Gordon Gee is President of Ohio State University which is one of the largest schools in the US. This Inside Higher Ed article, called Gordon Gee's Call for 'Reinvention' of Higher Ed points out some of the highlights of a recent speech by Gee. I see two points worth noting for staff in student affairs:
Interdisciplinary Approach
Importance of Community Colleges
The interdisciplinary comments could have a direct impact on student affairs staff in that this presents an opportunity for work outside the classroom to increase in value, especially when Gee is quoted as saying "that faculty members need to be rewarded for contributions broadly, not just those that advance their own fields."
Gee's prediction that “the drivers of our future will be this nation’s community colleges,” speaks to the increasing importance of applied learning. Again, this line of thinking supports the focus on learning outside the classroom that student affairs staff are so heavily involved in.
My last post showed a chart outlining how the Ontario government allocates funding to various categories. Funding for post-secondary institutions in the 05/06 fiscal year amounted to 5.6% of the province's expenses. The revenue collected by a university comes from more then the province though.
As Daniel Lang, from OISE, has outlined the different sources of revenue for universities has fluctuated over time. This chart shows four points in time over a 40 year period beginning in the late 1950's:
The chart clearly shows a trend the governments are providing a lower portion of the revenue for universities in Canada. Some schools have been fortunate enough to receive major donations in the past decade from some of Canada's wealthy people such as Ted Rogers (Ryerson), Seymour Schulich (York, UWO, Calgary, McGill), George Vari (Ryerson, York, UofT), Richard Ivey (UWO), Wallace McCain (Mount Allison), Mike Lazaridis (Waterloo), Jim Balsillie (Waterloo, WLU) and others.
There is little reason to believe that the trend of declining government funding will be reversed in the near future, which means that Canada's post-secondary schools must continue to look to wealthy citizens. To date the vast majority, if not all, of the donations made to higher education in Canada have been directed to academic activities and faculties.
This last fact makes me wonder if student affairs is missing out on an opportunity. The work of student affairs staff can have a tremendous impact on a student's career and chances are that today's donors were likely heavily involved in activities outside of the classroom. For this reason it might be time that student affairs staff get involved in fundraising efforts.
(Source: Lang, D. (2004). Financing Higher Education in Canada. In Steve O. Michael (Eds.), International Perspectives on Financing Higher Education (pp. unknown). Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.)
Have you ever wondered how much money government spends on post-secondary education? College and university staff and faculty in Canada should have an interest because our post-secondary education (PSE) model is heavily funded by the federal and provincial governments.
The 2005/2006 Ontario budget included about $84 billion in revenue. Approximately 5.6% of the provincial expenses was directed to PSE & Training. By far the largest category of expenses was spent on health care which amounted to nearly 40% of the Ontario's budget.
Daniel Lang, from OISE, has conducted research on funding for PSE and he points out that a great deal has changed over the past half century. In the mid 1960's there was no formal funding formula for universities (Ontario Colleges were introduced in 1966). A basic funding formula, especially when compared to today's standards, was introduced in the late 1960's and it has become increasingly complex. Today, in Ontario, 17 different "envelopes" exist in the Ontario Operating Funds Distribution Manual (03/04):
1.1 Basic Grants
1.2 Enhanced Accessibility for students with a disability
1.3 Performance Fund
1.4 Quality Assurance Fund
1.5 Expansion Funds (Accessibility; Medical Enrolment Expansion; Nursing Enrolment Expansion; Teacher Education Expansion)
1.6 Mission-Related Institution Specific (Northern Ontario Grants; Bilingualism; Differentiation; Extraordinary Grant to Algoma; Extraordinary Grant to Hearst)
1.7 Research Overhead's/Infrastructure
1.8 Special Purpose Grant
1.9 Institution-Specific Grants
1.10 Learning Opportunities Task Force
1.11 Partnerships Grants (Access to Opportunities Program; Graduate Scholarships in Science & Tech)
1.12 Enrolment Adjustment/Accessibility
1.13 Transition Grants
1.14 Program Adjustment
1.15 Library Enhancement & Student Equipment Fund
1.16 Pay Equity Assistance
1.17 Fair Funding for Universities
None of the envelopes provide dedicated funding for student affairs or for work outside the classroom. The government would likely suggest that a portion of various envelopes is used in activities outside the classroom. With the focus on student engagement and experience intensifying in recent years an argument could be made that the work of student affairs is increasing in importance and a dedicated envelop should be created.
Several associations in the US have been organizing themselves in the last five years for the purpose of lobbying government. Their work has influenced the political agenda. For example political discussion following the high profile shootings at Virgina Tech or Northern Illinois University was modified because of the work of association staff and other leaders in the student affairs' field. Student affairs staff north of the border could benefit from organizing for the purpose of lobbying the government as well. Organizing our field to develop a more formal relationship with the government would raise the value and profile of our work and could even lead to our own "envelope" in the future.
As a Harvard student, Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook which has revolutionized the way university and college students interact and communicate. This new tool is changing the way that student's develop community which means that colleges and universities, especially student affairs staff, need to adapt.
To date staff in student affairs have created profiles on Facebook and used features like the event planning tool to share what will be happening on campus and photos to post what's already happened. Both of these features are fairly basic applications within facebook. However, the site is designed to encourage others to add features, or applications, which provides for a dynamic online community. More than 52,000 Facebook applications have been developed to date.
Ontario universities and colleges have not taken advantage of this opportunity though. A quick search for Facebook applications designed by Ontario post-secondary institutions reveal that only a handful have been developed. Some examples include the University of Western Ontario and the University of Guelph had applications that allowed users to track news on their school while the Ryerson University Library designed a tool for users to access some of its resources.
This 2006 USA Today article states that online learning has been growing more then expected. A similar trend likely exists in Canada. The Online College Education Network outlines some of the advantages that online education has over traditional education. One disadvantage, not highlighted, is community development. Students that do not having an opportunity to interact face-to-face will have a more difficult time to develop community. And student affairs staff know that students that do not feel as though they belong to their school's community are at a greater risk of dropping out.
Online enrolment numbers are destined to collide with community development practices at colleges and universities. This is an important issue for staff that work in student affairs and student life. It will be interesting to see how this issue evolves and how staff take advantage of these new opportunities.
Nearly two years ago Web 2.0 became reality for me as I watched a video created by a Colorado school teacher that was called Shift Happens (here is version 2). Last year a friend and colleague from Clemson University shared a video called A Vision of Students Today that was created by a Kansas State University professor and his students.
Both videos deliver a powerful message in only a few minutes that was simply not as readily available five years ago. The videos have been a great educational tool for me so I wanted to highlight them in my blog. I have used the videos in student staff training and at the 2008 OACUHO Training Institute held at Carleton University.
When searching for the videos to create this post I discovered a new video called A Vision of K-12 Students Today. It was created "to inspire teachers to use technology in engaging ways to help students develop higher level thinking skills. Equally important, it serves to motivate district level leaders to provide teachers with the tools and training to do so."
When I first considered blogging about higher education a few months ago I did not discover many blogs that focused on student affairs and/or student life. Most of the blogs related to higher education highlight the use of technology, admissions, marketing and higher education in general. Lots of blogs exist for primary and secondary education as well.
Student Life and Student Affairs staff make such a strong contribution to the college or university student's experience, yet we have not taken advantage of tools like blogs and videos like others in the education industry have.
Some new approaches seem to be emerging from our associations as can be seen with the launch of iStudentAffairs.com and the ACUHO-I Network. My hope is this will lead to more individual efforts so the story of what our students do outside the classroom can be shared with a larger audience through the various Web 2.o tools that now exist. Perhap one day soon we'll see a video called A Vision of Students Outside the Classroom.
Another topic that follows the future of education theme and that college and university educators must grapple with is diversity.
The Ontario government suggests that 70% of jobs will require post-secondary education by 2013. This upward trend is likely not shocking to very many people, but if you think about it colleges and universities have gone through quite a dramatic evolution over the past 50 years.
Up to the middle of the 20th century university enrollment was much lower and colleges did not exist in Ontario. Centennial College was Ontario's first college and it opened in 1966. In the type of environment that existed 50 years ago it would have been very difficult for most students to go to university. Students that grew up in a background with some advantages, such as parents that attended university or a family with a higher income, stood a much greater chance of being able to continue their education beyond high school.
Today, in our knowledge based economy it is now generally accepted that a person's chances of being successful increase if they attend college or university. The expansion of higher education has meant students from very different backgrounds are participating in college and university. As a result our campuses are much more diverse today then 50 years ago on many measures. This leads me to wonder if we are taking full advantage of this opportunity to educate our students about diversity in its many forms.
I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and one part has troubled me. Gladwell acknowledged that he struggled as well. In chapter three Gladwell describes his experience with the Implicit Association Test (IAT). In this test participants are given a list of words and asked to place each word in one of two catagories. The catagories are labelled with a pair of words. In Blink one of the examples had Male or Career as one category and Female or Family as the other category. In the real test, participants are timed on how long it takes them to place each word in the list in one of the two catagories. Changing the word pairings leads to different results which brings me to the part that has troubled me.
A second example in Blink used the following two catagories: European American or Bad and African American or Good. The reader was then asked to place the following words in one of these two categories: hurt, evil, glorious, wonderful and so on. Pictures were also used. The word pairings were then changed to European American or Good and African American or Bad and the reader was asked to catagorize the same list of words and pictures again. My experience matched Gladwell's in that I was able to catagorize the words faster when the European American/Good and African American/Bad were paired.
Part of Gladwell's explanation for this outcome is that "we live in North America, where we are surrounded every day by cultural messages linking white with good." He also quotes Mahzarin Banaji, one of the IAT researchers at Harvard University, "You don't choose the make positive associations with the dominant group. But you are required to. All around you, that group is being paired with good things. You open the newspaper and you turn on the television, and you can't escape it."
In trying to understand this phenomenon I have had many thoughts, such as:
How can this information be used to help train our student leaders?
What systems or processes can we alter to benefit a greater number of our students?
What can be done so all students feel that they belong to their college or university community?
Answers to these questions are certainly not easily found, but post-secondary education has evolved to include much diversity and the IAT points out that our past decisions may have been biased.
A few months back I discovered this trailer on YouTube. It compares six students that are about to graduate from high school - a male and female student in the US, India and China. The title of the documentary is 2 Million Minutes which is based on the number of minutes in a high school student's life.
I duplicated the documentary's title in this post to point out that an undergraduate degree is also based on a four year period of time.
All six students plan to attend PSE and the film makers do a real nice job in comparing and contrasting the different cultures and student's expectations. Students in each of these cultures certainly spend their time in different ways. One of the (not so) underlying messages is that the US (and by default Canada) cannot take their position in the world for granted.
I would encourage anyone working in education to check out the trailer, watch the video and use it to start discussions with students. You can can also visit the 2 Million Minutes website to find out more. Enjoy.
