higher education

Faculty blasts proposed ‘Soviet-style’ changes in MnSCU management

  • Article by: MAURA LERNER , Star Tribune
  • Updated: September 30, 2013 – 12:51 PM

‘Charting the Future’ plan would hurt quality, MnSCU faculty says. Administration said it would not centralize colleges and universities system

A faculty group is denouncing a proposal to reshape Minnesota’s state colleges and universities, saying it would create “a Soviet-style management structure” that does little to benefit students.

“This is going to lower the quality of their education, and not do anything significant to reduce student debt or make tuition more affordable,” said Monte Bute, a sociology professor at Metro State University.

The proposal, “Charting the Future,” which was released in June as a draft report, calls for sweeping changes at the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system (MnSCU), which has some 430,000 students at 54 campuses.

Among other things, the plan encourages more coordination among the campuses, and suggests that some campuses and programs may be merged.

On Monday, the Inter Faculty Organization, which represents 4,000 faculty members at seven Minnesota state universities, released a scathing critique of the proposal.

“We oppose moving toward a Soviet-style management structure with centrally controlled decisionmaking by bureaucrats who are far removed from the classroom,” the faculty union said.

Administration officials dispute the criticism.

“The draft recommendations neither suggest nor should lead to more centralization or a larger system office,” said Michael Dougherty, a vice chancellor at MnSCU.

Nancy Black, the union president, said faculty members were caught off-guard when the draft report was released in June, after classes had ended. It wasn’t until last week, she said, that the union’s board was able to meet and hammer out its response.

The key criticisms: It could squeeze out “innovation” at the various colleges and universities and allow the business community to dictate academic programs, possibly at the expense of the liberal arts. “Student program choices should not be limited to the programs supported by the business community,” the group said.

The proposal has yet to be approved by the board of trustees.

Administrators say they have been seeking feedback on the draft report, and that it won’t be presented to the board until November.

Officials say the draft report was the result of months of discussions by three work groups involving 46 students, faculty members, administrators and others.

But Black, who was one of three faculty members on the work groups, said the report took her by surprise. “We had, what I would term euphemistically, lively discussions,” she said, but her group did not vote on any of the recommendations. She also said she did not see the final draft until it was made public June 19.

Black said the reaction from faculty has been fairly intense. “Let me put it this way: There were enough faculty around that were sufficiently enraged at me for being a part of it,” she said.

The faculty union also said the proposal would “have the effect of union busting,” because it suggests merging collective bargaining units.

Said Bute: “What we’re requesting is that the chancellor and the board of trustees look carefully at this, basically hit the delete button [and]  go back to the drawing board.”

Maura Lerner • 612-673-7384

The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It’s proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. . . . A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting fi rst things fi rst.
Wendell Berry

For those ordering and conducting investigations, it is all too easy to get caught up in the business-as-usual of policies and procedures. The self-justifying nature of bureaucracies sometimes blind us to the human dimensions of those processes. The Hunt is a cautionary tale of the unintended consequences of even the best-intentioned policies and procedures.

This weekend I saw this highly acclaimed Danish film. I  recommend The Hunt for both its artistic pleasure and moral edification. Art and literature have a marvelous capacity of penetrating our taken-for-granted realities, allowing us to experience the shock of recognition.

The New Republic

MARCH 31, 2013

MOOCs of Hazard: Will online education dampen the college experience? Yes. Will it be worth it? Well…

BY ANDREW DELBANCO

In the spring of 2011, Sebastian Thrun was having doubts about whether the classroom was really the right place to teach his course on artificial intelligence. Thrun, a computer-science professor at Stanford, had been inspired by Salman Khan, the founder of the online Khan Academy, whose videos and discussion groups have been used by millions to learn about everything from arithmetic to history. And so that summer, Thrun announced he would offer his fall course on Stanford’s website for free. He reorganized it into short segments rather than hour-long lectures, included problem sets and quizzes, and added a virtual office hour via Google Hangout. Enrollment jumped from 200 Stanford undergraduates to 160,000 students around the world (only 30 remained in the classroom). A few months later, he founded an online for-profit company called Udacity; his course, along with many others, is now available to anyone with a fast Internet connection.

Meanwhile, two of Thrun’s Stanford colleagues, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, founded another for-profit company, Coursera, that posts courses taught by faculty from leading universities such as Prince- ton, Michigan, Duke, and Penn. Three million students have signed on. Not to be outdone, Harvard and MIT announced last spring their own online partnership, edX, a nonprofit with an initial investment of $60 million. A new phenomenon requires a new name, and so MOOC—massive open online course—has now entered the lexicon. So far, MOOCs have been true to the first “o” in the acronym: Anyone can take these courses for free.

Many people outside academia—including New York Times columnists David Brooks and Thomas L. Friedman—are gushing that MOOCs are the best thing to happen to learning since movable type. Inside academia, however, they have been met with widespread skepticism. As Joseph Harris, a writing professor at Duke, recently remarked in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “I don’t see how a MOOC can be much more than a digitized textbook.”

In fact, MOOCs are the latest in a long series of efforts to use technology to make education more accessible. Sixty years ago, the Ford Foundation funded a group of academics to study what was then a cutting-edge technology: television. In language almost identical to that used today, a report on the project announced that television had the power to drive down costs, enable the collection of data on how students learn, and extend “the reach of the superior teacher to greater num- bers of students.” From 1957 to 1982, the local CBS channel in New York City broadcast a morning program of college lectures called “Sunrise Semester.” But the sun never rose on television as an educational “delivery system.”

In the 1990s, my own university, Columbia, started a venture called Fathom, using the relatively new technology of the Web. The idea was to sell online courses taught by star faculty such as Simon Schama and Brian Greene to throngs of supposedly eager customers. But the paying consumers never showed up in the anticipated numbers, and by the time it was shut down, Fathom had cost Columbia, according to some estimates, at least $20 million. Looking back, the project’s director, Ann Kirschner, concluded that she and her colleagues had arrived too soon—“pre-broadband, pre-videocasting and iPods, and all the rest.”

Of course, we will always be pre-something. Former University of Michigan President James Duderstadt foresees a technology that will be “totally immersive in all our senses”—something like the “feelies” that Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, imagined would render the “talkies” obsolete. The MIT Media Lab has already developed a vest that gives you a hug when a friend “likes” something you have posted on Facebook. It may not be long before we can log onto a Shakespeare course taught by, say, Stephen Greenblatt and feel the spray of his saliva as he recites “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.” Such technologies will likely find their biggest market through the pornography industry, but there’s no reason to doubt that academia will adopt and adapt them.

The Luddite in me is inclined to think that the techno-dreamers are headed for another disappointment. But this time around, something does seem different—and it’s not just that the MOOC pioneers have an infectious excitement rarely found in a typical faculty meeting. They also have a striking public-spiritedness. Koller sees a future in which a math prodigy in a developing country might nurture his or her gifts online and then, having been identified by a leading university, enroll in person—on a scholarship, one might imagine, funded by income derived from Coursera. This idea of using online courses as a detection tool is a reprise (on a much larger scale) of the one that spurred the development of standardized tests in the mid-twentieth century, such as the SAT, which was originally envisioned as a means for finding gifted students outside the usual Ivy League “feeder” schools.

Koller speaks with genuine passion about the universal human craving for learning and sees in Internet education a social good that reminds me of Thomas Jefferson’s dream of geniuses being “raked from the rubbish”—by which he meant to affirm the existence of a “natural aristocracy” to be nurtured for the sake of humankind. No one knows whether the MOOCs will achieve any of these things, but many academic leaders are certain that, as Stanford President John Hennessy predicts, higher education is about to be hit by a “tsunami.”

What’s driving all this risk-taking and excitement? Many people are convinced that the MOOCs can rein in the rising costs of colleges and universities. For decades, the price of tuition has outstripped the pace of inflation. Over the past ten years, the average sticker price at private colleges has increased by almost 30 percent (though net tuition has risen less because financial aid has grown even faster). At state universities, the problem has been exacerbated by public disinvestment. For example, less than 6 percent of the annual budget of the University of Virginia is covered by state funds. Last fall, I heard the chief financial officer of an urban public university put the matter succinctly: The difficulty, he said, is not so much the cost of college, but the shift of the financial burden from the state to the student.

There are many reasons why college costs continue to soar: the expense of outfitting high-tech science labs, the premium placed on research that lures faculty out of the classroom (and, in turn, requires hiring more faculty to teach classes), the proliferation of staff for everything from handling government regulation to counseling increasingly stressed students. At some institutions, there are also less defensible reasons, such as wasteful duplication, lavish amenities, and excessive pay and perks for top administrators and faculty.

But the most persuasive account of the relentless rise in cost was made nearly 50 years ago by the economist William Baumol and his student William Bowen, who later became president of Princeton. A few months ago, Bowen delivered two lectures in which he revisited his theory of the “cost disease.”1 “In labor-intensive industries,” he explained, “such as the performing arts and education, there is less opportunity than in other sectors to increase productivity by, for example, substituting capital for labor.” Technological advances have allowed the auto industry, for instance, to produce more cars while using fewer workers. Professors, meanwhile, still do things more or less as they have for centuries: talking to, questioning, and evaluating students (ideally in relatively small groups). As the Ohio University economist Richard Vedder likes to joke, “With the possible exception of prostitution . . . teaching is the only profession that has had no productivity advance in the 2,400 years since Socrates.”

This is a true statement—but it unwittingly undercuts its own point: Most people, I suspect, would agree that there are some activities—teaching and prostitution among them—in which improved productivity and economies of scale are not desirable, at least not from the point of view of the consumer.

True believers think that the new digital technologies will finally enable educators to increase productivity by allowing a smaller number of teachers to produce a larger number of “learning outcomes” (today’s term for educated students) than ever before. But it’s too soon to say whether MOOCs will really help cure the cost disease. Their own financial viability is by no means certain. The for-profits must make money for their investors, and the non- profits must return revenue to the universities that give them start-up funds.

Coursera has begun to try out a number of different strategies. It provides a matchmaking service for employers looking to hire people with certain demonstrable skills—a logical extension of a role that colleges already play. When a company expresses interest in a top-performing student, Coursera e-mails the student, offering an introduction, and receives a finder’s fee from the prospective employer. The college that developed the course also receives a cut. As for Udacity, Thrun says only that it charges companies looking for talent “significantly less than you’d pay for a headhunter, but significantly more than what you’d pay for access to LinkedIn.”

A few months ago, Coursera also announced a licensing arrangement with Antioch University, which agreed to pay a fee in return for incorporating selected Coursera offerings into its curriculum. The idea is for students to supplement their online experience by working with on-campus faculty—a practice known as “hybrid” or “blended” learning. The college can expand its course offerings without hiring new faculty, and Coursera can earn income that will be shared by the institutions and professors who develop the courses. So far, however, student interest has been low.

Other possible sources of revenue include selling expertise to universities that want to set up their own MOOCs or partnering with textbook publishers willing to share revenue in exchange for selling to online students. Some MOOCs are also beginning to charge fees for proctored exams (in person or by webcam) for students seeking a certificate marking their successful completion of a course.

If new technologies can cure, or even slow down, the cost disease before it kills the patient, that would be a great public service. The dark side of this bright dream is the fear that online education could burst what appears to be a higher education bubble. Consumers, the argument goes, are already waking up to the fact that they’re paying too much for too little. If they are priced out of, or flee from, the market, they will find new ways to learn outside the brick-and-mortar institutions that, until now, have held a monopoly on providing credentials that certify what graduates have supposedly learned. If that happens, it would be a classic case of “disruptive innovation”—a term popularized by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, who argues that, “in industries from computers to cars to steel those entrants that start at the bottom of their markets, selling simple products to less demanding customers and then improving from that foothold, drive the prior leaders into a disruptive demise.”

We’ve already witnessed the first phase of this process. Early consumers of online courses tended to be students with families or jobs for whom full-time attendance at a residential or even a commuter college was out of the question. As underfunded public colleges struggled to meet the needs of such students, private for-profit “universities” such as Phoenix, Kaplan, DeVry, and Strayer emerged. They offer mainly online courses that serve—some would say exploit—an expanding population of consumers (a word increasingly used as a synonym for students). The first time I heard someone commend for-profit universities was five or six years ago, when a savvy investor said to me, “Look at California—the public system can’t meet the demand, so we will step in.” He was making the safe, and sad, assumption that public reinvestment is unlikely to restore what was once an unrivaled system of public higher education. Last August, nearly half a million students found themselves on waiting lists for oversubscribed courses at California’s community colleges.

Many online students meet the low-income eligibility threshold for federal Pell grants—a ripe market for the for-profit universities. These institutions offer cheaper courses than traditional private colleges, usually in practical or technical subjects such as cosmetology or computer programming. Their business model depends heavily on faculty who receive low compensation and on students with high loan obligations. It’s a system that works well for investors. (In 2009, the CEO of Strayer University collected a cool $42 million, mainly in stock options.) How well it works for students is another question. Last summer, a U.S. Senate committee noted that for-profit universities spend more on advertising and recruiting than on instruction and that, without significant reform, they “will continue to turn out hundreds of thousands of students with debt but no degree.”

So far, the for-profit sector has been regarded with disdain or indifference by established universities. This fits the Christensen theory of “disruptive innovation”: The leap by low-end products into higher- end markets is sudden and surprising because the higher-ups have been lulled into thinking their place in the pecking order is unassailable. What has happened to newspapers and publishing are obvious examples. Suddenly everything changes, and the old is swept away by the new.

Because of the durable value of prestige, it will be a long time before Harvard has to fear for its existence. But one reason to think we’re on the cusp of major change is that online courses are particularly well- suited to the new rhythms of student life. On traditional campuses, many students already regard time offline as a form of solitary confinement. Classrooms have become battlegrounds where professors struggle to distract students from their smartphones and laptops. Office hours are giving way to e-mail. To the millions who have used sites such as the Khan Academy, the idea of hour-long lectures spread out over 15-week semesters is already anachronistic. “Disruptive innovation” is a variant of Joseph Schumpeter’s famous declaration that capitalism works by “creative destruction.” What will be innovated and created in our colleges and universities, and what will be disrupted and destroyed?

One vulnerable structure is the faculty itself, which is already in a fragile state. This is especially true of those who teach subjects such as literature, history, and the arts. The humanities account for a static or declining percentage of all degrees conferred, partly because students often doubt their real-world value. And as humanities departments shrink, some institutions are collaborating to shrink them faster (or close them altogether) in order to avoid duplicative hiring in subjects with low student demand. For example, Columbia, Yale, and Cornell have announced a collaboration whereby certain languages—such as Romanian, Tamil, or Yoruba—will be taught via teleconferencing. This is good for students, since the subjects will still be available. But it’s bad for aspiring faculty—as the number of positions dwindles, research and scholarship in these fields will dry up.

MOOCs also seem likely to spur more demand for celebrity professors in a teaching system that is already highly stratified. Among tenured faculty, there is currently a small cadre of stars and a smaller one of superstars—and the MOOCs are creating megastars. Michael Sandel, for example, who teaches a famous course on justice at Harvard, has become a global figure with millions of followers, notably in Asia, since his lectures became available online through Harvard’s website and at a site called Academic Earth. A few months ago, Harvard announced that Sandel had signed up with edX. Sandel is an exceptional educator, but as master-teachers go global, lesser-known colleagues fear being relegated to a supporting role as glorified teaching assistants.

In some respects, this is the latest chapter in an old story of faculty entrepreneurship. By the mid-twentieth century, the president of the University of California, Clark Kerr, was already describing the Berkeley faculty as “individual entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.” Today, as star professors increasingly work for themselves, more faculty members at less prestigious institutions face low wages, meager benefits, and—since many lack tenure—minimal job security. But if the new technology threatens some professors with obscurity, others face obsolescence. Language instructors may someday be replaced by multilingual versions of Siri on your iPhone. One of my colleagues speaks of the imminent “evisceration” of graduate study, once young people who might have pursued an academic career are deterred as it becomes harder and harder to find a dignified job after years of training.

These prospects raise many pressing questions—not just speculative ones about the future, but actionable ones about the present. What, if anything, can universities do to formulate new rules governing conflicts of interest? As faculty stars relocate to cyberspace, how can institutions sustain the community of teachers and students that has been the essence of the university for a thousand years? (The pacesetting Thrun, who is a vice president of Google, resigned from his tenured teaching post at Stanford, though he remains a “research professor.”) In this brave new world, how can the teaching profession, already well on its way to “adjunctification,” attract young people with a pastoral impulse to awaken and encourage students one by one?

There are also unanswered questions about how much students actually learn from MOOCs. Coursera recently withdrew one course at Georgia Tech because of student discontent and another, at the University of California, Irvine, because the professor disputed how much students were really learning.

So far, most testimonials to the value of online learning come from motivated students, often adults, who seek to build on what they have already learned in traditional educational settings. These are people with clear goals and confidence in their abilities. Stanford has even established an online high school “for gifted students” from around the world (a residential program brings them together in the summers). Its medical school has introduced “lecture halls without lectures,” whereby students use short videos to master the material on their own, then converge in class for discussion of clinical applications of what they’ve learned.

And yet it’s one thing to expect brilliant teens or medical students to be self-starters. It’s another to teach students who are in need of close guidance. A recent report from the Community College Research Center at Columbia finds that underprepared students taking online courses are, according to one of the authors, “falling farther behind than if they were taking face-to-face courses.” Michael Crow, one of the architects of Fathom and now president of Arizona State University and certainly no traditionalist, warns against a future in which “rich kids get taught by professors and poor kids get taught by computer.”

Back in the mid-twentieth century, the Ford Foundation report on “telecourses” asked the key question about technology and education: “How effective is this instruction?” When I came upon that sentence, it put me in mind of something Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a long time ago. “Truly speaking,” he said, “it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul.”I first understood this distinction during my own student days, while struggling with the theologian Jonathan Edwards’s predestinarian view of life. Toward the end of the course, my teacher, the scholar of American religion Alan Heimert, looked me in the eye and asked: “What is it that bothers you about Edwards? Is it that he’s so hard on self- deception?” This was more than instruction; it was a true provocation. It came from a teacher who listened closely to his students and tried to grasp who they were and who they were trying to become. He knew the difference between knowledge and information. He understood education in the Socratic sense, as a quest for self-knowledge.

Nearly 40 years later, in my own course on American literature, one of my gifted teaching assistants received an e-mail from a student after a discussion on Emerson:

Hi, I just wanted to let you know that our section meeting tonight had a really profound effect on me. … [T]he way you spoke and the energy our class had really moved me. …I walked the whole way home staring at the sky, a probably unsafe decision, but a worthwhile one nonetheless. I actually cannot wait for next week’s class just so I can dive even further into this. So I just wanted to send you a quick message thanking you, letting you know that this fifty minutes of class has undeniably affected the rest of my life. … [S]ome fire was lit within me tonight, and I guess I’m blowing the smoke towards you a little bit.

No matter how anxious today’s students may be about gaining this or that competence in a ferociously competitive world, many still crave the enlargement of heart as well as mind that is the gift of true education. It’s hard for me to believe that this kind of experience can happen without face-to-face teaching and the physical presence of other students.

Yet I’m convinced that those leading us into the digital future truly want to dispense the gift of learning more widely than ever before. Currently, the six-year graduation rate at America’s public four-year colleges is approximately 58 percent. It would be a great benefit to society if online education can improve on that record—although it should be noted that, so far, the completion rate by students who sign up for MOOCs is even worse—barely 10 percent.

In one experiment, Udacity is providing remedial courses to students at San Jose State for a much lower price than in-person courses. A bill is now under discussion in the California legislature that would require public colleges to offer online courses to students whom they can’t accommodate in their classrooms. If the new technology can bring great teaching to students who would otherwise never encounter it, that could lessen inequities between the haves and have-nots, just as digital technologies now give students and scholars worldwide access to previously locked-up books and documents. But so far, there is scant evidence on which to base these hopes.

Quite apart from the MOOCs, there’s an impressive array of new efforts to serve low-income students—including the online public Western Governors University, which charges around $6,000 in tuition and awards reputable degrees in such fields as information technology and business. Southern New Hampshire University—also a nonprofit—has moved aggressively into online learning, which it combines with on-campus programs; and Carnegie Mellon University has launched an “open learning initiative” that offers non-credit free courses, with substantial interactive capabilities, and seems to be working well in science, math, and introductory languages.

The best of the new education pioneers have a truly Emersonian passion for remaking the world, for rejecting the stale conviction that change always means degradation. I sense in them a fervent concurrence with Emerson’s refusal to believe “that the world was finished a long time ago” and with his insistence that, “as the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it.”

In the face of such exuberance, it feels foolish and futile to demur. In one form or another, the online future is already here. But unless we are uncommonly wise about how we use this new power, we will find ourselves saying, as Emerson’s friend Henry David Thoreau said about an earlier technological revolution, “We do not ride the railroad; it rides upon us.”

Andrew Delbanco’s most recent book, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, will be published in paperback later this month.

One of the joys of becoming a seasoned teacher is that you no longer need to lecture. The classroom becomes improvisational theater, a theater of the absurd–a magical space where cognitive and affective dissonance rule. It is Socratic teaching plus the humor of a Lenny Bruce, a Mort Sahl or, even better, a Betty White.

My 16 year-old daughter was raving this morning about how cool Betty White is. I think it is her over-the-top humor that appeals to the young. It suddenly dawned on me that since my cancer diagnosis I have been channeling Betty in my classrooms . . . I may have to put that in my course descriptions so as to forewarn unsuspecting students! As one student recently put it, “it’s not so much the outrageous things you say, but that it’s coming out of the mouth of an old man!!!”
Dear Seminar Participants,
Welcome to the MLS 600 Introductory Seminar. We are a small group. That will be both an advantage and a disadvantage: You will experience an intimate salon of stimulating and rigorous conversation, with both the living and the dead; you will also be expected to come to class prepared to a degree that perhaps you’ve never previously done. That does not mean that any of us (including your instructors) will have mastered the materials. What it does mean is that each of us, according to our abilities, with have engaged in a dialogue with the authors assigned for that evening. Then, as a learning community, we will share our individual understandings so that we may collectively come to terms with the readings.

We promise you two things. One, we will never bore you. Two, we will do our best to confound and provoke higher order thinking. We hope that you will do the same for your teachers. While we will certainly fall short, we seek to make this seminar a cognitive and affective experience that is a significant marker along your journey as a self-directed, lifelong learner. In the bluntest terms, that means metaphorically killing your teachers and becoming your own teacher. Anything less would be unworthy of a Master of Liberal Studies degree.

The theme for the first night is “What Liberal Education Ought to Be.” Attached are the readings for that class. We meet on Wednesday, Jan. 16 in 250 St. John’s Hall. We look forward to getting to know you and setting off on this odyssey.
Best,
Monte

What began in 1971 as what Clark Kerr called the most radical experiment in higher education, Metropolitan State University in the Twin Cities is now the nation’s premier university for adult learners. Faculty and graduates share tales about a truly working class institution.

http://bit.ly/TTT-MetroStateU

 

“We Are One March” Minnesota State Capitol
Larger view

MnSCU surveys employers about needed job skills

by Alex Friedrich, Minnesota Public Radio

April 30, 2012

St. Paul, Minn. — Employers across the country are saying too many American workers don’t have the right skills to fill open positions. In Minnesota, the State Colleges and Universities system is surveying employers in the region to find out what skills they’re not seeing in recent graduates and older workers — and what else employers need from higher education.

Chancellor Steven Rosenstone announced last month a new effort to better match MnSCU programs to needed skills. Since then, system officials have held more than 30 listening sessions in fields such as health care, transportation and engineering.

At one such session last week in Minneapolis, the focus was on information technology, which is a growth industry. In the past three years the number of IT job postings in Minnesota has tripled to about 15,000, even during an economic downturn. But up to 10 percent of those jobs were unfilled, according to Advance IT Minnesota, an office within MnSCU that aims to develop a stronger IT workforce in the state.

That gap could double in the next decade if things don’t change, because Minnesota’s workforce is aging and the number of high school graduates is declining.

So MnSCU officials recently talked with members of the Minnesota High Tech Association. Executives from about a dozen companies got together at the Minneapolis Convention Center to discuss what they need in the work force. What they said was pretty typical of what businesspeople have been telling MnSCU.

Tech executives — like their counterparts across the state — need everything. It just depends on the size of the company.

Joseph Ward of RJA Dispersions stressed broad technical skills — for example, a chemical engineer who knows computing.

“I’d ask for more cross-training in the engineering disciplines so people can do a bit of IT, or maybe more than a bit when it’s needed,” said Ward.

And some executives said job applicants aren’t required to have a bachelor’s degree, since technology changes a lot over four years. Instead, some suggested offering technical skills in two-year degrees — or in even shorter classes or certificate courses.

Executives at some larger companies said they don’t necessarily want the focus to be on tech skills that they can outsource to other countries.

“Technical will always be there. In fact, it’s easier to teach the technical skills,” said Tim Dokken with Thrivent Financial for Lutherans. “It’s much more difficult to train the soft skills and how to get people to influence, collaborate, work together.”

Those companies prefer well-rounded people. They say many tech workers have liberal arts backgrounds and shifted into technology.

It’s not just skilled graduates that executives wanted out of MnSCU. Lynn Hunt of Hunt Utilities Group says rural employees need more access to education. That means training programs run at their facilities, or online.

“What I’ve seen is the need of reaching both the older and the younger faster at home,” Hunt said. “They don’t have the time to take from their jobs. A very, very small company — you can’t let them go. Each person there is so needed.”

MnSCU will use the information it gathers at the listening sessions to shape the programs it’ll offer in the future. And it will update the survey every few years.

But there are some who question the premise of the MnSCU project, including one of its own faculty members. Monte Bute, a sociology professor at Metropolitan State University, says there’s no proof of a jobs/skills mismatch.

The skilled workers and students are already there, he says. Employers are just unable — or unwilling — to pay wages high enough to attract them.

At the Minneapolis listening session, Bute scolded the business executives in attendance, noting that they pushed for budget cuts and lower taxes while expecting even more out of a strained public education system.

Bute said the government shouldn’t pay for training or education that companies themselves should be providing.

“When is business going to start picking up their share of the tab, and quit expecting families and students to pick up the bulk of the tab?” he said.

MnSCU officials will hold sessions for the agricultural sector in June and July. It’ll address other sectors of the state’s economy, such as financial services and insurance, in the fall.

Minneapolis StarTribune, April 19, 2012

Counterpoint

Lori Sturdevant was right to call out the Legislature for failing to pass a bonding bill with significant funding for Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (“Sharp strategy for MnSCU. One catch … ,” April 1. However, she gave a nod of approval to Chancellor Steven Rosenstone’s Workforce Assessment Initiative without adequately investigating his basic premise.

Employers claim that many jobs are going unfilled because the labor pool is unqualified. This thesis remains unproved. Business lobbies are playing Rosenstone like a fiddle. Their disingenuous strategy has little to do with reform or producing well-educated persons. Rather, they want the public sector to pick up the tab for employee training in order to reduce labor costs and maximize profits.

Let us not mince words: Workforce development is corporate welfare.

To be fair, Sturdevant and Rosenstone are not alone in their enthusiasm for workforce development. Business leaders, legislators, state agency commissioners, reporters and editorialists, and even Gov. Mark Dayton have fallen prey to this latest institutional fad. The sociologist Joel Best’s recent book captures this phenomenon: “Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads.”

How does this bedazzling process work? Every institutional fad needs a good story — a perplexing problem and a compelling solution. What is the problem that Rosenstone seeks to solve? Minnesota’s jobs-skills mismatch. How is he going resolve this predicament? He has made an “all in” bet on workforce development.

Where did MnSCU’s “mismatch” story line come from? Credit David Olson, president of the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce and chairman of the MnSCU Board of Trustees from 2007-10. Olson proselytized the jobs-skills mismatch for the chamber while simultaneously reshaping MnSCU’s educational mission as workforce development.

MnSCU is planning 50-plus “listening sessions” with “Minnesota employers to gain a better understanding of their current and future workforce needs.” Sponsoring this initiative with MnSCU are the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, and none other than the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce. Does Rosenstone really expect unbiased data from these listening sessions? His workforce-development strategy depends not on dog-and-pony shows, but on reliable evidence of a jobs-skills mismatch.

Economists from Columbia University, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and New York University devised a sophisticated skills-mismatch index that they used in a 2011 study, “Measuring Mismatch in the U.S. Labor Market.” They published a follow-up paper on March 29. Their conclusions raise doubts about any significant structural or long-term mismatch:

“Based on this mismatch index, we conclude the following: First, the index displays considerable cyclicality, increasing notably in recessions. Second, the index has fallen appreciably during this recovery and is now near its pre-recession level. This pattern suggests that although mismatch rose considerably during the Great Recession, that rise proved temporary.”

In other words, the market has been working out the mismatch. Even during the recession, the problem was, to some extent, an illusion. It was often not a shortage of skills but employers’ inability to find workers at the wages offered. The way to resolve a labor shortage in a free market is for employers to raise wages. If they don’t, workers are free to pursue other opportunities.

The jobs-skills mismatch may be little more than a public-relations ploy by employer associations to get the public sector to pay for apprenticeships and job training that employers once provided. These same business lobbies have spent a small fortune seeking lower taxes, resulting in higher-education cuts that made tuition increases inevitable. Corporations not only want to call the tune for public higher education, they want students and their parents to pay the piper. Back in the day, students became well-informed citizens; today, they become commodities for industry.

These policy decisions about the future of higher education constitute a moral hazard. Economist Paul Krugman defined moral hazard as “any situation in which one person makes the decision about how much risk to take, while someone else bears the cost if things go badly.” Rosenstone and Olson, on behalf of MnSCU Board of Trustees and the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, are making a risky gamble on Minnesota’s future. Students, faculty and taxpayers will bear the cost if this wager is lost.