Vincent Tinto’s research related to student retention is well known among academicians.  His 1975 paper in the Review of Educational Research creating a theoretical construct of the major factors leading to student retention has been cited in hundreds, if not thousands of papers and publications.  Additionally, Tinto’s sociological construct of the college dropout influenced future researchers toward examining the cause of dropouts instead of blaming the victim.  In 1987, Tinto published Leaving College: Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition (and later reprinted a second edition in 1993). That book is particularly significant to me for several reasons. 

In 2004, the American Public University System (APUS) Board of Trustees elected Dr. Kate Zatz as a new board member.  As APUS’s newly appointed president, I visited Dr. Zatz who worked at Hudson County Community College in Newark, New Jersey.  We talked about a number of things during my visit and I asked her if she could recommend any publications about student retention.  She handed me a copy of Leaving College and told me that it was an excellent resource for reading about student attrition research.  I read it and distributed copies to others at APUS.  Later on, Leaving College and my interest in student retention would inspire my doctoral dissertation and subsequent research related to online student retention.  When I received a pre-publication notice for Completing College: Rethinking Institutional Action a few months ago, I ordered a copy.

In the preface to Completing College, Vincent Tinto states that the goal of his book is not to develop a new theory of retention but to suggest a framework that institutions can utilize in applying policies and actions to improve retention and college completion.  Based on the quantity of dog-eared pages and highlighted paragraphs in my copy, I would say that he has accomplished his goal.

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Rich DeMillo has a lengthy background in academia serving as a professor at four different universities, Dean of Computing at Georgia Tech College of Computing, Director of the Computer and Computation Research Division of the National Science Foundation, and was Hewlett Packard’s first Chief Technology Officer.  His latest book, Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities, developed from a five page memo that he planned to send to his colleagues about what was wrong at his university then evolved to a whitepaper in which he solicited the advice of friends and colleagues, and eventually to a book. 

Unlike Clayton Christensen who writes about innovative companies as a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (thus making his transition to writing about innovative universities less surprising), DeMillo’s background is in engineering and computer science.  His observations, however, stem from his background as a professor at a traditional “brick and mortar” school.  From his position inside the hallowed halls of academia, he notes that the institutions in the middle, those between the elite institutions (top 75) and institutions that admit everyone, are the ones that are in trouble with a value proposition squeeze coming from above (elite) as well as below (business model to serve anyone or everyone at a lower price point).  DeMillo stresses that modern universities are businesses (contrary to some of the myopic ideologues who insist that non-profit institutions don’t have a business model) and are competitive organizations run by smart people.  Similar to Christensen, DeMillo argues that the class-oriented society and culture of higher education creates a faculty-centered model that is difficult to break out of for institutions undergoing competition for enrolled students.  (For a review of Christensen’s book, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way to World Learns, see my August 2008 blog article.  To see my review of Christensen’s book, The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out, see my August 2011 blog article.)

DeMillo states that in any market, the winners are those with competitive brands, price, or value.  Brand is difficult to build for all but the elite colleges and universities, price continues to increase for almost all institutions and in most cases is becoming uncompetitive, and value is a concept seldom understood by the faculty at most institutions.  Because most college presidents are promoted from the ranks of academics, they are ill-equipped to understand the importance of strategic planning and understanding competitive threats from business disruptors like creative proprietary institutions.

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When I read Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, I enjoyed Clayton Christensen and his co-authors’ application of the potential of disruptive innovations to the K-12 classroom.  As a result, I looked forward to reading his new book, The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out.  It didn’t disappoint me.

Christensen and his co-author, Henry J. Eyring, take a different tack in this book.  Approximately 60-75 percent of the book provides a narrative of two institutions of higher education, Harvard University and Ricks College, now BYU-Idaho.  While many observers of higher education may not consider Harvard an innovator, decisions made by its presidents over its several hundred year history have influenced the direction of American higher education.  Whether it’s the four-year baccalaureate degree, the creation of various majors, the design of a baccalaureate degree to include general education courses, professional schools with a requirement that applicants complete a bachelor’s degree before matriculating, faculty tenure, the “publish or perish” culture for faculty, or athletic programs; most of those foundational principles that we take for granted today had an evolutionary turn at Harvard.  Christensen and Eyring make the case that the problem with higher ed today is that most four year colleges and universities aspire to “be like Harvard” but only five percent have a realistic chance of pulling it off.

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Frederic Jacobs and Stephen Hundley write in the preface of their book, Understanding and Supporting Adult Learners: A Guide for Colleges and Universities, that their focus is to help colleges and universities understand adult learners.  I suggest, however, that this text could also be used as an excellent primer for policymakers, reporters, and others who need a broader understanding of the complex issues involving adult students pursuing a higher education degree.

The authors acknowledge that there are many books about adult learners and higher education but inform the reader that their purpose in writing this one was to identify common issues and build profiles of those issues from student, faculty, institutional, and public policy perspectives.  In order to accomplish their goal, the authors organized the book into six chapters, the first of which provides the reader with background issues organized around much of the pertinent research published about adult learners in higher education.  While none of the research is discussed in depth, the 30-page chapter provides an excellent overview and resource for further reading about adult education topics.

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Douglas Thomas’ and John Seely Brown’s book, A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, provides a fresh insight into the rapidly changing learning environment and ways in which technology can enhance the quality of learning outcomes.  Thomas is an Associate Professor in the Annenberg School of Communications at University of Southern California (USC) and Brown is a visiting scholar at USC.  They state in their book that learning in the 21st century is not taking place in the classroom but is taking place everywhere thanks to changes in the culture of learning.  The authors write that the foundation of the new culture of learning consists of two elements:  the first is a massive information network that provides access to learning about almost anything; the second is a bounded and structured environment that allows individuals to build and experiment within those boundaries.  According to Thomas and Brown, the combination of those two elements is what elevates the culture of learning to the promise that it holds for the future.

Online games and the collectives that develop around them are a prominent example of how individuals are able to learn through the collective participation of many players working together to share tips and through collaborative team-playing.  Thomas provides an example of a class that he taught on gaming at the University of Southern California and the extra efforts and enthusiasm expressed by the students as they explored the multi-player game Star Wars Galaxies.  World of Warcraft is another multi-player game described by the authors that is used for a comparison of the learning that takes place in a collective environment.

Collective learning is not limited to gaming, however.  Brown and Thomas discuss the experience of a person diagnosed with diabetes who consulted the website Diabetes Daily and participated in a number of the forums where patients discuss their problems and experiences living with diabetes.  The patient learned how to live with diabetes from the social interaction with others diagnosed with the disease.  In a new culture collective, people belong in order to learn.  In a classroom in the new culture of learning, students take an active role to create and provide the latest information to the collective, supplementing the role of the teacher.  According to the authors, collectives scale almost unlimitedly and their learning outcomes improve with increases in size and diversity when assisted by technology.

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For years, I have been a semi-regular reader of The Economist, primarily because it’s written from the perspective of the European community and not Americans.  As a foreign policy student knows, perspectives are often colored by events and politics within your own country and an outside viewpoint may influence your thinking about a particular issue.

Most likely for that reason, I pre-ordered The Global Auction when I received a notice of it from the Oxford University Press.  The authors are professors at universities in the United Kingdom (Brown is Professor of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, Lauder is Professor of Education and Political Economy at University of Bath, and Ashton is Professor Emeritus of Labour Market Studies at University of Leicester) and their premise is that the American Dream that emphasizes higher education as the path for the lower class to become middle class and the middle class to become prosperous is deeply in trouble.

The authors discuss the fact that world economics have become more integrated and networked and that the market value of American workers is no longer compared to local citizens, but rather is part of a global auction for jobs.  According to the authors, economists who compare America, Britain, and Germany as head nations (brains) and China and India as body nations (brawn) have missed the point that the new global economy has allowed emerging economies to create a high-skill, low-wage workforce capable of competing for the hi-tech, high-value employment prized in the head nations. 

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