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	From: Teaching Breakfast List on behalf of Greenberg, James ([log in to unmask]) 
	Sent: Tue 1/13/2004 7:59 AM 
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	Subject: Higher Education's Changing Environment - Teaching Breakfast Posting by Jim Greenberg (a bit long)
	
	

	Folks: 

	The posting below gives an overview of the history and changing environment 
	of higher education in North America. It is from  Chapter 1: A Current 
	Perspective on Adjunct Teaching, in Success Strategies for Adjunct Faculty 
	by Richard E. Lyons, Faculty Development Associates. Copyright © 2004 
	Pearson Education, Inc. For related titles and support materials, visit 
	their online catalog at www.ablongman.com. Reprinted with permission.  My 
	apologies for the length of this posting.... 


	               Higher Education's Changing Environment 

	Historically, North American colleges and universities have embraced the 
	traditions of the British and German models, including "academic freedom" 
	that has empowered professors to pursue their research interests freely, and 
	the tenure system that has protected instructors' ability to work long term 
	in what many have regarded as an ivory tower immune from external checks and 
	balances.  They established high standards for admission that has focused on 
	applicants' standardized tests scores, high school class rankings, and other 
	"objective" predictors of student success.  The integrity of their practices 
	was regularly confirmed through their own internal reviews, as well as 
	through assessments by their peers at other institutions through the 
	regional and discipline-specific accrediting bodies.  While establishing a 
	culture of quality in the minds of internal stakeholders, many potentially 
	outstanding students came to perceive these practices as rigid and 
	exclusionary, and lacking the support resources to reduce their barriers to 
	admission, they did not try to pursue their educations immediately after 
	high school. 

	Beginning nearly a century ago with John Dewey (1916), an initially small 
	but courageous number of educators challenged the higher education community 
	to extend the full potential of a democratic system by serving a larger 
	share of those within our society. They lobbied extensively to change the 
	goal of admissions "gate-keeping" from one of exclusion to one of inclusion, 
	arguing that colleges should employ a wider range of admissions criteria 
	that did not penalize "late bloomers," those from working-class families, or 
	others who did not meet the "standard."  The first community colleges, which 
	from their infancy largely served marginalized students, were an outgrowth 
	of their efforts.  After the victorious close of World War II, military 
	veterans used the GI Bill to be the first from their families to kick open 
	college and university doors, and in the process, they established 
	themselves as role models for others who had been bypassed by higher 
	education, as well as for their own children.  As the first wave of veterans 
	completed their degrees, they left college and university doors ajar for 
	those empowered through the civil rights movement-minorities, women pursuing 
	nontraditional careers, recent immigrants, and other-to stream through in 
	increasingly large numbers. 

	In recent years, the historical chasm between academia and our mainstream 
	society has eroded markedly.  It is now commonplace for esteemed professors 
	to appear on television news shows to provide perspective in political 
	debates and to discuss other matters of concern to an increasingly informed 
	populace.  In the process, they often promote their latest books, private 
	consulting practices, or latest research projects.  Meanwhile, institutions 
	began to promote their sports teams widely to broaden support among the 
	general population and to attract upscale niche markets to on-campus 
	theatrical and musical productions.  They also developed and promoted more 
	intellectually oriented activities such as professor-accompanied tours of 
	foreign countries and Elderhostel programs.  Each of these initiatives was 
	undertaken, in part, as a strategy for increasing institutional prestige but 
	also to boost student enrollments and to mitigate declining public funding 
	for quality enhancement initiatives. 

	As a college degree has become widely valued as a ticket to upward mobility, 
	enrollments have increased significantly, and must of the mystique of the 
	ivory tower has evaporated.  To meet the demand for courses by those fully 
	employed by day, an increasing number of colleges and universities have 
	expanded their course schedules into evenings and weekends-hours during 
	which many full-time faculty members do not prefer to teach.  Although many 
	institutions have employed a small number of adjunct instructors through the 
	years, as well as some of their staff members (e.g., the college attorney), 
	to teach a few highly specialized courses per term, the expansion of course 
	offerings into nontraditional hours dramatically drove the increased 
	employment of part-time instructors.  Because evening and weekend students 
	are largely part time, a common bond has developed between the "new" 
	students and their adjunct instructors that has fueled further growth in 
	part-time enrollments (Lyons, Kysilka, & Pawlas, 1999). 

	More recently, powerful external stakeholder groups, followed by proactive 
	citizens, have imposed a template of college-as-business-enterprise on 
	higher education.  The increasing number of college presidents hired from 
	outside academia (Basinger, 2002), the growing number of closings and 
	mergers of less profitable institutions (Van Der Werf, 2002), and other 
	factors reinforce this paradigm.  Although significant differences between 
	higher education and business enterprises (Birnbaum, 2000) will always 
	remain, this public perception parallels that imposed on other societal 
	institutions (e.g., health care, organized religion, and philanthropic 
	organizations), which historically seemed insulated from society.  As with 
	other entities, the higher-education-as-business-enterprise paradigm invited 
	society's consumer mind-set into academia.  Students, as well as their 
	parents and employers who reimbursed their tuitions, began to demand 
	increased value from their investments, and most institutions installed 
	student ratings of faculty and courses.  Since student ratings have an 
	especially significant impact on adjunct instructors, they will be addressed 
	in greater detail in Chapter 13. 

	Once reserved for instructional decision makers, student ratings information 
	has become increasingly more widely disseminated, in both official and 
	unofficial print versions, and more recently online to increasingly 
	technology-savvy student-consumers.  For a number of years, U.S. News and 
	World Report and other have published highly popular guides that rank 
	institutions and their faculty members initially resisted consumer-driven 
	incursions into their cultures, an increasing number now embrace such 
	comparative evaluations for their own benefit.  One need not look far to see 
	U.S. News' ratings featured in institutions' print and online marketing 
	efforts, with the objective of differentiating their "product" from those of 
	others in the increasingly competitive higher education marketplace. 

	Over the past few years, for-profit institutions have begun to have a 
	dramatic effect on the delivery of higher education.  Employing a "skimming" 
	strategy, they typically target the most lucrative market segment-the 
	increasing number of bright working professionals who are older than 
	traditional students and who are willing to juggle an array of 
	responsibilities as they pursue degrees in highly popular disciplines such 
	as business, technology, and health care.  They more successful for-profit 
	institutions have developed "campuses" in suburban office parks, where they 
	offer classes, often in an accelerated format that students interested in 
	rapid achievement perceive as more convenient and manageable. Courses of the 
	for-profits are typically highly standardized and display few gaps or 
	overlaps in content from one course in each curriculum to the next-thus 
	reducing the instructor's preparation time and achieving other productivity 
	gains. 

	Classes at the for-profits are facilitated overwhelmingly by adjunct 
	professors, most employed full time in their areas of specialization, a 
	factor that most of their student-client view as an advantage over 
	traditional institutions.  The for-profits typically invest heavily in 
	developing the instructional skills of their part-time instructors, unlike 
	many traditional institutions, which often play down their numbers of 
	adjunct faculty members, and have been very slow to invest in the 
	development of their teaching and classroom management skills.  Students at 
	for-profits typically expect their courses to mirror the fields in which 
	they work or aspire to work more closely than courses at traditional 
	institutions do. Learning from instructors who were "on the firing line" 
	earlier in the day helps fulfill that expectation.  Because of the high 
	regard in which they are held, ongoing professional development, and nature 
	of the students, many adjunct instructors have come to prefer the 
	environment of the for-profits to that of traditional institutions (Lyons, 
	McIntosh, & Kysilka, 2003). 

	The success of the highly competitive for-profits, especially measured by 
	student enrollment in the most popular degree programs, has been nothing 
	short of phenomenal (Borrego, 2001).  Many traditional institutions have 
	benchmarked their marketing and course delivery strategies, including the 
	employment of highly qualified adjunct faculty.  In addition more than 2,000 
	businesses-largely dissatisfied with the applicability of coursework 
	available to their employees, whose tuition reimbursement represents a 
	significant investment of company resources-have established corporate 
	universities (Meister, 2001).  As the for-profits, corporate universities 
	rely on those most current with the best practices of business (adjunct 
	instructors) to deliver the majority of their courses. 

	As other products and services in the economy have become available 24/7, 
	demand for quality college instruction that can be delivered to time- and 
	place-bound students have also increased.  Many institutions, led by the 
	for-profits, require faculty facilitators. One of the larger for-profits, 
	The University of Phoenix, employs 7,000 adjunct instructors to deliver its 
	online courses alone, and has expanded the number of students it served by 
	tenfold over the past five years (Olsen, 2002). 

	Prodded by their constituents armed with data on such wasteful practices as 
	high dropout rates in expensive programs and excessive credit hours 
	accumulated by students (Lovitts and Nelson, 2000), state legislators and 
	institutional boards of trustees are being increasingly asked to justify 
	tuition increases, to provide more effectively taught classes and more 
	comprehensive student supports services, and to improve articulation 
	practices between institutions (Ewell & Jones, 1994).  The legislatures of 
	more than thirty states have implemented significant accountability 
	measures, including "performance-based budgeting," into their public higher 
	education systems (Schmidt, 2002).  More recently, the Federal Department of 
	Education has begun demanding that colleges and universities whose students 
	draw federally supported financial aid retain and graduate students in a 
	more effective and timely fashion with the tacit message being that their 
	eligibility to continue awarding student financial aid hinges on their 
	improving their performance (Burd, 2002).  Although varied in their 
	approaches, the measured mandated by state governments tend to focus on the 
	following objectives: 

	1. Increasing accessibility to higher education to all citizens who can 
	benefit from it, as a strategy for expanding the tax base and reducing the 
	costs of social services (Waller, et al., 2000) 
	2. Improving productivity by limiting students' accumulation of excessive 
	credit hours, through more effective advising and "seamless" articulation 
	between institutions and though improving student retention, graduation, and 
	placement rates (Selingo, 2001) 
	3. Dovetailing higher education funding and review processes with states 
	economic development objectives, especially workforce development (Schmidt 
	2001) 
	4. Deregulating public higher education by strengthening consumer 
	information bout factors of institutional performance (Wellman, 2001) 

	Among private colleges and universities, members of the boards of trustees, 
	especially those with business backgrounds, have become more active in their 
	institutions' decision making, with the objective of promoting standards of 
	accountability for their alumni, benefactors, parents, and other 
	stakeholders.  Increasingly, private colleges and universities are 
	scrutinizing investments of institutional resources that were once 
	rubber-stamped.  In their increasingly visible roles, trustees seek to 
	ensure the achievement of their institutions' widely communicated missions 
	and to reinforce their institutions' image among their especially demanding 
	stakeholders (Ehrenberg, 2000). 

	Lastly, the regional accrediting associations-the entities that confirm 
	overall institutional quality-have ratcheted up their role. With so much 
	riding on the results (e.g., students' ability to get financial aid to pay 
	rising tuition costs, students' ability to transfer credits earned to other 
	accredited institutions, and institutional prestige, among others), 
	accreditation processes are instituting an array of changes to foster 
	institutional effectiveness and accountability.  These include a shift in 
	primary focus from "inputs" and "must statements" relative to educational 
	processes such as the academic preparation of professors, number of 
	resources in campus libraries, and so on toward a focus on student outcomes 
	and related indicators of quality within their specific missions.  The 
	accrediting associations are thus playing perhaps the leading role in e 
	defining institutional effectiveness (Eaton, 2001) and are therefore 
	examining more closely than before institutions' policies toward employment 
	and development of their adjunct faculty members. 

	The widening circle of external stakeholders in higher education appear 
	fully committed to win out over traditionalists who seek to hold on to those 
	arcane practices that appear to benefit only those on the inside.  In the 
	process, we are likely to see a reduction in the bifurcation between full- 
	and part-time faculty that has historically plagued many colleges and 
	universities and contributed to so much angst for part-timers (Gappa & 
	Leslie, 1993).   

	References 

	Burd, S. (2002). "Accountability or Meddling?" Chronicle of Higher 
	Education, 49, no.4 (September 20), pp. A23-25. 
	Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education.  New York: Macmillan. 
	Eaton, J. (2001). "Regional Accreditation Reform." Change, 33, no.2, pp. 
	38-45. 
	Ehrenberg, R. G. (2000). "Private College Trustees Must Control Costs." 
	Chronicle of Higher Education, 47, no.5 (September 29), p. B14. 
	Ewell, P.T. & D.P. Jones (1994). "Pointing the Way: Indicators as Policy 
	Tools in Higher Education." In S.S. Ruppert, ed., Charting Higher Education 
	Accountability: A Sourcebook on State-Level Performance Indicators. Denver: 
	Education Commission of the States. 
	Gappa, J. & D. Leslie (!993).  The Invisible Faculty. San Francisco: 
	Jossey-Bass. 
	Lovitts, B. & C. Nelson (2000). "The Hidden Crisis in Graduate Education: 
	Attrition from Ph.D. Programs." Academe, 86, no.6 (November/December), pp. 
	44-50. 
	Lyons, R., M. Kysilka, & G. Pawlas (1999),  The Adjunct Professor's Guide to 
	Success: Surviving and Thriving in the College Classroom.  Boston: Allyn & 
	Bacon. 
	Lyons, R., M. McIntosh, & M. Kysilka (2003). Teaching College in an Age of 
	Accountability.  Boston: Allyn & Bacon. 
	Olsen, F. (2002). "Pheonix Rises." Chronicle of Higher Education, 49, no.10 
	(November 1), pp. A29-31. 
	Schmidt, P. (2002). "Most States Tie Aid to Performance, Despite Little 
	Proof that It Works." Chronicle of Higher Education, 48, no.24 (February 
	22), pp. A20-21. 
	Schmidt, P. (2001). "State Higher-Education Leaders What to See Improvements 
	in Job Training." Chronicle of Higher Education, online daily news (August 
	1). 
	Selingo, J. (2001). "Pennsylvania Rewards Fast Graduation, but Public 
	Colleges Cry Foul." Chronicle of Higher Education, online daily news (August 
	3), http://www.chronicle.com/daily/2001/08/2001080301n.htm. 
	Van der Werf, M. (2002). "Many Colleges will Close or Merge, Standard & 
	Poor's Predicts." Chronicle of Higher Education, 49, no.16, p. 34. 
	Waller, C., R. Coble, J. Scharer, and S. Giamportone (2000). Governance and 
	Coordination of Public Higher Education in All 50 States.  Raleigh, NC: 
	North Carolina Center for Public Policy Research. 
	Wellman, J. (2001). "Assessing State Accountability Systems." Change, 33, 
	no.2, pp. 46-52