Three summers ago, I met Bill Bowen and his wife, Mary Ellen, for breakfast in Avalon, N.J. In a phone conversation a few weeks earlier, Mr. Bowen and I had discovered our mutual love for the Jersey Shore, where he ended up spending more of his time as he reached his eighties. Amid vacationing families rushing to finish breakfast, the three of us lingered over coffee for what seemed to be hours, discussing the future of higher education and the leaders he thought were shaping it.
Mr. Bowen probably had better things to do that day. But for someone well into his retirement, he remained engaged in the pressing issues facing colleges and universities. He even pushed his research into new areas over the last few years, particularly about the effects technology had on teaching and learning. Unlike most of today’s university presidents, Mr. Bowen was a student not just of his academic discipline, economics, but of higher education in general. He wanted to better understand what was happening to institutions, their students, and their finances. He then used empirical data, not just sweeping anecdotes, to explain what he had discovered, in easy-to-understand prose and speeches to professors, administrators, and the public.
Mr. Bowen died this week at the age of 83. His impact on higher education reached far and wide, as you’ll see from reading his obituary, but in recent years — when we got to know each other as I reported my first book, College (Un)Bound — there were two areas in which his work had a particularly significant influence.
First was his research on why students drop out of college. In a 2009 book called Crossing the Finish Line, Mr. Bowen and his co-authors found that the selective colleges they studied had higher graduation rates for all types of students, even those the admissions offices might have worried about admitting in the first place. The authors diagnosed the problem of lagging graduation rates as partly caused by what they called “undermatching": students who chose not to attend the best college they could get into. As a result, the students were not pushed hard enough in college by peers or professors, and they dropped out.
Mr. Bowen and the other researchers studied a rich set of subjects: 60,000 seniors who attended more than 300 high schools in North Carolina in 1999. They determined that about 6,200 of those students were eligible, based on their grade-point averages and SAT scores, to attend the best college they could have. But the researchers found that four in 10 of those students had chosen not to attend one of those colleges, because they either didn’t apply or didn’t enroll.
What was interesting about their findings was exactly who had decided not to go to the most-selective colleges: Only 27 percent of students from the wealthiest households undermatched, but 59 percent of those from the poorest households did. Among those students whose parents had not gone to college, 64 percent went to the less-selective college.
Mr. Bowen told me there needed to be a good reason for deliberately choosing not to attend a selective college. Too often the reason students made questionable choices was some “combination of inertia, lack of information, lack of forward planning for college, and lack of encouragement,” he said.
He was a higher-education economist who published a series of important books and reports on the challenges facing colleges. He also wrote frequently for The Chronicle. Here’s a selection.
The second important contribution Mr. Bowen made to higher education in recent years was his work in studying the uses of educational technology in the classroom. He was the architect of a major study by Ithaka S+R, a nonprofit group he was affiliated with, on hybrid courses at six public universities in 2011. More than 600 students took part in the research. They were randomly assigned to either a hybrid course, which had an hour of face-to-face instruction each week with the rest online, or a traditional course, which met for three hours once a week or an hour and a half twice a week.
The group turned out to be a diverse set of learners. This was an important factor for researchers since the commonly held assumption is that those who perform best in online classes are self-motivated, high-achieving students. The bottom-line finding of the study was that students learned just as much in the hybrid format as they would have in the traditional course. What’s more, students in the hybrid course took about a quarter less time to learn just as effectively.
Many in higher education tend to romanticize what happens on college campuses, including the actual learning that occurs in traditional classrooms. For them, Mr. Bowen said, “the most important single result” of the research was that “it called into question the position of the skeptic who says, I don’t want to try this because it will hurt my students.”
That research became the basis for two lectures Mr. Bowen delivered at Stanford University in 2012, “The Productivity Problem in Higher Education” and “Prospects for an Online Learning Fix.” When you read them, you’ll discover why Mr. Bowen was a giant in academe even in his last years of life — and why, when I go to Avalon next summer for vacation, I’ll miss my master class in higher education over a long breakfast.
Jeffrey J. Selingo, a former editor of The Chronicle, is a writer and professor of practice/special adviser at Arizona State University and a visiting scholar at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Center for 21st Century Universities.
