Mission Differentiation: Code Language for Cutting Programs at Schools No Longer Wanted

The following is excerpted from my recent book, Access at the crossroads: Learning assistance in higher education (2010, Jossey Bass). Several of my recent blog posts have been about the elimination of developmetnal-level courses in Ohio. I also posted the message to the LRNASST email listserv and received reports from half a dozen other states that had previously enacted the same policy. I was disappointed to read that some people welcomed the decision since the students were better served at the two-year instiutions. I don't disagree about that result (as diappointing as that is). The issue I am concerned about is what happens when four-year institutions engage in "mission differentiation" and discontinue services and programs that had previously provided for more than 100 years. The following is my analysis of the practice and supported by research studies of others concerning the dramatic and negative outcomes as a result. -- David Arendale

Impact of Institutional Mission Differentiation on Learning Assistance

Economic challenges since the 1970s, especially among public institutions, have intensified. Land-grant institutions debate how to balance their historic egalitarian mission serving all state residents while curtailing programs and raising admission standards. Institutional leaders increasingly employ institu­tional “mission differentiation” to reign in costs and focus resources on the institution (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004). Mission differentiation recognizes institutions with special programmatic offerings and targeted student popu­lations. Selective college admission policies lead some to question the need for comprehensive learning assistance services, especially developmental courses.

Preliminary analysis of mission differentiation reveals unannounced and unanticipated outcomes for learning assistance (Bastedo and Gumport, 2003; Gumport and Bastedo, 2001; Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004). Analysis of learn­ing assistance policy in Massachusetts and New York confirmed that mission differentiation led institutions to terminate academic programs, eliminate remedial or developmental courses, and promote honors colleges. The result is stratification of academic program opportunity in the state. Prestigious and high-demand academic programs were offered at fewer institutions than before. For students, stratification encouraged higher admissions standards at upper-tier institutions. As a result, students had fewer choices for postsec­ondary education (Bastedo and Gumport, 2003; Gumport and Bastedo, 2001; Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004).

Another result was curtailment of developmental courses at upper-tier institutions in the state system (Bastedo and Gumport, 2003; Gumport and Bastedo, 2001). Developmental courses are often a key ingredient in providing access and success for historically underrepresented students. Bastedo and Gumport (2003) concluded that more intense analysis is warranted before sys­temic changes occur to avoid or at least predict major changes in the stratifi­cation of students’ opportunity to attend postsecondary education and the student support systems needed for their success.

As more historically underrepresented students from diverse racial and socioeconomic backgrounds seek admission, important learning assistance infrastructures are dismantled (Bastedo and Gumport, 2003). Mission differ­entiation assumes incorrectly that college aspirants are more academically pre­pared, and institutional leaders therefore conclude that developmental credit courses and other traditional learning assistance activities are not needed. Increasingly, public four-year institutions curtail or eliminate developmental courses with the expectation that students needing such instruction easily access them at a community college (Bastedo and Gumport, 2003; Gumport and Bastedo, 2001; Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004). This option requires a local community college. Most students do not have the financial resources or time to commute long distances for such classes. These students often are finan­cially disadvantaged and possess little free time. They cannot commute to mul­tiple institutions for courses while maintaining a job (or two) to pay for college and support a family. Based on a national dataset, students who attend mul­tiple institutions are less likely to graduate from college than those who begin at the intended degree-awarding institution (Adelman, 2006).

Mission differentiation raises a new set of questions and conflicts in post­secondary education (McPherson and Schapiro, 1999). Access to higher edu­cation shifts to access to what form of education and under what conditions. Differentiation among institutions increases stratification in society (Anderson, Daugherty, and Corrigan, 2005).

• Bastedo, M. N., and Gumport, P. J. (2003). Access to what? Mission differentiation and aca­demic stratification in U.S. public higher education. Higher Education, 46(3), 341–359.
• Gumport, P. J., and Bastedo, M. N. (2001). Academic stratification and endemic conflict: Remedial education policy at CUNY. Review of Higher Education, 24(4), 333–349.
• Slaughter, S., and Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Soliday, M. (2002). The politics of remediation: Institutional and student needs in higher educa­tion. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

More questions about moving developmental courses to community colleges

I have been thinking more about my previous blog posting about Ohio's decision to join a growing list of other states with eliminating developmental-level (they call them "remedial") courses at four year institutions. I posted that message to a listserv populated by people who either teach those courses or are in another role in the field of learning assistance. Some have commented community colleges may do a better job or the shift to the 2 year is good. As someone who spent his first decade in community colleges, I understand their point. We often prided ourselves as able to devote more energy and attention to teaching than our counterparts at four-year institutions who also had heavy responsibilities for reserach, grant acquistion, and publishing.

A few questions to consider about passively watching state and institutional policies lead in that direction.

1. Why can't four year schools do the job? Who has more resources?
2. Why would we not hold four year institutions to the same if not much higher expectations than two-year institutions? I seem to remember a quote from President Kennedy about the decision to place a person on the moon, "we don't do this because it is easy, but because it is hard."
3. Is this issue really about effectiveness of DE courses and the best venue for them, or just another opportunity for the four year colleges to shift financial burden to the often modestly funded community colleges so they can invest in better skyboxes at the stadiums and pay more outlandish salaries to the CEOs?
4. Is this issue about best place for DE courses to be offered or is this part of the historic movement to get "those" students off the campus so as not to contaminate the "best and brightest" and negatively impact their national rankings since the DE course takers may have lower ACT or SAT scores?
5. What happened to the REQUIREMENT that all land grant institutions be open for the children of state residents? I don't remember any exemptions passed by Congress on this historic federal legislation?
6. Why was it the norm for colleges in America in the 1700s through much of the last century to offer DE courses but now things have changed? Could it be the change in demographics for who needs one or more DE courses due to poorly funded public schools or returning to college?
7. Finally, whatever happened to choice in America? Why should our children and young people not have the opportunity to begin their education wherever they want, especially with the public four year colleges we support through our ever increasing tax dollars?

What do you think? Please post a reply below and lets keep up the conversation.

Kicking the can down the road: Ohio four-year institutions to ban remedial courses. Tells K-12 to fix the problem.

The Hamilton Journal-News reported by 2015 nearly all remedial (also called developmental level) courses would be eliminated at public four-year colleges in Ohio. "The nearly 40 percent of college freshmen in Ohio who are not ready for college-level work will take most of their remedial courses at community colleges under a statewide plan that dramatically changes how four-year schools provide instruction to those needing extra help." The newspaper reporter stated, "Ohio is following a national trend that critics say could limit access to the four-year degrees many need for high-paying jobs. Some fear it may discourage some students from attending college at all." State education leaders, at least those at the four-year institutions, said the long-term solution was for elementary and secondary education to do a better job. "By the end of 2012, university and college presidents must develop standards of what it means for a student to be “remediation free.”

Critics of the plan said “A lot of the students who need remediation are the same students who have already been marginalized by the system because they attended the worst high schools and are the least prepared,” said Tara L. Parker, a University of Massachusetts professor who studies developmental education. “There is no evidence community colleges do remedial courses any better or cheaper.”

The "Ohio Solution" is the same one that has been talked about since the mid 1970s with the "Nation At Risk" report. Elementary and secondary education must do a better job. Better articulation agreements need to be developed between secondary and postsecondary education. An endless number of education commissions made up of leaders from K-12 education, postsecondary education, corporate world, public advocacy groups, and the rest have been talking and experimenting for years to make "this problem" go away.

It appears the intense fiscal pressures facing public four-year colleges due to decreasing financial support from state government has renewed the desire to "save costs" and eliminate remedial or developmental-level courses. State officials claim offering these courses at the four-year public four-year colleges costs $130 million annually. While to the average taxpayer this seems considerable, what is the combined budget for these public colleges? National studies on this issue report the funds devoted to offering these courses is between one and five percent. Most faculty who teach these courses are part-time and paid considerably less than full-time and especially tenured faculty members at the same four-year institution.

The "Ohio Solution" has been implemented previously in many other places. They all share the same problems with achieving their stated goals:

1. Changing K-12 education curriculum does nothing to meet the needs of returning adults to education. While their exit from high school might have given them adequate skills for immediate entry to college, the long period out of school has led to atrophy of their skills and need for basic level instruction to bring them back to college-readiness.
2. Even if a school district wanted to change its curriculum, if it has less economic resources, how can it be expected to do the same level of quality as the better-funded suburban schools?
3. Changing K-12 education curriculum does nothing for the students who are not enrolled in rigorous college-bound curriculum. Some students and their parents have other future plans that initially do not include college. Maybe they plan to begin a family. Maybe attend a trade school or continue in the family business. Do we want to only have one track choice for students in high school?
4. Changing K-12 education curriculum does nothing for the students who do not fully focus on their classes, read their textbooks with great intensity, and complete all homework to perfection. If everyone earned A's in their classes, achieved to highest level of proficiency with all high risks tests, and in general, were "on task" all the time, they might not need the developmental-level courses. Assuming that they immediately enter postsecondary education immediately after successful completion of high school. With skyrocketing tuition costs, family members out of work or working low-wage jobs, and difficulty for high-school students to earn much at part-time jobs that now are sought by the out-of-work adults, it is not so easy to immediately attend college. Some have to earn some money first.

A wise person once said, "complex problems require complex solutions." The "Ohio Solution" fails on this account.

David Arendale, Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Jandris Center for Innovative Higher Education, University of Minnesota. Post comments to this blog or contact the author directly at arendale@umn.edu

It is More than Just the Money: More Challenges for "Low-Income" Students

In a recent blog posting from "College Bound", they reported some familiar statistics, 84 percent of high-income students enroll in college in the fall after high school, just 54 percent of those from low-income families go on to college, according to 2009 National Center for Education Statistics data. Poor students go to college at lower rates than wealthy students did 30 years ago. By age 24, young adults from high-income families are 10 times more likely to earn a bachelor's degree than those from low-income households. The authors asked, "What changes should be made to improve the landscape?"

The logical response is that it mostly about more financial aid (more grants than loans). That diverts from the bigger issue of lacking social capital for these low-income students. Probing further would reveal that a larger percentage of these "low-income" students are first-generation college, students of color, attended rural or urban school districts, and a variety of other factors. The answer to the question "what changes should be made...?" leads to a larger critique of higher education beyond just making some more money available. What changes does higher education institutions need to make to become more welcoming learning environments rather than focusing on the "deficits" of money. All institutions need to have a welcoming and supportive environment: trade school, community college, four-year liberal arts, and research-intensive universities.

Questions to ask of all institutions include:

• What sorts of faculty development programs do they have that provide comprehensive and ongoing efforts to enable them to embed best practices of Universal Instructional Design into their courses? How are they building in academic supports in the class rather than just passing them off to someone else?


• How high of a priority has the institution placed on raising more funds for grants targeted for students from low SES backgrounds? Are these funds keeping up with the dramatic increases in tuition and other costs associated with college?


• How comprehensive are learning assistance activities for students? Are these provided through both credit and noncredit venues? Are exit competencies in developmental-level courses articulated with entry level expectations for college-level courses that they take next? What efforts are being made to take academic-term length developmental-level courses and turn them into a series of modules that can be taken independent of one another to quicken time for completion and less use of Pell grant money to pay for the tuition?

This is just scratching the surface of the issue for what are the challenges for "low-income" students. It is not just about the money.

[Click here to read entire entry from the College Bound blog.]

Illinois Establishes Performance-Based Funding for Colleges

Governor Pat Quinn of Illinois signed a bill establishing performance-based measures to determine funding for public universities, community colleges and other state education agencies. Metrics such as student success in degree and certificate completion will be developed to influence a portion of state funding for higher education institutions.This matches our approach this year to budget for results for all appropriations in the Illinois Senate and extends it to Illinois universities," Maloney said. "Officials from WIU and other state institutions have been involved in setting the parameters for our initial measures. This has been a priority for me as Chairman of the Senate Higher Education Committee, and the opportunity to improve academic results and ensure funds are spent most efficiently make it one of the most important bills passed this year.House Bill 1503 will take effect in 2013 and begin with metrics to affect a small percentage of funding that would increase over time. Allocations would be based on academic milestones, retention, and time to completion. Statistics on students who are academically or financially at-risk, first-generation students, low-income students, and those traditionally underrepresented in higher education will also be measured to affect funding. [Click to read the entire press release.]

This provides a great opportunity for leaders in college access and student success programs to highlight their activities, approaches, and services increasing positive outcomes for students. Colleges in Illinois will be redoubling their efforts to increase access and college completion. The answers can come from their own college TRIO, learning assistance, and developmental education programs. They have solutions that could be scaled up for wider implementation.

Economics Curtailing Access at Public Universities

The headline of this blog posting is no surprise. At Berkeley they are reducing access for economically-disadvantaged students (which require institutional financial aid) and replacing them with out-of-state or out-of-country students who pay full tuition plus for being out-of-state. The article reported the dramatic change that occurred within a single year.

On one hand we have the U.S. President and the Lumina Fundation (among others) calling for a dramatic rise in college graduation rates needed for workforce needs of society and better lives for the college graduates. On the other hand, the financial support for public institutions has dramatically shrunk with little hope for reversal. The institutions are caught inbetween. They are operating with a "zero sum" financial model. To survive, the institutions replace students with financial need with those that have wealth to infuse. How long until we admit the truth, access to higher education requires an investment. Students are willing to invest their lives. Can't we invest more money for their and our collective futures.

Compounding this issue is that more institutions do not have classroom capacity for the increasing number of students that want to attend college. Another building boom is needed to increase the physical capacity of current institutions and probably to add more campuses. Distance learning does not work for everyone as an effective pedagogy, and besides, not everyone has the technology at home nor the finances for high-speed cable. 

It is a good thing that more students want to attend college. We have a collective responsibility to support them, especially those that are historically-underrepresented and economically-disadvantaged.

July 15, 2010, 12:48 PM ET U.C. Berkeley and the Access Mission of Public Universities, By Richard Kahlenberg, Chronicle of Higher Education.

The latest news involving the University of California—“Berkeley Sees Admission of Latino Students Drop and Nonresidents Jump”—pits two groups, Hispanic students and non-Californians. But of course what’s really going on is a struggle over money, economic class and the question of how dedicated public universities will be to their special mission of promoting social mobility. U.C. Berkeley is cash starved, and one way to raise money is to bring in more wealthy out-of-state students, who pay $22,000 more in fees than resident students. Berkeley didn’t make its change slowly—it more than doubled the proportion of out-of-state students in the freshman class in a single year, from 11% to 23%. And it did so with the full awareness that minority students would suffer. The drop in Latino admissions was 12%. (The data published by the U.C. system addressed changes in racial and ethnic breakdown but not income.) Berkeley has a couple of arguments in its defense. Among top colleges, it has long shouldered more than its fair share on the economic diversity front. In 2007, according to an Education Trust report, 33.0 % of Berkeley students received Pell Grants. By comparison, other leading public universities had Pell grant rates that were substantially lower, including the University of Virginia (9.5%), the University of Michigan Ann Arbor (13.4%), and the University of North Carolina, Chapel-Hill (15.3%). Furthermore, Berkeley admits fewer out-of-state students than other leading institutions. Michigan and Virginia, for example routinely admit more than 30% of students from out of state. Some have noted that the big increase in non-Californian freshman may backfire politically, fueling parochial anger from state taxpayers and further reducing the public support for the U.C. system. But this debate goes beyond politics to fundamental questions about the special role of public universities in American society. As scholar Gary Berg notes in new book, Low-Income Students and the Perpetuation of Inequality: Higher Education in America, today most private universities “serve a higher percentage of students from low-income families” than do public universities, undermining the “special responsibility” of public institutions of higher education to promote access. Some will argue that in tough economic times, public universities have no choice but to make financial decisions that hurt low-income students. This sounds plausible, but what, then, is the excuse for the major decline of academically qualified low-income high school graduates at public and private four-year institutions in more financially flush years? According to a recent report of the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, 54% of such students enrolled in four-year colleges in 1992, but by 2004, only 40% did. U.C. Berkeley has been long been the poster child for promoting both academic excellence and economic diversity—a worthy outlier, defending the particular mission of public universities. Its special status makes the recent retreat especially poignant.

Too Many Students Trapped in the Blender of Developmental-Level Courses

Following is a report from City College (SF, CA) about the enormous time and resources spent by students with completing years of developmental-level course sequences before enrollment in college-level courses. Much of the students' Pell Grants will have been exhausted by the time the prerequisite course sequences are completed. It is no surprise of the dismal college graduation rates. Studies consistently report the number one reason for college drop outs is financial. Few investigate WHY the students are having the financial problems. It is easy to assume that it is simply "the economy" and pass it off as unavoidable. The following report identifies a courageous college trustee that weathers the wrath of the faculty when he proposes shortening the sequence to A YEAR rather than nearly TWO YEARS of prerequisite developmental-level courses.

The story at City College is not unusal. There are other college, too many, that also have extensive developmental-level course sequences. At some institutions, there are SEVEN levels of developmental Enlish or reading courses to complete. Is is a surprise that students drop out. They come to college with hopes and dreams of a college degree leading to a meaingful career with decent pay and stability. Instead, they are trapped by institutional policies and antiquated thinking by administrators and teachers using models from the 1950s for students living in the 21st century.

So what's to do? Here are several action steps:

1. Continue the conversations, coordinations, and articulations between high school exit competencies and entrance skills needed for local colleges that receive many of those high-school graduates. Many college systems are doing this already, but more work is needed.
2. Limit the developmental-level course sequence to no more than two semesters. The levels of these courses should be limited to two, maybe three.
3. Provide intense summer learning experiences for students in need of developmental-level course work to increase their academic skills.
4. Provide better assessment of student acadmeic skills and offer learning modules targeted for specific weak areas rather than requiring everyone to enroll in the same academic term-length course. Not all students need the same set of learnign modules within a course. Uncouple the course and create learning modules.
5. For students with extremely low academic skills in reading, math, and English, experiment with partnerships with local GED centers. This provides a low cost alternative to chewing up the Pell grant funds of the college students in academic term length developmental level courses.
6. Think outside the box. The current system is broken and we can not continue to waste another generation of students and their precious lives. They deserve better than this from us.

At City College, a Battle Over Remedial Classes for English and Math. By CAROL POGASH
At City College of San Francisco, one of the country's largest public universities, thousands of struggling students pour into remedial English and math classes - and then the vast majority disappear, never to receive a college degree.

When Steve Ngo, a 33-year-old college trustee, learned that many minority students, among others, faced two-and-a-half years, or five semesters, of remedial English classes and a year and a half of math at the two-year college, he was shocked into action. His campaign for a one-year sequence of remedial courses ignited a campus furor, with students and a few trustees on one side and faculty members, irate about the intrusion of trustees on academic turf, on the other.

Mr. Ngo's less-than-collegial campaign was expected to prevail. On Thursday night, Don Q. Griffin, the college's chancellor, was to present a proposal for a shortened remedial curriculum, designed to get students into college-level courses more quickly.

While the battle - which Hal Huntsman, the former president of the Academic Senate, likened to a civil war - was about trustees' dictating policies to professors, everyone agreed that the achievement gap, with blacks and Latinos on one side and whites and most Asians on the other, needed fixing.
Some 90 percent of new C.C.S.F. students who take the placement test are unprepared for introductory English 1A; 70 percent are not ready for basic math. There are more remedial math and English classes at the school than college-level classes, the chancellor said.