Fact or Fiction?

An educational idea that evidence doesn’t support

Good morning,

Over the last week or so, the IR office has been prepping the various large-scale surveys that we send out annually to first-year and senior students. After a couple of years of administering the same survey instruments, it’s tempting to just “plug and play” without thinking much about whether the questions we’ve been asking are actually supported by the evidence we have gathered previously or are even still relevant at all.

Although there are good reasons to maintain consistency in survey questions over time, it is also true that we ought to change survey questions if they no longer match what we are trying to do or what we know to be true. Because we are human, we can get ourselves caught rationalizing something that we think ought to be so at exactly the time when we ought to do something else. It isn’t uncommon for us to believe something to always be so because it either seemed so at one time (and maybe even was so at one time) or because it appeared to be so in one instance it seemed like it ought to be so in every other situation or context.

Last week, I read an article in the Atlantic about one such educational “best practice” that subsequent research seems to have debunked. It’s not a very long article, but what it describes might be important for some as many of us are designing and redesigning classes for the new semester calendar.

The Myth of ‘Learning Styles’

A popular theory that some people learn better visually or aurally keeps getting debunked.

Hmmmmm  . . . . .

Make it a good day,

Mark

Beware of the Average!

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It’s been a crazy couple of weeks, so I’m just going to put up a nifty little picture.  But since I generally try to write about 1000 words, this pic ought to do the trick . . .

In case you can’t make out the sign on the river bank, it says that the average depth of the water is 3 ft!

Beware-The-Flaw-of-Averages

Sometimes an average is a useful number, but we get ourselves in some deep water if we assume that there is no variation across the range of data points from which that average emerged. Frequently, there is a lot of variation. And if that variation clusters according to another set of characteristics, then we can’t spend much time celebrating anything no matter how good that average score might seem.

Make it a good day,

Mark

What do students do about the textbooks and additional materials we assign?

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At first, that might seem like an incredibly dumb question.  If you’re in a salty mood, you might snarl, “Buy them and learn or fail the damn course.”  For most of us, I suspect the thought of not buying the additional materials required (or even recommended) for a class might seem utterly absurd. When I was an undergraduate, I remember being warned not to buy used books because they would likely have someone else’s notes in the margins, leaving no room for me to write my own (ok, maybe not the most convincing argument). Nonetheless, I definitely remember feeling like a slacker if I didn’t show up to the first day of class with a shiny new version of each required text.

Fast forward 30-odd years and things couldn’t be more different. The cost of textbooks has risen even faster than the cost of college tuition (have a look at this graphic from the Bureau of Labor Statistics), even as the cost of recreational books has gone down.

More and more, it appears that students are renting textbooks, borrowing from friends, or just foregoing some books altogether. The Chronicle of Higher Ed highlighted a study in 2011 suggesting that 7 of 10 students have skipped buying a textbook because of cost. More recent online columns and blogs seem to perpetuate the notion, if not brag outright, that a student can succeed in college without buying books. In January, the Atlantic published a longer piece examining the reality that, despite the surge in online and other edtech resources, the cost of textbooks and/or their online equivalent remains exorbitantly high. And in the context of the financial pressures that many students experience just paying tuition, room, and board, I guess it shouldn’t surprise us much when already financially-strapped students take advantage of any alternative that might save them some money.

A few weeks ago, about forty faculty and staff gathered in the library to kickstart a conversation about Augustana students and textbooks. After discussing the financial realities of textbook costs, the conversation turned toward the ways in which we choose the textbooks and additional materials that we assign. Although this is something that we might take for granted at times (especially if one might be scrambling to put a course together), it’s an issue that more and more folks are trying to address.  I’m sure there are plenty of examples, but three impressive efforts include the Open Textbook Library, College Open Textbooks, and the Open Educational Resources Commons. Most recently, 40 colleges have made the move to simply go without textbooks and only use freely available learning resources (see here and here).

At the end of the meeting, it seemed clear that we really need to know more about our student’s engagement with the textbooks and additional materials assigned in our courses. One person posed an exceedingly logical suggestion: could we add a couple of questions to the end of every IDEA course feedback survey at the end of spring term asking about:

  • The amount that students spent on textbooks for a given class
  • How often they used the textbooks and additional materials they bought for that class
  • How effective those materials were in helping the student learn in that class

It seems like this would be particularly useful information. But before acting on any of these ideas, I think it’s important to know what you all think about gathering this information, what questions you might have about what is done with this information, and any other concerns you might have about this project.

So . . . . what do you think?  Should we ask these questions?  What should we do with the data?  If we ask these questions, how do we need to be careful and transparent so that whatever we find, 1) gives us a deeper understanding of our students’ engagement with textbooks and additional materials, and 2) genuinely spurs our perpetual effort to improve in a way that fosters inclusiveness and understanding.

Please – send me your thoughts.  If you know my email, you can send them there. If you’d rather post in the comments section below, please post away.

Make it a good day,

Mark

 

 

Anticipating what our students need to know is SO complicated!

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Over the last few weeks, I’ve been wrestling with a couple of data trends and their accompanying narratives that seem pretty important for colleges like ours. However, unlike most posts in which I pretend to have some answers, this time I’m just struggling to figure out what it all means. So this week, I’m going to toss this discombobulated stew in your lap and hope you can help me sort it all out (or at least clean up some of the mess!).

First, the pressure on colleges to prepare their students to graduate with substantial “work readiness” appears to be at an all-time high. The Gallup Organization continues to argue that employers don’t think college graduates are well-prepared for success in the workplace. Even though there is something about the phrase “work readiness” that makes me feel like I just drank sour milk, we have to admit that preparing students to succeed in a job matters, especially when student loan debt is now such a large, and often frightening, part of the calculus that determines if, and where, a family can send their kids to college. Put all this together and it’s no wonder why students overwhelmingly say that the reason they want to go to college is to get a good-paying job.

Underneath all of this lies a pretty important assumption about what the world of work will be like when these students graduate. Student loans take, on average, 21 years to pay off, and the standard repayment agreement for a federal student loan is a 10-year plan. So it would seem reasonable that students, especially those who take out loans to pay for college, would anticipate that the job for which college prepares them should in most cases outlast the time it takes for them to pay off their loans. I’m not saying that everyone thinks this through completely, but I think most folks are assuming a degree of stability and income in the job they hope to obtain after earning a college degree, making the loans that they take out to pay for college a pretty safe bet.

But this is where it gets dicey. The world of work has been undergoing a seismic shift over the past several decades. The most recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that, on average, a person can expect to have 12 jobs between the ages of 18 and 50. What’s more, the majority of those job changes occur between the ages of 18 and 34 – the same period of time during which one would be expected to pay off a student loan. Moreover, between 2005 and 2015, almost all of the jobs added to the economy fit into a category called “alternative work.” This category of work includes contract labor, independent work, and any sort of temporary job (in addition to the usual suspects, think Turo, Lyft, or TaskRabbit). Essentially, these are jobs that are either spun as “providing wonderful flexibility” or depressingly described as depending on “the whim of the people.” As with so many other less-than-attractive realities, someone put a bow on it and labeled this whole movement “the gig economy” (sounds really cool except there’s no stage lighting or rock and roll glamor). It’s no surprise that the gig economy presents a rather stark set of downsides for individuals who choose it (or get sucked into it by circumstances beyond their control).

So what does all of this mean for colleges like ours that are (whether we like it or not) obligated to focus a lot of our attention on preparing students for a successful professional life?  I don’t have many great answers to this one. But a couple of questions seem pretty important:

  • To what degree are we responsible for ensuring that our students are financially literate and can manage through the unpredictability that seems likely for many early in their career?
  • What knowledge, skills, or dispositions should we prioritize to help our students thrive in a professional life that is almost certain to include instability, opportunity, and unexpected change?

Of all the possible options that an 18-year-old could sign up for, a small liberal arts college seems like it ought to be the ideal place for learning how to navigate, even transcend, the turbulent realities that seem more and more an unavoidable part of the world of work. But without designing what we do so that every student has to encounter this stuff, we leave that learning up to chance. And as usual, the students who most need to learn this stuff are the ones who are least likely to find it on their own.  Looks like we better role up our sleeves and get to work!

Make it a good day,

Mark

Rethinking our “competition” for future students

Welcome back! I hope you found a way to carve out at least a few moments of relaxation and rejuvenation during the holiday break. Of course, the phrase “holiday break” doesn’t mean nearly the same thing for everyone, especially this time of year. For example, the folks in admissions are in the midst of working their tails off. Nowadays, the mayhem of recruiting high school students to a private liberal arts college doesn’t take a holiday, ever.

Over the last few years, we’ve learned a lot about the nature of our “competition” for prospective students. Not so long ago, many of us might have assumed that a high school senior considering Augustana College would therefore have already limited their list of potential colleges to a set of small liberal arts colleges, mostly located in the Midwest. Several decades ago this assumption was almost always correct. However, these days we know that the majority of prospective students who consider Augustana tend to look hardest at Midwestern public or larger urban private institutions as they narrow toward their final choice, not other small liberal arts colleges. This knowledge has clearly helped us make a more convincing case for choosing Augustana College, since knowing which institutions we are competing against helps us make our case more precisely and concretely.

Over the last few years, we’ve heard rumblings about other looming competitors, mostly in the form of online colleges or MOOCs (massive open online courses). Fortunately, most of those up-and-comers have blown themselves up on their own launch pads. But the underlying assumptions that justify the continued quest to build similar launch pads might be the real “competition” that we need to understand most of all.

During the holiday break I stumbled upon an opinion piece that lays bare those assumptions in a way that is as explicit as it is cocky. Neil Patel, a bigwig in the online start-up and entrepreneur world (exemplifying his marketing chops with the hyperbolic clickbait headline “My Biggest Regret in Life: Going to College”) asserts that going to college was a waste of time and money because it didn’t teach him any of the things he needed to learn in order to succeed as an entrepreneur. He argues that his college classes were little more than instances of learning isolated facts, theories, and concepts solely to regurgitate them on a test or in a paper before the end of that academic term (sort of the academic equivalent of “lather, rinse, repeat”). He argues that the entire exercise fails an ROI (return on investment) analysis because he could have learned much more useful information, grown in more substantive ways, and ultimately made more money by diving into the real world right out of high school.

I am not sharing this article to suggest that Patel is right, although my own experience at big public universities as both a student and as an employee doesn’t do much to squash his argument. Rather, I share this article to lay bare the nature of our real competition. Because whether it is less expensive public institutions (2-year or 4-year schools), online institutions, some combination of MOOCs and competency-based education, or merely the simplification of a college choice to the largest financial aid package, in most cases our real competition isn’t other institutions. Instead, it is embedded in a series of assumptions that set up an entirely reasonable conclusion . . . IF those assumptions are, or appear to be, true. The logic stream goes something like this:

  1. College is primarily composed of a series of discrete experiences (AKA classes) that require regurgitating information that has been recently memorized.
  2. The information that is to be regurgitated exists in isolation (AKA is rarely transferable to other college experiences or to life after college).
  3. Accumulating completion approval (AKA at least a passing grade) for set number of classes across a set of categories earns a credential of completion (AKA a bachelor’s degree).
  4. Therefore, find the least expensive way to ensure a reasonable likelihood that one earns this credential.

The hardest part of facing the real world implications of this rationale is that we aren’t talking about our truth. We are talking about prospective students’ truth – the conclusions they draw as they take in what we tell them online, in print, and in person. This is the “truth” that drives real behavior. So as much as we might want to passionately argue that college transforms or that students just can’t know how what they learn will be useful until long after they’ve learned it, if the information that prospective students gather as they look at Augustana College doesn’t emphatically dispel the assumptions that undergird the logic stream spelled out above, all of our hot air (hot print, hot pixels, etc.) will likely end up sounding like a lone coyote howling at the moon.

The other hard part of facing this reality is realizing that prospective students apply this logic (fairly or not) in real time. So we help ourselves a whole lot when we show concrete evidence, from the very beginning of our interactions with each prospective student, that the experience we provide is not focused on memorizing and regurgitating information. And we help ourselves even more when we can show concrete evidence that the things students learn in one setting are directly applied during college and after college. Unfortunately, the lens through which prospective students increasingly evaluate potential colleges is not an unbiased lens. Rather, it is pre-tinted with the aforementioned assumptions, making it critical that every student sees in the most explicit and obvious ways that our understanding of a college education blows those pre-existing assumptions to bits.

All this leads to a pretty important question. If someone were to look at any of the documents or webpages that describe a given educational experience at Augustana (a syllabus, a program description, etc.), how would someone holding the assumptions described above respond? Is there a chance that the document or webpage in question would leave those assumptions unchallenged? Worse, would a review of those documents or webpages confirm those assumptions? Or would that document or webpage shatter those assumptions and open the door for a conversation about how an Augustana education might be completely different from anywhere else?

For those of us who aren’t on the front lines of recruiting students every day, this post might seem overblown. For the folks who are slogging it out in the trenches, this post might not seem urgent enough. But it seems pretty clear that these assumptions are driving the way that many prospective students and their parents start the college search process. If we don’t actively shatter those assumptions early and often, we leave ourselves susceptible to ending up on the short end of a flawed ROI argument. And to rub salt into the wound, if we end up on the losing end of this argument, we won’t even get the chance to challenge the flawed nature of their ROI analysis, because by then the prospective student has likely already crossed us off their list.

Sorry for the sobering post to start the new year. But sometimes sobering isn’t such a bad thing. In this case, we have the winning argument and the evidence to back it up. So knowing the nature of the “competition” gives us one more advantage that we ought to use every chance we get.

Make it a good day,

Mark

What’s the Problem We’re Trying to Address?

If you’ve had to sit through more than one meeting with me, you’ve almost certainly heard me ask this question. Even though I can see how the question might sound rhetorical and maybe even a little snarky, I’m really just trying to help. Because I know from my own experience how easy it is to get lost in the weeds when trying to tackle a complex issue that is full of dicey trade-offs and unknown unknowns. So sometimes I’ve found that it can be useful to pause, take a couple of deep breaths and refocus on the problem at the core of the conversation.

By now you’ve almost certainly heard about the discussion about transitioning from an academic calendar based on trimesters to one based on semesters. Last week, Faculty Council provided a draft proposal to the faculty to be discussed, vetted, and even adjusted as legitimate concerns are identified by the community. Since I’ve already seen a calendar discussion sap us of most of our energy twice (or once if you count the two-year discussion a few years back as a single event), I hope that this time we can find a way to get through this without quite so much emotional fallout.

With that in mind, after listening to the calendar conversation for the last few months I thought it might be helpful to revisit the question at the top of this post:

What’s the problem we’re trying to address?

It is true, in one very real sense, that there is not a single answer. In fact the “problem” looks different depending upon where you sit. But since the topic of semesters was formally put back onto the front burner by the senior administration and the Board of Trustees, it’s probably useful to understand the problem as they see it. From their perspective, the problem we are facing is actually a pretty straight-forward one. In a nutshell we, like a lot of colleges and universities these days, have a balance sheet problem. In other words, we are having an increasingly difficult time ensuring that our revenues keep pace with our expenses (or put differently, that our expenses don’t outpace our revenues).

The reasons for this problem have been presented countless times, so I’ll try not to dive down that rabbit-hole too far again. But suffice it to say that since American family incomes have been stagnant for a long time, each year that our costs go up we lose a few more prospective families that might otherwise be willing to pay what we charge. Combine that with a shrinking population of high school graduates in the Midwest overall, and you can imagine how it gets harder and harder to come up with the increased revenue necessary to pay for inescapable increases in expenses like electricity, gas, and water, not to mention reasonable salary raises, building and sidewalk repairs, and replacements of worn out equipment.

The possible solutions to a straight-forward balance sheet problem like ours are also relatively straight-forward. If we decide to think of it primarily as insufficient revenue, then we would likely choose a way to increase revenue (e.g., enroll more students, add graduate programs, start online programs . . . each of the examples in this category are perceived by many as a potential threat to our philosophical core). If we decide to think of this problem primarily as excessive expenses, then we would likely choose a way to reduce expenses (e.g., make the college demonstrably smaller, eliminate Augie Choice . . . the only examples in this category that I can think of are pretty depressing). If we don’t see plausible options to increase revenues or reduce expenses, then the only other possibility is to find ways to become more efficient (i.e., achieve similar results from smaller expenditures). Of course, we could concoct some combination of all three approaches.

From the administration’s perspective, the possibility of moving to a semester-based academic calendar addresses the balance sheet problem by giving the college access to an expanded set of opportunities for increased efficiency (i.e., achieving similar results from smaller expenditures). Some of those efficiencies are more self-evident, such as reducing the number of times we power up and power down specific buildings. Some of them are more abstract, such as reducing the number of times we conduct a large-scale process like registration. But the central problem that the semester idea attempts to address is an issue of imbalance between revenues and expenses.

Although some have suggested otherwise, the semester idea is not primarily intended to improve retention rates or increase the number of mid-year transfer students. It is possible that a semester calendar might be more conducive to retaining students who struggle initially or attracting transfer students just after the Christmas break. But there are plenty of similar institutions on semester calendars with lower retention rates and fewer transfer student. Of course, that doesn’t disprove anything either; it just demonstrates that a move to semesters doesn’t guarantee anything. Increases in retention and mid-year transfers will happen (if they happen at all) as a result of what we do within a new calendar, not because we move to a new calendar.

I truly don’t have a strong opinion on the question of calendar. Both trimesters and semesters can be done well and can be done badly. This is why Faculty Council and others have thought long and hard about how to construct a semester system that maintains our commitment to an integrated liberal arts education and delivers it in a way that allows faculty to do it well. Nonetheless, I think it is useful to remind ourselves why we are having this conversation and the nature of the problem we are trying to address. If you think that we should address our balance sheet issues by expanding revenue sources or by reducing expenses, then by all means say so. If you don’t think a balance sheet problem exists, then by all means say so. But let’s make sure we understand the nature of the problem we are trying to address. At the least, this will help us have a more transparent conversation that leaves us in a healthier place at the end, no matter what we decide to do.

And one more thing. Let’s not equate “increasing efficiency” with “doing more with less.” Increasing efficiency is doing differently with the same resources in a way that is more effective. If we are in fact continually doing more with less, in the long term we’re doing it wrong.

Make it a good day,

Mark

 

Some Myths Just Won’t Die

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I’ve recently heard more than a few folks suggest that the number of administrators at Augustana College is going up at the expense of faculty positions. This seems to be a particularly popular hypothesis, one that has been around at both the national level and on our campus for a long time. I’ve tested this assertion with our local data several years ago and, to be fair, it’s worth retesting hypotheses every once in a while to make sure that previous findings, and more importantly previous conclusions, still hold true.

Below I’ve laid out a table of our own Augustana data over the last ten years that includes instructional faculty numbers, non-instructional staff numbers, student enrollment, and ratios that give some sense of the relationships between a variety of combinations. Please note that the first column is the academic year 2014-15; data moves back in the time from left to right.

2014-15 2013-14 2012-13 2011-12 2010-11 2009-10 2008-09 2007-08 2006-07 2005-06
Tenured Professors 114 102 98 104 102 94 90 102 90 94
Tenure Track Professors 33 42 52 51 62 64 55 35 46 41
Total Tenure and Tenure-Track 147 144 150 155 164 158 145 137 136 135
Full-Time Instructors Off the Tenure Track 50 44 36 27 20 16 35 36 28 14
Proportion of Full-Time Instruction Workforce Off the Tenure Track 25.4 23.4 19.4 14.8 10.9 9.2 19.4 20.8 17.1 9.4
Academic Administration/Salaried Operations Administration * 153 135 171 158 172 183 172 167 159
Hourly Employees * 170 178 158 158 171 197 190 192 190
Total Full-Time Non-Instructional Employees * 323 313 329 316 343 380 362 359 349
Student Enrollment FTE 2483 2514 2538 2506 2529 2455 2531 2516 2450 2371
Ratio of Non-Instructional Employees to Full-Time Instructors * 1.7 1.7 1.8 1.7 2.0 2.1 2.1 2.2 2.3
Ratio of “Administrators” to Full-Time Instructors * 0.8 0.7 0.9 0.9 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.1
Ratio of “Administrators” to Total Tenure/Tenure Track Faculty * 1.1 0.9 1.1 1.0 1.1 1.3 1.3 1.2 1.2
Ratio of Students to Full-Time Instructors 12.6 13.4 13.6 13.8 13.7 14.1 14.1 14.5 14.9 15.9
Ratio of Students to Non-Instructional Employees * 7.8 8.1 7.6 8.0 7.2 6.7 7.0 6.8 6.8
Ratio of Students to “Administrators” * 16.4 18.8 14.7 16.0 14.3 13.8 14.6 14.7 14.9
*not reported to IPEDS until April, 2015

First, while the number of tenured professors has gone up and the number of tenure-track professors has gone down over the last ten years, the total number of traditional faculty (i.e., faculty within the tenure system) has gone up 9%. Moreover, the overall number of full-time instructional faculty has increased over the last ten years by 32%. (Although it’s a somewhat separate issue for a separate post, I couldn’t help but note the increase in the proportion of our full-time instructional workforce that is not a part of the tenure system.)

Second, the number of administrators and the number of hourly employees has dropped over the last ten years, from 159 to 153 and from 190 to 170, respectively. This change strikes me as particularly interesting given the increase in student enrollment over the same period, especially for the hourly employees who often are on the front lines of serving students’ non-academic needs.

Finally, I’ve included six lines of ratios that put these relationships between numbers of faculty, administrators, staff, and students into context over the past ten years. As you can see, there are now fewer non-instructional employees for every full-time instructor, fewer administrators for every full-time instructor, and fewer administrators for every tenured or tenure track faculty member. Moreover, even though the total number of students has increased, the number of students per instructor has dropped while the number of students per non-instructional employee and number of students per administrator has gone up.

So no matter how you slice it, asserting that the total number of administrators has gone up while the total number of faculty has gone down is, well, hogwash. Even in the context of the relationships between administrators and faculty, administrators and students, or faculty and students, this assertion is, well, hogwash. Nationally this assertion might hold some water, but at Augustana College . . . it just ain’t so.

Certainly, within those big-picture numbers there are lots of positions that have been moved from one office to another or faculty lines that have been moved from one department to another. You might not agree with one or more of those moves, but that sounds to me like a separate issue entirely – one worth a robust discussion no doubt, but a separate issue nonetheless.

Make it a good day,

Mark

Work hard, party hard!

Last week, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a series of articles and commentaries on the discomforting relationship between colleges and alcohol. Not surprisingly, they began the first article (“A River of Booze“) with the stereotypical “beer and circus” images of a large flagship university. Although much of what I read reminded me of the struggles I observed during my time at the University of Iowa, our residence life staff reminded me that many of the student justifications for drinking noted in these articles sound just like comments made by our own Augustana students.

So instead of writing something myself, this week I’m just going to refer you to this series of articles in the Chronicle. I’ve inserted the link to the opening piece above, and I’ve added another that digs into the challenges that colleges and universities have faced in trying to address dangerous drinking behaviors here.

Although we might be a small college, we struggle with many of the same issues noted by the Chronicle reporters. I hope you’ll find some time to read some of these articles and find out more about our own students’ alcohol-related behaviors. Like a lot of things, we will only succeed in addressing these issues to the degree that we tackle them together.

Make it a good day,

Mark

Week 10 + Halloween + Slicing Data = Disengaged Zombie Students!

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I suspect that the confluence of Week 10 and Halloween brings out a little crazy in each of us.  So I thought I’d share a brief response that I prepared for a recent media request regarding the potential existence of one underserved student population on our campus.

From our senior survey data, we find that students who self-report as Zombies also report statistically significantly lower levels of engagement across a wide range of important student experiences. These differences include lower levels of participation in class discussion despite higher satisfaction with faculty feedback.

Zombie students also report lower levels of co-curricular influence on understanding how one relates to others. Further qualitative study suggests a broad lack of self-awareness.

In addition, Zombie students indicate that they have fewer serious conversations with students who differ by race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or social values.  Instead, Zombie students seem to congregate together and rarely reach out of their comfort zone.

Interestingly, our first-to-second year retention rate of student zombies is 100%, despite the high number of PUGS and CARE reports.  Yet our six year graduation rate is 0%. While some have expressed concern over this dismal data point, a few administrators who are closely involved in managing the graduation ceremony have suggested that the graduation ceremony is long enough already without having Zombie students shuffling aimlessly across the stage to get their diploma.

Interestingly, Zombie students report an increased level of one-on-one student/faculty interaction outside of class.  We find no evidence to suggest that this correlates in any way with the substantial drop in the number of part-time and adjunct faculty from last year (108) to this year (52).

Happy Halloween and have a wonderful Week 10.

Make it a good day,

Mark

In Search of the Mysterious Muddler

On several recent occasions I have heard it said that about 25% of our students aren’t involved in anything on campus.  I am always intrigued by the way that some assertions or beliefs evolve into facts on a college campus, and this number seemed ripe for investigating.   Researchers into human behavior have found this phenomenon repeatedly and suggest that, because we want to believe our own intuition to be true, we tend to perk up at data points or anecdotes that support our beliefs.  We’ve all fallen prey to this temptation at least once – at least I have.  So I thought it might be worth testing this claim just to see if it holds up under the glare of our actual survey data.

First – to be fair, this claim isn’t totally crazy.  I can think of a particular data point that clearly nods in the direction of the 25% uninvolved claim.  For a few years, we’ve tracked the proportion of seniors who don’t use their Augie Choice money, and – although the number is steadily declining – over the last few years an average of about 25% have foregone those funds.  Others have suggested that every year we have a group of somewhere between 600 and 800 students (henceforth called “the muddlers”) who aren’t involved in anything co-curricular; athletics, music groups, or student clubs and organizations.  More ominously, some have suggested that there is a sub-population of students who are only involved in Greek organizations and that these students help to create an environment that isn’t conducive with our efforts to make Augustana a rigorous learning experience. (All of that is a wordy euphemism for “these lazy bums party too much.”).

Although the question of what should count as true involvement is a legitimate one, the question of simple participation is an empirical question that we can test.  So we looked at two sets of data – our 2013 senior survey data and our 2013 freshmen survey data – to see what proportion of students report not being involved in anything co-curricular. No athletics, no music, and no student clubs or organizations.  Then we added the question of Greek membership just to see if the aforementioned contingent of deadbeats really does exist in numbers large enough to foment demonstrable mayhem. (another wordy euphemism for “be loud and break stuff.”).

Well, I’ve got bad news for the muddlers.  Your numbers aren’t looking so hot.  From the students who graduated last spring, only 17 out of 495 said that they didn’t participate in anything (athletics, music, student groups, or Greeks).  When we took the Greek question out of the equation we only gained 5 students, ultimately finding that only about 5% (23/495) of our graduating seniors said that they didn’t participate in athletics, music, or some student group.

But what about the freshmen?  After all, the seniors are the ones who have stayed for four years.  If involvement is the magic ingredient for retention that some think it is, then we should expect this proportion to be quite a bit bigger in the freshman class.

Alas, though our muddler group appears a little bigger in the first year, it sure doesn’t approach the 25% narrative.  After eliminating freshmen who participated in athletics, music, a student group, and a Greek organization, we were left with only 15 out of 263 first year students who responded to our survey.  When we left out Greek membership, we only gained 4 students, increasing the number to 19 out of 263 (7%).  Now it’s fair to suggest that there is a limitation to this data in that we got responses from only about 45% of the freshman class.  However, even after calculating the confidence intervals (the “+/-“) in order to generalize with 95% confidence to the entire freshman class, we still end up with range in proportion of students not involved in anything co-curricular somewhere between 4 and 9 percent.

There are two other possible considerations regarding the muddler mystery.  One possibility is that there are indeed more than we know because the non-participant would also be more likely to not fill out the freshman survey.  On the other hand – as some of our faculty have observed, it’s possible that our muddlers are also the students who study more seriously; just the kind of students faculty often dream of teaching.

My reason for writing this post is NOT to suggest that we don’t have some students who need to be more involved in something outside of their classes.  We certainly have those students, and if it is almost 10% of our freshman class (as the upper bound of the confidence interval suggests), then we clearly have work to do.  Rather, it seems to me that this is another reason to think more carefully about the nature of involvement’s impact on students.  Because it appears that the students who depart after the first year are not merely uninvolved recluses (again, the limitations of the sample requires that I suggest caution in jumping to too certain a conclusion).  It seems to me that this evidence is another reason to think about involvement as a means to other outcomes that are central to our educational mission instead of an end in and of itself.

Make it a good day,

Mark