What can you learn about a campus at the local Cracker Barrel?
This week, Michael Baston moves on as president of Rockland Community College, in New York, to assume the top job at Cuyahoga Community College, known as Tri-C, in Cleveland. He hadn’t spent much time there before, but when he showed up for his interview in April, he wasn’t exactly a stranger.
A month earlier, he and his wife, Tasha, had secretly flown into town. Dressed in sweatsuits, the Bastons spent three days posing as parents of a daughter who was considering enrolling. They toured the institution’s four campuses, chatting with counselors, professors, and random students. They even popped into the local Perkins and Cracker Barrel restaurants and sought out locals’ impressions of the college.
I’ve heard of colleges sometimes adopting the business practice of using secret shoppers to test their systems or processes, but this is the first time I can recall a (prospective) president running such reconnaissance. (If it’s more common than I think, please let me know!) Baston recommends it. “Don’t just go with the glossy brochure,” he said, “that tells you everything’s OK.”
As it turned out, the visit raised no red flags for him — or at least none that he would share with a reporter. If anything, he told me, it made him all the more eager for the job, so much so that he donned a tie and vest in teal, the college’s color, for his interview. The folks he met on campus seemed more than prepared to help his fictitious daughter, he said, and out in the community, “spontaneously, people were telling me their Tri-C stories,” characterizing the institution as well regarded and accessible. One fellow the Bastons met at the Cracker Barrel happened to be a student, a photographer grateful for its courses in cybersecurity, because the profusion of digital cameras had made his profession untenable.
The visit also prepared Baston for some of the challenges ahead. Since the pandemic, Tri-C’s enrollment has fallen, in line with community colleges nationally, and faculty and staff members expressed “lots of concern” about that, he said. “They’re hoping people will come back.”
In five years at Rockland and now, at Cuyahoga, Baston has been thinking a lot about where higher ed is headed and, as he put it, what the reset looks like. He’s got some ideas, including: better connections between degree and nondegree programs, updated processes for assessing prior learning, and more-intentional outreach to employers as partners in teaching needed skills. Intel has recently pledged to invest $50 million in Ohio educational institutions, and the new president is also eager to find ways for Tri-C students to benefit from that.
Meanwhile, it’s important that Tri-C and other two-year colleges look hard at “who’s not here,” including gig workers, he said. “What are we doing to engage people who are now disengaged?“
Quote of the week.
“Welp. Just got the first state request for how to make policies more student-parent friendly, since they anticipate more student parents, post-Dobbs.” —Amy Laitinen, director of higher-education policy at New America, in a tweet just days after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a 49-year-old precedent guaranteeing access to abortions.
Check these out.
Here are some education-related items from other outlets that recently caught my eye. Did I miss a good one? Let me know.
- Circumstances that contribute to students’ completing college — family role models, adequate resources, and clear motivation — highlighted in a new report may not be that surprising. But the findings that noncompleters felt less supported “across all aspects of the college experience” bear some attention. The report, “How America Completes College, 2022” from Ipsos and Sallie Mae, also offers some advice: Two-thirds of noncompleters considering returning said they’d be more likely to do so with more scholarship money, tuition reimbursement from employers, coursework immediately relevant to their jobs, and flexible scheduling, including night and weekend classes.
- Female researchers are significantly less likely to be credited with authorship on papers and on patents than are men, and one reason for that is that their contributions are “not being acknowledged,” according to a new analysis published in preliminary form in Nature. As the six authors of the study note, this disparity has “clear consequences for the retention and promotion of women in science.”
- As more colleges begin to recognize the needs of student parents, one Black father urges institutions to consider men in particular. “Student fathers are far more likely than student mothers to leave college before completion, and this gap is even wider for student fathers of color,” writes Jahkeer Wainwright, a sophomore at the University of Maryland Global Campus and a participant in the Generation Hope program, in this opinion piece in The Grio. “Lack of representation makes the lives and experiences of Black fathers on campus nearly invisible.”
- With all the talk of “hardening” schools to protect against gun violence, the investor and author Isabelle Hua makes an intriguing case for a different approach. Along with sensible gun-safety policies, she argues in an opinion piece in EdSurge that we should “double down on ‘softening’ schools to focus on building social emotional skills of students and educators and strengthen relationships between students and educators.”
- An expert on race and equity in higher education says he’s finding inspiration from a new Beyoncé song, “Break My Soul.” “At several junctures throughout the song, Beyoncé chants, ‘You won’t break my soul, you won’t break my soul, you won’t break my soul, you won’t break my soul,’” Shaun Harper writes in an essay in Diverse Issues in Higher Education. “This declaration aligns powerfully with what I hear from Black faculty in my research on workplace racial climate.”
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