Raising Academic Quality: A Playbook
Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, CM
Universities compete in numerous ways, including the mix of academic programs they offer, their price, location, support services, and any number of amenities. They compete, too, on the impression and reality of the quality of the education being conveyed.
Repositioning an institution’s “academic quality” is a challenging task. It requires financial investments, to be sure. It also requires the imagination and commitment of administrators and faculty to change their current practice in meaningful ways. It requires, too, a certain combination of intellectual substance and reputational work.
Tactical Vagueness
In truth, the term “academic quality” is often loosely coupled to actual student learning, referring more to the broad array of inputs and activities as well as outcomes that may more often pertain to individuals than the student body as a whole. There are at least three reasons for this.
First, student learning turns out to be harder to define and measure than many education reformers would care to admit. If the purpose of a business education is to compute net present value accurately, then measurement is simple. If it is to prepare a student to successfully identify business opportunities and then start and run a business, that will reveal itself only in time and may only partially be explainable by the education received. If, however, the purpose of a “quality” higher education includes noble citizenship and various claims for virtue, counting how many students took part in service activities hardly suffices.
But what if a “quality education” is defined by the immediacy of job placement upon graduation, or the starting salaries; or how far graduates rise in their fields over time or earn over time? Are those sufficient marks of an educated person? Are they truly markers of the value-added contribution of the education process if they are also inextricable from the advantages of birth into wealthy families and connected communities of privilege? Are these outcomes even fully under the control of the institution, or controlled by the ever shifting economy?
Second, while activities to raise academic quality are undertaken out of concern for student learning, they are just as often undertaken to draw a wealthier clientele who can pay the increasing costs of higher education, or to better secure market share in hotly contested regions by being perceived as a stronger institution than the one nearby.
More importantly, claims of academic quality and prestige are high-stakes assertions for institutions and for the presidents who lead them. What school could withstand a general public perception that their academic quality was poor or had declined in a measurable way? What president could possibly assert anything other than his or her school was “above-average?”
University administrators often avoid, therefore, explaining the true reasons for academic quality initiatives. Candid conversations about what constitutes academic “quality” can stir up controversy and slow a university community’s readiness to pursue the projects being proposed. They can contradict and compromise the marketing efforts of the admissions staff. They can also lead to calls for measurement of actual student learning, something both faculty and administrators fear being held accountable for when the measurements are notoriously difficult to devise.
Rather, when universities propose activities to reposition the institution, the advantages to the institution are simply taken as self-evident, and if anything, portrayed as bettering an already satisfactory situation. Tactically, a certain vagueness enables institutions to get on with various initiatives. The challenge, of course, is for an institution to be honest with itself, if not with its various publics, as to the quality concerns to be addressed and improved and then to choose initiatives that directly accomplish those goals.
Which men’s suit is better quality: the one costing $800 or the $1,600? One would hope the shopper knows to how and why to pinch the lining, to note the buttons and stitching, and to recognize fine fabric. For the ordinary shopper, however, the price itself is the quality indicator most relied upon.
To a degree, the same is true for higher education. Admissions professionals have long attracted applications using a “high-tuition-high-aid” strategy, where a sticker price is set substantially above the actual cost to drive perceptions of quality, and then offset with tuition discounts characterized as “scholarships.” There are multiple reasons for this, but it begins with a long proven observation that, when it comes to higher education, the market desires a high-priced product more than the low-cost option.
Universities take advantage of this dynamic to create a quality impression that will attract a stronger student body with higher SAT scores or from better quality high schools. To the degree they are successful, faculty find they can teach more easily, introduce more challenging material at a faster clip, reduce the time they spend correcting poor writing skills, and rely on the students themselves to raise the caliber of classroom discussion. The strategy is to create a stronger educational experience in time by creating an impression of rising standards.
Not dissimilarly, institutions are known to “announce” that they are raising their entry standards in an effort to set an impression of the institution’s quality and desirability, hoping to attract a stronger cohort of students. Or, by increasing applications while holding the size of the freshman class constant, broadcasting that the selectivity of the institution has increased. The hope is that high school counselors will take notice and encourage stronger applicants in their directions in future years.
As any bell-curve might suggest, the numbers of potential students are progressively smaller as scores rise, and increasingly sought by many universities. An institution may find itself having to discount these students deeply to get them to attend or having to broaden one’s traditional recruiting region by hiring additional recruiters and investing in marketing activities within those new regions. There is a classic cost-benefit tradeoff that admissions departments must eventually acknowledge.
To moderate the risk, schools sometimes provide “side doors” to admit students with lesser admission qualifications, and then do not report their test scores to government and ranking surveys. Spring enrollment, evening programs, opportunity programs, or even welcoming students “provisionally” enable schools to siphon some students away from the traditional freshman class and then report higher average freshman student entry qualifications, while continuing to accept students with a lower profile. These practices border on the untruthful, but are well known in American higher education.
More straightforwardly, institutions may raise their reported entry standards by building or expanding academic programs that are known to attract a higher caliber of students and perhaps even students with higher abilities to pay non-discounted tuition, such as pre-medical and other health-related majors.
As attractive and conceptually elegant as these strategies might be, their effect is modest at best. As more universities go to the “common app” to generate additional applications that can be denied, any early “statistical advantage” is lost. High school advisors are sophisticated enough to track who among their students were accepted and were not and to share actual “entry standards” information among their peers.
And so which is it? Must an institution first raise its academic quality to enable it to command a higher price? Or will the market’s simplistic judgments about quality allow an institution to raise its price and then take the resulting increased income and invest it smartly to create the quality institution it portrayed through its pricing scheme? Kalsbeek and Zucker insist it is mostly the former.1 A university’s “net revenue per student” is largely set by the market, and the impressions that market has of the institution compared with its competitors. Setting the shortcuts aside, then, the trick is to invest and improve some set of quality indicators that matter to a defined market.
Faculty Hiring and Development
Leadership matters. For a president or provost, the most effective single tactic to raise a college’s academic quality is to appoint a wise and knowledgeable dean or department chair who has taken the task to heart. New leadership over a unit breaks open both a conversation and expectation of change in a way few other moves engender.
Similarly, faculty hiring is the most immediately substantive method to supplement the breadth and depth of expertise within a given program, assuming, of course, that the faculty are personally committed to building the program.
Whether dean or faculty, the difference maker is if the individual treats the position as a “start-up” business, of sorts. New leaders and colleagues bring fresh ideas, new connections and new energy to the entire group. The challenge is always the human factor.
This is particularly true when hiring “academic stars” to raise a program’s quality. Academic stars can settle into their own projects and do little for the larger enterprise, unless their role is discussed clearly at the outset. Renowned new hires can be “marketed” in their own right to recruit stronger students and faculty. They can attract third-party funding, and they can mentor and bring young faculty into important research and professional worlds. They can also use their privileged roles on academic journal editorial boards, academic association leadership, and/or conference-organizing committees to further bring the department into major intellectual work of the moment. They can even add a bit to the department’s overall competitive spirit, hopefully raising everyone’s game. The reduced teaching loads and other arrangements made to recruit them can feed professional jealousy, however, and sometimes confound departmental cohesion. Any strategy of introducing a “star” into the department’s midst has to be handled with sensitivity.
Whether or not new hiring is an option, investments in current faculty also can have a strong effect on elevating a program, giving faculty time and resources to update and retool, build key international relationships, consult or otherwise practice their craft for a time, visit competing institutions, and see fresh ideas at work. The classic sabbatical leave of offering time to read and reflect through their own writing, if well-planned, remains a powerful way for faculty to update and broaden their knowledge in a given field, or to strategically shift toward a new specialization. More creative forms of leave also can be helpful. Performance-based faculty can be given time away to tour, or more flexible schedules during the academic year. Scientists can be sent to spend time in labs with their colleagues elsewhere in the world. Faculty preparing students for specific professions can take time to work in those professions themselves and thereby build new contacts and update themselves on current practice.
When it comes to enhancing an academic program, not all research time or leaves are equally strategic. Some are more useful for the faculty member’s expertise and development, and while that may serve its own purpose in keeping individual professors’ teaching fresh in the classroom, administrators who want to leverage an institution must offer faculty larger opportunities to rebuild a unit or program, and give them the wherewithal to do so, including any knowledge base they require. The delicate conversation with faculty is to invite or approve leaves that serve the larger purpose, even as they serve the desired needs of the individual faculty member. Toward this end, many universities no longer grant sabbatical leaves automatically every 7 years, but instead ask faculty to propose a course of action and set of “deliverables” that will serve both them and the institution.
Most difficult, of all, however, are those situations where a given faculty member cannot or will not change his or her own practice or otherwise cooperate. In some cases, the department chair simply has to work around them, assigning workload that minimizes the impact of their intransigence. In the end, no program design can rise above what happens within a faculty member’s classroom. The maxim “addition by subtraction” exists for a reason.
Curricular Rigor
The heart of any institution’s educational quality is the outcome question on the day students graduate: “What do graduates know and what can they do because they spent time under our tutelage?” This is largely a question of curriculum.
Reforming a curriculum has been compared to moving a graveyard, and for good reason.2 Challenging, difficult questions lie underneath, such as “What should students know?” and “How will we know if they know it?” All too human dynamics surface as well, even to the point of faculty simply finding a comfort and appreciation for the status quo.
Among the newer for-profit institutions and even within some more traditional community colleges, the rigor and content of curriculum are determined centrally, either with content experts to design courses or using groups of expert faculty to set standards together. Courses are then offered using these central standards, and faculty are expected to adhere to these protocols as a way in which the larger institution can better “guarantee” a certain educational outcome.
Most universities eschew this approach, trusting the individual faculty themselves, as professionals, to design courses of sufficient caliber and content to reasonably prepare students to be conversant and capable in the material they are studying. Calibration of the proper level of rigor comes over time as faculty see the capability of the given student body that has been recruited to the institution, but also from conversations with other faculty as they compare syllabi and settle in to a given level of rigor.
The challenge of this approach is immediately evident. Students studying freshman writing with one professor may encounter startlingly challenging standards of grammar, syntax, and form, whereas students in another class may receive a single grade at the top of a paper with little or no feedback. One professor may be lecturing on the latest decisions of the Federal Reserve’s economic policies, whereas another is reading from the dusty notes of a macrofinance lecture written years earlier.
Institutions that wish to increase rigor, update content, or create a more consistent educational experience for all students generally must find ways to do so while honoring faculty professionalism and academic freedom. Perhaps the most common is simply when department chairs, individual faculty, or more senior administrators ask a leading question.
• “How does our curriculum compare to our peer institutions and the aspirational schools we all respect?”
• “What graduate programs accept or deny our graduates? How could our curriculum prepare them better?”
• “How has our field changed in recent years, and where in the curriculum is this being presented?”
• “What do recruiters say about our students, and how can we adjust our programs to make them more competitive?”
The use of external comparators is a useful and effective way that many administrators employ to raise questions that skate near the edge of faculty prerogative. Rather than introducing new standards or specific content, they bring eternal ideas to bear and then “call the question” of how the department should adjust given this external information. Some institutions set an aspiration of seeking a prestigious accreditation for their academic programs, and thereby invite on a regular basis an outside review that forces the curricular questions. Where accreditations do not exist, institutions sometimes arrange their own periodic external academic department reviews and invite experts from other institutions to visit and provide feedback. Others create more permanent advisory boards of experts who visit at least annually and ask penetrating questions that can push the department forward in important ways. Some universities improve their curricula by taking a close look at the training programs that legal firms and businesses establish because they do not trust the universities to have fully educated their newest employees. Liberal arts institutions seek Phi Beta Kappa membership, a jewel in any institution’s crown, and yet another external set of goals that can galvanize an institution’s self-transformation.
To the degree that these external advisors are truly recognized as experts, faculty are generally willing to be advised and even critiqued. It often helps, however, if the college or university administration connects this external feedback into its strategic planning, its annual budgeting, and its capital plans. Faculty will respect a process that will lead to investment in their program and that they believe will come to fruition. Over time, they will choose to pay it lip service or actually implement it depending on whether its outcomes have been incorporated into the institution’s investments.
Some departments use students as a source of ideas for improvement. Besides taking course evaluations seriously, some departments create common examinations or develop assessment tools to measure student achievement, and then adjust their pedagogical techniques, time-on-task, and curricular substance accordingly.3
Other departments will set common, specific, and measurable learning goals for courses and for entire programs. Many create public moments where students can display their mastery of the material in front of their peers, ranging from in-house research conferences, where history majors present their senior theses to faculty and students from the department, to taking students nationally and internationally to conferences in the field to present in student-tracks or to co-present with faculty themselves. Some have students who present business plans before real angel investors for funding, or compete in national challenges in a given field. To the degree that students distinguish themselves nationally, universities frequently use these successes for recruiting purposes.
At the lower end of the spectrum, some colleges will set or raise their minimum standards for entry into the major, recommendation for student teaching, professional certification, or for receiving recommendations for graduate school. Other institutions identify the courses that students fail most often and/or drop-out of the university after failing. Popularly known as “gateway courses,” faculty will redesign the courses, so that more students master the material, or tighten the prerequirements so that they are suitably prepared.
Curricular improvement is necessarily a decentralized activity, and institutions often accept that the work and outcome will be uneven. Some departments will have higher standards for the students in their majors simply because the faculty are willing to ask the questions and make the adjustments. Some institutions, however, will seek to invest in and raise the quality of a limited number of academic units above the others by design. They may even focus a department on one school of thought or other specialization within a field, in order to build and lay claim to being among the finest in the country for that single specialization.
Ph.D. programs, particularly, bring luster to an institution, even if they normally must be subsidized by the other operations of the university. At times, institutions will seek to establish doctoral programs specifically to change the rankings classification of their institution from regional to national, or to create a public impression that because they offer the Ph.D., they are a better institution than in the past or than their present competitors. This strategy frequently requires extensive investment and an acceptance that these units will be more highly resourced than others in the institution.
Similarly, many institutions will institute an honors program or even honors college in order to attract a more capable student that might otherwise be bored with the institution-wide curriculum or with the general student body. Honors programs have numerous benefits for the students who enroll in them, but they are also used strategically. They enable a university to invest in students who, in turn, can achieve at a level that can be trumpeted by an institution, such as increased numbers of students accepted into medical school or law school for example, or increased numbers of students receiving Fulbright, Marshall, or perhaps even Rhodes scholarships. Institutions also hope that bringing in a brighter-than-average (and predictably wealthier-than-average) cohort of honors students will in time lead other similarly gifted students from other institutions to enroll and thereby raise the overall profile of the student body.4
Even where there is not an honors program, institutions find it useful to establish targeted advising for students who hope to attend graduate school, or who intend to apply for prestigious post-graduate opportunities. Again, institutions hope that by helping certain gifted students achieve at very high levels, they can attract larger cohorts of students who are seeking the same.
There are also any number of surveys that can provide internal and external benchmarking, and therefore help to drive change.5
The Company They Keep
Institutions frequently attempt to change the public’s perception—and in turn, the reality—by increasing the distinction of the company they keep or the students they draw. Most commonly, this is seen in the aspiration for institutions to become a research intensive institution, and then to advance further along that continuum over time. “Colleges” will not infrequently re-brand themselves as “universities” for much the same reason.
At other times, institutions will raise one specific program to levels of prestige far beyond the rest of the programs and then use that marquis program—and especially heightened comparator set that it commands—to bring reflected glory to the institution. Others, such as Rensselaer and OSU, will invest heavily in select areas of specialization for the same reason.6
Some specifically seek to join new athletic conferences, so that they can be associated in the public mind with the academic reputations of the other member schools. Some form international study abroad partnerships with prestigious institutions overseas—such as the renowned Lausanne Hotel School or the London School of Economics—and immediately raise the impression of the program’s quality by association. Some partner for research with well-respected organizations, such as Pew or Merkt.
Others announce internship opportunities with highly respected firms, such as Google for IT students or Paramount Pictures for film students. Some invite guest speakers or executives-in-residence, such as Wynton Marsalis for jazz studies, or Toni Morrison for writing. Some might outsource and partner with well-known brands where learning could be improved or campus facilities are substandard, for example using Berlitz for foreign language instruction or a prominent school for culinary instruction.
Some institutions, however, start their journey toward improvement by standing out as unique against the field of competitors with whom they wish to be associated, becoming known nationally for their excellence in contradistinction to the rest for that particular item, and then, in time, taking a step back toward full-service but at a higher level. Northeastern University’s co-op program, for example, helped it emerge from the tightly condensed pack in Boston. It then took that new attention, lessened their reliance on co-op self-definition, and pursued an aggressive rankings improvement strategy.7
Others jettison the part of the institution that holds them back in the public eye. Universities will close weaker programs and often shift resources to build stronger more competitive ones, such as Emory did when it closed its Journalism program.8
The same principle holds when universities shift a less-prepared portion of their student body elsewhere. As Miami University of Ohio and The Ohio State University become increasingly selective, they are assigning lesser qualified students to the state’s regional campuses, with the promise that they can transfer to the flagship campus later. The University of Florida is doing much the same using its online options and thereby repositioning the profile of the traditional student body.9
Shiny Objects
Universities have long sought to create powerful impressions of strength and quality using architecture. New or extensively renovated buildings and grounds can have a powerful lift effect on the impression one forms of a university. There are, in fact, many ways that universities invest to create a better impression that may or may not be related to the actual quality of the academics, but which can assist an institution to raise its reputation and, in turn, its quality.
Some institutions employ early adoption strategies to distinguish their institutions from the rest. Oftentimes, this involves bringing the latest technology onto the campus or into the educational process. At times, it can be as simple as slightly adjusting and renaming current degree programs to take advantage of popular concepts, such as “forensic” accounting, forensic law, forensic biology, and forensic chemistry in the 2000s, or the breadth of “sustainability” studies in the 2010s.10
Universities create their own prizes and medals to honor the best in a given field, and share. Harvard University, for example, awards the national W.E.B. DuBois Medal for contributions to African American Culture and the life of the mind.11 The Iowa Short Fiction Prize is awarded by the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Columbia University annually awards the Pulitzer Prize.
Similarly, universities trumpet an endless parade of awards from accounting competitions, magazine rankings, and computer hacking competitions, all of which can assist an institution to raise its reputation.
Some find ways in which the campus name is associated with important social conversations. The first presidential debate is always held at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire. Quinnipiac University famously houses the Quinnipiac polls.12 Other universities establish yearly lecture series or otherwise invite prominent individuals and scholars-in-residence whose comments will make news or can at least be pictured in the university’s view book and social media, such as Supreme Court justices or High Point University’s association with Steve Wozniak.13
Other institutions seek to participate in projects funded by prestigious foundations, whose reputation can burnish the university’s own, such as MacArthur or Gates, or to participate in federal projects such as Civic Engagement Honor Roll.
All of these can serve as proof points and public relations opportunities that a given university is on the move and perhaps rising faster and higher than its traditional peers. Reputations change slowly and attempts to change popular opinion require constant feeding.
Observations
A decade ago, Elon University grabbed the nation’s admiration for the way in which it successfully repositioned itself from a small, undistinguished regional institution, to a selective, national liberal arts institution. Independently examining how the university managed this, George Keller made clear that there was no magic bullet, but extensive, dogged work on many fronts, let by a stable, long-serving administration with the close collaboration of the faculty at every turn.14 More recently, High Point University has attempted to follow a similar route, again demonstrating that a combination of many initiatives, centered most importantly on the actual quality of instruction and caliber of faculty, matters enormously.15
In both cases, fundraising played a key role. Growing the endowment or completing a capital campaign or deploying the income from unexpected athletic successes are not strategies themselves, but few plans of any ambition can be completed without bringing new resources to bear.
In both cases, however, the key work of improving the academic quality of the institution was accompanied by sophisticated and powerful strategies and also shifting the public perception of the institution. Some of these methods of shaping public perception border on sleight-of-hand if they are not accompanied by substantive increases in academic rigor. But when taken together, much like the classic chicken and egg question, both sets of activities smoothed and assisted the other. Some shifts, such as raising student entry standard, actually served both a substantive and a public relations function.16
The noble challenge amidst any of this activity is to remember and perhaps even protect the institution’s mission of whom it was designed to serve. Employing these many strategies, it is far easier to pursue a strategy that seeks wealthier and more privileged students, replacing less-prepared and needier populations who once attended the institution. In truth, most institutions that consider themselves “elite” today serve only a small proportion of first-generation and underrepresented students. In a national context, where the “American Dream” remains as a national ideal, universities that seek distinction may wish to add the additional goal of doing so while continuing to provide a powerful pipeline for those whose families cannot afford such an education for their children. There is a typical playbook for universities to rise in distinction, but it may not always serve the public interest or the institution’s historic mission.17
That challenge noted, students and their parents have asked us to show them the world and prepare them for it. There is a nobility to the task of raising an institution’s academic rigor and substance, as it honors the request of those who entrust their education to our hands.
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1 Kalsbeek, D.H., & Zucker, B. (2014). Market and market niches. In D. Hossler, B. Bontrager, and associates (Eds.) Handbook of Strategic Enrollment Management (pp. 77–102). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
2 Zolner, J. (1996). Moving the academic graveyard: The dynamics of curricular change. Selections, Winter, 1–10.
3 Angelo, T.A., & Cross, K.P. (1993). Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers, 2nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Inc.
4 Selingo, J. (May 31, 2002). Mission Creep?: More regional state colleges start honors programs to raise their profiles and draw better students. The Chronicle of Higher Education.
5 Ewell, P.T. (2006). Making the Grade: How Boards Can Ensure Academic Quality (pp. 60–62). Washington DC: AGB Press.
6 “Shirley Ann Jackson Sticks to the Plan.” Chronicle of Higher Education. June 15, 2007. http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2012/11/13/osu-faculty.html.
7 Kutner, M. (September 2014). How to Game the College Rankings: Northeastern University’s single-minded focus on just one list. Boston Magazine.
8 http://news.emory.edu/stories/2012/09/EmoryCollegePlan/campus.html.
9 http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/u-of-florida-gets-few-takers-for-online-path-to-campus/99641.
10 http://sspp.proquest.com/sspp_institutions/display/universityprograms.
11 http://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/dubois/about/w-e-b-du-bois-medalists
12 http://www.quinnipiac.edu/news-and-events/quinnipiac-university-poll/
13 http://www.highpoint.edu/president/2013/10/03/nido-qubein-steve-wozniak-video/
14 Keller, G., & Lambert, L. (2014). Transforming a College: The Little-Known College’s Strategic Climb to National Distinction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
15 MacTaggart, T. (2007). The three stages of college and university revitalization. Academic Turnarounds: Restoring Vitality to Challenged American Colleges and Universities (pp. 3–18). Washington DC: American Council on Education/Praeger.
16 Carlson, S. (November 14, 2010). “How to Build a Perception of Greatness: It’s Hard to Bottle the Buzz about a Hot College, But These Suggestions Can Help.” The Chronicle of Higher Education.
17 Luzer, D. (August 22, 2010). “The Prestige Racket: George Washington University.” Washington Monthly. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/the_prestige_racket.php?page=all. Keller, J. (March 7, 2010). “As Its Popular Chief Retires, USC Seeks an Encore.” The Chronicle of Higher Education.