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Becky Hirta’s recent post about grades got me thinking. My college doesn’t give ‘plus’ or ‘minus’ semester grades — you can get a B, but not a B-plus or a B-minus. The topic comes up for discussion about once a year.

The argument for pluses and minuses is basically that they offer greater precision. There’s some distance between a B-plus and a B-minus, but in our system, that difference is erased. By the same token, if a student is on the border between two letters, there’s more at stake in the decision which way to go.

The argument against, as near as I can tell, is based on false precision. The greater the number of gradations, the harder it is to get it just right. There’s also the persistent ambiguity of the C-minus.

Since this argument is raring up for its annual go-round on campus, I’d like to get my readers’ perspectives. Does it make sense to go with pluses and minuses, or are we better off sticking with blunt, whole letters?

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My cc, like most community colleges and many lower-tier four-year colleges, doesn’t have dorms. Since it’s located in suburbia, public transportation options are extremely limited and not very good. So most students, and almost all employees, drive. (A select few ride one of the rare buses.) We even refer to it as a commuter college.

Parking is an issue, which has always been true at every college known to man. But we’ve dealt with that forever, and have reached a sort of tolerable detente on it. I still think that anything tall and opaque (i.e. SUV’s) should be segregated into a different lot, so the rest of us can actually see what’s coming when we try to back out of our spaces, but that’s another issue.

Now oil is coming close to $100 a barrel, which, sooner or later, is likely to trickle down to gasoline prices. (As I mentioned recently, I’m surprised that it really hasn’t yet. But it will.) Some of that price runup is likely due to the monumental, world-historical idiocy of the Bush administration’s foreign and fiscal policies, and may be remedied somewhat when we elect somebody worthy. But some of it, I think, is likely due to a combination of rising world demand for oil — especially in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) — - and the much-slower pace of new discoveries. Whether oil came from dinosaurs or lava or both, we’re pumping it faster than the planet is making it. Even a President who understands the concepts of “wars of choice” and “balanced budgets” and “peace dividend” will have her work cut out for her.

In other words, even if we as a country stop sabotaging ourselves, we as a college face a fundamental, long-term challenge to our business model. We’re built on cars.

We cater to students who have to work part-time at low-paying jobs to get through school. As the low-tuition option, we attract the folks to whom low tuition is the most salient. Transportation is a major cost for our students. They often drive older cars of suspect
reliability, and find themselves at the mercy of whatever repairs need to be made. Their jobs pay crap, and car insurance — especially for young males — is staggeringly expensive.* If the price of gas continues to climb substantially, eventually I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of these students cut back, or drop out entirely.

Online instruction has something to be said for it in this respect,
since the cost advantage of telecommuting (as opposed to standard commuting) only climbs as the price of gas climbs. But very few students take all-online schedules; most use an online class or two as part of their mix, to make the job-school juggle easier. They’re still driving to campus three or four days a week.

Unless there’s a really dramatic embrace of all-online education, I suspect that the transportation-cost gains from this will be minor. (Theoretically, we could also move everything to a half-online, half-classroom “hybrid” format, and run all the classroom classes, say, on Mondays and Tuesdays. But at this point, students avoid hybrid classes like the plague.)

There’s also the question of the relevance of geographically defined
service areas to online education. Community colleges have specific geographic areas they’re designed to serve, which makes sense if you assume that everybody drives to campus. But if you can log on from anywhere, how much sense does a geographic distinction make? If we embrace a more thoroughgoing online approach, I’d expect to see the whole concept of “service areas” start to fade. The political implications are staggering.

Dorms are the classic solution. Park everybody on campus, let them walk to class, and cars become irrelevant. At Snooty Liberal Arts College, I didn’t have a car at all for all four years.

But that only works when the college is either highly urban, or extremely wealthy. In a setting in which most students work off-campus for money, parking them in dorms doesn’t really solve the problem. Instead of being stranded off-campus, they’d be stranded on-campus.

Dorms also bring with them the infrastructure needs, and student-life issues, that drive up the costs of four-year schools. Keep students stuck on campus, and they’ll start demanding climbing walls and football teams and the rest of it; the costs will follow.

Public transportation will not be a viable large-scale alternative in suburbia for the foreseeable future. The travel patterns just aren’t
linear enough.

To the extent that transportation costs are factored into financial aid awards, we may be able to offset a very small amount of the impact. But even that money has to come from somewhere.

Am I missing the obvious? Or are we staring down the barrel of a
serious long-term problem?

*Every so often, somebody proposes removing “liability” insurance from individual drivers and tacking it onto gasoline as a tax. This strikes me as absolutely brilliant, since it moves insurance from a fixed cost to a variable one. Taking the bus half the time would reduce your insurance cost by half; right now, it reduces it not at all. As my economist friends like to say, you have to get the incentives right.

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Apparently, there’s a candy now called “Nerds.” The Boy got some in his Halloween loot, and opened the box after dinner last night.

The following ensued.

TB: NERDS!

The Wife: (chuckle)

DD: Ouch.

TB: I like nerds!

The Wife and DD: (chuckle)

TB: Mmm. Nerds are sweet.

TW/DD: (snarfle)

(TB spills some.)

TB: Uh-oh! There’s a nerd by The Girl!

TW: There certainly is.

DD: Harumph.

TW: How do you feel about that, DD?

DD: Exposed. I’ve been outed.

TB: Huh?

DD: Do you know what a nerd is?

TB: No.

DD: Good.

TW: Someday, you’ll hear that there’s a nerd by TG.

DD: She could do a lot worse.

TW (smiling wryly): Mmm-hmm...

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A new correspondent writes:

So here it is: I teach (adjunct) Anthropology and Cultural “Survey” at a local art college that awards a BA in Visual Communication. I taught Anthro. last semester, and it was well received by both students and faculty (they asked me back.) We have a new “academic advisor", who has decided that all syllabi will follow his “meta-chart", including course content, goals, learning objectives. The problem is ... there is no Anthro. committee or other faculty. This advisor teaches Design, and has never taken an Anthro class in his life.

The meta-chart, which I am expected to use verbatum (sic) has verbage in it that is not only unprofessional (ie. misuse of anthro terms, etc.), but inaccurate, and (truth be told) badly written. I cannot in good conscience ... or professional ethic ... use this stuff.

Briefly: I’ve been in this business for over 30 years. I have excellent degrees from (prestigious places). In other words, I’ve been around the academic block.

I have tried the diplomatic approach. So, I guess my question is..what would you do?

I feel your pain. I’ve recently been on a committee on which chemists have been opining about the content of history courses and vice versa. It ain’t pretty.

I’d start by getting a sense of just how much clout this guy has, and just how much of what he suggests is actually binding. At PU, for example, faculty were mandated to include several different categories on syllabi, including such oddities as “Keys for Success.” However, what we put in those categories was largely up to us. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s something similar going on here, with mandated elements and discretionary elements mushed together in a well-meaning, if embarrassing, ’sample.’

One of the dirty little secrets of higher ed, as I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, is that words like “mandatory” have different meanings. In some cases, “mandatory” means just what it means in any other context. Sometimes, it’s more of an opening bid, like a speed limit — post 55 in hopes that most people won’t go over 70. Sometimes it’s honored in the breach, like when professors claim that attendance is mandatory but don’t take attendance or give quizzes.

Sadly, there are also some folks out there who fundamentally misunderstand the quantitative turn, and mistake micromanagement for rigor. These are the folks who believe that there’s no whole that can’t be made greater by itemizing every little part. It’s murder by numbers, like trying to analyze a joke. (For example, I’ve seen course outlines in which time allocations per topic show up as single percentage points. Absurd, yet distressingly common.) It sounds like your instructional designer is one of those. (For my money, the proper use of the quantitative turn is to look at major outputs, not minor inputs. Breaking down the minor inputs into smaller and smaller pieces is, at best, a distraction.)

In the short run, I’d try to gauge the size of the interstices. Does this guy actually have the full support of the people who actually hire you, or is he bluffing? Is there actually an expectation that you’ll use every single word, or was he just trying to give examples of what the categories might look like? (That’s my guess, but I could be wrong.) What would happen if you ignored the input? Does anybody check?

Worst case, your college is actually run by morons. If that’s the case, then you can either work for morons, or leave.

Good luck!

Wise and worldly readers — have you found a productive way around something like this?

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

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An occasional correspondent writes:

After many years as a full-time faculty member at a community college, I have decided to apply for tenure track positions at four-year colleges. My question is about letters of recommendation. Who should I ask for letters? For several reasons, I do not want my current dean to know that I am “on the market,” which means I can’t ask him for a letter of recommendation. Are letters from faculty colleagues ok? What about former students? What are hiring committees looking for in letters of recommendation?

I’ve gone on record as opposing letters of recommendation generally. And as the recent blogfire over at Dr. Crazy’s has demonstrated, there are still plenty of folks out there who are willing to punish people
for looking. It’s perverse, and thoughtless, and petty, but there it is.

In my experience with searches, letters never helped anybody. They hurt a few. The arms race of effusive praise has rendered them pretty much useless, except when you can read between the lines of faint praise. (There may be a limited exception to this for spanking-new Ph.D.’s emerging from the tutelage of Monster Superstar. At cc’s, that’s generally much irrelevant.) There’s no training in how to write letters of recommendation, and there aren’t any generally accepted industry standards (other than brevity). Fear of litigation — whether founded or unfounded — has fostered a bias toward leaving out anything distinctive. Inadvertent cultural bias can creep in easily, as in the case of international applicants coming from traditions in which praise is less effusive.

Worse, anybody beyond the “first real job” stage is placed in a compromising position by asking for them. At least the newly phudded are supposed to be looking. Once you’ve landed somewhere, though, asking for letters involves letting it be known that you are looking, which many people are more than willing to punish.

From this end of the desk, I’ve found more value in simply asking for a list of three references and contact information, and stipulating that they won’t be contacted without the candidate’s permission. Once the search committee has picked the top one or two people, then I contact those references to see if there are any red flags. (Again, praise is deeply discounted, but any criticism is taken very seriously.) So the references have no bearing until the very end, and then, only if something unexpected, bad, and relevant pops up. And the candidate doesn’t have to give anybody a heads-up until the possibility of an offer materializing is substantial.

All of that said, some places continue — for whatever reason — to ask for actual letters.

I’d personally shy away from using former students as references. If you have some sort of useful statistical breakdown of student evaluations, and they’re both comprehensible and flattering, go ahead and use that. But I’d assume that anybody with significant teaching experience has at least one student who liked her, so it would strike me as odd if you had to prove it.

You don’t mention the “tier” of four-year college to which you’re applying, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you ran into some snobbery about community colleges. Anything you could do to defuse that would be likely to help. Have you collaborated on projects with anybody at a four-year school? To the extent that you can do it, recruiting some writers from your “target tier” or higher might help. Departmental
colleagues are obviously great, but only if you can trust their discretion and/or the enlightened attitude on your campus. If you get the impression that anything you ask for can and will be used against
you later, you might want to look someplace else.

I suspect that my wise and worldly readers have much to add on this one, so I’ll throw it open. Wise and worldly readers: in my correspondent’s shoes, who would you ask to write? And is there actually an argument for letters of recommendation, or should they be consigned to the dustbin of history?

Good luck!

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

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From the “Sometimes I Get Tired of Being Right” department: a few days ago I posted “How Chrysler stays in business is a complete mystery to me.” Yesterday, Chrysler announced another RIF of 12,000 jobs. Honestly, I wouldn’t have minded being wrong on that one.

Has anybody else noticed that the price of oil has doubled in the last year, but the price of gasoline hasn’t changed much? You can “summer driving season” all you want, it still doesn’t make sense. My hunch — and I really don’t understand the situation well enough to say — is that we’re in for some truly nasty gasoline price increases by this time next year. (Either that, or the price of oil is about to drop like a stone. I consider that unlikely.) I just can’t make the math work any other way.

On the bright side, judging by what The Boy and The Girl harvested in their trick-or-treating this year, people are getting a little smarter about halloween candy. More chocolate-based stuff, fewer Sugar Daddies and Sweet Tarts. This is all to the good. I’m old enough to remember the aged hippies of the ’70s giving out those little boxes of raisins, and saying that they’re “nature’s candy.” Uh, no. That’s why we had to invent “Raisinets.” It’s all about the chocolate.

If there’s anything sweeter, or more hope-inspiring, than the sight of The Boy (as a basketball player) and his girlfriend (as Minnie Mouse) contentedly holding hands while they cross the street, well, I haven’t seen it.

Helpful photographic hint: if you’re trying to get a bunch of 3 and 6 year olds to smile, just have them say “TB’s Dad Smells Like Cheeeeeese!” They’ll laugh for a solid five minutes.

One of the unexpected consolations of middle age: at a certain point, hair loss finally defeats The Indomitable Cowlick. A little “middle ground” might have been nice...

The new car has a dashboard light that flashes — by design — whenever the ignition is off. This includes when the key is not in the ignition. It seems to me that if the key isn’t in the ignition, I could default to the assumption that the car is, in fact, off. “Warning: The Car Is Not Hotwired.” Okaaaay...

Sometimes I think my job should be renamed something like Calmer. For whatever reason, we have a fair number of otherwise-wonderful people here who can get a little tightly wound. When something goes askew you can just see the steam come out of their ears. This week I’ve had several occasions on which my primary value-add was helping some high performing but steaming people to exhale a bit, collect their thoughts, and see that the situation is actually not so bad. (Not perfect, but not so bad.) I don’t know if this is more a reflection on my personality or the personalities around me, but it happened at my last employer, too. It’s a fine line between “dean” and “shock absorber.” If “metabolism” can be defined as “the process of turning food into poop,” then my style of management can be defined as “the process of turning stress into clarity.”

One of the best parts of deaning is observing classes. When a class goes really well, it’s a joy to behold. I’ve seen several winners recently, and it’s hard to convey just how gratifying that is. Some professors who are relatively quiet outside of class absolutely light up when they get in front of a group. It’s really a privilege to be able to see that.

The Wife and I are actually going to our local high school’s homecoming game tonight! This will be my first high school homecoming game since the Reagan administration. The cool thing about it this time is that I can go home with my date, and nobody can say boo about it...

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Careful readers will notice that, from time to time, I take the occasional potshot at some of the tenured types.

Today, in the interest of being fair and balanced, I frag some of my administrative colleagues. Specifically, those who insist on “retreats.”

For those mercifully untouched by retreats, they’re sort of like reeducation camps, except with air conditioning and flip charts.

The theory behind retreats, as near as I can figure, is that it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees when you’re at work, since you’re mired in the quotidian muck. So by moving everybody off-site, hiring someone from the outside with Dynamic People Skills and absolutely no familiarity with the reality of the particular workplace, and making people tape oversize sheets of butcher paper on the wall, we can channel the spirit of Thoreau, except for all the nonconformity.

Proprietary U was a big believer in retreats, but it was also legendarily cheap. So the retreats happened at the low-end chain hotel a half mile away, often on Saturday mornings when the conference room rates were cheaper. Yes, attendance was mandatory.

They were spectacularly bad. The living envied the dead.

They were often led by some Muckety-Muck from Home Office, which, as near as we could tell, was on Pluto. (This was back when Pluto was still recognized for being a planet.) Although this was several years ago now, I can still remember a particularly representative exchange I had with a Muckety-Muck early in my deaning days:

MM: Of course, the way we’ll really improve student success rates is through hiring better faculty.

DD: So you’re lifting the hiring freeze?

Weirdly, I was considered the inappropriate one. Apparently, there’s a taboo against introducing Objective F-ing Reality at a retreat.

(One of my finest moments at PU came at the end of a daylong on-campus Motivational Speaker Event, when my boss caught me in my office, skipping the Rope Exercise. (Don’t ask.) He asked what I was doing in my office. I told him that since I got my doctorate, I don’t do Rope Exercises. He knew me well enough at that point to drop it.)

As hellish as retreats are in a corporate setting, they’re that much worse in higher ed.

For all their foibles, which I’ve noted from time to time, tenured faculty are — on the whole — intelligent, independent-minded sorts. That comes with costs — God knows, that comes with costs — but it’s also essential to what they do. As much as I resent the sense of entitlement that some of them display about the most ridiculous things, like actually being asked for receipts for travel reimbursement, I also don’t want to staff classes with cubicle drones. As scary as self-styled “free agents” are, the ones who actually drink the Kool-Aid are that much scarier.

Dr. Crazy recently started a blogfire with a post about looking for another job when you already have one. Some trolls took offense, claiming that in a tight job market, it’s selfish for the “haves” not to content themselves with their lot. But she was right, and I’d be afraid of anyone who didn’t understand why. These are jobs. That’s all they are. They involve “doing work” in exchange for “pay and benefits.”

(And yes, I get hostile at the ones who take the pay and benefits, but don’t do the work.) They do not involve pledging your immortal soul, or suspending your better judgment, or altering your personality according to what some motivational speaker with Dynamic People Skills says.

That’s overreaching, and it’s insulting.

The workplace isn’t a family, or a cult, and it shouldn’t be. (Arlie
Hochschild has written a great book on this, called The Time Bind.) If I want my faculty to do their best work, I need to respect the fact that different people have different work styles. If the results are good, and have been achieved in ethical ways, who am I to complain that I wouldn’t have done it that way?

My plea to administrators everywhere: Faculty are already highly
educated. They don’t need to be re-educated. Do what needs to be done to forestall liability, but beyond that, back the hell off. Judge the results of their performance rigorously, but let them perform — within ethical limits — according to their own styles and personalities.

Don’t make Saturday morning meetings mandatory for anybody, ever. And don’t ever, for any reason, pretend that Rope Exercises have anything to do with anything.

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IHE’s story yesterday about a kerfuffle over Gen Ed reforms at the University of Kentucky convinced me that the issues are the same everywhere.

For those outside higher ed, “general education” refers to the classes that students have to take for graduation, but that don’t count towards their major. For example, even chemistry majors have to take English composition, and even art majors have to take math. The idea is that anybody with a college degree should have the background of an educated person. It’s what separates education from training.

Reforming Gen Ed is one of the hardest things to get done, bureaucratically. It’s obviously important, since every matriculated student is affected. But it flies in the face of almost every organizing principle we have. A few obstacles, just off the top of my head:

1. Different configurations of Gen Ed requirements at the various 4-year schools to which our grads transfer. They love to nitpick, as a way to deny transfer credits, so we have to play it conservative here. No interdisciplinary freshman seminars, for example, since transfer courses have to fit neatly into disciplinary boxes.

2. Conflicting and/or ambiguous statewide requirements. These are legion, and uniquely demoralizing.

3. The widely held doctrine of “nullification.” I’ve written on this before.

4. Interdepartmental turf battles. Credits added to one category have to come from another, since the overall number of credits we can include in a degree are capped. So if we add a requirement in social science, we have to take one away from, say, humanities. Anybody who believes in the purity of faculty governance is invited to observe those meetings. They make town hall discussions over the location of a new halfway house seem civil.

5. Honestly and deeply held conflicting beliefs about what an educated person should know and/or should be able to do. These are often of long standing, and in direct conflict with the realities of 1-4.

6. Requirements set by ’special’ licensing/accrediting agencies in specific fields (i.e., Nursing).

7. Different degree ‘types’ (AA;AS;AAS;AFA, etc.), and the extent to which degrees designed for one purpose gradually morph into different purposes over the years ("career” degrees with high rates of transfer; “transfer” degrees that are often terminal).

Since my state doesn’t have a tightly integrated system, different colleges have adopted different approaches over the years. Worse, it’s not always clear when ‘nullification’ is actually an option, and when local control has to take a back seat to directives from the outside.

Internally, the faculty are divided into academic departments. Departmental ownership of program curricula works fairly well when it comes to the specialized courses in a discipline, but it doesn’t work well with the gen ed part, since that crosses boundaries. In fact, there’s no one arbiter of gen ed to adjudicate disputes, so decisions are often made based on interest-group politics.

Repeat that cycle a few times, and the veterans of those battles will do everything in their power to resist bringing up the subject again. The wounds are barely healed from the last round, even if the last round was decades ago.

(Weirdly, in retrospect, this structural flaw didn’t exist at Proprietary U. There, there was a single Gen Ed department, which owned the Gen Ed part of all the other curricula. At the time, I didn’t realize how unusual that was. While there were certainly issues, the jurisdictional lines in this sense were clear.)

The shame of it is that Gen Ed is, in many ways, the most important part of what we do. It’s what students in disparate programs have in common, and it’s where (we hope) students hone some of the “softer” skills that will serve them long after their field-specific training has become obsolete, or has been superseded by subsequent, higher-level training. (I used to tell my techies at PU that their technical skills would get them hired, but their communication skills would get them promoted.) This is the stuff that employers constantly complain is lacking in their new hires. (They don’t complain enough to hire English majors and give them the technical training, but they complain nevertheless.) Critical thinking, clear writing, and effective speaking don’t go out of style.

I’m just struck at how hard it is to get at our central mission, given the way we’re organized.

Wise and worldly readers — has your college found an effective and honest way to deal with changes to its Gen Ed?

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Last week, car shopping went abruptly from “I should think about that” to “I need to do this right now,” so I’ve spent way too much time lately at dealerships and on car websites.

Apparently, someone passed a law saying that all car salespeople must be male. Over the past week, I’ve dealt with I don’t know how many salespeople, and they’ve been a multiracial, multiethnic group of young men. The demographics are pretty much the same as a minor league baseball team. I have no explanation for this.

I thought car shopping would be easy enough. I had my Consumer Reports at the ready, and I knew the parameters I had in mind. Cost is a real issue, given that the whole family is on one academic paycheck, so the cooler, more expensive cars were out of the question. Reliability is key, as is mileage; I consider money spent on gas or repairs to be money wasted. I don’t do SUV’s. And most important of all, it had to have enough headroom in the
backseat to accommodate tall children. Still, I figured, with car companies desperate for customers, how hard could it possibly be?

Yuck yuck yuck.

I didn’t get the memo, but it seems that, at some point, the car companies collectively decided that anybody who wants rear seat headroom should just buy an SUV or minivan and be done with it. Cars — by which I mean, ” not trucks” — have incredibly short back seats these days. It seems that the trend of higher bodies has collided with the trend of aerodynamic shapes to squeeze backseat headroom.

Honda Civic, Hyundai Elantra, Ford Fusion, Ford Focus, Mazda 3 — no backseat headroom in any of them.

The Honda Fit has headroom, but awful rear-seat crash test ratings, so I ruled that out, too.

The Scion xD has headroom, but it’s butt-ugly, gets terrible mileage, and has one of the shorter windshields I’ve ever seen — it’s like the thing is squinting. I sort of like “visibility.” I use it every single day. No, thanks.

I’ve had lousy luck with Toytoas — I’ve buried two of them — and Corollas just make me sad, so that was out. (The Prius was out of my price range, anyway.) And I won’t do Dodge or Chevy, just because I don’t enjoy spending time in repair shops. (How Chrysler stays in business is a complete mystery to me. A few years ago I rented a Sebring, and couldn’t believe the overall
crappiness. My brother in law bought a Dodge truck new three years ago. At 50,000 miles, the transmission went. His mechanic told him they’re notorious for that. Amazing. They’re like big American Yugos, without the charm.)

After burying two Toyotas bought used in my grad school days, each having consumed several years’ worth of repair shop intensive care, I have an allergy to the concept of buying “used.” There’s just something comforting in the concept of a warranty. I know that, say, a used Camry wouldn’t have been an unreasonable option, but I’m just not there psychologically. Twice
burned, real shy. Besides, with the two greatest kids in the world, I’d like the most current safety features I can get.

So, my latest in an ongoing series of hints I like to drop for the Big Three automakers: some of us have tall children, and don’t want SUV’s. Hint freakin’ hint. Produce something decent — reliable, safe, efficient, not-butt-ugly — and you’ll own this demographic.

Or you can keep producing unreliable, squat, poorly engineered pieces of crap, and try to make up the difference with union concessions. Your call.

Also, I’m fairly sure that equal opportunity laws apply to car salespeople. I’m just sayin’. I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not actually technically illegal to have women on your sales team. Whether it would help, I don’t know, but I’m guessing that the overall level of cluelessness might be a little less bad. ("I don’t know about antilock brakes, but check out the CD changer!") Worth a shot, anyway.

And then there’s Idiot Feature Creep. When did sunroofs become moonroofs? And why do about half the cars out there suddenly have them? I didn’t get that memo, either. Little known fact: when they put in a sun/moonroof, you lose about an inch of headroom. When there isn’t enough to start with, that’s a big deal. Clearly, this is a conspiracy of short people. They’re getting back at the rest of us for those high shelves at Barnes and Noble, or maybe that Randy Newman song.

So after all these years, and all this research, and all this looking, I’m back into the hatchback habit of my grad school years. Back to the egg. As The Wife puts it, I’m returning to my roots. All because the ()#%)# car companies haven’t grasped that some of us have tall kids.

Confidential to the Ford Motor Company: Seriously, are you guys even trying anymore?

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A new correspondent writes:

>Why do community colleges mail catalogs to everyone? It seems like a lot
>of expense for something that’s unlikely to generate a lot of new students.

This is a very live issue on my campus. It’s a tough one, because beliefs are held strongly, and almost entirely without evidence.

Most community colleges that I know of produce several different types of publications for public consumption. The most common are

1. Catalogs
2. Course Schedules
3. Flyers

Catalogs usually cover multiple years (two seems to be the local standard), and they include full course descriptions, every imaginable policy, requirements for every major, campus maps, and just about everything except the actual days and times that classes meet. Catalogs take a full year to produce, since they’re legally binding and remarkably comprehensive. That means, among other things, that they’re already partially obsolete the minute they arrive on campus, and become progressively more so over their run. (Most colleges run up-to-date versions of the catalog on their websites.)

Course schedules typically cover a single semester or season (in the case of the summer, which may contain multiple sessions). They don’t contain full course descriptions or major requirements, but they do include days, times, and locations of class meetings. There, too, the printed schedule is usually pretty buggy, and savvy students know that if they want the real information, they should look online. (This is also where that mysterious creature, Professor STAFF, can be found. It’s code for “adjunct.")

Flyers are usually supersized postcards announcing a single event (an open house, say) or a new program. Flyers are much cheaper to produce and mail, but necessarily light on content.

There’s a tension, really, between the need for marketing and the need for informing.

In classic conflict-avoidant fashion, we split the difference and mail the course schedule to every household in our service area, but only make the print catalog available on campus or by request. (Anybody can access it online.) The thinking is that the printing and shipping costs for that large
a catalog run would be prohibitive, and it would be silly to re-mail the same thing every semester for two years. But the course schedule is smaller and it changes every semester, so we use that as a de facto marketing tool.

Of course, if you look at them, you’ll notice that the catalog — which takes a little effort to find — is actually a much slicker marketing piece than the schedule, which is ugly, detailed, and everywhere.
My guess is that over time, we’ll move away from thick paper publications and bulk mailings, and more towards online information. It’s easier to update, the marginal cost of adding readers is close to zero, and the savings in printing and postage would be surprisingly substantial. I could envision a flyer each semester announcing that next semester’s course schedule is online, giving the web address, and leaving it at that. A postcard is much cheaper to print and mail than a course schedule is, and
much less likely to be riddled with errors.

We haven’t tried it yet, though, since there’s still no way of knowing what percentage of our target population won’t look online. I suspect the percentage is small and shrinking, but when you’re scraping for enrollment as it is, every little bit hurts. Given enough data, we could do a cost-benefit on it, but the cost of getting the data is itself prohibitive.

I’ll ask my readers. Wise and worldly readers — has your college abandoned the detailed mailings in favor of putting the catalog and schedule entirely online? If so, has it worked? Did anything happen that nobody anticipated?

Any real-world guidance you could offer would be much appreciated.

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

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