Today’s entry was kindly contributed by John Douglass, Gregg Thomson, and Chun-Mei Zhao of the Center for Studies in Higher Education, UC Berkeley. This fascinating contribution should be viewed in the context of some of our earlier postings on learning outcomes, including:

• ‘The OECD’s AHELO: a PISA for higher education?‘ (30 July 2010)
• ‘OECD launches first global assessment of higher education learning outcomes‘ (28 Jan 2010)
• ‘TUNING USA: Echoes and translations of the Bologna Process in the US higher education landscape‘ (26 Jan 2010)

as well as Scott Jaschik’s recent article ”Tuning’ History‘ in Inside Higher Ed (13 February 2012).

Today’s entry is a timely one given debates about the enhanced importance of assessing learning outcomes at a range of scales (from the intra-departmental right up to the global scale). In addition, please note that this entry is adopted from the article Douglass, J.A., Thomson, G., Zhao, C. ‘The Learning Outcomes Race: the Value of Self-Reported Gains in Large Research Universities, Higher Education, February 2012.

Responses, including guest entries, are most welcome!

Kris Olds

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It’s a clarion call. Ministries of education along with critics of higher education institutions want real proof of student “learning outcomes” that can help justify large national investments in their colleges and universities. How else to construct accountability regimes with real teeth? But where to find the one-size-fits-all test?

In the US, there is a vehicle that claims it can do this – the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) test. In its present form, the CLA is given to a relatively small sample group of students within an institution to supposedly “assess their abilities to think critically, reason analytically, solve problems and communicate clearly and cogently.” The aggregated and statistically derived results are then used as a means to judge the institution’s overall added value. In the words of the CLA’s creators, the resulting data can then “assist faculty, department chairs, school administrators and others interested in programmatic change to improve teaching and learning, particularly with respect to strengthening higher order skills.” But can it really do this?

The merit of the CLA as a true assessment of learning outcomes is, we dare say, debatable. In part, the arrival and success of the CLA is a story of markets. In essence, it is a successfully marketed product that is fulfilling a growing demand with few recognized competitors. As a result, the CLA is winning the “learning outcomes race,” essentially becoming the “gold standard” in the US.

But we worry that the CLA’s early success is potentially thwarting the development of other valuable and more nuanced alternatives – whether it be other types of standardized tests that attest to measuring the learning curve of students, or other approaches such as student portfolios, contextually designed surveys on student experience, and alumni feedback.

The search for the Holy Grail to measure learning gains started in the US, but the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) wants to take it global. Here we tell a bit of this story and raise serious questions regarding the validity of the CLA, this global quest, and suggest there are alternatives.

The OECD Enters the Market

In 2008, the OECD began a process to assess if it might develop a test for use internationally. A project emerged: the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) program would assess the feasibility of capturing learning outcomes valid across cultures and languages, and in part informed by the OECD’s success in developing the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) – a widely accepted survey of the knowledge and skills essential of students near the end of the compulsory education years.

The proclaimed objective of the AHELO on-going feasibility study is to determine whether an international assessment is “scientifically and practically possible.” To make this determination, the organizers developed a number of so-called study “strands.” One of the most important is the “Generic Strand,” which depends on the administration of a version of the CLA to gauge “generic skills” and competences of students at the beginning and close to the end of a bachelor’s degree program. This includes the desire to measure a student’s progression in “critical thinking, the ability to generate fresh ideas, and the practical application of theory,” along with “ease in written communication, leadership ability, and the ability to work in a group, etc.” OECD leaders claim the resulting data will be a tool for the following purposes:

• Universities will be able to assess and improve their teaching.
• Students will be able to make better choices in selecting institutions – assuming that the results are somehow made available publicly.
• Policy-makers will be assured that the considerable amounts spent on higher education are spent well.
• Employers will know better if the skills of the graduates entering the job market match their needs.

Between 10,000 and 30,000 students in more than 16 countries take part in the administration of the OECD’s version of the CLA. Full administration at approximately 10 universities in each country is scheduled for 2011 through December 2012.

AHELO’s project leaders admit the complexity of developing learning outcome measures, for example, how to account for cultural differences and the circumstances of students and their institutions? “The factors affecting higher education are woven so tightly together that they must first be teased apart before an accurate assessment can be made,” notes one AHELO publication.

By March 2010, and at a cost of €150,000 each, the ministries of education in Finland, Korea, Kuwait, Mexico, Norway and the United States agreed to commit a number of their universities to participate in the Generic Strand (i.e. the OECD version of the CLA) of the feasibility study. The State Higher Education Executive Officers – an American association of the directors of higher education coordinating and governing boards – is helping to coordinate the effort in the US. Four states have agreed to participate, including Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Missouri. A number of campuses of the Pennsylvania State University agreed to participate in the OECD’s version of the CLA with the goal of a spring 2012 administration.

However, the validity and value of CLA is very much in question and the debate over how to measure learning outcomes remains contentious. Many institutions, including most major US research universities, view with skepticism the methodology used by the CLA and its practical applications in what are large institutions, home to a great variety of disciplinary traditions.

The Validity of the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA)?

A product of the Council for Aid for Education (CAE), the CLA is a written test that focuses on critical thinking, analytic reasoning, written communication, and problem solving administered to small random samples of students, who write essays and memoranda in response to test material they have not previously seen.  The CAE is technically a non-profit, but has a financial stake in promoting the CLA has emerged as its primary product, much like the Educational Testing Services that hawks the SAT.

In the US, the standard administration of CLA involves a cross-sectional sample of approximately 100 first-year students and another 100 fourth-year seniors. It is necessary to keep the sample size small because scoring the narrative is labor intensive. With such a small sample size, there is no guarantee that a longitudinal approach in which the same students are tested will yield enough responses.

CLA proponents justify the cross-sectional approach because students in US colleges and universities often transfer or do not graduate in a four-year period. The cross-sectional design also has the convenience that results can be generated relatively quickly, without having to wait for a cohort to matriculate to their senior year.

Test results derived from these samples are used to represent an institution-wide measure of a university or college’s contribution (or value-added) to the development of its students’ generic cognitive competencies.  Based on these results, institutions can then be compared with one another on the basis of their relative value-added performance.

Proponents of the CLA test claim its value based on three principles:

• First, for accountability purposes, valid assessment of learning outcomes for students at an institution is only possible by rigorously controlling for the characteristics of those students at matriculation.
• Second, by using SAT scores as the control for initial student characteristics, it is possible to calculate the value-added performance of the institution, which is a statistically derived score indicating how the institution fares against what it is expected in terms of student learning. This is done by comparing two value-added scores: one is the actual score, which is the existent difference between freshman and senior CLA test performance; and the other is the predicted score, which is the statistically yielded freshman and senior difference based on student characteristics at entry.
• Third, this relative performance, i.e., the discrepancy between the actual and predicted value-added scores, can in turn be compared to the relative performance achieved at other institutions. Hence the CLA test has accomplished a critical feat in the learning outcomes pursuit: it produces a statistically derived score that is simple and “objective” and that can be used to compare and even rank institutions on how well a college is performing in terms of student learning.

Prominent higher education researchers have challenged the validity of the CLA test on a number of grounds. For one, the CLA and the SAT are so highly correlated. The amount of variance in student learning outcomes after controlling for SAT scores is incredibly small. Most institutions’ value-added will simply be in the expected range and indistinguishable from each other. Hence, why bother with the CLA.

The CLA results are also sample-dependent. Specifically, there is a large array of uncontrollable variables related to student motivation to participate in and do well on the test. Students who take CLA are volunteers, and their results have no bearing on their academic careers. How to motivate students to sit through the entire time allotted for essay writing and to take seriously their chore? Some institutions provide extra-credit for taking the test, or provide rewards for its completion. At the same time, self-selection bias may be considerable. On the other hand, there are concerns that institutions may try to game the test by selecting high achievement senior year students. High stakes testing is always subject to gaming. There is no way to avoid institutions cherry-picking – purposefully selecting students who will help drive up learning gain scores.

Other criticisms center on the assumption that the CLA has fashioned a test of agreed-upon generic cognitive skills that is equally relevant to all students. But recent findings suggest that CLA results are, to some extent, discipline-specific. As noted, because of the cost and difficulty of evaluating individual student essays, the design of the CLA relies upon a rather small sample size to make sweeping generalizations about overall institutional effectiveness, it provides very little if any useful information at the level of the major.

To veterans in the higher education research community, the “history lessons” of earlier attempts to rank institutions on the basis of “value-added” measures are particularly telling. There is evidence that all previous attempts at large-scale or campus-wide assessment in higher education on the basis of value-added measures have collapsed, in part due to the observed instability of the measures. In many cases, to compare institutions (or rank institutions) using CLA results merely offers the “appearance of objectivity” that many stakeholders of higher education crave.

The CLA proponents respond by attempting to statistically demonstrate that much of the criticism does not apply to the CLA: for example, regardless of the amount of variance accounted for, the tightly SAT-controlled design does allow for the extraction of valid results regardless of the vagaries of specific samples or student motivation. But ultimately even if the proponents of the CLA are right and their small-sample testing program with appropriate statistical controls could produce a reliable and valid “value-added” institutional score, the CLA might generate meaningful data in a small liberal arts college, but it appears of very limited practical utility in large and complex universities.

Why? First, the CLA does not pinpoint where exactly a problem lies and which department or which faculty members would be responsible to address the problem. CLA claims that, in addition to providing an institution-wide “value-added” score, it serves as a diagnostic tool designed “to assist faculty in improving teaching and learning, in particular as a means toward strengthening higher order skills.”

But for a large, complex research university like the University of California, Berkeley, this is a wishful proposition. Exactly how would the statistically derived result (on the basis of a standard administration of a few hundred freshman and senior test-takers) that, for example, the Berkeley campus was performing more poorly than expected (or relatively more poorly than, say, the Santa Barbara campus in the UC system) assist the Berkeley faculty in improving its teaching and learning?

Second, CLA does not provide enough information on how well a university is doing in promoting learning among students from various backgrounds and life circumstances.  This assessment approach is incompatible with the core value of diversity and access championed by the majority of large, public research universities.

Embarking on a “Holy Grail–like” quest for a valid “value-added” measure is, of course, a fundamental value choice. Ironically, the more the CLA enterprise insists that the only thing that really matters for valid accountability in higher education is a statistical test of “value-added” by which universities can be scored and ranked, the more the CLA lacks a broader, “systemic validity,” as identified by Henry Braun in 2008:

Assessment practices and systems of accountability are systemically valid if they generate useful information and constructive responses that support one or more policy goals (Access, Quality, Equity, Efficiency) within an education system without causing undue deterioration with respect to other goals.

“Valid” or not, the one-size-fits-all, narrow standardized test “value-added” program of assessment in higher education promises little in the way of “useful information and constructive responses.” A ranking system based on such could only have decidedly pernicious effects, as Cliff Adelman once observed. In Lee Shulman’s terms, the CLA is a “high stakes/low yield” strategy where high stakes corrupt the very processes they are intended to support.

For the purposes of institution-wide assessment, especially for large, complex universities, we surmise that the net value of CLA’s value-added scheme would be at best unconstructive, and at worst generating inaccurate information used for actual decision-making and rankings.

One Alternative?

In a new study published in the journal Higher Education, we examine the relative merits of student experience surveys in gauging learning outcomes by analyzing results from the data from the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium and Survey based at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley. There are real problems with student self-assessments, but there is an opportunity to learn more than what is offered in standardized tests.

Administered since 2002 as a census of all students at the nine undergraduate campuses of the University of California, the SERU survey generates a rich data set on student academic engagement, experience in the major, participation in research, civic and co-curricular activities, time use, and overall satisfaction with the university experience. The survey also provides self-reported gains on multiple learning outcome dimensions by asking students to retrospectively rate their proficiencies when they entered the university and at the time of the survey. SERU results are then integrated with institutional data.

In 2011, the SERU Survey was administered at all nine University of California undergraduate campuses, and to students at an additional nine major research universities in the US, all members of the Association of American Universities (AAU), including the Universities of Michigan, Minnesota, Florida, Texas, Rutgers, Pittsburgh, Oregon, North Carolina and the University of Southern California. (A SERU-International Consortium has recently been formed with six “founding” universities located in China, Brazil, the Netherlands, and South Africa.)

SERU is the only nationally administered survey of first-degree students in the US that is specifically designed to study policy issues facing large research universities. It is also one of four nationally recognized surveys for institutional accountability for research universities participating the Voluntary System of Accountability initiative in the US. The other surveys include the College Student Experiences Questionnaire, the College Senior Survey, and the National Survey of Student Engagement.

The technique of self-reported categorical gains (e.g., “a little”, “a lot”) typically employed in student surveys has been shown to have dubious validity compared to “direct measures” of student learning. The SERU survey is different. It uses a retrospective posttest design for measuring self-reported learning outcomes that yields more valid data. In our exploration of that data, we show connections between self-reports and student GPA and provide evidence of strong face validity of learning outcomes based on these self-reports.

The overall SERU survey design has many other advantages, especially in large, complex institutional settings. It includes the collection of extensive information on academic engagement as well as a range of demographic and institutional data. The SERU dataset sheds light on both the variety of student backgrounds and the great variety of academic disciplines with their own set of expectations and learning goals.

Without excluding other forms of gauging learning outcomes, we conclude that designed properly, student surveys offer a valuable and more nuanced alternative in understanding and identifying learning outcomes in the university environment.

But we also note the tension between the accountability desires of governments and the needs of individual universities who should focus on institutional self-improvement. One might hope that they would be synonymous. But how to make ministries and other policymakers more fully understand the perils of a silver bullet test tool?

The Lure of the Big Test

Back to the politics of the CLA. This test is a blunt tool, creating questionable data that serves immediate political ends. It seems to ignore how students actually learn and the variety of experiences among different sub-populations. Universities are more like large cosmopolitan cities full of a multitude of learning communities, as opposed to a small village with observable norms. In one test run of the CLA, a major research university in the US received data that showed students actually experienced a decline in their academic knowledge – a negative return? It seems highly unlikely.

But how to counteract the strong desire of government ministries, and international bodies like the OECD, to create broad standardized tests and measures of outcomes? Even with the flaws noted, the political momentum to generate a one-size-fits-all model is powerful. The OECD’s gambit has already captured the interest and money of a broad range of national ministries of education and the US Department of Education.

What are the chances the “pilot phase” will actually lead to a conclusion to drop the pursuit of an higher education version of PISA? Creating an international “gold standard” for measuring learning outcomes appears too enticing, too influential, and too lucrative for that to happen – although we obviously cannot predict the future.

It may very well be that data and research offered in our study that uses student survey responses will be viewed as largely irrelevant in the push and pull for market position and political influence. Government’s love to rank and this might be one more tool to help encourage institutional differentiation – a goal of many nation-states.

• A fifth transnational hub for the Gulf: Bahrain announces plans to create a ‘Higher Education City’

Welcome to Bahrain, circa December 2011:

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Bahrain’s reputation is in tatters a mere four years later, and the ruling Khalifa family is showing no signs of being able to coordinate a genuine reform agenda.

Those of you interested in up-to-date developments in Bahrain are advised to track the #Bahrain hashtag on Twitter…a veritable feast of links to commentary, analysis, arguments, information, and video clips. Also see, of course, the independent commission report that investigated the 2011 uprising and its aftermath (the 513 page report is summarized here by the New York Times, 23 November 2011).

Source: Universities UK (2011) Driving Economic Growth, London: Universities UK, 1 December; also see Chester, J., and Luzajic, J. (2011) ‘Time to recognise that universities have a central role in UK growth strategy,’ The Guardian, 1 December.

Source: EdStats, Education Advisory Service, World Bank.

Note: our thanks to Emilio Porta of the World Bank for permission to post these slides on GlobalHigherEd.

Source: Moody’s (2011) Weekly Credit Outlook, 31 October, p. 43.

Source: ‘Chart: One Year of Prison Costs More Than One Year at Princeton,’ The Atlantic, 1 November 2011. A direct link to the chart by Joseph Staten (an “info-graphic researcher with Public Administration“) is available here.

While these graphics are not comprehensive in nature, and I’m positioned in one specific state (Wisconsin), a number of dynamics are arguably intersecting:

• Progressively reduced levels of state support for public higher education (see image 1 above). Despite this, there is no correlation, whatsoever, between declining levels of state support and the desire to govern public higher education systems and institutions.
• A public university funding burden shifting to student-derived revenue (primarily via tuition fees). Indeed we’re past the tipping point now for, as Moody’s stated this week, “[a]lthough most colleges and universities are improving operating efficiency and expense containment, a college’s ability to increase net tuition remains a critical credit risk factor for the sector;”
• Ideologically-derived views emerging, within some ruling political circles, that frame fiscal crisis as an integral element of engendering structural change within higher education systems and institutions. A case in point is this Cato Institute report (How Much Ivory Does This Tower Need?) and associated video coverage, both released last week;
• Given the above fiscal constraints, increased competition for state support (e.g., prisons, as patently evident above);
• Enhanced use of the principle of ‘flexibility‘ as a vehicle to (a) increase efficiencies, (b) ameliorate a symbolic but only small portion of budget cuts, and (c) gain enhanced control over the governance of higher education systems and institutions.

One of the ironies of the situation is that public universities in the United States are actually, despite their reputations, not very market-oriented in comparison to those in countries like Australia, New Zealand, and England (at least when it comes to one revenue stream – fee paying foreign students- that could be enhanced). See, for example, this Ombuds report (26 Oct 2011) from the Australian State of Victoria which outlines a variety of serious problems with the way Australian higher education institutions handle and support (or fail to) their foreign students.

In my biased opinion (after living here for 10 years), most of the ‘US publics’ are remarkably ‘public good’ and scholarly in orientation: they have long been willing to focus on serving their respective states’ residents, while also indirectly supporting foreign students via graduate fellowships, TA- and PA-ships, and so on. Of course they are mandated to support in-state students (especially at the undergraduate level), but still, the necessary ideological/regulatory work to engender systemic change to draw in substantially more foreign students has not really occurred, to date.  This is evident in the statistics profiled in one of my recent entries (‘International student mobility highlights in the OECD’s Education at a Glance 2011′), which again shows the US with a relatively low percentage of foreign students relative to total student numbers.

Will the future see a continued fiscal squeeze put on public higher education in the US? If so, what will ‘give’ even more that it has, to date? I’m particularly curious if the public mandate to serve state residents will loosen up such that the territoriality of admissions becomes progressively, if haltingly, more and more global. This is likely to be a hot-button issue in most US states, but it is one that needs to be confronted and debated in a serious way given the structural problems that regional (ie state) politicians have helped to create via year-after-year budget decisions that generate the patterns evident in the two images above. One way or another, confronting the austerity-induced fiscal squeeze that public higher education faces in the US cannot help but be a messy affair.

Kris Olds

I’m most familiar with the concept of flexibility in relationship to the changing nature of production systems. There has been a long debate in Economic Geography, for example, about phenomena like ‘flexible specialization’ and ‘flexible accumulation’. These interrelated concepts have helped scholars and industry analysts make sense of how production systems are evolving to cope with increasingly levels of competitive pressure, the emergence of global value chains, new forms of territorial development, and so on.

The concept of flexibility was also used, in abundance, when I lived and taught in Asia until 2001. It was frequently used in association with the corporatization (aka autonomy) agendas occurring at the same time as Asian higher education systems and institutions (HEIs) were expanding. Since then numerous systems of higher education (including Singapore, Malaysia, China) have seen expansion going hand in hand with rapid increases in funding, along with enhanced flexibility with respect to governance. Implementation problems exist, of course, and autonomy and flexibility mean different things to different people, but this was and still is the broad tenor of change.

It’s surely a sign of the times in America that we have also seen an expansion of the use of the concept of flexibility, though linked not to increased levels of funding, but to striking budget cuts. Given this, the concept of flexibility needs to be interrogated. This entry does that, though only in a very exploratory manner.

As noted above, flexibility is emerging as a keyword in some ongoing higher education debates in the US. For example, it is frequently used in in association with the ‘Charter University’ agenda in several states (e.g., Ohio). Closer to home (for me), flexibility was a mantra in deliberations and communications about the proposed ‘New Badger Partnership‘ (NBP) initiative put forward by the recently departed Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Carolyn ‘Biddy’ Martin) as well as the University of Wisconsin System alternative known as the ‘Wisconsin Idea Partnership‘ (WIP). If realized, the NBP would have led to the separation of UW-Madison from the UW System, along with numerous flexibilities and enhanced autonomy (from the System & the State). See here for an April 2011 summary of key elements of the NBP (vs the WIP), including proposed ‘flexibilities’ with respect to:

• Budgeting
• Tuition/Pricing
• Human Resources
• Capital Planning/Construction
• Financial Management
• Purchasing/Procurement
• Governance
• Accountability

In the end, the NBP was not supported by the State Government due to a complicated array of political factors, as well as a problematic planning process that generated ineffectual support on our campus.

Now, while the NBP is unlikely to be resurrected, some elements of it have been incorporated into the unfolding governance agendas reshaping both the future of the UW System and UW-Madison itself.  A state-appointed “Special Task Force on UW Restructuring and Operational Flexibilities” was recently established to consider the future of the UW System (it will report back by January 2013).

Given the debates about the NBP to date, and the announcement of even more budget cuts last week, it is inevitable that the  ‘flexibility’ mantra will continue to exist. Indeed last week we witnessed one Wisconsin politician (Alberta Darling) state that:

[U]niversities could use budget flexibilities passed by lawmakers in June as part of the budget. “It’s not going to be easy, but it can work out,” Darling said.

But what is the full meaning and significance of flexibility with respect to higher education? I’m not 100% sure, to be honest, but what I have noted is that there is more missing from the debate about ‘flexibility as solution’ than there is present. In short, there is a surprising absence of information about what flexibility is and can be defined as, what it can help achieve, and what its costs and limitations are.

There is also an absence of discussion about the long-term implications of relying on ‘flexibility’ to play a significant role in resolving what are in reality structural problems including the steady decline of state support for higher education, as well as the absence of a compact about optimal and necessary levels of support for public higher education. In other words the flexibility debate is a problematically truncated one.

In the interest of helping myself sort things out, I’ve put together a few thoughts and questions about flexibility. Please feel free to disagree with them, and/or add more to the list:

• Flexibility as legitimacy vehicle: The discourse of ‘flexibility’ masks the scale of budget cuts by tying painful cuts to a hoped-for (and unbudgeted, see below) mediating factor. The chance of new flexibilities generating enough savings or new revenue streams to significantly cover the costs of proposed and actual budget cuts cannot be anything but marginal. The language of new forms of flexibility can let politicians off the hook in that they do not need to accept, in public and in private, responsibility for the full scale of the cuts they themselves are proposing.

• Flexibility as reward: US politicians seem to be putting forth new flexibilities as a defacto reward of sorts if HEIs accept deep budget reductions. But why were these flexibilities held back for such a long time, including by politicians (Democrats as well as Republicans) who are ideologically predisposed to a constrained role for the state in the development process? And are these rewards indeed rewards for all? For example, flexibility on tuition can generate enhanced costs for students, or flexibility on governance can weaken the ability of some key stakeholders to participate in governance.

• Flexibility as a means to enhanced governance: The offer of flexibility usually comes in association with significant budget cuts and new found demands regarding ‘accountability,’ ‘efficiency’, ‘transparency,’ and the like.  In most cases enhanced flexibilities come with enhanced forms of governance by Government, not less. These forms of governance can entail an attempt to reshape curricula, course offerings, program funding, faculty practices, etc. Agreements about some forms of flexibility have the capacity to enable Government to burrow more deeply, not less, into what happens within higher education institutions. The irony is that there is no correlation between declining levels of public funding and the desire to govern public HEIs.

• Flexibility unbudgeted: Flexibilities are often put forward as a key solution to coping with budget cuts, but the potential cost savings associated with proposed changes are rarely (if ever) modeled in detail, nor in a transparent manner. This is arguably a politically-based ‘wish and a prayer’ approach to strategic planning.

• Flexibility costs vis a vis implementation capabilities: The provision of many forms of flexibility involves shifts in the nature of governance, not its erasure. The recalibration process — pushing responsibilities up, or down (which is usually the case) — puts additional demands on the other units and officials. It is important to determine if these HEIs and officials have the capabilities to take on new responsibilities. If flexibility is distributed more widely, downwards, is there a ripple effect generated such that multiple units are now responsible versus the one before? Are proposed flexibilities more or less costly (in terms of labor costs) to implement in aggregate (e.g., across the campuses of a system)?

• Flexibility’s power geometries: the application of ‘flexibilities’ in most institutional contexts involves the realignment of power relations at a state-HEI scale, and at an intra-institutional scale, with a planned breakdown of the status quo for good and bad. The realignment outcome often increases the power of some parties, and decreases the power of other parties. It is worth reflecting if this inevitable outcome is an implicit or explicit objective of proffered flexibilities, with an eye to the developmental agendas of various parties.

These are but six aspects I see associated with the emerging ‘flexibility’ agenda for public higher education in the US.

Who could be against flexibility? No one, really, and certainly not me (having worked in some very rigid systems of higher education)! But surely we need to be more critical about what the concept of flexibility really means given how frequently it is thrown around in this era of austerity. Given the nearly 200 years of building up a world class public higher education system in the US, the stakes are simply too high to allow concepts like flexibility be accepted at face value, especially if they mask agendas that are facilitating the decline of said system. This is the era of the ‘knowledge economy,’ after all, and higher education is a critically important dimension of the systems of innovation we are dependent upon for future prosperity.

Kris Olds

What Cox, Keil, Koolhaas, Kotkin, McGee, Sudjic, and many other urban analysts are pointing out is that we are seeing not just the growth of the proportion of the world’s population living in cities, but also the emergence of new spatial patterns and orders; ones associated with more dispersed and therefore less dense concentrations of people than in older (denser) ‘urban’ areas.

This emerging pattern is associated with terms like extended metropolitan regions, exurbs, edge city, borderless cities, megapolitan areas, megalopolis, the ’100 Mile City,’ and the like. There are some important differences between these terms and their origins (some of which go back many decades), but for the purposes of this blog entry we’ll leave the differences to the side.

Here are a few graphics to flag some dimensions of the global urban era. Graphic 1 is from UN Habitat’s Global Report on Human Settlements 2011 (p. 3), graphic 2 is from nordphil.com, and graphic 3 is from UN Habitat’s State of the World’s Cities 2010/2011:

And here are a few comments, from Cox’s piece in newgeography, on the dispersal dimension of urbanization:

Analysts occasionally note that urban areas (“cities”) are becoming larger and denser. This is only half right. It is true that most of the world’s urban areas are becoming larger, with megacities like Delhi, Jakarta, Shanghai, Beijing and Manila adding more than five million people in the last decade and most other urban areas are growing, but not as fast.

Understanding Urban Areas: However almost without exception, urban areas are getting less dense. ….

1960-1990 Data: Historical urban population density is not readily available. Kenworthy and Laube were pioneers in this area, publishing estimates from 1960 to 1990 for a number of urban areas. That data indicates density losses in the more than urban areas for which they were able to develop comparable data. The world average decline was 20 percent, ranging from 15 percent in the United States to 29 percent in Europe and 33 percent in Australia. While Tokyo was doubling in population, its population density was dropping 17 percent between 1960 and 1990. While Zurich was adding 21 percent to its population, it was becoming 13 percent less dense.

Recent Data: The dispersion continues, which is indicated by these high-income world cases:

• Today, the ville de Paris has 700,000 fewer people than at its peak, and inner London (generally the former London County Council area) has lost more than 1,500,000 people since its peak. All growth has been in lower density suburban areas in both the London and Paris urban areas.
• In the United States, urban areas with more than 1,000,000 population more than doubled in population from 1950 to 2000 (2010 data not yet available), while the population density dropped by nearly one-third. Detailed analysis indicates that this trend has continued over the past decade in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Seattle, St. Louis and other major US urban areas.
• The dense core city of Seoul has been losing population and all growth has been in the suburbs, which are lower density.
• The dense urban core of Milan has experience substantial population losses, while the less dense suburbs have captured all the growth.

Dispersion is not limited to high income urban areas, with declining densities in evidence across lower and middle income nations as well. For example:

• Nearly all of the growth in Jakarta has been in the suburbs for the last 20 years, while the core has gained little in population. The net effect is a less dense, but much larger urban area, because the suburbs are not as dense.
• Nearly all of the growth for 30 years in Manila has been in the suburbs, while the core city. Again, the urban area has become much larger, but much less dense because the suburbs are much less dense.
• The dense core of Shanghai has lost population and all growth has been in the suburbs, which are lower density.
• The population in the dense core of Beijing has nearly stopped growing, with nearly all population in the suburbs, which are lower density.
• The core of Mumbai has lost population in two of the last three census periods, while all growth has been in the suburbs, which are lower density.
• The urban core of Mexico City has been declining in population since 1960 and all of the growth has been in the suburbs, which are less dense.
• The dense core city of Buenos Aires has fewer people today than in 1947, while at least 8 million people have been added to nearly 1,000 square miles of lower density suburbs.

Urban growth continues to be overwhelmingly in less dense suburban areas, rather than in the more dense urban cores, and as a result even as urban areas grow, they become less dense. This is how cities grow.

Now, we have seen the growth of tertiary enrollment at the same time that we have seen the emergence of the era of global urbanization.  The numbers evident below (in a graphic from p. 11 of UNESCO’s Global Education Digest 2009) also point to the rapid growth of enrollment numbers and levels outside of the West, albeit unevenly. I don’t have the data available about the proportion of these students enrolled in tertiary institutions located in ‘urban’ areas, but it would be safe to assume they are in the majority.

The questions I’d like to raise are these:

1. Can and should the core ideas associated with the sociospatial structure of the university (including proximity; a unified administrative structure; substantial in-situ infrastructure investment; a primary (and for most, singular) office for faculty & staff; stable classroom locations for courses throughout a term) hold firm while the sociospatial structure of societies around the world is spreading horizontally across an increasing scale?
2. Can we carry on assuming that people should/will come to a campus to receive all or a majority of their formal higher education? Or should higher education funders and providers progressively adjust institutional infrastructures, pedagogical practices, and broad ways of operating, to better serve people IN PLACES, versus drawing people to A PLACE?
3. Do the locations of branch campuses that have been established in fast changing world regions (e.g., East Asia, the Gulf) reflect the distortion-creating draw of state-provided subsidies, or the potent (albeit unrealized) demands of qualified students scattered across much space within these regions? Does a base deep in the heart of global urbanization (e.g., coastal China, as evident above in graphic 2) offer unprecedented opportunities to reach humankind like never before?

On these points, I can’t help but think that the rise of the on-line for-profit higher education providers (e.g., Laureate International Universities), or the providers with smaller offices scattered through metropoli around the world (and indeed across parts of some metropolitan regions), reflect not just their ability to identify and serve new demographic segments of society, but perhaps in ways that also reflect the emerging new geographies we see in this era of global urbanization. In other words perhaps these higher education providers are less fixed in space since fixity is not one of their core objectives. I’m not suggesting that this stance is necessarily desirable, but it is worth thinking about carefully.

It is also worth questioning if traditional providers of higher education are built for the much more stretched out spatial era emerging in almost all of our world regions. And if not, what are the options — technological, organizational, etc. — for addressing a provider-society disconnect that will surely deepen over time?

Kris Olds

Polished up further after some unfortunate fall-outs from last year, this year’s outcome promises to give us an all improved, shiny and clean result. But is it?

Like many people in the higher education sector, we too are interested in the ranking outcomes, not that there are many surprises, to be honest.

Rather, what we’d like to ask our readers to reflect on is how the world university rankings debate is configured. Configuration elements include:

• Ranking outcomes: Where is my university, or the universities of country X, Y, and Z, positioned in a relative sense (to other universities/countries; to peer universities/countries; in comparison to last year; in comparison to an alternative ranking scheme)?
• Methods: Is the adopted methodology appropriate and effective? How has it changed? Why has it changed?
• Reactions: How are key university leaders, or ministers (and equivalents) reacting to the outcomes?
• Temporality: Why do world university rankers choose to release the rankings on an annual basis when once every four or five years is more appropriate (given the actual pace of change within universities)? How did they manage to normalize this pace?
• Power and politics: Who is producing the rankings, and how do they benefit from doing so? How transparent are they themselves about their operations, their relations (including joint ventures), their biases, their capabilities?
• Knowledge production: As is patently evident in our recent entry ‘Visualizing the uneven geographies of knowledge production and circulation,’ there is an incredibly uneven structure to the production of knowledge, including dynamics related to language and the publishing business.  Given this, how do world university rankings (which factor in bibliometrics in a significant way) reflect this structural condition?
• Governance matters: Who is governing whom? Who is being held to account, in which ways, and how frequently? Are the ranked capable of doing more than acting as mere providers of information (for free) to the rankers? Is an effective mechanism needed for regulating rankers and the emerging ranking industry? Do university leaders have any capability (none shown so far!) to collaborate on ranking governance matters?
• Context(s): How do schemes like the THE’s World University Rankings, the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), and the QS World University Rankings, relate to broader attempts to benchmark higher education systems, institutions, and educational and research practices or outcomes? And here we flag the EU’s new U-Multirank scheme, and the OECD’s numerous initiatives (e.g., AHELO) to evaluate university performance globally, as well as engender debate about benchmarking too. In short, are rankings like the ones just released ‘fit for purpose’ in genuinely shed light on the quality, relevance and efficiency of higher education in a rapidly-evolving global context?

The Top 400 outcomes will and should be debated, and people will be curious about the relative place of their universities in the ranked list, as well as about the welcome improvements evident in the THE/Thomson Reuters methodology. But don’t be invited into distraction and only focus on some of these questions, especially those dealing with outcomes, methods, and reactions.

Rather, we also need to ask more hard questions about power, governance, and context, not to mention interests, outcomes, and potential collateral damage to the sector (when these rankings are released and then circulate into national media outlets, and ministerial desktops). There is a political economy to world university rankings, and these schemes (all of them, not just the THE World University Rankings) are laden with power and generative of substantial impacts; impacts that the rankers themselves often do not hear about, nor feel (e.g., via the reallocation of resources).

Is it not time to think more broadly, and critically, about the big issues related to the great ranking seduction?

Kris Olds & Susan Robertson

Source: Common Curriculum Outline for Yale-NUS College (2 September 2011) via Wordle.

The OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2011: Innovation and Growth in Knowledge Economies report was released on 20 September.  While I’ve only seen the summary (which is the source for the first three images below) and an informative entry (‘A Changing Landscape: University hotspots for science and technology‘) in the OECD’s Education Today weblog, it is interesting to see a now common pattern and message emerging in these types of reports, and in a series of like-minded conferences, workshops, and associated reports (e.g. the Royal Society’s excellent Knowledge, Networks and Nations: Global Scientific collaboration in the 21st century, March 2011):

(a) relative stasis or decline in the OECD member countries (though they still do dominate, and will for decades to come);

(b) relatively fast growth within the so-called BRIC countries; and

(c) increased international collaboration, both as outcome and as aspiration.

And it is the aspiration for international collaboration that is particularly fascinating to ponder, for these types of scoreboards — analytical benchmarking cum geostrategic reframing exercises really — help produce insights on the evolving ‘lie of the land,’ while also flagging the ideal target spaces (countries, regions, institutions) for prospective future collaboration. National development processes and patterns thus drive change, but they interact in fascinating ways with the international collaborative process, which drives more international collaboration, and on it goes. As Alessandra Colecchia of the OECD puts it:

What does this [the changing landscape, and emerging 'hotspots'] mean and why is it important? As students and researchers become more mobile, new sets of elite universities outside of the US could materialize. Whether or not we call it the “Banyan” or “Bonsai” League is yet to be determined, but it is clear that OECD countries may no longer have the monopoly on scientific excellence in higher education.

Luckily for us, education is generally not a zero-sum game. When others gain important insights and breakthroughs in science and technology, the entire field benefits. So wherever you are in the world, you can wear your college sweatshirt with pride.

True, though questions remain about the principles/missions/agendas driving international collaboration. For example, there is an ongoing scramble in Europe and North America to link up with research-active Brazilian institutions of higher education; an issue nicely summarized in today’s OBHE story titled ‘Brazil leads the charge from Latin America.’

As noted in the fourth image below (which was extracted from the Royal Society’s Knowledge, Networks and Nations: Global Scientific collaboration in the 21st century), the nature of coauthor-based collaboration with Brazil is changing, with some countries edging closer because scholar-to-scholar ties are deepening or thinning. The reconfiguration is most likely deepening from 2008 on as a slew of new policies, programs and projects get promoted and funded in both Brazil and actual or potential partner countries.

Some of the questions that come to my mind, after participating in some workshops where relations with Brazil are discussed include:

• What values drive these new initiatives to reach out across space into and out of Brazil?
• What disciplines are factored in (or not), and what types of researchers (junior? senior? elite? emerging?) get supported?
• What languages are they dependent upon, and what languages will they indirectly promote?
• Are these international collaboration drives built on the principle of ‘you are only as strong as your weakest link’ (i.e. an exclusive one), or are they attendant to the need for capacity building and longer time horizons for knowledge development?
• Are these international collaboration drives built upon implicit and explicit principles of reciprocity, or otherwise?
• What about the territorial dimensions of the development process? Will we see hotspot to ‘emerging hotspot’ linkages deepen, or will hotspots be linked up with non-hotspots and if so how, and why? Can an archipelago-like landscape of linked up hotspots ‘serve’ nations/regions/the world, or is it generative of exclusionary developmental tendencies?

These are but a few of many questions to ponder as we observe, and jointly construct, emerging ‘hotspots’ in the global higher education and research landscape.

Kris Olds

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Note: the first three images were extracted from the OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2011: Innovation and Growth in Knowledge Economies (Sept 2011). The fourth image was extracted from the Royal Society’s Knowledge, Networks and Nations: Global Scientific collaboration in the 21st century (March 2011).