% decline in the overall graduation rate, and a decline in the 4-year graduation rate:
Blink as much as you must—your eyes don’t deceive you. Boise State’s most recently-reported four-year graduation rate is 7 percent. Now, administrators everywhere will tell you that graduation rates are calculated unfairly, in particular because transfer students aren’t included—only “full-time, first-time, degree/certificate-seeking undergraduates.” That’s a fair criticism. However, it’s not fair to ignore entirely the 7 percent figure, as it indicates that for every 100 first-time, degree-seeking undergraduates that begin their college careers at Boise State, 93 won’t graduate from that university in four years–and 71 won’t graduate within six. That’s deeply troubling. (The national 6-year graduation rate is 59 percent, and 57 percent at public institutions—considerably higher than Boise State’s 29 percent.)
Funding undergraduate education
Let’s move on to funding for undergraduate education. I’ve observed some of Boise State’s administrators like to use the term “lean” rather than “underfunded” to describe the university’s programs. “Lean” not only suggests an efficient use of muscle/resources, but it also evokes the “lean start-up” paradigm so beloved by many business schools at the moment. I’m using “underfunded” instead of “lean” because I want to emphasize not how programs are performing with few resources, but rather make clear how little the state and university are investing in our students.
Unfortunately, the only current Boise State budget I was able to find is broken down by major categories; we can’t learn much from it. (Worse, it collapses student loans into the category “Scholarships & Fellowships.” Gah!) Fortunately, we aren’t constrained by the university’s lack of budgetary transparency online. (Update: a friendly Boise State librarian tells me paper copies of the budget can be checked out for two hours at a time, so check to see if your university’s library keeps a copy of the budget available.)
Thanks to the site College Measures, we can discover, to the dollar, how much the university declares it spends educating each undergraduate student per year: $9,571, which puts it in the 7th percentile overall among all colleges and the 11th percentile among public institutions. I’m glad to see the university ranks in the 36th percentile in instructional spending per student among all colleges, and 38th in academic support—not great numbers, but far better than its overall ranking.
click image to enlarge
A year’s in-state fees (charged in lieu of tuition) cost each undergraduate $6,292. (A brochure released yesterday by the university includes an asterisk that explains students are also charged $2,088 in “health insurance fees” (see page 10), but we won’t include those in our analysis.)
Here’s where I’ll refer you to a post about colleges’ discount rates I wrote on my admissions blog. To sum up: the discount rate is typically calculated as the difference between the full-fare cost of enrollment and what the average student and his or her family actually pay. The New York Times recently reported that small colleges are trying to get out of the discounting game, but I don’t think any institution will ever escape it, as there will always be a difference between what the student pays and the true cost of educating a student. I call this the “actual discount rate.” So, as I explain in my post at the admissions blog:
Just how generous is the actual tuition discounting at some colleges? Here’s a slide from a 2011 presentation Grinnell College made to its alumni and other stakeholders:
click to enlarge image
The chart reveals the college’s actual per-student costs varied from $50,600 to more than $58,000 per year, while the comprehensive fee hovered under $40,000. Even if all students paid the full fee, Grinnell was eating up to $20,000 per year per student! Even more astonishing, very few students pay the full fare at Grinnell, so the college was “losing” even more revenue per student. If you look at the blue portion of the bars, you’ll discover that revenue from students and their families covered on average only 36.5 to 38.5 percent of the college’s total cost. (Currently, about 85 percent of Grinnell’s students receive financial aid.)
Of course, $40,000 a year is still a lot of money for most families, but if you click through to that post, you’ll discover that the typical Grinnell student is expected to contribute $7,500 out of her own pocket and racks up only $12,350 in loans, meaning that, not counting student loan interest, she gets a college education worth at least $224,000 for less than $20,000. And that amount includes not only tuition and fees, but also room and board.
Now, you may think it unfair to compare an elite liberal arts college’s real discount rate with a practically open-admissions regional public university, but I’m going to do so anyway, as I’ve made the comparison for some of my students, and they find it enlightening. (They also often regret their choice of institution because they find themselves with a lot of debt.) If an in-state traditional student is one of the lucky ones who graduates from Boise State within six years, and she lives in the cheapest on-campus residence for two of those and uses her parents’ health insurance, according to Boise State’s own cost attendance calculator, her tuition, fees, room and board would look like this (if costs remain stable, which of course they won’t):
The total the student pays, then, is $79,280 for an education that costs the state $57,426. That means Boise State students don’t actually get a discount rate if we count off-campus room and board. We’ll no longer be comparing apples to apples, as Grinnell students tend to live on campus for four years, but let’s subtract the off-campus room and board from that figure because the university isn’t seeing any of that money. Even then, the total the student pays to the university is $48,816, though the student of course still has to pay to live somewhere. If we remove this amount, then the student does indeed get a discount—$48,816 for a $57,426 education. (Of course, this is a hypothetical ideal; I’ve met Boise State graduates with $100,000 in student loan debt.)
Of course, I’m using a mishmash of Boise State’s and Grinnell’s own data, along with data from College Measures, in these examples. Let’s compare the cost of an undergraduate education at each institution using only College Measures data.
Here’s Grinnell’s:
And Boise State’s:
Click either image to enlarge it.
But wait–here the Boise State cost-per-degree is lower than I’ve estimated it to be–but that’s because the College Measures site assumes a five-year graduation rate, but as we’ve learned, the typical student, if she’s lucky, will graduate from Boise State in six years, whereas almost all Grinnell students graduate in four. Yes, Grinnell’s students are significantly different from Boise State’s students, but the question remains: what would happen if the university invested more per year in each student; would the four-year graduation rate increase? Would the six-year? What about the attrition rate, and, post-graduation, the student loan default rate? It’s worth investigating.
And what of retention, attrition, and the cost to the university of losing students? Thanks also to College Measures, we discover that in 2011, 31 percent of first-time, full-time undergraduates did not return to the university for their sophomore year. The university spent $6.8 million educating students it did not retain.
Again, I want to emphasize that I know it’s not entirely fair to compare an elite private college with a regional public university; doing so, however, allows us to see the kind of choices universities make, or are forced to make, based on their funding models. Everyone, including state legislators who set higher ed budgets, should be aware of the repercussions of these choices. And remember, once we have a sense the spectrum of choices, we can perhaps better begin to understand the choices being made at “peer institutions”—and we’ll look at those in the next section.
Maybe improving faculty morale might help retain faculty and therefore students? Many of my teaching readers have undoubtedly had the experience where a student (for me it’s usually a graduate student) admits she is returning the following year just because you’re there to support her. Few faculty are truly irreplaceable, but often students view individual faculty as essential to their success.
Of course, one great way to improve faculty morale (or at least retain some faculty) is to pay faculty fairly. We know about the adjunct crisis, and it needs to be addressed in a huge way, and quickly. (Although, oddly, Boise State’s pay rate for full-time, non-tenure-line instructors is above average, though I suspect there may be a few fantastically paid outliers who are messing up that particular curve. The state salary database shows that one of our local celebrities, for example, gets paid $150,000 per year despite the title “adjunct faculty” and a highest degree of B.A.) The size of the adjunct issue—76 percent of faculty nationwide are now contingent—can easily obscure the fact that tenure-line faculty income has been stagnating.
In a previous post, I compared my own salary, as well as my take-home pay, to the cost of living in Boise. You can use the Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator to determine the cost of living in your city or town.
This year, our dean announced the college would make one-time salary adjustments, so that full profs would earn 84.5 percent of the median CUPA salaries for their rank—so, they’re still 15.5% below median, but, hey, it’s an improvement. Still, faculty in our History department make far less than those in, say, the business school.
If you’re not sure what your colleagues make, you can ask them if you’re comfortable doing so (yes, I know most people aren’t, and in higher ed we need to get over this etiquette roadblock for the sake of solidarity), or, if you’re at a public institution, chances are the salaries are already available online; simply search for the name of your state plus “state employee salaries.” Sometimes this information is made available by the state itself; other times, newspapers have made it available. Idaho’s state salary database, for example, is hosted by the Idaho Statesman, and California’s can be found at the Sacramento Bee. You can, of course, look up the average salaries for your discipline at the CUPA site.
To find out the average faculty salaries from your institution, use the Chronicle’s faculty salary tool. Here’s where Boise State stands:
The Chronicle tool also allows you to compare data across institutions. It autofills the comparison fields with “several similar institutions.”
I suggest you take a look at that data, but then also look at your college’s peer institutions. Some colleges post this information on their own websites—here’s Boise State’s list—but if that’s not the case for your institution, you can find the colleges and universities your institution considers its peer using this slick peer institution tool at the Chronicle. (It also lets you see which schools believe your institution to be their peer; in Boise State’s case, that list includes a variety of public universities around the U.S., as well as one DeVry and three University of Phoenix campuses.)
And here are Boise State’s “aspirational” peers:
The tl;dr version of those tables: Boise State pays its faculty less—in some cases significantly less—than its peer institutions, regardless of whether they’re current or aspirational peers. Yesterday the governor’s state-of-the-state address for 2014 made clear there won’t be any pay raises for state employees this year, unless someone is being promoted. In my time at Boise State—this is my fourth year—faculty have received one raise of 2 percent. If this pattern persists, I know many of us will be unable to afford to keep our jobs, as cost of living has already outpaced our salaries. Perhaps you have observed this to be the case at your institution as well.
As the Chronicle explains below the tables, these figures represent only “full-time staff whose primary role is instruction, regardless of whether they have formal ‘faculty status.’ That includes tenured, tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty. Left out are any part-time instructional staff, which can include adjunct faculty.”
To see, then, how many teaching faculty are made invisible by this survey, return to the IPEDS Data Center, find your institution, and then click on “Financial and Human Resources.” Finally, click on the + next to the items “Number of staff by primary function” and “number of full-time instruction/research/public service staff.” Here’s Boise State’s information:
Note that you can also look at data from previous years by searching for your institution, then clicking on “Reported Data”:
There’s a lot of relatively fine-grained information in that archived data about various aspects of the university. I find the student financial aid info particularly interesting. You can also download any of this reported data as a PDF. For example, here is the PDF I downloaded about 2011-12 financial aid at Boise State. It’s not the easiest thing to decipher, especially because the formatting of the reported data has changed over the years, but if you’re an inquisitive or investigative type, you’ll probably find it’s worth poring over.
It’s common for columnists and other armchair accountants outside of higher ed to blame faculty salaries for the quickly rising costs of a college education. Chances are very good that the data you’ve found about your college or university shows faculty salaries aren’t driving increasing costs.
If we aren’t investing a ton of money into student and faculty retention, then where are we spending it? All over, really. But two places where costs have been rising in the past decade or two are athletics and administration. In fact, according to a brochure released this week, Boise State employs 260 more full-time “professional staff” than it does full-time faculty. (That speaks volumes about faculty, or even shared, governance, doesn’t it?) The “professional staff” category, which typically includes salaried, non-academic staff exempt from overtime laws, does not include classified staff; there are an additional 529 full-time classified employees at Boise State.
The university pays its vice presidents between $206,000 and $220,000 per year, and its president roughly $400,000. For comparison, that’s in line with recent salaries for chancellors at the University of California—campuses I’m guessing most faculty would consider far more successful as research and teaching institutions. Some people might point out that university presidents make far less than CEOs of comparably-sized private-sector companies, so the salary is reasonable. I might point out that faculty—yea, even in the arts and humanities—also make less than they would as employees in the private sector.
But what of athletics? What kind of money is your institution spending there? Here you might have to do some digging in your local newspaper’s online archives.
The football coach who left Boise State at the end of this season made $1,898,000 per year and licensed his likeness to the university for a quarter million dollars per year.
Some of you will say I’m comparing apples to oranges with the next comparison, but it’s important to look at these two numbers together, as once again, the difference in the numbers throws institutional priorities into high relief.
The football coach made more than $2 million per year, plus myriad benefits. Discussion leaders for courses in the university’s new general ed/core Foundations program are paid only $1,000 per semester.
But let’s look beyond employees. What does the university say it spends on student athletes?
In 2010, Boise State spent $13,018 in operating expenses per football player. This is lower than the NCAA Division I average, but it’s also just slightly less than half of my take-home salary each year. It’s also $3,500 higher than the university spends educating an undergraduate for a year. The university spends 27 percent more on outfitting and training its football players than it does supporting students’ education.
You can find a thumbnail of major college athletic teams’ financial information at USA Today. Here’s what the site shares about Boise State; I encourage you to see if your institution is on this list and take a hard look at its figures as well.
Revenues:
Expenses:
Be sure to check out the report authors’ methodology and category definitions. Pay particular attention to the definition of “subsidy”—”the sum of students fees, direct and indirect institutional support and state money”—as in the main list of universities, you can see that Boise State athletics are subsidized by this kind of support—again, these are state appropriations and student fees—at 24.96 percent.
According to the Idaho Statesman, the Boise State athletics budget for this past year was $33.4 million, which represents a $1 million shortfall from its projected revenues. According to NCAA figures, the university actually spent $43,172,225 on athletics, with $43,440,905 in revenue–nearly $11 million of which was subsidized by the state or student fees. Despite what is suggested by the “total revenue” vs. “total expenses” numbers in the charts above, athletics are a long, long way from paying for themselves because they are subsidized.
. . .which is funny, because we’re always hearing about how important it is for academic programs to be self-supporting.
(And even if they once were on a trajectory to increase revenue, football ticket sales are declining.)
One of the liabilities of having researchers and teachers as employees is that we undertake research, investigating the subjects and following the leads that most interest us, and then share our findings with students and the public. That’s what I’ve done in this post. And yes, I’m cherry-picking from the available data in choosing what to share here, but it’s the data that concerns what matters most to me: the undergraduate educational experience and its outcomes.
I’m sure some university officials are going to contest the data I have shared, suggesting I’ve crunched it wrong or used out-of-date information. Perhaps I have. Yet by highlighting this reported data, asking some questions, and encouraging my readers to mine the data themselves, I’m trying to start a broader and deeper conversation among faculty, students, staff, and other stakeholders.
State governments and universities talk a good deal about transparency, and this post is offered in that spirit.
That said, I try to include in all my teaching and public outreach a critical thinking activity, and this post will not be an exception.
To be honest, it’s very difficult for me to look at these figures and not editorialize extensively about campus and state priorities, and I worry more than a little bit that even highlighting the straight numbers for the public will make me unpopular on campus and elsewhere. I’m going to let you, therefore, construct various narratives around the data I’ve presented.
I can’t, however, finish this post without asking a few pointed, leading questions.
1. Why is a purportedly academic, intellectual institution investing so much money in a sport that does this to its players’ brains? Beyond brand awareness for admissions—the benefit faculty and administrators alike cite to me as the major benefit of the football program—what does the university get from placing students in danger of lifelong brain injury? And, as a faculty member, to what extent am I complicit in the destruction of these students’ futures?
Guess which brain belonged to a football player, aged only 42?
2. What if we invested into student and faculty retention the $11 million of state appropriations and student fees currently going to athletic subsidies, plus some of the inflated salaries of the ever-proliferating associate vice presidents? Our football players’ graduation rate over six years—67 or 91 percent, depending on how you calculate it (see info below from the NCAA graduation rate tool)—is far better than the overall university’s, so why not offer non-athletes the same kinds of academic support athletes receive?
3. Why is there only one tenure-line faculty member on the program prioritization committee that will be making important decisions about how the university invests its resources?
We often hear that universities should be run “like businesses,” and indeed, faculty have noted the business-speak (strategic dynamism!) and capitalist imperatives (disguised as an embrace of entrepreneurial thinking and institutional efficiency, e.g., MOOCs) that have seeped into the rhetoric and decision-making at the university in recent decades. I’d argue that universities have been trying for some time to become more like businesses—behavior driven not just by trends, but by declining state revenues—and they’re failing pretty miserably. Perhaps they’re not running the right cost-benefit scenarios or SWOT analyses, so I encourage you to undertake your own for those institutions that matter to you.
Still, let’s play along for a minute, and consider students as the university’s “customers” or its “products”:
4. How might we shift our investment of limited resources so that we can increase both retention and graduation rates for our student “customers”? Should we be investing in instruction, academic support, student life, academic technology, or upper administration to produce better “products” for our communities and economy?
5. How will these metrics be translated into analytics for the purposes of program prioritization, at Boise State or elsewhere? That process has not been as transparent as it might be here. (In case this is all mumbo-jumbo to you, as it was to me, here are metrics vs. analytics, explained.)
These questions have no easy answers, and probably not comfortable or comforting ones, either. The data itself is complicated, and determining cause-and-effect even more so.
My challenge to you: Using the resources to which I’ve linked here, as well as others available to you locally, go through the exercise of finding the data that matters to you, share it publicly, and, if you’re comfortable with it, offer your interpretation of it—or ask questions about how we might use it, as I’ve done. If you’re a faculty member, this kind of research, driven by you or by students, also might form the base of an activity or assignment in some undergraduate or graduate courses.
If readers are interested, I’d be happy to create and share a downloadable list of data sources and other resources for this kind of research. Let me know if you’d find that useful.
During the holiday season last year, two things were proving particularly worrisome: pneumonia, which was also in my lungs, and guppies, of which there were far too many in the tank.
Once again, I start the new year with too many guppies and crud in my lungs (but hey, not yet pneumonia).
I need to break out of this cycle. Maybe someone will find a guppy-based yet vegetarian cure for bronchial distress? (Alternatively: self-cleaning, self-culling guppy tanks?)
I have too many metaphorical guppies as well. I declared last year’s theme to be completion, and I did make big progress on a number of projects, but I finished none of the most important ones. I’m hoping to get a couple of 80% to 90% completed articles out the door within the next couple of months, as well as to launch a new public history project in a couple of weeks (which at this point depends as much on a programmer as it does me).
This semester’s primary focus, however, is a new research project—part of the above public history project—on the history of health and wellness in Idaho, for which I have received one of my university’s coveted Arts & Humanities Institute fellowships. I’ll be working with the largely uncurated medical collection of the state history museum, trying to make sense of both the artifacts and what they suggest about Idahoans’ understandings of health and wellness. It’s a diverse collection, including everything from an iron lung to a Chinese apothecary’s herbs to a Revigator, and spanning the human lifecycle from birth (obstetrical forceps) to death (a mortician’s cosmetics). The history of medicine is a new field for me, though I am fortunate to have had, in grad school and beyond, a mentor who has written about U.S. Americans’ (often wacky ideas) about health and wellness, and her findings will undoubtedly inform the direction of my own research. Idaho has long had a physician shortage, as well as a good number of residents who might not be able to afford medical care, so I’m expecting to find a good deal of creativity and flexibility in self-care. I’m looking forward to the research–and not just because it comes with a semester-long break from teaching. 
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