HBCU-Levers

MOOCs in Brief

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 14:25:00 +0000

The biggest news in distance learning in recent years, both in immediate, eye-popping headlines and in potential long-term impact, was the series of announcements by the nation’s leading universities of their intention to offer free MOOCs – massive open online courses. (Note: For discussions of the original, more extensive concept of a MOOC, click here for Wikipedia and click here for a video.)

Their announcements rolled out in a powerful, continental media storm with booms and bolts on both coasts and key points in between, beginning in August 2011 with Stanford University’s “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course that enrolled 160,000 students, and peaking with the joint Harvard-M.I.T. press conference in May, 2012 that proclaimed their edX partnership to which each institution was committing $30 million to develop free MOOCs.

Indeed, the sudden decision in May 2012 by the Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia to dismiss UVa’s highly respected president, Dr. Teresa A. Sullivan, at the height of this media storm was collateral damage due, in part, to the Board’s sense that she was not sufficiently committed to launching MOOCs at UVa and would therefor miss an important opportunity to reaffirm UVa’s position as one of the nation’s academic leaders. Following intense protests by UVa’s faculty, students, and alums, Dr. Sullivan was subsequently reinstated as UVa’s president. (See “After Leadership Crisis Fueled by Distance-Ed Debate, UVa Will Put Free Classes Online” -- Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/18/12).

While it is too soon to predict the ultimate impact of elite MOOCs, their immediate consequence was a clear and welcome shift of online courses in the public consciousness, a shift from the money-making delivery systems favored by for-profit corporations to legitimate academic platforms on which the nation’s most prestigious universities will compete for leadership in making the best and brightest instructors accessible to anyone on the planet who wants to learn … for free. (For some well-informed reservations about MOOCs as currently proposed, see "MOOCs and Machines" -- Inside Higher Ed, 5/10/12 – with an embedded podcast of an interview with Candace Thille, Director of Carnegie-Mellon's Open Learning Initiative.)

By mid-July, 2012, the following top-tier MOOC providers were in place:

edX – Harvard University and M.I.T. partnership … video of press conference  -- Students who passed MOOCs would receive certificates branded HarvardX and MITx, depending on which partner sponsored the courses 

-- The learning management system (LMS) that hosts the courses will also provide a platform for data-intensive research projects that will have the potential to make ground-breaking discoveries about how people learn, thereby enabling colleges and universities to develop more effective teaching methods.
Coursera – a for-profit corporation that will manage MOOCs offered by elite universities. Its initial partners included Stanford University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan

-- On July 17th, Coursera announced the addition of twelve new partners: University of Virginia, California Institute of Technology, Duke University, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (in Switzerland), Georgia Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, Rice University, and the Universities of California at San Francisco, Edinburgh (U.K.), Illinois, Toronto and Washington.
Udacity – a for-profit corporation founded by former professors at Stanford University that will retain well-known experts having affiliations with the nation’s top universities to develop MOOCs. (See “Massive Courses, Sans Stanford” – Inside Higher Ed, 1/24/12)

-- Certificates will be signed by the experts who teach the courses

________________
Related Notes

Seven HBCU Strategies for Survival and Success ... modified 7/18

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 11:34:00 +0000

Impending Collapse

Like other members of the HBCU community, I have been concerned for many years about the long-term survival of HBCUs. My obsession with this question has been expressed in four notes on this blog titled, "Why Are HBCUs Still Needed?" (Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV) and related notes ("From HBCUs to BCUs", "HBCUs as a National Laboratory", etc). But in recent months my thinking has returned to its engineering roots. Being needed is not sufficient to ensure the survival of any institutions under any circumstances. So my question has become, "What should HBCUs do to survive the impending flood of IT innovations in higher education that will overwhelm so many non-HBCUs?"

Most HBCUs have always operated under strained budgets. Their money has always been tight. Federal support via programs coordinated by the White House Initiative on HBCUs brought substantial relief in recent decades, but the long-term downward trend has been greatly accelerated by the Great Recession.
Of course it's not just HBCUs that are in deep water. All nonprofit institutions of higher learning, except the most elite and best endowed, are also in dangerous financial territory. So the dozens of HBCUs that will fail within the next fifteen to twenty years will not fail because they are HBCUs or because they failed to remain "true" to their mission as HBCUs; they will fail for the same reasons that hundreds of non-HBCUs will also fail.
They will fail because they cling to obsolete institutional models. Perhaps the saddest failures will befall HBCUs that make the most strenuous efforts "do the right thing" in terms of these obsolete models. Unfortunately, HBCUs and the vast majority of non-HBCUs have now become involuntary contestants in a radically new game that requires a radically new playbook.
I find a painful irony in the outrageous treatment that Dr. Teresa A. Sullivan received from the University of Virginia's Board of Visitors between her sudden termination and her triumphant reinstatement as UVa's president last month. The Board's lack of understanding of how to reposition a great institution was appalling. But the irony is that the UVa Board moved clumsily and disrespectfully because they were panicked by their vision of a scary future, a vision that seems likely to prove to be correct. In this scary future, UVa might lose its place as one of the premier universities in the country, but less prominent colleges and universities may suffer far greater losses that will cause them to close their doors forever.
Powerful disruptive forces of high tech innovation, akin to those that wrecked havoc on newspapers and bookstores in the last two decades, will be descending on colleges and universities in the next two decades like the torrents that led to the Biblical flood. I am therefore concerned that faculty in some HBCUs and in some non-HBCUs will learn the wrong lessons from the events at UVa. They will confuse the UVa Board's apocalyptic vision with its appalling behavior, and reject both ... at their peril.

Sections A, B, and C of this note sketch successive models of American colleges and universities. The models are roughly outlined in succinct bullets and some data is provided to demonstrate their plausibility. Taken together, the models represent sequential segments on a broad trajectory that has reached a dead end. Section D presents my current thinking as to how HBCUs can not only survive, but thrive after the flood ... :-)

Note: Readers looking for a concisely written, well-documented characterization of the top tier American universities during the second phase, "The Golden Age" after World War II, might enjoy Eugene M. Tobin's superb essay, "The Modern Evolution of America's Flagship Universities" that appears in Appendix A of Crossing the Finish Line by William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, and Michael S. McPherson (Princeton University Press, 2009).

A. The Good Old Days ... Before World War II

College provided "opportunity" for the select few, i.e., for the more affluent and the most able ==> small enrollments, small faculty, and small administrative staffs
Few black students and few black faculty at non-HBCUs
Low salaries for faculty (by today's standards)
Scholarships for a small percentage of financially needy, able students
Minimal facilities, no fancy science labs; the campus library was the biggest investment
No formal pedagogical training for faculty and no systematic measures of the effectiveness of their instruction. Instructors learned (or didn't learn) how to teach by teaching the same courses over and over again.

Their deficiencies as teachers were offset by their students' high intelligence, prior high school preparation, good study habits, and long study hours. In other words, students taught themselves what their professors failed to teach; but students who dropped out and/or flunked out were regarded as "unworthy" because they failed to make the most of the "opportunity" that had been provided.
Low operating costs (by today's standards)
Tuition did not fully cover the operating costs. Shortfalls were covered by other funds
-- Public institutions received additional funds from state & local governments
-- Private institutions received additional funds from alumni and from other wealthy donors via direct grants or via income from endowments funded by alumni and other wealthy donors
Shortfalls in tuition placed limits on enrollments. Colleges and universities and universities could not enroll more students than could be covered by the additional funds they could "beg" from governments, alumni, and wealthy donors to cover their shortfalls.

The Good Old Days for HBCUs ==> Same as for non-HBCUs, except that:

HBCUs enrolled over 95 percent of all black college students
HBCUs had (and still have) a diverse faculty ... many non-black instructors

B. The Golden Age ... 1950s to 1980s ==> Prolonged Expansion

College now provided "opportunity" for the masses ==> much larger enrollments than before and retained more faculty at higher salaries than before

-- Table 1. (below)
Column (1) in the table shows that enrollments in two year and four year degree programs more than doubled between 1960 and 1970, increasing from 3,639,847 in 1960 to 8,004,660 in 1970. Enrollments in these undergrad programs then rose to 13,818,637 by 1989/1990 academic year, which is almost four ties as large as its level in 1959/1960.
Larger, more complex facilities, e.g., new science labs, computer facilities, and larger libraries
Still no formal pedagogical training for faculty and no systematic measures of the effectiveness of their instruction. Instructors still learned (or didn't learn) how to teach their larger classes by teaching the same courses over and over again. Their deficiencies as teachers were offset by the students' own intelligence, study habits, and study hours. So once again, students taught themselves what their professors failed to teach ...

... but not as well as they did before. On the one hand, the teachers were not as good as they used to be. Many classes were now taught by less experienced younger professors and graduate assistants because the most illustrious subject matter experts were devoting more time to research and less to teaching, especially at the nation's leading research universities. On the other hand, the larger enrollments included a higher percentage of students who weren't as well prepared as in the "Good Old Days" nor did they study as hard as in earlier times

... Nevertheless, students who dropped out and/or flunked out were still regarded "unworthy" because their colleges and universities were not responsible/accountable for their failure to make the most of the "opportunity" that was provided
Larger enrollments and more complex facilities ==> rising operating costs and larger administrative staffs
Tuition covered a smaller percentage of operating costs, so larger funds from other sources covered the larger shortfalls
-- Public institutions received more funds than ever from state & local governments
-- Private institutions received more funds than ever from alumni and other wealthy donors via direct grants or via income from endowments funded by alumni and other wealthy donors
-- The Cold War and the related panic over the Soviet Sputnik satellite heightened public fears of nuclear defeat by a technologically superior Soviet Union. Therefore colleges and universities received substantial increases in support from federal and state governments, but combined state investments in their public institutions was larger than federal contributions to all institutions. Students at public and private institutions greatly benefited from massive, federally insured loan programs.

-- Table 1 (below)
Column (2) in the table shows that tuition increased by 35.1 percent between 1980 and 1990. (I couldn't find tuition data for 1960 and 1970.) While this was a substantial increase, it was evidently not enough to cover the shortfalls for those years, judging by the far larger percentage increases in support from the states. Column (3) shows that state support rose by 106.2%.

Indeed, comparing columns (1) and (3) throughout the "Golden Age" shows that increases in state support increased by substantially larger percentages that enrollment increases, the drivers of the shortfalls. Column (1) shows that enrollment increased by 119.9% between 1960 and 1970, whereas support from state governments rose by 337.4% during that decade. Column (1) shows that enrollments increased by 44.5% between 1970 and 1980, whereas column (3) shows that state support rose by 211.5%. And column (1) shows that enrollments rose by 19.4% between 1980 and 1990, whereas state support rose by 106.2%.

Column (4) shows the generosity of the federal government in its direct support to colleges and universities, wherein aid in 1970 was $3,447,697,000; it then rose by 222.4% in 1980 to $11,115,882,000. It rose by another 22.8% from 1980 to 1990 to $13,650,915,000.

Finally, the average size of the loans that students and their parents obtained to pay for four year bachelors degrees in 1993 was only $9,797 -- a figure that would rise dramatically during the next three decades, as displayed in Chart 1 (below the table). By 2010 students who graduated with bachelors degrees were saddled with loans that averaged $31,979
The extraordinary generosity of external supporters during this period -- federal, state, local, and private sector -- enabled most colleges and universities to greatly expand their enrollments. In effect, the massive increases in external support covered the larger shortfalls in tuition receipts that came with the larger enrollments.

Unfortunately, this was a not-so-Golden Age for HBCUs ==> prolonged decline

Desegregation laws in 1960s opened non-HBCUs to black students, black faculty, and black administrators ==> HBCUs lost their monopoly on the Black America's Talented Tenth
Percentage of black college students enrolled at HBCUs declined from over 95 percent in the 1940s to less than 40 percent by the end of the 1980s
Closing of many HBCUs led President Jimmy Carter to establish the White House Initiative on HBCUs in 1980 to ensure that the remaining HBCUs received substantial federal support

Table 1. Enrollment, Tuition, Government Support, and Student Loans

Year	(1) Enrolled	(2) Tuition	(3) State $000s	(4) Federal $000	(5) Student Loans
1960	3,639,847		$1,399,904

1970	8,004,660		$6,123,084	$3,447,697
	4,364,813		$4,723,180
	119.9%		337.4%

1980	11,569,899	$7,842	$19,075,829	$11,115,882
	3,565,239		$12,952,745	$7,668,185
	44.5%		211.5%	222.4%
					1993
1990	13,818,637	$10,595	$39,337,633	$13,650,915	$9,797
	2,248,738	$2,753	$20,261,804	$2,535,033
	19.4%	35.1%	106.2%	22.8%

2000	14,849,691	$13,353	$56,682,253	$15,008,715	$19,546
	1,031,054	$2,758	$17,344,620	$1,357,800	$9,749
	7.5%	26.0%	44.1%	9.9%	99.5%

2010	20,427,711	$17,649	$73,742,207	$50,166,341	$31,979
	5,578,020	$4,296	$17,059,954	$35,157,626	$12,433
	37.6%	32.2%	30.1%	234.2%	63.6%

2012			$72,497,045	$64,309,984	$37,127
			-$1,245,162	$14,143,643	$5,148
			-1.7%	28.2%	16.1%

Sources
(1) Enrollment in higher education degree programs = Digest of Education Sttistics 2011, Table 197 = http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_197.asp?referrer=report
(2) Tuition = Digest of Educaton Statistics, 2011, Table 349 … all institutions = http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_349.asp?referrer=report
(3) States appropriations for higher education up to 2000 = Grapevine Historical data = http://grapevine.illinoisstate.edu/historical/index.htm … for 2010 and 2012 = Grapevine National Tables = http://grapevine.illinoisstate.edu/tables/FY12/Revised_March13/Table%201%20Revised.pdf
(4) Federal appropriations for postsecondary education = Digest of Education Statistics, 2011, Table 386 http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_386.asp
(5) Debt at graduation for bachelors degree students = NPSAS & MarkKantrowitz (Fastweb.com) http://www.finaid.org/loans/DebtAtGraduation.xlsx

Chart 1. Student Loans Upon Graduation from Bachelors Programs

C. Nonprofit Collapse vs. For-Profit Challengers ... 1990 to 2030

This section makes two points: first, if present trends continue, nonprofit colleges and universities will be offering degrees at tuition prices that will only be affordable by the most affluent students; and second, some "reformed" for-profit colleges and universities are likely to seize this opportunity to greatly strengthen their challenge to the traditional dominance of nonprofit institutions.

1a) As the Non-profit Bubble Bursts ...
Here's a very old joke that used to be told by very old MBAs:

"We take a loss on each transaction, but we make up the difference in volume"

And here are a couple of lines that used to be part of every dean's orientation speech to freshmen at nonprofit colleges and universities:

"Your tuition only covers X percent of the cost of your education" [where X is any positive number well below 100]
"Look to your left; now look to your right. One of the students you just saw won't be here next year."

At first glance, the dean's reference to tuition only covering X percent of the cost of the students' education sounds uncomfortably like the MBA joke -- except that in the "Good Old Days" most colleges and universities could count on their alums to cover their shortfalls. And the "Golden Age" that followed was made possible by federal and state governments becoming higher education's generous rich uncles who wrote the fat checks that covered their expanding shortfalls.

Of course, the downside risk to relying on government support in a democratic republic is a loss of support among the electorate. In this case, the continuous increases in government funding that financed the "Golden Age" during the Cold War were based on the electorate's fears of a communist nuclear victory via superior technology. Therefore as the Cold War waned, then abruptly ended with the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. electorate's fears subsided, as did its appetite for providing large subsidies for higher education.

Perhaps the most visible sign of the end of the "Golden Age" of public support for "Big STEM" R&D that entailed substantial support for universities was the Congressional decision in 1993 to cancel the completion of the Superconducting Super Collider. ("The Supercollider's Demise Disrupts Many Lives and Rattles a Profession" NY Times, 11/14/1993). This would have been the largest and most expensive scientific project in history. Had funding been continued, the recent discovery of the Higgs boson -- the so-called "God particle" -- by an international team led by European physicists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Switzerland, might have have been made years earlier at the Super Collider by an international team lead by American physicists in Texas. ("Physicists Find Elusive Particle Seen as Key to Universe" NY Times 7/4/12)

-- Table 1 and Chart 1 (above)

Columns (3) shows that state appropriations for higher education plummeted from previous three digit percentage increases in the "Golden Age" to two digit percentage increases (based on constant 2011 dollars). Whereas states had increased their support between 1980 and 1990 by 106.2%, the increase between 1990 and 2000 was only 44.1%, and this increase declined to 30.1% in 2010. The final collapse in 2012 is marked by the states actually appropriating less funds in 2010 than they did in 2000, i.e., dropping from $73,742,207 down to $72,497,045 for a -1.7% reduction.
Column (4) shows that the federal government's increases plummeted earlier than the states. Whereas federal appropriations increased between 1970 and 1980 by 222.4%, they only increased from 1980 to 1990 by 22.8%. The federal increase from 1990 to 2000 was only 9.9%, much smaller than the states' increase of 44.1% during that same decade. However, the increase by 234.2% between 2000 and 2010 was a dramatic turnaround. Most of this increase was in financial assistance to students, i.e., grants and loans, that rose from roughly $9 billion in 2000 to roughly $33 billion in 2010. (See the Digest of Education Statistics, 2011, Table 386). This was an substantial increase, but a substantial portion of the increase went to students who dropped out, i.e., didn't graduate in four, six, or eight years, and with substantial college loans to be repaid. And for those who did graduate, it was evidently too little, too late, as can be seen by the comparably dramatic rise in student indebtedness upon graduation in column (5).
Column (2) shows that as governments provided smaller increases in their support, colleges and universities raised their tuition again and again and again.Whereas column (1) informs us that enrollments only increased between 1990 and 200 by 7.4%, colleges and universities raised their tuition by 26.0%, i.e., by more than three times as much. Whereas column (1) shows that enrollments increased between 2000 and 2010 by 37.6%, colleges and universities raised their tuition by almost as much, by 32.2%

Note: The large 37.6% surge in enrollments during the last decade was driven by the Great Recession. In severe economic downturns the unemployed go back to school to acquire new skills that will qualify them to find new jobs, whereas the still employed go back to school to acquire new skills to help them keep the jobs they already have.

Note: non-elite colleges and universities raised tuition to cover their shortfalls. By contrast, elite colleges and universities raised their tuition, partly to cover their shortfalls, but also to maintain their reputations as providers of the highest quality degrees. If their degrees cost more, they must be better, right? ... :-)
Column (5) and Chart 1 show the inevitable consequences of raising tuition again and again ==> higher student personal debt upon graduation. The average student debt upon graduation from four year degree programs almost doubled (99.9%) between 1990 and 2000. The commencement sticker price increased by another 63.6% between 2000 and 2010; and it kicked up another 16.1% between 2010 and 2012 to a whopping $37,127. (Note: these figures combine the loans taken by students with those taken by their parents.)

Some analysts have argued that college debts should be regarded as profitable investments because college graduates enjoy substantially larger lifetime incomes than non-graduates, high enough to make college loans one of the best investments that graduates will ever make. Of course, this argument would more compelling if student debts were lower and graduation rates were higher, especially for minority students. Drop-outs don't obtain the kind of "gainful employment" enjoyed by graduates.

1b) College as a Provider of Opportunity for the One Percent

The debt curves in Chart 1 are sloping upwards -- meaning that if present trends continue, a college education will become less and less affordable for more and more people. A college education will become just another measure of the growing inequality in our society that is closely related to the growing inequalities in wealth and income. However, as our society moved from an industrial to a post-industrial society, then to a knowledge based society that is part of a global knowledge-based economy, a college education has become an essential prerequisite for jobs that provide adequate income.

Of course, the loss of opportunity for a college education will hit minorities hardest because they are the least affluent segments of the population, even more so today as consequence of the Great Recession:

Last year the Pew Research Center issued its analysis of the impact of the Great Recession on the wealth of blacks and Hispanic households, "Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics." Among other disturbing findings, the report notes that, "The median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households." The report also notes that, "From 2005 to 2009, inflation-adjusted median wealth fell by 66% among Hispanic households and 53% among black households, compared with just 16% among white households."

1c) Few Productivity Gains in Higher Education

American colleges and universities expanded their enrollments in order to meet the the nation's growing need for a college-educated workforce. But they failed to substantially improve their productivity. Productivity is the measure of the resources required to produce a unit of a product or a service. When productivity rises, the goods and services being produced costs less and/or are of higher quality.

For example, when consumers buy computers, cars, TV sets, and telephone services today, they pay less in constant dollars than they paid thirty years ago and they obtain products and services that are of substantially higher quality. Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe that the substantially higher sticker prices on today's college education buy a better education than than thirty years ago.
Indeed, the recent landmark report from Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift (University of Chicago Press, 2011), suggests that there is good reason to believe that the education provided to many of today's college students is substantially inferior to the eduction that was provided in the "Golden Age." Among other things, their report presents convincing data that more students are receiving higher grades today for less study.

The electorate's loss of appetite for providing large subsidies to institutions of higher learning has been reinforced by its growing dissatisfaction with academia's traditional answer to the question implied by our mythical dean's second comment to the freshman. If one third of the freshman dropped out and/or flunked out, whose fault was that really? Academia's self-serving response in the "Good Old Days" and in the "Golden Age" blamed the student. But today's electorate wants to know why colleges and universities have failed to develop innovations in teaching that are more affordable and more effective for more students given that it is becoming increasingly clear that academia's traditional methods are neither affordable nor effective for larger and larger segments of our society.

The most important cause of the failure of our colleges and universities to become more productive is not hard to identify. Whereas just about every other sector of our economy has become more productive in the last fifty years via intensive applications of information technology, our colleges and universities -- the institutions that focus on the most information-intensive and most critical processes in a knowledge-based society, i.e., teaching and learning -- have been among the least progressive in their development and widespread adoption of powerful IT innovations.

2. For-profit Challengers

For-profit institutions have challenged the hegemony of nonprofit colleges and universities by adopting the same strategies used by Toyota, Walmart, Amazon.com, and other high-volume/low-cost upstarts in other economic sectors. (Note: At the present time, for-profit institutions only enroll about 10 percent of the students in college degree programs.)

They began by providing reliable, lower cost services for a previously under-served niche market; then they expanded their target market, widened the range of services offered, and raised their fees as they overcame the previously dominant service providers. Indeed, it seems to me that we are now coming to the end of the first phase of what might be called "the Fed-Exification of higher ed" -- wherein the nation's non-elite, nonprofit colleges and universities have cast themselves as the beloved, but grossly inefficient local post offices.

Initial focus on non-traditional students
Whereas nonprofit institutions of higher learning focused on traditional full-time students by offering courses on weekdays, the for-profits focused on non-traditional students whose family and/or work obligations only allowed them to take courses on a part-time basis on evenings and weekends or via some form of distance learning.
Limited range of degrees and certificates ... little or no research
For-profit institutions offer a limited range of certificate programs and bachelors & associates degree programs that have a pronounced career emphasis. Only a few engage in enough research to be placed in a "research" category by the Carnegie Foundation, which is not surprising because very few universities actually make money on their research programs.
Profitable courses and programs
Tuition at for-profit institutions covers the full cost of the courses taken by each student plus enough surplus to pay taxes to governments and dividends to shareholders. There are no shortfalls ... so "more students = more profit"
No shortfalls, so no limits to growth ... especially online
Since "more students = more profits" the for-profits are driven to become as large as possible. For example, the University of Phoenix, the largest for-profit, enrolled 380,800 degree seeking students in the 2010/2011 academic year, (SEC 10-K Statement, Apollo Group -- corporate parent of the University of Phoenix, August 2011).

The university's 2011 Academic Annual Report informs us that (at least) 18.4 percent of its students were black, which would imply that (at least) 70,000 were black, a figure that is larger than the combined black enrollment of the largest five HBCUs. (Note: The "at least" qualifiers are included because the Annual Report notes that the race/ethnicity of 31.3 percent of the students was unknown.)
Efficient administration via intensive use of information technology
For-profits use IT far more intensively than their nonprofit competitors. IT skills are a prerequisites for hiring administrative staff and instructors. The for-profits continuously monitor their operations data in search of greater efficiencies because doing more with less generates more profit.
Flexible workforce receives lower wages and less benefits
Instructors at most for-profit institutions are contract employees who receive lower pay and fewer benefits than faculty at nonprofit institutions. They don't have tenure so they can be hired and fired as demand for the courses they can teach surges or subsides.
Faculty trained to teach standardized courses
Courses offered by for-profit institutions are designed by interdisciplinary teams of subject matter experts and experts in instructional technology. When instructors are hired by for-profit institutions, they are taught how to teach the courses using the lesson plans, home work assignments, quizzes, exams, references, and other pedagogical procedures specified by the design teams.
Intensive marketing
"If you build it, they will come" ... No, they won't. You have to tell them about your product or service over and over and over again, which is why the most successful for-profits devout 20 to 30 percent of their gross revenue to intensive advertising and recruitment campaigns, especially on the Web. If you search for any topic that is remotely related to the degrees and certificates they offer, their ads will pop-up at the top, sides, and bottom of the pages containing whatever results your search engine returns.
Customer Orientation
For-profits see their students as customers. At this time, this is a short-term perspective that leads the for-profits to solicit frequent assessments from their users as to the students' satisfaction with the courses they're taking. It also leads them to monitor their students' progress, providing offers to help if a student's progress isn't what might be expected. But the for-profits have only recently begun to share their data with the rest of the academic community to demonstrate that their students are, indeed, learning the subjects as well as at nonprofit institutions and to participate in research efforts in collaboration with their nonprofit peers to develop more effective pedagogical techniques.
Bias towards online
Despite the growing body of evidence that indicates that students learn more in blended courses than in courses that are purely face-to-face or courses that are purely online, for-profits are biased towards online because online courses can enroll larger classes from a global pool of potential students than blended courses; and online courses have no facilities rental/management costs as do face-to-face or blended courses.
Minimize risk by forming de facto partnerships with the federal government
Realizing that the biggest risk to their profitability was non-payment of tuition loans, the for-profits preferred that their students pay their tuition with federally insured loans. This strategy enabled them to receive tuition payments up front and left the feds or the banks that provided the insured loans to worry about repayment.

The for-profits have set up efficient loan-processing units that are run with the same glib, high pressure tactics as employed by the loan desks in auto dealerships. Their loan officers "encouraged" the largest percentage of their students to pay their tuition via federally insured loans as the current federal laws and regulations would allow ... and successfully lobbied Congress to raise those limits again and again.

2a) Abuses

The for-profits' short-term perspective and their fundamental equation, more students = more profit, led to some predictable abuses as they challenged the dominance of the traditional nonprofit institutions. These abuses are disturbingly similar to the sub-prime mortgage abuses in the housing market that led to the housing bubble that led to the Great Recession, abuses that were also powered by short-term profit-maximizing perspectives. The for-profit's abuses listed below and many others have been documented by hearings conducted by Senator Harkin (e.g., "For-Profit College Investigation"), by GAO reports (e.g., For Profit Schools, Experiences of Under Cover Students Enrolled in Online Classes at Selected Colleges, October 2011) and by the analyses offered by the Department of Education in support of various regulatory reforms it has proposed to curb these abuses (e.g., "Obama Administration Announces New Steps to Protect Students from Ineffective Career College Programs" -- gainful employment, June 2011).

Recruitment abuses
Some for-profits aggressively recruited students into courses and programs for which the students did not have the prerequisite knowledge and skills. So the students flunked out or dropped out, didn't get the higher paying jobs they were hoping for, and were stuck with loans they couldn't repay.

It must be noted that a surprisingly high percentage of students enrolled in for-profit programs are black, especially their online programs wherein black enrollments are estimated to lie somewhere in the 25% to 40% range. This range is two to three times as high as might be expected given that black Americans represent only 13% of the total U.S. population. While there is no evidence that the for-profits deliberately recruited a higher-than-expected percentage of black students, as did the purveyors of sub-prime mortgages, the results are the same. A disproportionate number of black Americans have been victimized by for-profit abuses.
Excessive tuition
The for-profits are not competing with the nonprofits on price. Why should they? Most nonprofits charge high tuition because they run inefficient operations; the for-profits charge comparable tuition because higher tuition also equals higher profits.
Degrees and certificates that provide bridges to nowhere
But what about the students who passed the courses and earned the degrees and certificates? Many of them could not find gainful employment in the fields they had studied so hard and paid so much to enter; hence they were stuck with loans they couldn't repay.

2b) Affordable/High Quality Education -- The Bigger Challenge

The inevitable regulatory reforms designed to eliminate these abuses would probably have spelled the end of the for-profit challenge were it not for the Great Recession and the Tea Party.

As noted previously, the non-elite segment of the nonprofit sector is collapsing because of its failure to cope with the ending of the "Golden Age." The ending of ever-increasing support from governments at all levels, support that used to cover the ever increasing shortfalls between their tuition and their costs of operation left them no choice but to institute substantial increases in tuition
The nation's decades-long growth of inequality was exacerbated by The Great Recession. The richest one tenth of one percent saw dramatic increases in their shares of the nation's wealth and income; whereas the bottom fifty percent saw their shares decline, nor is there reason to believe that prospects for the bottom half will improve in the foreseeable future. As a result, the substantial increases in tuition by the non-elite colleges and universities have made their programs less and less affordable for larger and larger segments of the population.
College is once again becoming an opportunity that is restricted to the most affluent and the most talented, as in the "Good Old Days" -- but with a tragic difference. In those days, breadwinners without a college education could earn substantial paychecks as laborers in factories and other manual trades; but not today. In today's knowledge-based global economy, a college education is the entry ticket for most of the jobs that pay the kind of wages that most families need.
Reorganizing the non-elite colleges and universities in the nonprofit sector will be a monumental task that will very expensive. Mind you, I'm not talking about obtaining funds to cover shortfalls in current operations; I'm talking about substantial investments to support the development and widespread dissemination of cost-effective innovations in our system of higher education that will deliver quality education at affordable prices without shortfalls -- because the affordable tuition will cover the cost of delivering the education.

Perhaps the most critical component of the dissemination efforts will be retraining current faculty to use the innovative procedures. An innovation can't be cost-effective if faculty don't know how to use it. Therefore the cost of extensive professional development programs must be factored into the total costs of introducing the innovations.
Where will these substantial funds come from? If the Tea Party didn't exist, I would expect that the funds would come from governments; but the Tea Party does exist and retains enough political clout to ensure that tax-dependent governments will not allocate the required funds. So the funds will have to come from the profit-oriented, private sector. But will the private sector rise to this challenge? There is reason to believe that it will.

2c) Three Kinds of Private Sector Players

Going forward, it will be important to distinguish three kinds of private sector players in the higher education degree and certificate sector: abusive for-profit institutions, reformed for-profit institutions, and online service providers.

Abusive For-Profits ... Quick Bucks
The Department of Education has stumbled repeatedly in its efforts to promote effective reforms, e.g., the court's recent rejection of its "gainful employment" proposal. (See "Judge Strikes Down 'Gainful'" in Inside Higher Education, 7/2/12) However, it seems likely that it will eventually produce enough acceptable restrictions to make it considerably less profitable for practitioners of well-documented abuses to stay in business.
Reformed For-Profits ... In it for the Long Run
Wiser heads in the investment community have already recognized that employing abusive practices to gain quick millions from higher education programs will leave billions on the table in the long run. The same global forces that are pressuring American workers to obtain college degrees and certificates are also pressuring employees all over the planet. Reformed for-profits are now facing an extraordinary window of opportunity. On the one hand, the global market for higher education is massive, and on the other hand in the next phase of their challenge to traditional institutions, the for-profits face permanently weakened competitors.

Therefore greed, not goodness, will motivate the "reformed" for-profits to abandon short-term abusive tactics that undermine their brands in the long run. They will invest substantially greater funds than individual colleges and universities in the non-elite, nonprofit sector for continuous improvements to their management systems, eLearning technologies, and academic analytics. They will strive to maximize their profits from the massive global higher education market by developing degree and certificate programs that are more affordable and demonstrably better than the programs offered by their underfunded nonprofit competitors.

Resisting the temptation to predict which for-profits will actually become born-again pillars of the higher education community, I feel comfortable suggesting that plausible candidates would include, among others, the corporations that have already made the substantial investments required to obtain and retain accreditation for their programs from the same regional bodies that accredit the nation's leading nonprofit colleges and universities. A partial list includes: University of Phoenix (North Central), Kaplan University (North Central), DeVry University (North Central), National American University (North Central), Strayer University (Middle States), American InterContinental University (North Central), Capella University (North Central), and Walden University (North Central).

Gaining and retaining accreditation from the six regional associations is becoming more difficult for for-profit institutions, as indicated by Bridgeport Education's pending loss of accreditation from North Central for its Ashford University and by the recent denial of Ashford University's request for accreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. (See "Western Association Rejects Ashford U's Initial Bid for New Accreditation" Chronicle, July 9 2012)

[Note: Given the prevalence of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools on this list, it's worth noting that North Central also accredits many prominent nonprofit institutions, e.g., University of Michigan, Case Western Reserve University, University of Notre Dame, and Northwestern University]
Online Service Providers
Unlike the for-profit colleges and universities, the service providers don't offer degree and certificate programs themselves. Instead, they form strategic partnerships with nonprofit colleges and universities wherein they invest the substantial funds require to develop and market online or blended programs; the partner college or university invests nothing. When students enroll in the courses, the provider receives a negotiated percentage of the tuition revenue. Eventually, as the provider recoups its original investment, the fundamental for-profit equation holds ==> more students = more profit

In this case, the fundamental equation also provides a strategic insight. Online service providers are not looking to maximize the number of colleges and universities they partner with; they want to select the "right" institutions as partners who will help them enroll the most students so they can achieve economies of scale. Like the U.S. Marines, the online providers are looking for a few good partners. Better to have five partners that enroll 100,000 students than 50 partners that only enroll 10,000 students.

How much do these providers invest in each degree program? It depends on the overall market demand for the program, on how much of that demand can be captured by the brand name of the institutional partner, and on the funds available to the provider. Some providers are backed by equity funds; others are owned by equity funds; but the largest providers finance their investments internally. Investments per partner run as high as $10 million. A partial list of online service providers includes EOServ Corp, 2tor, Blackboard, Pearson Learning Solutions, Deltak Innovation, and Embanet-Compass.

D. Survival and Success
The previous sections of this note presented data and links to sources of additional data that indicate that tuition is becoming less affordable for more students, especially minorities. The data provide no basis for hope that this problem will be resolved using the traditional, non-IT intensive procedures that have prevented colleges and universities from improving their productivity.

As tuition rises, more and more colleges will recruit fewer and fewer students, i.e., they will price themselves out of their segments of the academic market. Eventually the hardest hit institutions, including HBCUs, will be forced to close their doors forever. This downward spiral will be accelerated by the "Fed-Exification of higher education" wherein the reformed for-profit institutions make investments in appropriate IT that will enable them to deliver high quality courses at affordable tuition prices. Readers who found the previous sections of this note to be unconvincing should stop reading at this point because the strategies recommended in this section are presented in the context of this apocalyptic vision. The "Good Old Days" are gone forever and the "Golden Age" is over.

But the good news is that non-profit colleges and universities that develop the will to cross this Digital Divide may find new prosperity because they don't have to pay taxes or maximize profits. This may give them sufficient financial leeway to adopt the same productivity enhancing information technologies as the reformed for-profits AND remain loyal to fundamental values that define higher education as something more than vocational training.

1. Overlapping Themes as a Framework
The specific strategies recommended in this section are framed by the following overlapping "themes":

Non-traditional students in a global market
High quality
Intensive use of information technology (IT)
Continuous training and retraining
Leveraging resources via partnerships
Revenue vs. affordability
TLC

Elaborating each theme in turn:

HBCUs should expand the reach of their course offerings beyond their local physical campuses so as to reach non-traditional students anywhere in the world via courses and programs that are online or blended combinations of online and face-to-face delivery
HBCUs should offer high quality courses and programs
HBCUs should greatly improve the productivity of their teaching and administrative processes via intensive applications of information technology
HBCUs must commit to programs of continuous training and retraining of their faculty and staff in the use of productivity enhancing innovations in information technology. Innovations can't enhance productivity if faculty and staff don't know how to use them.
HBCUs should leverage their own limited resources by forming partnerships with other organizations
HBCUs should price their courses and programs for non-traditional students so that they generate revenue. There should be no shortfalls between the tuition charged for a courses and the actual cost of offering the course. On the other hand, HBCUs are not for-profit operations, so they should offer courses and programs that are affordable. Tuition levels will inevitably represent a trade-off between more revenue vs. more affordability.
HBCUs should differentiate themselves from other colleges and universities by providing their students with the personalized "tender loving care (TLC)" that has been the defining element of their legacy ever since they were founded over one hundred years ago.

As will be seen from the following discussions, these themes sometimes reinforce each other but at other times present mutual constraints.

For example, HBCUs should charge high enough tuition to enable their courses and programs generate revenue, but not so high that they are not affordable by most students.
For example, striving to reach non-traditional students anywhere on the planet is supported by IT, but constrained by TLC. IT will permit students to be enrolled in courses that are 100 percent online if they have Internet connections that are fast enough and reliable enough. For some kinds of courses, intensive use of IT-based social media will enable instructors to provide sufficient TLC; but for other courses IT-based social media may not provide the enough "human touch." Such courses should be limited to local markets wherein they might be offered as blended combinations of online and face-to-face sessions.
For example, some courses might cost so much for an HBCU to develop with its own resources that the tuition required to recover these investments might be so high as to make these courses unaffordable. However, if HBCUs shared the costs of developing the courses with partners, the tuition might be affordable and its share of the tuition revenue might be sufficient to cover the HBCU's share of the development and operating costs.
For example, there is considerable overlap between the concepts of "high quality" and TLC for a student who needs TLC in a course. In other courses, the student may not feel that he or she needs much TLC ... but TLC should always be available in all courses sponsored by HBCUs just in case a student's initial assessment of his or her own abilities to handle the course material without assistance turns out to be incorrect. Indeed, this guarantee of TLC may cause HBCU courses to be priced somewhat higher than courses offered by other colleges and universities which, in turn, may limit the size of the market for HBCU courses and programs.

2. Seven Strategies

The following recommendations are tagged with their dominant themes. Most have already been implemented by some HBCUs and non-HBCUs; therefore links to descriptions of previous implementations are provided wherever possible. Hopefully, this will encourage HBCUs to contact these other institutions in order to learn from their experience. All of the recommendations apply to programs for non-traditional (part-time, remote) students, but some are also applicable to programs for traditional (full-time, on-campus) students.

eLearning technologies

Before proceeding, it's useful to distinguish between two types of IT applications that could enhance the productivity of HBCUs. On the one hand, there are IT applications that support more efficient and more effective administrative processes. On the other hand, there are IT applications that support more efficient and more effective teaching, i.e., the core academic function. Although there are many names for the second group of applications -- e.g., "instructional technology"-- I prefer "eLearning" because the "e" suggests that the most cost-effective are likely to be Internet-based, and "learning" reminds us that the ultimate measure of the value of our technology is how much our students learn.

2.1 Encourage and train faculty to develop more intensive and extensive use of eLearning technologies in all courses, not just those that are directed at non-traditional students ... intensive IT + training/retraining + high quality + TLC

Online and blended courses make the most intensive and extensive use of eLearning technologies, but an HBCU can't just jump from face-to-face courses to online/blended degree programs overnight.

In principle, an HBCU might engage consultants to develop all of the courses that would comprise an online/blended degree program, and do so with little or no involvement of the HBCU's regular factory. This strategy has seldom been effective in the long run.
Successful development of online and blended degree programs for non-traditional students requires the active participation and support from the faculty in the schools and departments that currently offer the corresponding face-to-face programs for the HBCU's traditional students. In other words, online business degree programs should be developed with the active participation and support of the faculty in an HBCU's school of business; online nursing degree programs should be engage the faculty in an HBCU's school of nursing, etc, etc, etc.
HBCUs must therefore encourage and train their faculty to move their courses step by step, from face-to-face to Web-enhanced, wherein at least 10 percent of the course content and communications are delivered over the Web; then from Web-enhanced to blended, wherein at least 30 percent is delivered over the Web; and from blended to online, wherein at least 80 percent is delivered over the Web. (Note: this definition of "online" as less than 100 percent via the Web allows for testing to be done in face-to-face, proctored exam facilities.)
Most courses can benefit by being transformed from face-to-face into a blended format; but faculty may determine that the quality of some courses would be compromised if they were delivered beyond 40 or 60 or 80 percent over the Web. In such cases, the faculty's judgment should be respected.
A recent report from the Pew Research Center ("Technology Trends Among People of Color" 9/17/10) found that blacks and Latinos use social media more intensively than whites, a finding that suggests that employing social media in online/blended programs for minority non-traditional students might substantially offset the loss of face-to-face contact. Pew's finding merits an extended quotation:

"Minority adults also outpace whites in their use of social technologies. Among internet users, seven in ten blacks and English-speaking Latinos use social networking sites—significantly higher than the six in ten whites who do so. Indeed, nearly half of black internet users go to a social networking site on a typical day. Just one third of white internet users do so on a daily basis. The same is true for status update services like Twitter—one quarter of online African-Americans use these services, significantly higher than the 15% of white internet users who do so (English-speaking Latinos are right in the middle, with 20% of such internet users using these sites)."

Therefore HBCUs should regard social media, like Facebook and Twitter, as eLearning technologies that can involve their non-traditional students with each other, with traditional students on-campus, and with an HBCU's extended community of alums.
HBCUs should give serious consideration to establishing certificate programs and associated high tech incubators that will assist black entrepreneurs to succeed in the T & E components of STEM, especially information technology (IT). Ever since Steve Jobs founded Apple and Bill Gates founded Microsoft thirty plus years ago, the global knowledge-based economy has been driven by highly profitable IT innovations that were developed by courageous entrepreneurs who had minimal formal training and minimal experience in technology and engineering -- "minimal" as in college drop-outs and graduates without PhDs in any component of STEM.

Year after year the nation's business press has been filled with exciting stories about founders of start-up ventures who had become billion dollar captains of industry -- Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, etc, etc, etc … but to date, none of these "boy billionaires" has been black. Nor is this likely to happen until black wannabe entrepreneurs can benefit from the kinds of technical/financial support networks that many non-black entrepreneurs have received from the nation's leading non-black universities. Bluntly put, now is the time for some leading HBCUs to play the kind of supporting roles for black entrepreneurs in IT that Stanford and Berkeley have played for non-black entrepreneurs.

2.2 Establish strategic partnerships with online service providers to help the regular faculty to develop online and blended degree programs for non-traditional students ... intensive IT + partnerships + high quality + revenue vs. affordability

Instead of bearing the full costs of converting its courses into formats suitable for non-traditional students, an HBCU could engage a strategic partner
As noted in Part C of this note, online service providers invest funds up front to cover the costs of converting existing courses into online/blended degree programs in formats that are most appropriate for non-traditional students; and they make the additional investments needed to market these programs, especially via the Web. They recoup their investments by receiving a negotiated share of the tuition revenues from the degree and certificate programs.
Some examples of HBCUs that have used strategic partners to help them launch their online/blended degree programs include (among others):

-- Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University + HBCUsOnline
-- Howard University's Executive MBA + Embanet-Compass
-- Jackson State University + EOServ Corp.
-- Kentucky State University + EOServ Corp.
-- Langston University + EOServ Corp.
-- Southern University at New Orleans + EOServ Corp.
-- Texas Southern University + HBCUsOnline
-- Virginia University of Lynchburg + EOServ Corp.

2.3 Flip the classrooms ... intensive IT + training/retraining + high quality + TLC

As faculty upgrade their courses to make more intensive use of eLearning technologies, they should flip as many classrooms as possible, i.e., redesign courses so that presentations are made online and class time is used by the course instructors for Q&A, discussions, demonstrations, hands-on lab type activities, brief tutorials for small groups, etc (Note: by definition, all "flipped" courses are blended courses.)
Establish training programs for faculty who want to learn how to flip their courses
Wherever possible, HBCUs should use MOOCs (massive open online courses) offered by the nation's leading universities (for free or for cheap) as the online presentation components of their "flipped" courses, e.g., MOOCs from edX (Harvard & M.I.T.) and Coursera (Stanford, Princeton, Penn, University of Michigan ... as of 7/17/12 plus University of Virginia, California Institute of Technology, Duke University, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (in Switzerland), Georgia Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, Rice University, and the Universities of California at San Francisco, Edinburgh (U.K.), Illinois, Toronto and Washington)

2.4 Establish competency-based degrees and certificates for non-traditional students ... revenue vs. affordability
Wherever possible, configure degree and certificate programs for non-traditional students so that progress towards completion is based on demonstrations of competency rather than on the number of courses taken

Develop efficient admissions/assessment procedures that will enable non-traditional students to receive credit for job experience, military service, and life experience. Assistance in developing workable procedures can be obtained from the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL)

Develop admissions/assessment procedures that will affirm competency for non-traditional students who have passed MOOCs (massive open online courses) offered by the nation's leading universities, e.g., MOOCs from edX (Harvard & M.I.T.) and Coursera (Stanford, Princeton, Penn, University of Michigan, etc)
Examples of non-profit institutions offering competency-based programs include:
-- Western Governors University ... See related article, "Model of the Moment" (Inside Higher Education, 5/9/2011)

-- University of Wisconsin (will allow MOOCs as proof of competency) ... See related article, "Another State to Assess Skills" (Inside Higher Education, 7/9/12)

-- Northern Arizona University's Personalized Learning Division (courses developed by engaging Pearson Learning Solutions as its strategic partner, part of broader initiative sponsored the EDUCAUSE Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) funded by the Gates Foundation) ... See related article, "Competency Loves Company" (Inside Higher Education, 7/9/12)

2.5 Deploy eLearning remedial/developmental applications ... intensive IT + training/retraining

A high percentage of freshmen, and an even higher percentage of black freshmen, enter U.S. colleges every year with inadequate preparation in basic math and language skills.

Traditional "chalk and talk" (low tech/no tech) remedial courses have not provided cost-effective remedies. Deficiencies persist for too many students. In some cases these persistent deficiencies, especially in math, force some students to change majors from STEM to non-STEM fields. Other students with larger deficiencies drop out or flunk out. When they return to college as non-traditional students, they bring their unresolved deficiencies back to school with them.

The good news is that an expanding array of eLearning applications have been developed that can be used in online courses wherein each student can improve their basic skills at their own pace or as online components in flipped classrooms, e.g., the so-called "Emporium" model first developed at Virginia Tech, wherein students interact with online courseware in computer labs at their own pace, but on-site instructors engage the students in one-on-one tutorials when needed. The "Emporium" model is described in these articles:

"At Virginia Tech, computers help solve a math class problem" (Washington Post, 4/22/12) ... describes Virginia Tech's "emporium"
"The Math Emporium: Higher Education's Silver Bullet" (Change, May-June 2011) ... places the "emporium" concept in a broader context

Some remedial/developmental applications have been produced by major education sector companies, companies that are committed to making the continuous investments required to make their applications more and more effective for wider range of students. A few producers and their products are noted below:

Blackboard's Developmental Education
Pearson's MyMathLab ...used in Virginia Tech's "emporium"
Knewton's Math Readiness ... See related article, "Knewton Is Building The World's Smartest Tutor"

2.6 Use IT to reduce administrative costs per enrolled student ... intensive IT + training/retraining + generate revenue

HBCUs should provide training for their staff that would enable them to use IT as intensively as the reformed for-profits in processing admissions applications, loan applications, grant applications, student records, transfer requests, tuition payments, etc.

Fortunately for HBCUs, the underlying information technologies (hardware and software) they need to become nimble competitors in market niches have become so cheap that any institution can afford to rent what it needs, either locally or as services in inexpensive clouds, e.g., Amazon.com's Web services ... but once, again, the secrets to using these low-cost technologies effectively will be well-trained support staff

2.7 Monitor the reformed for-profit institutions ... high quality + revenue vs. affordability + TLC

The increasing size of the reformed for-profits will make them pervasive components of every HBCU's environment. Nevertheless, HBCUs can thrive as academic boutiques in the sizable niches in the global academic marketplace that are not dominated by these behemoths as they grow bigger and bigger in their endless quests for the larger enrollments that bring larger profits.

Potential enrollments for HBCUs as global academic boutiques should not be dismissed too quickly. Let's assume that 500 million people out of the world's seven billion will be interested in obtaining a degree or a certificate as non-traditional students. If HBCUs only captured 0.5 percent of that market, they would enroll 2.5 million students -- which is about eight times as large as the roughly 300,000 students enrolled in HBCUs today.

For reasons spelled out in Part C of these notes, the reformed for-profits are likely to become the undisputed champions in the nation's efforts to develop affordable, high quality degree and certificate programs. Their services will set the benchmarks for quality and affordability against which HBCUs will be measured. HBCUs will therefore need to carefully monitor the playbooks of these competitors in order to be sure that they, the HBCUs, keep abreast of the latest productivity enhancing IT innovations.

As also noted in Part C, the for-profits have to pay taxes to governments and dividends to shareholders, substantial obligations not incurred by HBCUs. This greater margin of retained revenue can be used by HBCUs to finance the extra TLC that will provide their competitive advantage, the definitive component of their legacy that a small but significant percentage of the non-traditional students in the massive, global academic marketplace will appreciate and need. As Tom Joyner once said,

"Historically Black colleges have always been known from their inception to take a student, care for them, nurture them, make it so that they are equipped for success in this world." (CNN Interview with Tony Harris, 9/17/10)

_____________________

Related Notes:

HBCU-Levers: Gateway to HBCUs ... Expanding Our Coverage

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 22:09:00 +0000

A recent note on this blog, HBCU Websites -- Some Best Practices, agreed with the growing consensus that HBCUs have to do a better job of telling the world about their success stories. The note went to suggest that an HBCU's Website linked to social media, like Facebook and Twitter, provided the most powerful medium for achieving this objective. Indeed, the Gateway to HBCUs portal associated with this blog was designed to help HBCUs tell the world about their success as academic institutions, i.e., their achievements in teaching & learning, research, and community service.

As of July 1, 2012 the Gateway will expand its coverage of HBCU achievements to include receipt of accreditation notices, new degree and certificate programs, and the achievements of HBCU alumni (especially in STEM) -- categories that were previously omitted. This expanded coverage is now possible because the Gateway and its HBCU-Levers blogsite have been upgraded during the last six months to make more intensive and extensive use of Google's powerful free technologies. Further upgrades will occur in coming months when the HBCU database is moved from a physical server on Howard University's campus onto a virtual server in the Amazon.com cloud.

______________________
Related Notes:

HBCU Websites -- Some Best Practices

Earnings Lost by Opting Out of STEM -- updated 6/27

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 13:53:00 +0000

Yesterday (25 June 2012), the online editions of Inside Higher Education and the The Chronicle of Higher Education posted articles that called their readers' attention to a recently published research report, "The Earnings Benefits of Majoring in STEM Fields Among High Achieving Minority Students" by Tatiana Melguizo and Gregory C. Wolniak (Research in Higher Education, Volume 53, Number 4, 2012).

I strongly urge the readers of this blog to read this important report. Skim or skip the authors' extensive descriptions of their sophisticated statistical methodologies and focus on their data, findings, and recommendations (which they call "implications"). To help get you started, I offer my own brief summary as an alternative to the reviews by Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle.

Summary of Findings

The report presents the results of the authors' efforts to answer two questions:

How much more did high achieving minority students who were science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) majors earn in their first jobs after graduation than high achieving minority students who were not STEM majors?
How much more did high achieving minority STEM students earn if their first jobs were directly related to STEM vs those whose jobs were not directly related to STEM?

Compared to what? Compared to a wide range of other non-STEM majors, but especially to students who were humanities and education majors, and across a wide range of non-STEM jobs. The authors call the alignment of college majors to the skills required by jobs taken within a few years after graduation the "congruence" between major fields and first jobs. So they also answered a more general third question:

For each major field of study (including STEM), how much more was earned by students who took congruent jobs than students who took jobs that were not congruent to their major field of study?

Few readers will be surprised to learn that the authors found that STEM majors enjoyed higher salaries than non-STEM majors in their first jobs; that for all majors, most students who took jobs that were congruent with their majors earned higher salaries than those who didn't; and that STEM graduates who took STEM-related jobs earned higher salaries than those who took non-STEM jobs.

But most readers will probably be surprised that the authors found such large differences in the average earnings they found in answer to each of these questions:

STEM grads earned $48,856 per year, whereas humanities and education majors only earned $31,236 per year.
Black graduates earned $35,900 per year, which is considerably less than than the $42,180 earned by Latino graduates .
Black STEM graduates earned $39,365 per year, which is substantially less than the $56,875 per year earned by Latino STEM graduates.
Interestingly, black education graduates earned $39,537 per year, which is considerably more than the $27,253 earned by Latino education graduates ... but well below the $48,856 earned by all STEM graduates and further below the $56,875 earned by Latino STEM graduates.

However, the reader's disappointment may be tempered by the authors' preliminary findings that earnings gaps were related to the fact that a larger percentage of black STEM students took non-congruent first jobs than Latino STEM students. Given their overall finding that congruent first jobs usually paid higher salaries than non-congruent jobs, the lower average salaries earned by black STEM students is not surprising after all ... but it raises the question: "Why did so many black STEM majors take non-STEM jobs so early in their careers?" Or to use the term favored by another researcher, "Why did so many high achieving black students 'opt out' of STEM right after they graduated?"

Who Were These High Achieving Minority Students?

The authors analyzed the records of a weighted sample of 1,067 black, Latino, and Asian Pacific Island students who had applied to the Gates Foundation's Millennium Program for scholarships in 2000. Some were accepted into the program; others weren't; but both groups had grades, SAT scores, and other characteristics that marked them as high achievers. In addition to STEM, the students also majored in the social sciences, humanities, education, and professional fields.

Other Studies

Three other recent studies are related to this one:

"What Happens After Enrollment? An Analysis of the Time Path of Racial Differences in GPA and Major Choice" by Peter Arcidiaconoy, Esteban M. Aucejoz, and Ken Spennerx. Duke University Website, June 2, 2011.
Opting Out, Losing the Potential of America's Young Black Elite by Maya A. Beasley. University of Chicago Press, 2011.
"Why they leave: the impact of stereotype threat on the attrition of women and minorities from science, math and engineering majors" by Maya A. Beasley and Mary J. Fischer

Whereas "Earnings Benefits" addressed the decisions of high achieving black students to change from STEM to non-STEM fields after they graduated, these other studies considered the decisions by high achieving black students to change majors from STEM to non-STEM before they graduated:

"After Enrollment" found that changing majors raised the GPAs of the black students; whereas Opting Out focused on why the black students switched to non-STEM majors. Taken together, these three studies indicate that opting out of STEM either before or after graduation is a substantial phenomenon that needs to be reversed as soon as possible.

The authors of "After Enrollment" are perplexed by the decisions of so many black students to accept lower paying job offers, so they suggest that follow-up qualitative studies be done to explore why the students made such financially incorrect career choices.
The authors of "After Enrollment" imply that the black students switched out of STEM in order to improve their GPAs ... which is a rational decision in the short run, but as shown by "After Enrollment", it undermines the students' subsequent earnings potentials.
The author of Opting Out conducted the kind of qualitative study advocated by the authors of "Earnings Benefits." She found that black students switched majors in large part because of their perception of racism in STEM fields where there are still relatively few blacks. Faced with this "stereotype threat" -- the anxiety caused by the expectation of being judged based on a negative group stereotype -- many black students dropped out STEM majors and changed to "racialized" fields, her term for fields wherein there are already a substantial number of black professionals and therefore substantially less racism.
The author of Opting Out also co-authored "Why They Leave" -- a statistical analysis of the the impact of stereotype threat on the decisions of women and minority students to drop out of STEM majors based on the responses of nearly 4,000 students to the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen (NLSF).
As noted earlier, the "Earnings Benefits" study found that black education graduates earned considerably more than Latino education graduates. This would be consistent with the possibility that some well-prepared black students opted out of STEM in favor of education, a racialized field, or chose education as their major without considering STEM.

As with the previous notes on this subject that I have posted on this blog, full disclosure once again requires that I acknowledge that I am the very proud Daddy of Dr. Maya A. Beasley, the author of Opting Out and co-author of "Why They Leave." And, as before, I also voice my profound frustration with her findings.

Yes, racism still exists and it may still exist fifty or even one hundred years from now, but so what? Why is it that highly gifted black athletes in the NBA, NFL, and MLB had the guts to persevere in the face of the crudest racism to become superstars in the world's most highly competitive sports, whereas highly gifted black STEM scholars don't have the courage to win Nobel Prizes?

We cheered Jack Johnson and Jesse Owens and Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson and Arther Ash and Tiger Woods. Is it possible that when we en-couraged their courage, it strengthened their resolve to persevere?. If so, then why are we now saying "There, there, poor baby. Did that mean white Dr. STEM-y hurt your feelings when he looked at you funny and muttered the N-word?"

Why aren't we en-couraging our young black scholars to be more courageous? Why aren't we celebrating their victories and strengthening their resolve to persevere in the presence of racism? As Dr. DuBois correctly observed, a people's progress is driven by the achievements of its best and brightest, its "Talented Tenth."

The authors of "Earnings Benefits" have made an important contribution by putting dollar figures on the benefits gained or lost by the decisions of our Talented Tenth to opt in or to opt out of STEM, benefits or losses that will be compounded by the proportional pay raises they receive or don't receive in subsequent decades.

_____________________

Related notes:

UVa, Strategic Dynamism, and What Corporate Management Can Teach Academia ... updated 6/19/12

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 06:04:00 +0000

"Corporate-style, top-down leadership does not work in a
great university. Sustained change with buy-in does work."

This quotation is from a public statement by Dr. Theresa A. Sullivan, former president, University of Virginia, that was linked to an article published by the Chronicle of Higher Education (6/19/12). An article in last Friday's Chronicle (6/15/12) suggested that the recent and as yet unexplained firing of Dr. Sullivan reflected the influence of a powerful alumnus, a venture capitalist, who proposed that UVa needed leadership that embodied "strategic dynamism" -- whatever that is.

This struck me as yet another example of corporate intellectual imperialism, the belief, correction, the fundamentalist faith that corporate America has what it takes to cure whatever ails the rest of America, in this case, a prominent institution in its academic sector. So let me begin by addressing the question implied by the last item in the title of this response. What can corporate management teach academia? My answer ==> not much.

Now isn't that a shocker? A man who has spent most of his adult life in universities as a student, as a tenured faculty member, and as a member of an academic senior staff declares that corporate managers don't have much to offer faculty and academic administrators who seek to improve the functioning of their colleges and universities. Yup. I'm just another pointy-headed, closed minded academic who refuses to worship in the High Church of Corporate Management, MBA. Or am I? In my defense, I offer the following fable.

A Mostly Corporate Fable
Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, a businessman faced a vexing problem. Try hard as he might, he made no headway. When he was just about to give up, he had a flash. Why not ask Professor Know-Something to give him a hand? Know-Something had been one of the most interesting teachers the businessman had had in college because the professor really enjoyed solving problems.

So he called his old teacher, described his problem, and was disappointed when Professor Know-Something honestly declared that he had never considered such a problem before, but would give it some thought. A few days later the professor stopped by the businessman's office on his way home and gave him some creative suggestions as to how the problem could be solved. The businessman immediately realized that the professor's ideas not only solved the problem; they would enable him to increase his profits by 10 percent right away. So he insisted on paying the professor one percent of his anticipated gains. The professor was delighted. Indeed, he was so pleased with his windfall that he offered to help his former student whenever possible in the future. Moreover, the professor was able to develop a rigorous formulation of his solution to the business problem in the form of a paper that he submitted to a refereed journal, a paper that was promptly accepted for publication.

From time to time thereafter, the professor would call the businessman to inquire if he needed more help. Sometimes he did, but not often enough to absorb most of the professor's creative energies ... and the professor's thirst for extra income to supplement his meager academic salary. So the professor began to approach other businesses, especially those owned or managed by his former students, asking them if they needed help. Many of them did, and each of them paid the professor what he considered to be a generous consultant fee.

From time to time the professor also called a few of his students who had become government administrators. Yes, they also needed help; but since government agencies couldn't pay the professor nearly as much as private corporations, the professor spent most of his time with his corporate clients.

And once in a great while, the professor would approach a university administrator and invariably get the same response. "Yes, indeedy, we could really use your help, but unfortunately we don't have any money so we can't pay you." Needless to say, the professor didn't do much academic consulting.

At the end of each year Professor Know-Someting found that his consulting fees had the same distribution: 90 percent from corporate clients, 10 percent from government clients, and nothing from his few pro-bono academic clients. And his records showed that he allocated his consulting time and creative energies in a similar manner: 90 percent for corporate clients, 9 percent for government clients, and 1 percent for his pro-bono academics.

What's more interesting is that other professors heard about Professor Know-Something's prosperous consulting activities and began to do some consulting themselves. And at the end of each year these other professors also found that their income and man-hours had similar distributions. Their corporate clients dominated their practices, although they did earn significant income from government agencies. And, of course, none of them spent very much time working on academic problems.

As the professors published more and more descriptions of their clever problem solving methods, they realized that they had amassed a considerable body of knowledge, especially with regards to business problems. Being professors, they created graduate degree programs through which they could teach bright students their creative approaches to business problems. They called these programs Masters of Business Administration, or MBAs. The well trained graduates of MBA programs quickly became the rising stars in whatever businesses they entered. And of course they always called their old professors for help whenever they encountered problems they couldn't solve using the techniques they had learned in their MBA courses. In other words, the virtuous cycle continued with better trained MBAs asking for help on more complex problems which the professors solved, published in journals, and incorporated into their courses.

The End.

Moral of the Fable
So what's the moral of this little fable? Very simple. Corporate managers know how to solve business problems because smart academics like me taught them what they know. Government managers aren't as clever because smart academics didn't spend as much time on government problems because government fees were substantially lower than corporate fees. And finally, nobody knows very much about how to solve academic problems because smart academics seldom work for free ... :-)

So whenever I read that the University of XYZ has hired a president or a provost to apply "proven" corporate management techniques to the university's problems, I usually chuckle, become annoyed, or sadly shake my head. We academics fathered corporate management as it is now practiced, so what can we learn from our robust intellectual offspring? Not much. More importantly, we didn't develop those ideas to solve academic problems nor did we ever verify their applicability to academic problems; so no one should assume that they will work in an academic environment. As for why so many universities seem determined to apply these untested notions, we need only look at their Boards of Trustees whose memberships are increasingly dominated by MBAs ... :-)

HBCU Websites -- Some Best Practices ... with a P.S. on 6/20/12

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 02:24:00 +0000

Part I -- It's a Web World

A consensus has recently emerged within the HBCU community that lack of public awareness of the recent achievements of HBCUs makes them vulnerable to judgments that they have nothing more to contribute to U.S. society, that HBCUs have a distinguished legacy, but a dubious future. HBCUs need to tell their stories more effectively so that the general public can better understand why they are still needed. I agree with this consensus.

However, I disagree with most of the specific suggestions I have encountered as to what HBCUs should do to remedy this situation because most suggestions haven't focused on the most important tool for managing the public's perceptions of what HBCUs are all about ==> their Websites.

To rephrase the emerging consensus, some HBCUs have used their Websites to tell their stories very effectively; but most haven't. Even a cursory examination of the 105 HBCU Websites provides ample evidence that most HBCUs don't seem to understand that their Websites are their primary opportunities for informing prospective students, alumni, and potential sponsors of their R&D projects about their most important strengths and recent achievements.

In today's world, institutions are defined by what people see and hear on their Websites. If HBCUs don't tell their stories well on their Websites, it doesn't matter how well they present themselves in other media because today's world is a Web world, a world wherein all other media are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Anyone who doubts this assertion need only consider the fact that the other media -- newspapers, magazines, radio, network TV, and cable TV -- are losing readers, listeners, and viewers while for more and more people the Web has become their primary source of information about everything.

HBCU Websites as News Media

But the good news is that the Web also provides every institution, including HBCUs, with an inexpensive medium through which they can tell their stories directly to everyone else on the planet in their own words, unfiltered by reporters and editors, and at the times best suited to yield the biggest advantages.

As the manager of the Digital Learning Lab (DLL), I have visited each of the 105 HBCU Websites every week since 2003 in search of announcements about their academic achievements or upcoming academic events, i.e., announcements and events related to their teaching & learning, their research, and their community service. I then post links to these announcements on the DLL's "Gateway to HBCUs" Web portal and also add them to the DLL's searchable database.

The following notes summarize my personal observations about the features of HBCU Websites that have assisted or impeded my search for their academic news, observations that I will categorize as the Do's and Don'ts that are most likely to assist or impede prospective students, alums, potential sponsors of R&D projects, and other visitors in their search for information about a much broader range of information that includes academic issues, but also includes news about campus life, sports, fraternity activities, band competitions, theater productions, rivalries with other HBCUs, Home Comings; assistantships, fellowships, and internship opportunities for current students; career opportunities for graduates; alumni achievements; etc, etc, etc.

An Illustrative Example

But allow me to pause for a moment to cite an example from the last presidential election that illustrates my point that HBCUs must not only continue to do good stuff; nowadays they must also provide good descriptions of their good stuff on their Websites.

As most readers will probably recall, the 2008 campaign for the nomination of the Democratic Party began with a series of nationally televised debates among the Party's candidates that started in 2007. The first debate was held on April 26, 2007 at South Carolina State University, an HBCU; and the third debate, moderated by political commentator Tavis Smiley, was held at another HBCU. That two of the first three debates among the Democratic Party's candidates were held at HBCUs were not only major achievements for the HBCUs that hosted the debates; their locations set the stage for an historic turnout of support from the entire HBCU community that greatly contributed to Senator Barack Obama's historic election in November 2008 as the nation's first African American president.

Now let's get down to the Web stuff. Searching the DLL's HBCU archive database on South Carolina State University in 2007 for "Democratic Party debate" returned three headline links and excerpts from the full articles that South Carolina State posted on its Website:

"First Democratic Presidential Primary Debate to be broadcast from SC State, April 26
The Democratic Presidential Candidates’ Debate will be broadcast live from SC State’s Martin Luther King Jr. Auditorium on Thursday, April 26, at 7 p.m., and will be produced by NBC News. This will be the first Presidential Primary debate broadcast from a Historically Black College or University." (1/8/2007) ... Initial announcement
"All systems are go! All candidates confirmed for 2008 Presidential Debate
With less than two weeks before South Carolina makes history with the first presidential debate for either party in the 2008 cycle, officials from the South Carolina Democratic Party and South Carolina State University announced today that all systems are ready and on track for a both a successful and a historic Path to the Presidency Debate on SC State’s campus on Thursday, April 26, 2007." (4/13/2007) ... Timely reminder
"600 media, 1,279 stories boost image of SC State
Now, the debate’s success can be told in numbers. There were 1,279 stories told about the university and the debate. The total audience for programs mentioning SC State and the debate from April 16 until May 7 was 119,526,115, according to Nielsen Media Research figures. Had S.C. State purchased all of the advertising it received, it would have cost $1,331,716. The total publicity value of hosting the debate was $4 million." (5/9/2012) ... Announcing the benefits

The third announcement is the key. While the major media alerted the nation and the world that the first debate was held at SC State, the post-debate Nielson figures were not featured in subsequent reports by the major newspapers or TV networks. Publicizing the good news embodied in that important data to the justifiably proud members of SC State community -- its students, faculty, staff, and alums -- and then to other interested readers, like you and I, at a later data was something that SC State's Website was uniquely qualified to do ... and it rose to the challenge ... Well done, SC DOGGS! Well done!!! ... :-)

Framework

Let's start by sketching a general framework for the specific do's and don'ts for HBCU administrators and Webmasters that will be presented in subsequent sections:

Objectives ... The basic idea is to post enough new stories on your Website about your HBCU's achievements and upcoming events on a week-to-week, month-to-month basis to attract new visitors and to convert old visitors into "subscribers" who come back to your Website again and again the way readers and viewers used to read their morning newspapers and watch the evening news on TV.
Drive new visitors to your Website by engaging the support of new Internet media that focus on issues of concern to the HBCU community. Think of them as tech-savvy partners who can marshal an array of Web-related technologies -- Websites, blogs, twitter feeds, YouTube channels, Facebook pages, etc -- to reach far larger audiences than you can. Their success is based on their capacity to relay reports of your success; so when you win, they win ... and vice versa. Ironically, many of these private cyber-operations were developed by far-sighted, young entrepreneurs who recognized the potential value of Internet technologies for the HBCU community long before the HBCUs themselves.
Make it easy for visitors to find the news on your Website. Place headlines and short blurbs for your most important stories on your Home Page with links to the full stories on separate pages with unique URLs.
Write clearly. Your announcements and your descriptions of forthcoming events should be easy to read ... so include photos and video clips where possible ... and in those rare instances wherein numbers are key features of your announcements, also include eye-catching charts and graphs.
Check your visitor stats regularly, e.g. use Google Analytics (it's free) every day/week/month to see how well you're doing ... or not.

Part II -- Some Do's
The section recommends a few of the "best practices" that are followed by some of the best known HBCUs. Indeed, one of the reasons their brands retain their prominence in the public's awareness is their adherence to these practices. Most of the recommendations can be implemented with a minimal increase in the work loads of the staff currently responsible for an HBCU's Website and overall communications. Note: Some of the following bullets include links in italics to HBCU Web pages that illustrate their points.

1. Think of Your Website as Your HBCU's Most Important News Medium

Publish news items of interest to all of your stakeholders -- students and their families, prospective students and their families, faculty, staff, senior administrators, alumni, trustees, donors, funding agencies ...
Emphasize your HBCU's academic achievements, i.e., teaching & learning, research, and community service. Note all contracts & grants, publications, awards, and honors awarded to students, faculty, and alumni; guest lectures by distinguished experts; commencement speakers; conferences and workshops hosted by your HBCU ...
Highlight your HBCU's community service activities.
-- Meals for poor people at Thanksgiving ... St. Augustine's College, University of Maryland Eastern Shore
-- Toys for children at Christmas ... Claflin University
-- Free tax preparation services ... Harris-Stowe State University, Jackson State University, Coppin State University
-- Alternative Spring Breaks ... Bowie State University, Howard University ...
Provide complete coverage of the most popular non-academic activities sponsored by your HBCU with lots of photos and video clips of the newsmakers, e.g., sports and other competitive activities, campus life, band performances, theater productions, poetry readings, concerts ...
Feature occasional reports that quantify the economic impact of your HBCU on its local community.
... Tennessee State University, Alabama State University, Savannah State University, Fort Valley State University, Southern University of New Orleans ...
Cover events of general interest to the HBCU community.
... Trayvon Martin Demonstrations/Rallies ... University of Maryland Eastern Shore, Alabama State University, Harris-Stowe University, Grambling State University, Tougaloo College, Clark Atlanta University ...
Use your Website to present your HBCU's definitive policy statements in times of crisis.
-- Hurricanes ... Howard University, FAMU, Clark Atlanta University ...
-- Great Recession ... Virginia State University video, Spelman College video, Morehouse College ...

2. Drive New Visitors to Your Website

We're talking about raising the visibility of your brand in the academic marketplace, so this is really about advertising; which means that we're talking about ads on the Web, today's most powerful communications medium. The goal is to get the most favorable references to your HBCU in front of the most Web users for the least cost to your HBCU. Two approaches to this challenge come to mind:

Pay for search engine ads via Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. with your HBCU's funds
Engage partners who will cover the advertising costs

Make no mistake: the most successful for-profit institutions -- like Phoenix, DeVry, Strayer, and Kaplan -- pay millions of dollars each month for search engine ads for their certificate and degree programs because their expensive Web-based advertising works. It generates lots of student inquiries that yield high enrollments that yield high tuition revenues that yield high profits. But you know this. So let's talk about the second option.

(a) Use Social Media to Mobilize Your Home Base

Start with your own HBCU. Don't assume that the members of your own community read your press releases and other news notices just because you post them on your Website. This is a particularly dubious assumption for your current students and youngest alums. You're more likely to get their attention through social media, e.g., Facebook and Twitter.

Establish a Facebook identify for your HBCU and place a Facebook logo in at the bottom of your Home Page that links to your Facebook page ... Note the Facebook "f" logo/links on the following HBCU Home Pages: Claflin University, FAMU, Howard University, Jackson State University, Spelman College, Tuskegee University
Establish a Twitter account for your HBCU and place a Twitter logo at the bottom of your Home Page next to your Facebook logo that links to your Twitter page .. Note the Twitter bird logo/links on the following HBCU Home Pages: Claflin University, FAMU, Howard University, Jackson State University, Spelman College, Tuskegee University
Send out mass emails a few times to all faculty, staff, students, and alums imploring them to "Like" your HBCU on Facebook and to "Follow" your HBCU on Twitter.
Whenever you publish a press release or an important news notice on your Website, post a message that provides a headline and summary for the news on your Facebook page that includes a link to the full description of the news on your Website.
Tweet your news announcements with a brief (max 140 character) headline that included a link to the full news item on your Website

-- Hampton University tweet = "HU Community Mourns the Loss of Devoted Honors College Director Dr. Freddye T. Davy http://www.hamptonu.edu/news/060412_76_davy.html" ... clicking the link leads to the full announcement on Press Release page

-- North Carolina A&T tweet = "Take a look at this week's Alumni Times! http://bit.ly/L3iuG3 #NCAT" ... clicking the encoded link leads to the online magazine "Alumni Times" on A&T's Website

-- Spelman College tweet = "Beverly Daniel Tatum ‏@BDTSpelman
New revamped Spelman website unveiled tonight. Check it out http://www.spelman.edu Retweeted by Spelman College"... This tweet is a neat bank shot. President Tatum sent a tweet from her BDTSpelman Twitter account that encouraged those who followed her to look at Spelman's newly reorganized Website found at http://www.spelman.edu ... The official Spelman College Twitter account follows Dr. Tatum's BDTSpelman account, so it received her tweet. It then retweeted (rebroadcast) her tweet to all of its followers.

-- Morehouse College tweet = "The @Morehouse Class of 2012... facebook.com/photo.php?fbid... " Clicking the encoded link leads to a large photo on the Morehouse Facebook page of the graduates in procession. Below the photo find happy comments of the grads, families, and friends.
Indeed, an HBCU's Facebook page makes a great supplement for an HBCU's Website because of Facebook's capacity to share photos, videos, and online conversations in which members of the HBCU community can exchange comments about the HBCU's announcements.

At this time Facebook has two additional advantages with regards to communicating with students and younger alums ==> (a) they "all" use Facebook; and (b) they "all" know how to publish materials on Facebook. Indeed a far higher percentage of students know how to publish materials on Facebook than on Websites; so there are more potential student assistants who could be hired to help an HBCU publish more concise versions of its announcements on Facebook than on the HBCU's Website. Some HBCUs now publish a large share of their announcements on their Facebook pages. This is especially convenient for announcements about local news that is more likely to be of interest to the students, faculty, staff, and alums within the HBCU, rather than news that would be shared with the community of all HBCUs or with the wider world beyond HBCUs. In such cases, their tweets contain links to the full news announcements on Facebook, rather than to the archives on their Websites.

-- Elizabeth City State University ... Twitter ==> Facebook
-- Howard University ... Twitter ==> Facebook
-- Florida A&M University ... Twitter ==> Facebook
-- Spelman College ... Twitter ==> Facebook

(b) Understand How HBCU Service Providers Support the HBCU Community

As previously noted, entrepreneurs have established Web-based, for-profit companies and non-profit organizations that provide information, social networking, memorabilia, and other services for the ultimate consumers within the HBCU community -- students, staff, faculty, alums, former students who never graduated ... and their families and close friends.

There are about 300,000 students currently enrolled in the 105 HBCUs, so I would conservatively estimate that the HBCU market represents between 3,000,000 and 4,000,000 core consumers.
These core consumers are also well positioned to influence the institutional purchases made by their HBCUs for computers, networks, enterprise applications, textbooks, cable TV services, food services, travel services, conference services, etc, etc, etc.
Beyond this, successful providers have attracted the attention of the staffs of foundations, government agencies, educational media, major media, and other potential supporters.

Here's a short list of HBCU providers. Note: Appearance on this list is not an endorsement; nor does omission reflect a derogatory judgment:

Some other providers of online information services address the broader market of black American consumers; but they also focus on HBCU issues from time to time

Many of your own students, faculty, staff, and alums already subscribe to the services offered by HBCU providers because they are not only interested in what's happening at their own HBCU; they also want to keep up with what's happening at other HBCUs and to stay in touch with friends and colleagues at other HBCUs.

They don't want to look at all 105 HBCU Websites every week. They want to obtain the news they are interested in -- e.g., sports, campus life, entertainment, academics -- via convenient access to the Web pages, blogs, tweets, and Facebooks of a couple of sources; and they want to be able to interact with members of other HBCU communities without having to look up names, email addresses, and other contact info by going to the 104 other HBCU Websites. Indeed, providing convenient access to the entire HBCU community is such a fundamental function that some providers include words like "connect" and "digest" in their names ... :-)

(c) Use Social Media to Engage HBCU Service Providers as De Facto Partners
HBCU service providers are the new Black Press. They aggregate and distill the success stories of the 105 HBCUs for their subscribers. More stories attract more subscribers; more subscribers enable the profit-oriented providers to generate more profit from the Web ads of their corporate sponsors; and more subscribers attract more support from the sponsors of the non-profit providers. In other words, your success as an HBCU enhances their success.

But the partnership works both ways. The providers' capacity to reach more subscribers enhances their capacity to raise the visibility of your HBCU and thereby increases the public's understanding of what your HBCU is doing nowadays and why it's still needed.

The following bullets suggest a few basic techniques to get you started using Facebook and Twitter to draw the attention of HBCU providers to the announcements and events posted on your HBCU's Website. You can find more advanced techniques in the Facebook/Twitter online "help" sections and/or by using Google, Bing, or Yahoo to search for more extensive "how to" manuals written by third parties.

Configure your HBCU Twitter and Facebook accounts to follow/"Like" HBCU providers on Facebook and Twitter.
Use Facebook and Twitter to send messages that encourage more members of your HBCU community to sign up for the providers' services on their Websites and to follow the providers on Facebook and Twitter
Retweet the tweets and share the posts of the providers that are most relevant to your HBCU and/or to the HBCUs that the members of your HBCU community relate to most strongly.
HBCU providers follow all HBCUs that have twitter accounts and Facebook pages. But if your accounts are new, then @mention the providers in your first few tweets to alert them that you're online.
Use #hashtags in your tweets to identify the categories of your press releases and other announcements; for example #HBCU or #HBCUs or #HBCUgrant or #HBCUsports

3. Provide News That's Easy to Find, Easy to Read

The "best practices" noted in this section are obvious and widely applied; so the only question is why all HBCUs have not adopted them yet; but unfortunately, they haven't.

News Facts vs. Forthcoming Events
It's useful to distinguish between announcements that present important news facts (for example, your HBCU's receipt of a large donation or a major grant) versus announcements of forthcoming events (for example, Homecoming, conferences, commencements, and guest lectures.)

-- Alabama A&M University ... "AAMU Spotlight" vs. "Upcoming Events"
-- Claflin University ... "Claflin News" vs. "Upcoming Events"
-- Florida A&M University ... "News" vs. "Events"

News facts should be presented asap, or at least before the most important information reaches your target audience via other media. Forthcoming events should be announced far enough in advance for your target audience to make plans to participate. Reminders of the events a few days before their occurrence are a good idea.

Summaries of what happened at an event as news facts should also be published after the event for the benefit of the members of your target audience who were unable to attend

-- South Carolina State University ... Impact of hosting Democratic debates in 2008
-- Hampton University ... Summary + video of Mayor Cory Booker's 2012 Commencement address
Headlines, optional blurbs, and full text
Headlines for a few of your HBCU's most important recent announcements in all categories should appear in prominent locations on your Website's Home Page, followed by an optional blurb that provides the reader with a brief description of the announcement. The headline should be linked to the full story on another page (or in set of paragraphs on another page).
News Archives
The reader should be given access to old news via a list of all headlines (and blurbs) grouped by month and year on a page called "Archives" or "Old News" or some other name that has similar meaning. If your archives cover more than one year, it's best to provide a drop-down list from which the reader can select a year. Each year should be a link to a page that contains all of the headlines (and blurbs) that your HBCU published that year. As on the Home Page, when the reader clicks a headline, the full text of the news announcement should appear.

-- Hampton University ... Drop down links to archive list at top of every full story
-- Howard University ... Links to archive list at top of Press Release page
Headlines, Blurbs, and Social Media
All headlines should be tweeted at least once and each tweet should contain a link to the full text of the news announcements on your Website ... or for HBCUs that publish announcements on Facebook, the link should point to the full text on your Facebook page.
Change Your Headlines (and blurbs) "frequently"
If the headlines (and blurbs) on your Website's Home Page (or on its Facebook page) don't change from time to time, visitors will get the worst impression about your HBCU -- that little or nothing is happening there, that it's becoming irrelevant. But how often you change your headlines (and blurbs) will depend on how much news really occurs.

Large HBCUs have more faculty, staff, and students so they have more opportunities to do "interesting" things every week; whereas small HBCUs have less opportunities so their news headlines (and blurbs) might only change every two weeks, or once per month. But no matter how small your HBCU, it's always doing something interesting.
Good Writing
Your headlines should be eye-catching; they should stimulate visitors to your Website to want to read the full stories. And your stories should be well written; to be specific, they should follow the hallowed format inherited from printed news media. The first paragraphs should present the essence of the story for all readers; whereas later paragraphs should present more details for readers who become engrossed in the story.
Search Engines
Install a search engine on your Website whose scope covers your archive pages and possibly the files that contain the full text of all of your news announcements. This will enable readers to find each and every news announcement months or years after you first publish its headline on your Home Page.

If you don't include this kind of search feature, your HBCU will lose access to its history. When someone asks, "Which HBCUs have done this or that?" your HBCU may not be included in the answer. It's not enough to tell your HBCU's stories once; you have to tell them again and again and again. The easiest way to do this is to let readers who ask the same questions about your HBCU be able to find the same answers again and again and again by using your Website's search engine.
Caveat ... the Limits of Facebook
Posting announcements on Facebook is convenient, but poses significant retrieval problems. On a Website, you can use keywords to search for all announcements, no matter how old the announcements; but on Facebook, searching is highly restricted at this time. Indeed, here's a quote from Facebook about its search function:

"How can I best use [Facebook] search to get news and information? ... Currently, you can only search for content that has been posted in the last 30 days. The range of the search history may be expanded in the future."

Until Facebook's search history is greatly expanded, HBCUs that use Facebook for their announcements are strongly advised to also post their most important announcements on their Websites. Otherwise, no one will be be able to search for and retrieve announcements older than 30 days ... :-(

4. Keeping Score

It's not enough to tell your HBCU's success stories. You also need to know how many people are reading its stories so that you can see if your efforts to increase the visibility of your HBCU's brand are succeeding or not.

(a) Web Pages

We're talking numbers now, nerd stuff, the cold-blooded, green-eye-shaded figures that tell you whether all of those sleek new graphics that you added to your Web site really made any difference, in what ways, and by how much.

Some Useful Statistics 
Among other things you will want to know how many visitors come to your site; how many pages they visited; which pages; how long they stayed on each page; how many/what percent of your visitors were new versus how many/what percent were making return visits; where they came from -- city, state, country; which browsers they were using and (sometimes) which operating systems managed their platforms.You'll want to compile these stats on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis; and compare them to the stats for previous days, weeks, months, and years. And you'll want to produce compact graphics that will let you quickly identify important patterns in these statistics. 
Analytical Packages 
There are numerous commercial (expensive) and freeware analytical packages on the market that will enable you to compile these kinds of statistics and graphics for your Website. Some are more powerful than others, but also require time to master.

Google provides a tool kit called Google Analytics that is powerful, easy to learn, and free. If you decide to use any other set of tools you should compare the alternative to Google in terms of power and ease-of-learning. If the alternative is a commercial package you should be absolutely sure that its reports are sufficiently superior to Google Analytics to justify whatever they cost.

(b) Social Media

If your HBCU uses Facebook and Twitter, you should track how many people "follow" its tweets and how many people "like" its Facebook page from week to week. Ideally the number of "follows" and "likes" should be a high percentage of the total number of your HBCU's current students and recent alums because they're the members of your community who are most likely to be regular users of social media.

Of course, when your HBCU first launches its Twitter and Facebook pages you will have to use your Website, email, and other non-social media to encourage the members of your community to follow its new social media.
As your HBCU's Twitter and Facebook pages acquire interesting content, the HBCU service providers discussed in previous sections of this report can help you enlist followers from other HBCUs and from the wider world.
Unfortunately, at this time there is no reliable way for you to track how many people actually view your HBCU's Facebook pages, not even Google Analytics, as per this statement from Google:

"Can Analytics track my Facebook or MySpace account?
Currently, it is not possible to use Google Analytics to track individual profiles in Facebook or MySpace. These accounts do not allow user-defined JavaScript code. Therefore, you won't be able to install the tracking code. Because the Google Analytics code uses Javascript, if the code can not successfully execute, a visit will not be recorded and you will not retain any visitor information."

Part III -- Some Don'ts

It's usually difficult to do the right thing and and the wrong thing at the same time. So given my extensive list of "Do's" that were presented in the preceding sections of this piece, my list of "Don'ts" is correspondingly brief ... :-)

Never Place Announcements in Word Documents 
Word documents and other files produced by Microsoft Office are able to contain macro programs. This makes them relatively easy targets for hackers who infect the files with malicious virus programs. Modern anti-malware packages can detect some, but not all macro viruses. Therefore prudent visitors to your Home Page will be reluctant to open announcements that are housed in Word files.
Never Delete Your HBCU's History 
Your announcements are the rough drafts of your HBCU's history, so this "Don't" is merely the flip side of the "Do" about maintaining searchable archives for your announcements. Nowadays digital storage is so cheap that deleting old announcements can only be justified in the most dire circumstances.

This also means that if you have to move an announcement file, you should configure your Web server to automatically redirect browsers that have the old URL for your announcement to the file's new location.  
Never Waste a Home Page 
A Home Page without any headlines for announcements about what your HBCU has done recently or about forthcoming events at your HBCU is a wasted opportunity to inform your visitors that your HBCU is still engaged in important activities, that it's still needed.

__________________
__________________

Post Script on 6/20/12 ... The good news is that Google's stats show that lots of folk have viewed this note; but the bad news is that only a few people have left any comments so far.

I've received direct feedback from friends and colleagues, mostly approving, but also mostly preferring a different balance. Some thought that some of the best practices I included were "too obvious" to have been listed; whereas others felt that important innovations, e.g., use of social media, were not given sufficient emphasis.

So now I'm making a direct appeal to the readers of this blog. What do you think of the "best practices" that I described? Should other strategies have been given more emphasis? If so, which ones? .... Please leave your comments in the form at the bottom of this note. Thanks ... :-)

____________
Related notes:

DLL 2012 Directory of HBCUs' Online/Blended Degree Programs -- 6/1/12

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Sun, 27 May 2012 13:07:00 +0000

The following table lists the online and blended degree programs offered in 2012 by HBCUs.
Degree programs are listed in the 2012 directory if and only if during the last two weeks in May 2012, the programs were described on the Websites of one of the 105 HBCUs on the official list of HBCUs maintained by the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)

All of the courses in the program are 100 percent online, or
Only a few courses in the program are not 100 percent online; these courses are either hybrid/blended or face-to-face.

Table of HBCUs Online/Blended Degree Programs in 2012

HBCUs/Links to Online Programs	Type	Associates	Bachelors	Masters	Doctoral	Comments
Albany State University (GA)	4-Year Public			Criminal Justice
Bethune-Cookman University (FL)	4-Year Private			Transformative Leadership
Fayetteville State University (NC)	4-Year Public		Criminal Justice, Psychology, Sociology, Fire Science (Fire Investigations), Fire Science (Fire Management), Business Administration (General Concentration)	Criminal Justice, MBA		Bachelors are degree completion programs; students must have completed 1st two years or Associates degree
Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FL)	4-Year Public			MSN, Public Health (MPH), MBA
Fort Valley State University (GA)	4-Year Public		Criminal Justice, Political Science, Psychology, Technical and Professional Writing
Hampton University (VA)	4-Year Private	General Studies, Business Management, Aviation Management	Criminal Justice, Busines Management, General Studies, Paralegal Studies, Nursing, Religious Studies, Systems Organization and Management, Systems Organization and Management (Human Resource Management), Aviation Management (Airport Administration)	Nursing, Education in Curriculum and Instruction	Business Administration, Educational Management, Nursing	Degrees awarded by Hampton University College of Education and Continuing Studies
Howard University (DC)	4-Year Private		Clinical Laboratory Science, RN to BSN	Executive MBA This blended/hybrid program instruction is almost completely delivered online, with the exception of the closing Capstone Residency Presentation and an optional study abroad opportunity.	Pharm.D
Jackson State University (MS)	4-Year Public		Education	MBA, Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT)		Bachelors are degree completion programs; students must have completed 1st two years or Associates degree
Kentucky State University (KY)	4-Year Public			Special Education (Learning and Behavior Disorders)
Langston University (OK)	4-Year Public		Business Administration
Mississippi Valley State University (MS)	4-Year Public		Organizational Management Note: This program is blended/hybrid -- During each module (class) learners will meet one evening for four hours during each week or alternatively, meet during the first week with the balance of the entire course conducted online			Bachelors are degree completion programs; students must have completed 1st two years or Associates degree
Morgan State University (MD)	4-Year Public				Community College Leadership
Morris Brown College (GA)	4-Year Private		Organizational Management and Leadership			Bachelors are degree completion programs; students must have completed 1st two years or Associates degree
Norfolk State University (VA)	4-Year Public		Interdisciplinary Studies
North Carolina A&T State University (NC)	4-Year Public		Agricultural Education, Business Education, Electronics Technology, Occupational Safety& Health	Agricultural Education, Information Technology, Instructional Technology	Technology Management
North Carolina Central University (NC)	4-Year Public		Elementary Education , Middle Grades Education , Hospitality and Tourism Administration ** … Criminal Justice +, Early Childhood Education, RN to BSN +	Elementary Education , Middle Grades Education , Information Science, Library Science, Educational Technology		Programs with ** are blended/hybrid; some face-to-face courses may be required Bachelors with + are degree completion programs; students must have completed 1st two years or Associates degree
Prairie View A&M University (TX)	4-Year Public			Executive MBA, Executive Masters of Public Administration
Texas Southern University (TX)	4-Year Public			Juvenile Justice, MBA, Education Administration, Counseling
Southern University A&M College (LA)	4-Year Public		RN to BSN
St. Phillips College (TX)	2-Year Public	Business Management and Technology, Computer Support Specialist, Early Childhood Studies, Health Information Technology, Network Administrator, Web Developer
Tennessee State University (TN)	4-Year Public		Interdisciplinary Studie, Professional Studies (Information Technology), Professional Studies (Organizationnal Leadership)	Holistic Nursing, Speech and Hearing Science, Education (Advanced Studies in Teaching & Learning), Professional Studies (Strategic Leadership), Professional Studies (Human Resource Leadership), Professional Studies (Training & Development), Nursing		Bachelors are degree completion programs; students must have completed 1st two years or Associates degree
Tougaloo College (MS)	4-Year Public			Economics (Business Online)
Virginia University of Lynchburg (VA)	4-Year Private	Liberal Arts and Sciences	Religious Studies, Business Administration, Organizational Management, Sociology, Sociology Criminology), Organizational Management, Divinity
Winston-Salem State University (NC)	4-Year Public		Clinical Laboratory Science, Interdisciplinary Studies (Integrative Studies), Birth to Kindergarten Education, RN-BSN	Rehabilitation Counseling, Elementary Education		Bachelors in Interdisciplinary Studies is a degree completion program; students must have completed 1st two years or Associates degree

Howard-Online @ Gig.U

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Tue, 22 May 2012 13:15:00 +0000

Gig.U

"The University Community Next Generation Innovation Project, or Gig.U, is a broad-based group of over 30 leading research universities from across the United States. Drawing on America’s rich history of community-led innovation in research and entrepreneurship, Gig.U seeks to accelerate the deployment of ultra high-speed networks to leading U.S. universities and their surrounding communities. Improvements to these networks drive economic growth and stimulate a new generation of innovations addressing critical needs, such as health care and education." (This description is from Gig.U's home page)

Howard-Online

When Howard University (Washington, DC) joined Gig.U in 2011, Howard-Online became one of its participating components. Howard-Online is the university's recently established administrative unit that promotes the expansion of the university's reach beyond its physical campus to non-traditional students in the global academic market via online and blended courses offered via the Internet. (Click this link to reach Howard-Online's home page)

This note provides brief descriptions of two initiatives to which Howard-Online is giving serious consideration as part of its participation in the university's Gig.U program.

Support for the Public School System in Washington, DC

Howard University has a long-standing, historic relationship with DC Public Schools (DCPS). Its School of Education has trained many of the best teachers and highest level administrators in the DCPS. It has also provided support for curriculum design, assessments, and other efforts designed to improve the quality of the instruction received by DCPS students.

Working with the university's School of Education, Howard-Online proposes to use broadband technologies to extend this support via the development of MOOCs for "flipped classrooms" that will contain high definition multimedia elements -- e.g. video clips, animations, and educational games -- that DCPS students will find more engaging than traditional computer-based educational materials.

Note: In "flipped classrooms" most course content is delivered via the Web outside of regular class hours; class time is reserved for hands-on experiences, discussions, and Q&A. See GradHacker, "Flipping out? What you need to know about the Flipped Classroom "(Inside Higher Ed, 2/21/12) for a more complete description.

Howard-Online is already planning to develop materials for two series of massive open online courses (MOOCs) for its post-secondary degree and certificate programs, and "lite" versions of these MOOCs that could be used in high school and middle school courses. This initiative is described on its eLearning Innovations Hilltop MOOCs pages and College Prep pages.

-- The first series will cover "black" subjects, e.g., Black History, Black Music, Black Poetry, Black Dance, Black Studies, etc -- subjects in which Howard University's position as a global leader is unchallenged.

-- The second series will provide introductions to STEM subjects in order to encourage young black students to consider fields based on STEM as career options.
As currently planned, the College Prep MOOCs could be delivered to DCPS student workstations via standard broadband connections. However, if Howard University's participation in Gig.U results in higher speed broadband Internet access by the University itself and by selected computer labs in the DCPS, Howard-Online would produce customized editions of its planned MOOCs in high definition formats.
Higher speed broadband access would also enable the teachers-in-training enrolled in Howard University's School of Education degree programs to participate in DCPS flipped classes as discussion group leaders, tutors, and mentors via two-way video communications instead of text-based chat rooms, instant messaging, and tweets.

A High-Tech Incubator for Washington, DC Minority Entrepreneurs

A second initiative that might be included as part of Howard-Online's contributions to the University's Gig.U program is the extension of Howard University's high tech incubator for applications developers, the Howard-Apps-Dev Group, from its current focus on Howard University's students to provide support for black and other minority high tech entrepreneurs throughout the Washington, DC area. The home page of the Howard-Apps-Dev Group provides a complete description of its activities. (Cooperation between Howard-Online and Howard-Apps-Dev is facilitated by the fact that the Director of Howard-Online is also the Coordinator of Howard-Apps-Dev.)

Students on campus currently gain access to the software development kits (SDKs) and other tools via hands-on dedicated workstations in various computer labs. However, higher speed broadband access would enable non-campus members of the incubator group to develop and test their mobile apps and other software creations via remote access to the workstations in our labs or, preferably, to virtual developers' workstations in the cloud.
Higher speed broadband access would also make it easier for non-campus members of the incubator group to participate in developers' meetings via two-way video communications instead of text-based chat rooms, instant messaging, and tweets.
Howard's incubator could also form virtual partnerships with other HBCUs that had access to higher speed broadband access, thereby providing student entrepreneurs enrolled at partner HBCUs with direct exposure to the Washington area's rapidly developing market for apps for mobile platforms and other high tech services. This powerful partnership could transform the Washington, DC area into a "black Silicon Valley", with Howard and its virtual partners playing roles comparable to Stanford University and UC Berkeley.

________________________

Related Notes:

Commencement Address 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Sun, 13 May 2012 02:01:00 +0000

Today, May 12, 2012, was Commencement Day at Howard University, my long-time employer ... and at A&T, Winston-Salem, Tuskegee, Virginia Union, and Claflin to name a few other HBCUs. So I got to thinking, "What would I say to the happy young graduates if I were asked to give the commencement address at one of these institutions? "

What words of wisdom would I impart to them that would enhance their chances of success, knowing that most of them will probably forget most of what I say within a few moments after I was done? What would I say in ten or fifteen minutes that they might remember for the rest of their lives?

I find it difficult to explain original ideas in only ten or fifteen minutes, but then again, originality shouldn't be the primary metric for commencement addresses. Commencements should provide last minute reminders of important stuff that students have already learned, but should never forget. Eloquence will make these things easier to remember, but it's not essential. I recall the video of Steve Jobs' justly famous commencement address at Stanford University in 2005. He delivered a clear message -- "Follow your heart" -- but made it unforgettable by presenting his message in the context of a succinct, but painfully honest summation of his life. So, assuming that most of the graduates in my HBCU audience are black, here goes:

_______________________________

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Today is your day. Congratulations graduates!!! Your classes are done. It's all over. Finally!!! No more lectures for a while, perhaps forever. You won't have to take notes because I'm not going to say anything you haven't heard many times before.

Commencement speakers are supposed to share their "secrets" of success. Well, truth be told, commencement speeches are like recipes for stuffing ==> Every cook has his or her own favorite recipe; and all of the recipes contain the same ingredients more or less; and all of the ingredients are familiar to the dinner guests. So you already know my ingredients, but the way I mix them may contain a surprise or two.

Here's my recipe:

Success = Ambition + Knowledge + Courage + Hard Work + Selective Networking

Ambition & Knowledge
I'm sure that your instructors and mentors have encouraged you to be ambitious, to aim high, and to consider unexplored paths. And the fact that you celebrate the completion of your degree requirements today shows that you understand the importance of knowledge for achieving your ambitions, whatever they may be.

But here's a word of caution for those of you who who think that today marks the end of your formal studies for the rest of your lives. Please don't take these sentiments too seriously. Nothing will undermine your future success more surely in today's knowledge-based global economies than your failure to recognize the need to substantially expand your knowledge base from time to time. Learning has always been a life-long endeavor, but it has become even more so now than ever before, as field after field is up-ended by the introduction of ever more powerful information technologies again and again and again. So wave your happy goodbys today, but don't burn any mental bridges because you'll be back ... again and again and again ... :-)

Courage
Now moving on to my third ingredient, courage, let me say that every graduate needs courage. But if you're black and willing to explore new career paths, you may find yourself confronting an old adversary, racism, whenever you become a pioneer as one of the first blacks in a field or in an organization.

It takes courage to confront prejudice whenever it appears. It took courage for Dr. King and his brave colleagues to confront legalized prejudice back in the Sixties; and it will take courage for you to confront the de facto prejudice that you will encounter from time to time throughout your lives. Yes, racism is still out there, not as strong as it was before the Civil Rights Revolution, but pervasive enough to disappoint those of us who are old enough to have heard Dr. King's powerful description of his dream and strong enough to defeat those of you who lack the extra courage you'll need to persevere in its presence.

Hard Work
Ingredient number four. I'm sure that all of you know that you yourselves will have to work hard to succeed; but I'm concerned that some of you may not realize just how hard your ambitious white competitors are already working to achieve their dreams. Yes, most of them will have better connections in the workplace than most of you; and yes, they won't have to overcome unfair hurdles of racism. But don't be fooled by their posturing that their success is "inevitable" ... because it isn't, and they know it.

I was recently amused to learn about "Stanford ducks" -- hard working, over achievers who seem to float placidly on that famous university's academic waters, but whose feet are always paddling furiously just below the surface.
I was amused because many years ago a colleague of mine from Ghana used the same metaphor to describe the colonial British who had made a great show of being unflappable and unperturbed, but who were always furiously paddling to maintain their advantages.

Please remember that our society only rewards a few winners, so most of your white competitors are going to lose, and they know it. That's why they work so hard. And that's why you "black ducks" will have to work even harder.

Selective Networking
The fifth and final ingredient in my recipe for success is selective networking. The old maxim, "It's not what you know, but who you know" no longer holds. Nowadays it's what you know AND who you know. In a knowledge-based economy, what you know provides access to opportunities that are allocated through your networks of associates. Indeed, it's difficult to become well-connected or to remain well-connected if you don't have valuable knowledge that's needed by the other members of your networks.

In a world driven by accelerating advances in information technology (IT), advances that make your professional networks more important than ever, it's good to know that IT also facilitates your capacity to maintain your networks:

Most of you probably know that at the present time LinkedIn provides the most powerful tool for managing your professional networks.
LinkedIn makes it easy to inform other members of your networks about your past experiences and your current expertise, and alerts them when you acquire more skills and/or experiences. And it makes it easy for you to obtain references from colleagues that can be viewed by prospective employers and/or by prospective partners in proposed projects or new business ventures. Please use LinkedIn, but keep on the lookout for the emergence of networking tools that are even more effective.
Please be "selective." We're not talking about Facebook "friends"; this is your career; so having a small, high quality network of respected peers and powerful potential mentor/advocates is far better than a large network of nobodies.

Example of a Selective Network
I conclude my remarks by calling your attention to a specific example, the well documented cluster of overlapping, high-tech networks known as "Silicon Valley" whose most prominent nodes include Stanford University, UC Berkeley, many of the professors in those institutions, venture capital firms and individual investors, world class corporate behemoths like Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Oracle, Intel, Yahoo!, Google, and Facebook, plus thousands of freewheeling entrepreneurs -- including current students and recent grads of Stanford and UC Berkeley -- whose world class ambitions are to found the next Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Oracle, Intel, Yahoo!, Google, and Facebook.

When Soledad O'Brien's documentary "Black in America, the New Promised Land: Silicon Valley" aired on CNN in October 2011, its bad news was that there weren't any black high-tech entrepreneurs in the Valley. The good news is that this finding was an overstatement of a painful truth. The documentary should have stated that black high-tech entrepreneurs existed, but were grossly underrepresented in the major networks. The better news is that black entrepreneurs are now actively promoting their own networks via organizations like Black Founders. Of course the best news will come when HBCUs decide to play active roles in the formation of networks of black high-tech entrepreneurs in other locations, comparable to the roles that Stanford and UC Berkeley play for their students and their alums in Silicon Valley.

_______________________
Related Notes:

HBCUs and MOOCs

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Tue, 08 May 2012 01:23:00 +0000

A. The edX Partnership

Academia's good news last week was the announcement by Harvard University and M.I.T. that they were forming a partnership called edX that will offer online courses. Each partner will invest $30 million in this venture. (Click here for a video of their press conference.)

Students who successfully complete the requirements of a course will receive a certificate branded Harvardx or MITx, according to which partner sponsored the course. It is anticipated that enrollment in these courses will massive, as in hundreds of thousands of students, because the courses will be free or very cheap. Indeed, a pilot course offered by MITx enrolled 120,000 students. And the courses will be open to anyone who wants to enroll. That was the good news.

Note: Such courses are called massive open online courses or MOOCs ... pronounced "mooks" ... because their enrollments are massive and because they are open to anyone who wants to register ... This simple definition meets the needs of the Harvard/M.I.T. partnership and similar ventures by other universities. For the original, more general/richer concept of a MOOC, click here for Wikipedia and click here for a video.

The better news was that the partners will provide other colleges and universities with access to their platforms, so that somewhere down the road students from all over the world might earn certificates branded SpelmanX, HamptonX, FAMUx, NCA&Tx ... and, oh yes, Howardx ... :-)

But the best news was that Harvard and M.I.T will enable the mountains of data captured from these massive enrollments by its open source platform -- data about student demographics, student behavior while enrolled in the courses, and student success in the courses and afterwards -- to support research that will advance our understanding of how students learn and how we should design courses that provide customized learning experiences that will meet the particular needs of individual students. This is especially good news for educators like me who have begun to despair that our system of higher education would ever develop teaching technologies and procedures that were powerful enough to close the yawning black/white academic achievement gaps, i.e., gaps in retention rates, graduation rates, GPAs, successful completion of STEM majors, etc. (See the bad news in the Education Trust's May 2012 report "Replenishing Opportunity in America")

It's also important to note that the partners repeatedly affirmed that much of what will be learned from the study of the online courses hosted by edX will also be applicable to traditional classroom-based courses. In other words, edX is not just a giant step for online courses; it's a giant step for all courses.

B. Recent Context

Fairness demands that the Harvard/M.I.T. partnership be placed in context so as to acknowledge important contributions made by other elite universities to the MOOC movement.

M.I.T. set the stage for renewed interest in online courses among elite institutions with its Open Courseware project back in 2001 that placed the syllabi and other course materials for all of its courses on Websites where anyone in the world could access them.
But the starting point for the current wave of high profile MOOCs was probably Salmon Kahn's short video courses in STEM for K-12 students that he began to produce in 2005 for his Kahn Academy.
The next event to capture attention in the media was the introduction to artificial intelligence MOOC offered by two Stanford professors in the Fall 2011 Semester that enrolled 160,000 students. This course was offered with Stanford University's cooperation, but the certificates of achievement the students received upon successful completion were merely signed by the instructors; they did not carry Stanford's official brand.
That step was taken by M.I.T. when it launched MITx in December 2001, an initiative that would develop MOOCs whose certificates would receive M.I.T.'s official brand (but not the same brand that it placed on its degrees). Its first MOOC, a course in circuits and electronics that began in March 2012, enrolled 120,00 students. (Note: the course is free, but the certificates cost a modest fee.)
Coursera, a private for-profit company partnered with Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan represented another big step forward. The academic partners will use the platform developed by Coursera to host free courses; however the branding of certificates by the universities has not been determined yet (as of 5/6/12).

C. Broader Significance

This historic partnership between Harvard University and M.I.T. is likely to have an impact on online education comparable to the impact that IBM's creation of its PC had on personal computers thirty years ago. Yes, Apple and other companies had produced good personal computers before IBM. Indeed, the Apple II was arguably a better computer than IBM's initial PC; but IBM's "endorsement" made these devices legitimate tools for corporate America.

Yes, Western Governors University, Penn State, and the University of Phoenix have been offering online programs for well over a decade. But Harvard's partnership with M.I.T. will make online programs a legitimate tool for the totality of academia. If online courses are good enough to carry the Harvard brand, they will be good enough for less elite colleges and universities. This loss of residual stigma about online courses should greatly accelerate the development of and widespread acceptance of online degrees and certificates.

D. A Misleading Metaphor
The New York Times published a widely cited op-ed by David Brooks on the day after the Harvard-M.I.T. announcement with the eye-catching title, "The Campus Tsunami" (NY Times, May 3, 2012). His piece invoked a powerful metaphor of American colleges and universities being overwhelmed by a crushing wave of online technologies. Unfortunately, the metaphor doesn't work. True, it drew a lot of attention to the Harvard-M.I.T. partnership; but in a few months, nah, a few days, most academic administrators will go back to business as usual. Why? Because they think they will have enough time to run their institutions up to the safety of higher ground as soon as they see a monstrous wave looming offshore.

In my opinion, the metaphor is dangerously misleading. While there's surely going to be a flood, no one is ever going to see a giant wave. The rise in the online water level will be be slow and steady; but thanks to Harvard's endorsement, all pervasive. It's going to be water, water, everywhere, so there will be no higher ground to run to ... which would strongly suggest that now is probably a good time for visionary academic administrators to start building their Arks ... :-)

E. Scenario -- Producers and Aggregators
Disclaimer: the following scenario merely sketches some plausible directions in which higher education might move. Its most obvious deficiency is its simplicity. For example, the scenario divides all institutions of higher learning into three categories, whereas there will surely be a much richer variety in the real future. In short, the scenario is useful for the purposes of this discussion; it should not be read as a literal, detailed prediction of what will actually happen ... :-)

Flash forward to fifty years from now. As foretold by the prophets, the global academic landscape underwent a radical transformation after The Flood. There are now far fewer institutions of higher education than before and they fall into two groups: producers and aggregators.

Producer institutions create MOOCs, enroll hundreds of millions of students in these courses from every country on the planet, and provide graded certificates of achievement to the students who successfully complete their course requirements.

-- State-of-the-art MOOCs have become expensive packages that cost millions of dollars to produce, making them risky investments comparable to producing movies or complex games.

-- Producer institutions invest hundreds of millions of dollars each year on research in their quests for more effective teaching technologies and procedures.

-- 80 percent of the producers are private, for-profit institutions; 10 percent are private, non-profit institutions; and 10 percent are public institutions.

-- These distributions reflect the irreducible risks in course development. Like producing movies or complex games, anticipating which MOOCs will sell well in the global academic marketplace remains more art than science. As in other economic activities, the entrepreneurs who guide the for-profit producers have proven to be more nimble than their non-profit counterparts.
Aggregator institutions award degrees to millions of students each year that are based on a specified curriculum of required courses and electives. Aggregators convert MOOC certificates into course credits and award degrees to students who accumulate enough credits based on the graded certificates they receive from the producers. Associations of aggregator institutions perform continuous assessments of the effectiveness of the producers' MOOCs using state-of-the-art academic analytics.
Producer institutions operate small chains of elite, high tuition university campuses around the world that enroll hundreds of thousands of students who are highly gifted and/or come from well-connected families. They serve as their own aggregators for their elite students. All of their courses are blended courses that "flip the classrooms" by using their own MOOCs to present the materials and by using class time for hands-on learning, discussions, and Q&A. All of their students live on campus, can meet with professors in their offices, and can meet with tutors for live sessions. About 0.1 percent of the world's students attend producer universities.
Aggregator institutions enroll millions of students in their degree programs.

-- Selective aggregators enroll gifted students. They charge high tuition, but not as high as the producer institutions. Half of their courses are MOOCs; the other half are blended courses that "flip the classrooms" by using MOOCs from a variety of producers to present the materials and by using class time for hands-on learning, discussions, and Q&A. Selective aggregators require their students to enroll in specific MOOCs offered by specific producers. Most students live on campus, can meet with professors in their offices, and can meet with tutors for live sessions. Forty percent of the selective aggregators are private, for-profit institutions; 40 percent are private, non-profit institutions; and the remaining 20 percent are public institutions. Almost 20 percent of the world's students attend selective aggregators.

-- Non-selective aggregators enroll 80 percent of the world's students. Tuition is much, much lower than in 2012. All courses are MOOCs. These institutions focus on meeting their students' career objectives. None of their students live on campus. They meet with professors and tutors via online sessions. Students can readily transfer from one non-selective aggregator to another because all of their grades are based on their performance in MOOCs. Half of the non-selective aggregators are private, for-profit institutions; the other half are public; none are private, non-profit.
Producer universities and aggregator universities provide career counseling services and employment placement services for their students. Most are also affiliated with online dating services and online entertainment services that facilitate their students' social lives.
Producers will segment their products by creating one set of MOOCS for their own elite campuses, another for the selective aggregators, and a third for the non-selective aggregators.

F. A Global Flight to Quality
Life is unfair. Nature does not distribute significant talents evenly, democratically. Some people are born with innate capacities that flower into genius in the right environments; whereas the rest of us can only rise to levels of professional competence, at best. Teaching is no exception to this generality.

The vast majority of teachers in any field are, at best, mediocre; there are very few Socrates. So the holy grail of distance learning has long been the development of technologies that would enable anyone who wanted to learn anything in any field to have access to the best teachers in that field. MOOCs represent the first credible implementation of this sacred goal ==> excellent instruction for the masses at an affordable price ... free!!! ... :-)

In today's global, knowledge-based economies, those who know have valuable knowledge enjoy success and security; whereas those don't are threatened with poverty and failure. So no one should be surprised that hundreds of thousands of students signed up for courses that provided highly prized knowledge from experts at Stanford and M.I.T. without guarantees that their efforts would be granted credits towards any degrees -- especially when those courses were free ... :-)

Now consider the hypothetical case of a student who is enrolled in an unnamed college that has access to a high speed Internet connection in the not-too-distant future.

As she selects her courses for the coming semester, she notices that one of the electives she was considering, "Introduction to ABC", will be taught by a young associate professor who has published six papers in the field. Then she scans Angie's List and finds a MOOC introduction that's taught by a three person team of Nobel Prize winners from Stanford, Princeton, and the University of Virginia. Students who took this MOOC gave it excellent ratings ... and it's free.
So she contacts her adviser and asks him if she could take the MOOC for credit. Sorry, but you can't, he says. She immediately tweets all of her classmates who might be interested in this course and suggests that they approach the Department Chair and ask her if they could take the MOOC instead of the local course.
As it happens, the Chair is already aware of this highly regarded MOOC, so she agrees to meet with the students. At the meeting, the Chair says she is sympathetic to the students' request, but her reading of the reviews of the MOOC by her department's professional society suggests that departments in other universities have found that it is far more effective when offered in a blended format wherein the classes are flipped. The students like the idea, especially those who weren't sure they wanted to risk flying without the support of a local instructor on such an important course. So they agree to enroll in the flipped MOOC ... :-)

This hypothetical case had a happy ending, but such outcomes will become less and less likely as more prestigious MOOCs become available for more subjects. Colleges and universities that don't embrace MOOCs proactively may face declining enrollments as students advise their younger friends to enroll at other institutions that facilitate their students' access to instruction from the world's leading experts in every field.

G. HBCUs as Aggregators and Producers
The producer/aggregator scenario suggests that most institutions of higher education in the future will be aggregators, i.e., users of MOOCs produced by the most elite institutions. During the transition from now until then, the affluent elite institutions most likely to evolve into global producers will be scrambling to develop the technologies and procedures that will enable them to forge ahead of the pack in order to maintain their leadership positions. It also suggests that other institutions that want to survive the coming flood of MOOCs will also scramble to learn how to become effective users of the emerging new technologies and procedures in order to capture a sufficient share of the emerging global academic market.

Slow start for producers
On the day that Harvard and M.I.T. announced their partnership, they only one operational MOOC between them, the circuits and electronics pilot course developed for MITx. And from their announcement it's clear that the infrastructure needed to support their courses and their research programs that will use the data generated by the courses is also a work in progress.

But even the smallest colleges offer hundreds of courses and the largest universities offer thousands. So it will take some time before the producers can say, "We have a MOOC for that!!!" ... They will have to start slowly, but once the production processes becomes less labor-intensive, the inventories in their MOOC stores will expand rapidly thereafter.
Learning about MOOCs
Faculty at HBCUs should learn as much as they can about MOOCs, especially faculty in STEM fields because it's likely that most of the initial MOOCs will be in STEM. Accessible sources include articles in the education press (such as the references at the bottom of this article), course descriptions on the producer's Websites, #MOOCs tweets, blogs, online discussion groups, conference sessions, etc.
HBCU faculty should become affiliated with one or two the producers' platforms (that are likely to be quite different from Blackboard, Desire2Learn, and other commercial LMS). They should understand how the systems operate and become familiar with the kinds of data that will be generated by these systems that can be used to design better courses, both online and blended.
HBCU faculty should subscribe to the reports generated by their affiliated producers and encourage the producers to generate reports that include issues of particular concern to HBCUs.
HBCU faculty should experiment with "flipping their classes" by using MOOCs for online presentation of course content and using class time for hands-on experience, discussions, and Q&A
HBCU faculty should encourage their best students to enroll in MOOCs as online independent study courses; require their students to write short real-time reports about their experiences via blogs and tweets; and give them course credit -- the base grade as assigned by the MOOC plus bonus points for the students' efforts to share their experiences.
HBCUs should establish procedures for converting MOOC certificates from their affiliated producers into course credits for entering freshmen and transfer students, similar to the way the provide course credits for high school AP courses.
HBCU faculty should share their MOOC experiences with their colleagues at other HBCUs
The leading HBCU associations -- UNCF, TMCF, and NAFEO -- should establish relationships with the leading producer institutions. The HBCU associations should also fund periodic independent assessments of the effectiveness of MOOCs, with emphasis on their effectiveness for black students at HBCUs and elsewhere.
All HBCUs should strive to become selective aggregators, and a few should become producers. More realistically, a few, working singly or in collaboration, should produce a series of MOOCs on topics of particular relevance to black students everywhere, not just their own students, e.g., courses on black history, black music, black literature, the black church, workplace diversity, STEM courses that target black students, etc, etc, etc. Given the continuing popularity of black culture among non-black students around the country and around the world, these courses could easily attract the massive enrollments that define a MOOC.

__________________

References:

Steve Kolowich, "MOOCs and Machines" (Inside Higher Ed, 5/10/12)... with embedded podcast of interview with Candace Thille, Director of Carnegie-Mellon's Open Learning Initiative expressing thoughtful reservations about MOOCs
David Brooks, "The Campus Tsunami" (NY Times, 5/3/12)
Steve Kolowitch, "Massive Courses, Massive Data" (Inside Higher Ed, 5/3/12)
Nick DeSantis, "Harvard and M.I.T. Put $60 Million into New Platform for Free Online Courses" (Chronicle, 5/3/12)
Tamar Lewin, "Harvard and M.I.T. Team Up to Offer Free Online Courses" (NY Times, 5/2/12)
Steve Kolowich, Elite Universities' Online Play" (Inside Higher Ed, 4/18/12)
Steve Kolowich, "An LMS for Elite MOOCs" (Inside Higher Ed, 3/7/12)
Tamar Lewin, "Massive Online Open Courses -- MOOCs" (NY Times, 3/4/12)
GradHacker, "Flipping out? What you need to know about the Flipped Classroom" (Inside Higher Ed, 2/21/12)
Steve Kolowich, "Breaking Virtual Ground -- MITx" (Inside Higher Ed, 2/13/12)
Kevin Carey, "MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency" (Chronicle, 1/24/12)
Steve Kolowich, "Massive Courses, Sans Stanford" (Inside Higher Ed, 1/24/12)
Marc Parry, "M.I.T. Will Offer Certificates to Outside Students in Online Courses" (Chronicle, 1/1/12)
Paul Fain, "Letting Go of Lecture" (Inside Higher Ed, 12/23/11) ... alternative hybrid/blended approach to developmental math
News Office, "MIT launches online learning initiative, MITx" (MIT Web, 12/19/11)

Why Are HBCUs Still Needed? -- Part IV

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Tue, 01 May 2012 05:22:00 +0000

Keepers of the Dream
This is my fourth attempt to address this question, and each version has been more pessimistic than the last as to the likelihood that the non-HBCUs in the integrated mainstream of U.S. higher education will close the persistent academic achievement gaps -- in retention rates, graduation rates, GPAs, participation in STEM fields, etc -- between their black and non-black students. (For example, see The Education Trust's May 2012 report "Replenishing Opportunity in America") The persistence of these gaps becomes ever more ominous as the percentage of black students enrolled in non-HBCUs rises to 90 percent and beyond.

Fifty years after the victorious Civil Rights Revolution of the 1960s, HBCUs should not exist. Fortunately they are still there because they provide an unexpected remedy for the unexpected failure of mainstream institutions to fulfill Dr. King's Dream, a dream that can only be fully realized in an integrated society wherein race has no more bearing on any kind of significant achievement than the width of one's shoes.

From Stagnation to Revolution
It seems to me that the mainstream has become integrated just enough to perpetuate academic achievement gaps indefinitely. It has now become awkward, politically incorrect, and possibly illegal for colleges and universities in the integrated mainstream to direct their funds and other resources towards developing remedies that might substantially improve the performance of their black students unless these remedies show promise of improving the performance of all students. For lack of sufficiently powerful innovations, the mainstream's traditional methods will leave black students stuck where they are.

Ironically, HBCUs are not bound by such constraints. For example, a random sample of students at most HBCUs would be mostly black. And there would be enough variation within the sample that researchers could explore the influence of non-racial factors on the students' performance. On the other hand, HBCUs have always had more diverse faculties than the mainstream. So they are better positioned to identify innovative teaching methods that also work for non-black instructors. Without such color-blind innovations, black students in the mainstream would be significantly disadvantaged until the faculties at those institutions become as diverse as their student bodies, something that won't occur, at the current pace, for at least another fifty years.

Archimedes, the great physicist/mathematician of the third century BC, claimed that if he had a long enough lever and a place to stand he could move the earth. Well I say that the community of HBCUs provides the ground where we can stand. And the lever we need to move U.S. higher education is the powerful cluster of inexpensive Internet technologies that are rapidly transforming every sector of every society on the planet.

If black America's first revolution was the Civil Rights Revolution, I say that HBCUs should lead a second revolution, an Education Revolution, that will introduce inexpensive, Internet-based eLearning innovations in all courses in all programs that will be far more effective than the traditional methods that have failed to achieve the Dream, innovations that will be powerful enough to close the persistent black/white achievement gaps within the next ten to twenty years.

Unfair Burden on HBCUs

Let me acknowledge right away that my perspective imposes an unfair burden on HBCUS. Fairness demands that the non-HBCUs in the mainstream that enroll almost 90 percent of the black students and have access to far more than 90 percent of the funds and other relevant resources of U.S. higher education should develop at least 90 percent of the needed innovations. Indeed, that's what I expected for most of my career as an educator, but no more. Why not? Because I finally accepted life's harsh lesson that necessity really is the mother of invention.

In today's highly networked global economy, knowledge has become the coin of new opportunity. But the persistence of monumental historic disparities in our society means that all other things are still unequal; hence black students need more knowledge than their non-black peers to order to purchase the equal opportunities they desire. Hence Black America needs more powerful innovations in education than anyone else. In other words, most of the students in the mainstream may be content with slow moving evolution; but our students need a revolution, and they need it now.

Local Impacts

Let me also categorically state that I am not advocating that any HBCUs be closed if they only contribute limited leadership towards efforts to radically reorganize the nation's system of higher education. HBCUs are complex institutions that make a broad array of contributions to their local communities:

On the one hand HBCUs have substantial impact on their local economies via their purchase of the goods and services they need to support their operations; and their students, faculty, and staff add to this impact via their purchase of goods and services as consumers.
On the other hand, HBCUs employ highly educated faculty and staff who provide their communities with a reliable supply of informed citizens whose presence has substantial cognitive impact on their community's affairs via their participation as volunteers on PTA committees, school boards, after school tutoring programs, police review boards, library committees, churches, juries, charity drives, voter registration drives, political campaigns, etc, etc, etc.

So the existential question must be addressed on two levels, national and local. In other words, we should really ask, "Why is this particular HBCU still needed?" In many cases its tangible local contributions will greatly exceed its potential contributions to national initiatives.

A Case Study
It's too soon to say what the "Education Revolution" will look like once it's underway, so I conclude these notes with a sketch of an initiative with which I am personally involved that suggests that our goals may be clear, but our path from "here" to "there" may not be straight-forward ... :-)

Tom Joyner's Appeal
Howard-University is in the process of organizing a comprehensive array of online and blended, degree and certificate programs for non-traditional students. The immediate inspiration for this initiative came from Tom Joyner's impassioned appeal back in 2010 for HBCUs to become major players in the market for online programs, a market wherein the for-profit colleges and universities had become the fastest growing institutions.

Note: Mr. Joyner is a successful radio personality and in the last ten years his Foundation has provided substantial philanthropic support for the HBCU community, second only to the Gates Foundation.

Note: Non-traditional students have family and/or job responsibilities that prevent them from taking classes on a full-time basis on weekdays; they can only take classes part-time in the evenings, on weekends, or via distance learning.
Black Enrollments
A key point in Mr. Joyner's appeal was the fact that the explosive growth of the for-profits was fueled by their black enrollments. Indeed, somewhere between 25 percent (my estimate) and 40 percent (other analysts' estimates) of their students were black, i.e., two to three times the market share that one would have expected from the relative size of the black population with respect to the entire U.S. population.
For-Profit Abuses
These figures were alarming in the context of the abusive recruitment practices, low graduation rates, large student loans, high default rates, and subsequent unemployability of many of the graduates of the for-profit institutions -- as documented in hearings by Senator Harkin, GAO reports, and reviews by the U.S. Department of Education. In other words, Mr. Joyner was appealing to HBCUs to "Do well by doing good." If HBCUs offered high quality online programs that only recruited qualified black students, they would provide these students with better value for their tuition dollars ... and might earn substantial revenue in the process.
Howard-Online
Howard University's Board of Trustees responded to Mr. Joyner's appeal by directing the university's president to establish an administrative unit, eventually called "Howard-Online," to develop a feasible plan for Howard's entry into this market, a plan that would enable the University to offer a comprehensive array of degree and certificate programs within a few years.

Note: Full disclosure requires that I inform the reader that I am Howard-Online's Director ... :-)
Impediments to Online Programs
Developing online and blended degree programs is easier said than done. All HBCUs face two major impediments:
(1) Developing enough online courses to offer a degree program is expensive i.e., faculty members who are subject matter experts and instructional technologists who enhance the faculty's drafts have to be paid for the time required to develop online courses; and
(2) Marketing online programs on the Web and elsewhere in today's highly competitive market is even more expensive.
Selective Private HBCUs face a third impediment:
(3) Substantial segments of the faculty at selective private HBCUs, like their peers at selective private institutions in the mainstream, have reservations about the quality of online programs for non-traditional students compared to the quality of their traditional programs. Howard University is one of the most selective private HBCUs.
Strategic Partners
Developing and marketing a comprehensive array of online and blended programs will require very substantial up-front investments, investments that would strain Howard's budget in the context of the Great Recession. Therefore Howard-Online is currently considering an alternative approach: engaging a strategic partner.

In this context, a strategic partner is a well-funded provider of online services who will cover the development and marketing costs of online programs in exchange for a negotiated share of the tuition received when students enroll in the programs.
Quality Control through Faculty Control
The second major component of Howard-Online's strategy is faculty control. All of the courses in Howard-Online's degree and certificate programs must be approved by the faculty; all instructors hired to teach the courses in its programs must have the degrees, years of teaching experience, and other qualifications specified by the faculty; and all students enrolled in its programs must have the GPAs, test scores, and other qualifications specified by the faculty.
"Filling the Pipeline"
The third major component of Howard-Online's strategy recognizes that at this point our faculty have only developed enough courses for a few degree programs that could be converted to online formats suitable for non-traditional students. Once those programs are launched, we have nothing left in our pipeline.

Therefore in order to fill the pipeline, the University will award a larger share of the tuition revenue to its strategic partner in the initial years of Howard-Online's programs in exchange for the partner's providing personnel and other resources that will assist our faculty to move a substantial number of their courses from face-to-face formats to Web-enhanced, from Web-enhanced to blended, and from blended to online. At each stage the partner will support faculty members' efforts to adopt the specific Internet-based eLearning technologies that would be most likely to enhance the effectiveness of their courses.

Note: As per the Sloan-Consortium's definitions, "Web-enhanced" courses deliver 10 to 30 percent of their content via the Web; "blended" courses deliver 30 to 80 percent via the Web; and "online" courses deliver 80 to 100 percent via the Web.
Current Status ... RFI to RFP
Howard-Online is currently selecting a strategic partner. A Request for Information (RFI) was published and four nationally renowned providers were invited to respond. In the coming months they will make formal presentations of their responses to the University's faculty, academic support staff, students, and senior administrators as to how their companies could help our faculty move enough courses through the pipeline so that Howard-Online would be able to offer a comprehensive array of degree and certificate programs to non-traditional students within a few years.

At the end of the RFI discussion period, Howard-Online will publish a Request for Proposal (RFP). The providers' confidential responses will be assessed by a select committee of faculty who are experts in online methodology, by a select committee of the Faculty Senate, and by the University's senior administrators. A contract to become Howard-Online's strategic partner will be negotiated with the provider who submits the winning proposal.

_______________
Related Notes:

Related References:

The Howard-Apps-Dev Group -- A Progress Report, April 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 04:49:00 +0000

A. Howard University's High-Tech Incubator for Students
In early March 2012 a few colleagues at Howard University joined me in starting a high-tech incubator for Howard's students, who are mostly black. Our initiative's full name is the Howard University Applications Developers' Group, or Howard-Apps-Dev for short. We are currently focused on encouraging black students to become founder/entrepreneurs in the market for mobile apps, i.e., consumer applications for smart phones and tablets.

This note presents a progress report on our first eight weeks of operation. It's posted on the public HBCU-Levers blog so that it can be used by other HBCUs, MSIs, and colleges & universities having substantial black enrollments in their efforts to establish similar incubators on their own campuses. Additional progress reports will be posted on this blog from time to time, perhaps quarterly.

B. Individual Characteristics
In previous notes, I emphasized what I believed to be the most important characteristics that black students need in order to become successful high-tech entrepreneurs:

(1) Success = Technical Skills + Courage + ???

The required IT skills can be learned in computer science/info tech courses that are offered everywhere and/or from the Web, where free tutorials can be found on just about every relevant topic. Howard-Apps-Dev focuses on the mobile apps market because it has rapidly become the hottest sector in the short history of information technology and because it requires minimal skills sets compared to older, less lucrative high-tech sectors. Relatively small investments in study time and development can yield outsized financial rewards.

As for courage, the conventional wisdom holds that courage is innate; you either have it or you don't because you were born with it or you weren't. But the clustering of recent alums from a few academic institutions, most notably Stanford University, who have gone on to become highly successful entrepreneurs, would suggest that a substantial chunk of the particular kind of courage required by high-tech entrepreneurs may be learned behavior, i.e., behavior that can be taught or at least encouraged by the right academic environment.

Indeed, our incubator's working hypothesis is that many qualified black students opt out of high-tech entrepreneurial careers (a) because they perceive the presence of prejudice in high tech companies, possibly where it doesn't exist or is not as extensive as they think it is; and/or (b) because they don't believe they have enough talent to succeed.

Creating a supportive academic environment should help students recognize that the extraordinary financial gains to be made from becoming successful high-tech entrepreneurs, even in the face of the most discouraging prejudice, is well worth their efforts. More importantly, a supportive academic environment should enable students to acquire the kinds of hands-one experience in developing their own apps and related high-tech services that will let them realize that they do, indeed, have sufficient technical aptitude to become successful.

C. Incubator Features
Equation (1) above is incomplete because it focuses on the characteristics of the student entrepreneurs, but omits the features of the incubator that will nurture their success. This point bears elaboration. Most of the recent reports of successful high-tech entrepreneurs, especially those who were either still in college or were recent grads, make it plain that their success was a product of the interactions of their talents and entrepreneurial courage with favorable environments. The "complete" recipe for success is therefore represented by equation (2) below, wherein the last three components are the features of a supportive environment, such as an incubator, like Howard-Apps-Dev.

(2) Success = Technical Skills + Courage + Other Resources + Support Roles + V.I.P.s Networks

Taking each of the last three (incubator) features in turn, the "Other Resources" includes hardware and software that an incubator's students use to develop and test their apps. Whereas the Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), Software Development Kits (SDKs), and other software tools may be free; the hardware is inexpensive, but not free. To be sure, many students might be able to afford a PC or a Mac, but not both. And many students may have an iPhone or some other kind of smartphone, but not an iPhone AND every kind of Android phone, AND every kind of Windows phone, AND every kind of Blackberry. But extensive arrays of smartphones and tablets would be affordable for an incubator based at a college or a university, especially if that incubator was able to engage the support of a V.I.P. network of successful developers, venture capitalists, foundations, government agencies, and other sources of external support.
Whereas instructors, mentors, and role models abound in academia for most of the high-tech skills a student seeks to master, very few faculty and staff at any university have developed mobile apps that have been market winners; so an incubator like Howard-Apps-Dev will have to supplement its faculty and staff with willing members of its V.I.P. networks
An incubator's V.I.P. networks include key players in the mobile apps markets who are willing to donate their time, IT resources, and funds to enable an incubator's students to become successful developers. Time and again the reports of the Internet's most successful start-ups disclose that the entrepreneurs' connections to a network of supportive V.I.P.s was crucial for their success -- high-tech gurus, private investors, venture capital firms, and other founder/entrepreneurs. Whereas a student would have difficulty getting any of these very important people to return his or her phone calls, initial contacts from representatives of an incubator within a respected university are likely to receive their most serious consideration.

D. Current Status of Howard-Apps-Dev -- April 20, 2012
As noted above, this initiative began shortly after it was conceived, about eight weeks ago in late March 2012. Howard University, like most colleges and universities, operates on a relatively inflexible semester schedule; so starting anything in late March quickly runs into the end of Spring semester crunch of final exams plus commencement preparations. Nevertheless, the group made significant progress:

Enrolled 21 charter members -- including 11 students from computer science, electrical engineering, business, and law; 3 tenured faculty members (including the Chair of the Computer Sciences Department); 7 members of the University's senior technical staff; and a vice president who had founded two software firms before he joined the University three years ago. Additional members will be recruited in the Fall 2012 semester.
Downloaded and installed the Eclipse IDE and the Android SDK on six PCs in one of the University's computer classrooms
Created a blog at http://howard-apps-dev.blogspot.com whose posts summarized the weekly meetings and whose tabs provided links to useful resources on the Web; created a Google group; and created a group on LinkedIn (for communications with external V.I.P.s)
Held five weekly meetings that identified the members' individual and shared interests in the mobile apps market
Determined that the group's projects will cover all four major smartphone tablets -- Apple, Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry; and would target Apple's iPad; no other tablets were specified yet.
Developed preliminary specs for "The Howard App" as the group's first collective project. Work on the initial beta will begin in August 2012 and will be completed two weeks before the semester ends in December.

When the Howard App is fully developed it will provide the members of the Howard community with all of the information they want to know about any aspect of campus life at any time of day or night via their smartphones or tablets. Because of its comprehensive scope, the fully developed Howard App will need extensive real-time access to the University's enterprise data stores -- PeopleSoft, Banner, and Blackboard. Therefore the group will only develop some early betas; the complete app will be developed and managed by the University's central computing services.

E. Summer Activities

The group determined that its student members should spend the summer becoming familiar with the IDE and SDKs and using free tutorials on the Web to teach themselves how to use these tools. They should learn enough to begin coding modules for the Howard App when the Fall 2012 semester begins.
The group's non-student members should spend the summer establishing relationships with V.I.P.s networks in the mobile apps market, especially in the Washington, DC area, relationships that can be used to provide experienced adjunct instructors, mentors, and role models for the students.
The group's non-student members should also obtain essential "other resources" from the University and from the V.I.P. networks including: a permanent lab facility for the group equipped with networked developer workstations (PCs & Macs), an array of smartphones and tablets for demonstrating and testing the student apps, and access to market databases about sales and other demand indicators for existing mobile apps.

_______________________
Related Notes:

Moses, Joshua, and Instagram

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 17:33:00 +0000

In one the first speeches he made after he declared his candidacy for the U.S. Presidency in March 2007, then Senator Barack Obama -- addressing a congregation in Selma, Alabama -- summoned the post-Civil Rights generation to take up the challenges still facing black America with the same courage as the Civil Rights giants who had gone before them.

The giants were the Moses Generation; their immediate successors were the Joshua Generation. And just as Joshua, not Moses, led the Jews into the Promised Land, so too the work of Dr. King and his brethren did not complete the Dream; those challenges were left to their successors, to Senator Obama and his brethren of the Joshua Generation.

Unfortunately, the events of the last five years, especially the horrendous loss of wealth and jobs and other economic setbacks imposed on Black America by the Great Recession and the impending decimation of Medicare and other components of the Federal safety net make it plain that Senator Obama was an optimist. We may need two or three Joshua Generations to achieve the Dream ... especially if Black Americans don't seize the extraordinary financial opportunities that have been generated by the explosive growth of the Internet and its associated technologies, technologies that are now the most powerful drivers of the global economic system and will become even more powerful during the foreseeable future.

Joshua's Opportunities
In his speech, the young Senator expressed concern that the Joshua Generation "thinks that the height of ambition is to make as much money as you can" ... whereas the older I get, the more concerned I become that Black America's Joshua Generations are not making as much money as they could or, more importantly, as much as they need to make. Money certainly isn't everything, but it's what you you need to pay your brother's mortgage when he loses his job in a Great Recession. It's what you need to pay for higher education for your son or daughter or nephew or niece when the state university raises its tuition, but their Pell grants and other financial aid get cut ... again. And it's what you need to pay for your grandmother's health care services when the Federal programs that provided those benefits are reduced or eliminated. And it's what we all need to elect the kinds of leaders who will be truly responsive to the broader needs of America's black communities.

Today's America is a land of increasing inequality, where those who have money have the best chances to live comfortable, satisfying lives ... as will their families and their friends ... but if you don't have it, aren't related to it, or don't have friends who have it, you won't live comfortably and life's satisfactions will be so much harder to come by. But now more than ever before, this America is also a land where the entrepreneur is king. Indeed, we are living in a Golden Age of Entrepreneurship. And the biggest financial rewards have gone to the high-tech entrepreneurs of the Internet. Never before have so many entrepreneurs made so many billions of dollars so quickly.

Instagram
Last week's purchase of Instagram by Facebook is a case in point. The press gave extensive coverage to this purchase, but an article in the NY Times underscored the facets I want to emphasize, "Facebook to Buy Photo-Sharing Service Instagram for $1 Billion" (New York Times, 4/13/2012):

"Instagram, an Internet start-up in San Francisco, has no revenue and about a dozen employees."
"Instagram is essentially a social network built around photography, offering mobile apps that let people add quirky effects to their smartphone snapshots and share them with friends."
"For Instagram’s founders, two Stanford graduates in their 20s who are now worth in the tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars, it has been a productive couple of years."
"Mr. Systrom [one of the founders of Instagram] was a sophomore at Stanford in 2004 when he developed a service called Photobox that let people send large photo files to each other. The service caught the eye of Mr. Zuckerberg [Facebook's CEO], who offered him a job. But Mr. Systrom decided to finish his studies."

Please take special note about the last point. Mr. Systrom conceived the idea when he was a sophomore. It's a simple idea. It runs on smartphones, so it's a small program that didn't take long to write or debug. No one has accused Mr. Systrom of breaking new ground in computer science. So how hard could it be to produce an app like Instagram? The answer is obvious ==> not very.

No Black Instragrams
To date, there have been no boy billionaires and no boy multimillionaires who were black. Is it possible that Caucasians and Asians have won all of the prizes because of their genetic superiority? Of course not. Decades of research have thoroughly discredited the self-serving myths about the innate superiority of any ethnic groupings ... so it must be racism, right? ...

... Yeah ... Residual racism in our society explains every gross disparity now and forevermore. Isn't that what we've been taught and have been teaching each other ever since the monumental legislative victories of our Moses Generation made racism illegal? Unfortunately, this time the only explanation that's supported by the facts on the ground is that Caucasians and Asians have been the only winners because blacks and other minorities haven't been players on the Internet. This is the first Big Game where the costs of entry are so low that just about anyone can afford to play. The computers are cheap, the software development tools are free, and the knowledge of how to use the computers and software tools can be acquired from free tutorials that have popped up all over the Web.

We Can't Win If We Don't Play
I suggest that the real reason why black Americans haven't been players -- correction: have been grossly underrepresented among the players -- is because too many of us are convinced that we don't have a chance to win. Programming computers is hard, right? You have to have a PhD from one of the best universities on the planet to be able to create a zillion dollar game for an XBox or a viral app for a tablet or a smartphone, right? Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. So I also suggest that it's time for our well-intended, but grossly misinformed "leaders" who have been perpetuating these urban myths to shut up.

What it takes nowadays to become winning participants in the Internet Revolution is a modicum of talent, training, and experience coupled with gigantic chunks of courage, the courage to become a successful entrepreneur, the same courage that propelled the Moses Generation to their historic legislative victories. Dr. King and his brethren were social and legislative entrepreneurs because generating sufficient pressure to change the laws that justified America's oppressive apartheid created the greatest opportunities for the advancement of America's black communities back then. The Talented Tenth of the Joshua Generations will need the courage to become high-tech entrepreneurs because that's where the greatest opportunities for advancement of America's black communities are to be found today.

Courage
Having said my piece, I can already hear the murmurings of prominent black nay-sayers, humming their all-too-familiar blues about how it can't be done. They're always out there. And the bigger the goals we set for ourselves, the louder they sing their same old discouraging chorus, "White America won't let a black person enjoy that kind of success ... not now ... perhaps not ever." Dr. King addressed his brilliant "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" to nay-sayers who were absolutely certain of their "wisdom" that he was trying to do what couldn't be done ... but he did it!!! ... :-)

It takes courage to be an entrepreneur, and given the persistence of powerful racist forces in American society it takes even more courage to become any kind of black entrepreneur. So I agree with Senator Obama, who silenced the nay-sayers for at least a few moments in January 2009 when he swore the oath that made him President Obama ==> it takes courage to be a Joshua.

__________________
Related Notes:

Washington, Du Bois, and Silicon Valley

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 01:58:00 +0000

One hundred plus years ago, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois engaged in a protracted dispute:

Mr. Washington encouraged black Americans to advance their economic positions by acquiring the skills required for manual trades and lower level white collar occupations. The businesses they could establish with these skills would provide services that were greatly needed by American society, but would encounter less racist resistance than businesses based on higher level skill sets.
Dr. Du Bois resisted any "compromises" that surrendered opportunities for black America's best and brightest to develop their abilities to the fullest extent because he believed that the "Talented Tenth" were the primary engines of black economic progress. Hence he argued that racism should not be accommodated, that it must be resisted and, eventually, overcome.

This summary grossly oversimplifies the positions of both men, but it is accurate enough to underscore the fundamental incompatibility of their strategies for the economic advancement of black America ... an incompatibility that persisted for the next eighty years until the dawn of the information age and the "progressive digitization of everything."

Ironically, the sudden emergence of computers and computer networks -- the most brilliant products of the world's most advanced science, technology, engineering, and mathematics -- as the dominant forces shaping modern economies has opened extraordinary economic opportunities for persons with high aptitude and minimal education. While it's still necessary for students to obtain PhDs to become leaders in the "S" and "M" of STEM, i.e., science and mathematics; the "T" and "E" -- technology and engineering -- have become the Wild, Wild West with regards to information technology and software engineering.

Steve Jobs (Apple), Bill Gates (Microsoft), and Marc Zuckerman (Facebook), three of the most successful entrepreneurs in the short history of information technology, were college drop-outs; other IT billionaires -- like Jerry Yang and David Filo (Yahoo!), Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google) -- dropped out of grad school. Their dirty little not-so-secret is that you don't need a college degree to learn how to use computers and computer networks to create services for which the markets will shower you with billions of dollars -- if you have the right mix of technical and entrepreneurial aptitudes. None of these boy billionaires studied long and hard at anything before they made their vast fortunes. And for all of the pain that Wall Street's Masters-of-the-Universe inflicted on millions of Americans as consequence of the Great Recession that was triggered by their felonious greed, few of them have amassed fortunes as large as the Silicon Valley elite.

Partisans could plausibly support either protagonist in the Washington vs. Du Bois debates one hundred years ago. But as we move into the New Millennium, the facts on the ground are squarely on Mr. Washington's side of the line ... for the foreseeable future. Back then, he preached that every student should learn a trade, whatever else they learned in school; in today's markets that trade should be skills and certifications in information technology. As for Dr. Du Bois' Talented Tenth, we should encourage them to become IT entrepreneurs, because that's where their efforts will earn the biggest returns ... for the foreseeable future. And yes, our black high-tech wannabe entrepreneurs will encounter racism, but so what. The level of racism they will encounter is substantially lower than it was one hundred years ago, while the potential financial gains are substantially higher.

_______________________
Related notes:

High Tech Incubators for (Black) Students

noreply@blogger.com (Roy B) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 13:33:00 +0000

The "black" in the title of this note may prove to be irrelevant to its content, but is central to its purpose. On the one hand, academia's steady production of non-black, high-tech superstars provides ample evidence that American colleges and universities somehow manage to stimulate non-black students to become successful high-tech entrepreneurs:

Bill Hewlett and David Packard (Hewlett-Packard, Stanford), Steve Jobs (Apple, Reed College), Steve Wozniak (Apple, U of Califormia Berkeley), Bill Gates (Microsoft, Harvard), Marc Andreeson (Netscape, U. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Jerry Yang and David Filo (Yahoo!, Stanford), Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google, Stanford), and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook, Harvard).

By contrast, the lack of comparably successful black entrepreneurs suggests that American colleges and universities aren't providing comparable stimulation for their black students. So the Howard-Apps-Dev incubator at Howard University and similar initiatives at other institutions are breaking new ground that will probably require new, possibly radically new approaches. Given that creativity respects no racial boundaries, academic innovations that make it more likely for black students to achieve success as entrepreneurs will probably provide similar benefits for non-black students.

Blending Incompatible Frameworks
It seems to me that a high-tech incubator for students (HTI-S) must something like a platypus, a contradictory creature that National Geographic describes as follows:

"Duck-billed platypuses can't be real, can they? This small, amphibious mammal has a tail like a beaver, a body like an otter, walks like a reptile, has webbed feet and a beak like a bird, and it lays eggs!"

An HTI-S will have to be a cross between an academic interdisciplinary research program and a commercial business incubator, inheriting incompatible characteristics from both parents. Given the current focus of Howard's incubator on apps for mobile platforms, my comments will focus on this particular kind of incubator:

Expertise vs. Teaching Skills
-- When students become members of academic research teams, these teams are usually headed by faculty because faculty usually have more relevant expertise than their students. But where mobile apps are involved, this may be a dubious assumption, especially for apps directed at the young adult market wherein students may have keener insights than faculty who are twenty or more years older.

-- The mentors with the most demonstrable expertise in such markets are likely to be the most successful developers of mobile apps, i.e., the entrepreneur/founders of profitable start-up operations. But their greater understanding of what it takes to succeed doesn't guarantee that they will know how to teach what they know. In other words, faculty have two kinds of expertise, subject matter and teaching; whereas entrepreneurs may only know what they know.

-- One way to address this mismatch might be to persuade successful entrepreneurs to become "adjunct" members of the incubator staff. These role models could inspire the students and tell them what they need to know; then the participating faculty could teach the students the specific skills that the entrepreneurs recommended that they learn... :-)

-- An equally important benefit that will come from involving successful entrepreneur/founders in a HTI-S will be their memberships in the networks of other high tech companies, marketing firms, and venture capital operations and the exposure to these networks these successful adjuncts can give to the students enrolled in courses and projects sponsored by an HTI-S at a college or university.
Tests vs. Downloads
How should we measure a student's success in an incubator? Clearly, the ultimate metrics should be market indicators, e.g., the number of times an app is downloaded by new users from online markets (or from a local Website hosted by the incubator) in the first few weeks after it's posted, the dollars earned in the first few weeks, etc. However, it also seems reasonable that the faculty who are supporting the students' efforts should regard market metrics as summative indicators that are invoked upon an app's completion; but while the apps is under development, while the students are learning the component skills required to produce successful apps, their mastery of these skills should be measured by faculty grades on earlier drafts as formative measures that would guide the student's learning efforts.
Earning a Grade vs. Launching a Business
The two sides of this issue are especially incompatible, so I'm going to take two shots at this one; and being a to-the-bone-Libra, I will achieve a balanced perspective by offering strong support both sides ... :-)

First, the traditional perspective ==> colleges and universities are academic institutions that teach their students the knowledge and skills they will need to achieve success in their personal and professional lives after they graduate. Students who develop apps with the support and encouragement of an HTI-S should be expected to learn how to produce marketable apps, but not to become entrepreneur/founders of new enterprises that produce these marketable apps for income and profit before they graduate. The higher the grades the students receive for their participation in an HTI-S, the more confident they should be that they have, indeed, acquired the knowledge and skills they sought to learn.
Unsuccessful Graduates vs. Successful Drop-outs
How should we measure the success of an HTI-S? Clearly, the ultimate metrics should be market indicators, e.g., the number/percentage of the students who participate in the HTI-S who go on to become entrepreneur/founders of high-tech startups and the number/percentage who succeed. Otherwise an HTI-S will merely be running a "high-tech appreciation" program.

But how soon should these outcomes be measured? How soon should an HTI-S encourage its students to launch their own startup companies? Entrepreneurs, by definition, are not salaried employees; they are risk takers. So an HTI-S should encourage its students to launch their own start-ups as soon as they are able to assume the risks involved ... with the understanding that sometimes this capability may be realized before a student graduates.

Some of the most successful non-black high tech entrepreneurs mentioned earlier in this note dropped out of undergraduate or graduate programs, e.g, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, Jerry Yang, David Filo, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Colleges and universities have been wrestling with this dilemma for decades with regards to their star athletes, many of whom were black, who dropped out of college before graduation in order to launch careers as professionals. Would the drop-outs who went on to become the highly paid superstars of the pro leagues have been better off had they waited until they graduated?

_______________________
Related notes:

One Million Plus (non-black) Apps

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 05:37:00 +0000

Here's a disturbing headline from an article that was published in Information Week, (Eric Zeman, September 19, 2011)

Android + iOS = 1 Million Apps

The article was published sixth months ago, so the total is probably substantially higher today. The headline disturbs me because I "know" that only a very, very small fraction of this million plus total were the products of black hands. How do I "know" this? Mostly by the ominous lack of "black buzz" -- I don't know anyone who knows anyone who knows a black anyone who's developed five of six mobile applications, an arbitrary cutoff, but good enough to separate "dabblers" from "developers" ... Nor have I read much in the press about app developers who were black ... Nor do I find any links when I google "black developer mobile apps" ... nor did Soledad O'Brien find any black developers in Silicon Valley. (See "Black in America, the New Promised Land: Silicon Valley", CNN, October 2011)

Freedom to Be Underrepresented
But I didn't get to my three score and ten years without learning two things with absolute certainty a long time ago, but especially in the decades since the Civil Rights Revolution made overt discrimination illegal:

First, there is no reason to believe that the proportion of blacks who have inborn aptitude to excel in any significant human activity is lower than the proportion of whites (or Asian Americans) who currently excel in that activity.
Second, there is no such thing as a significant human activity that involves "no blacks."
The correct statement is always, "Blacks are substantially underrepresented in this activity."

This insight lets me "know" that there are a lot of black developers out there somewhere, scattered about, just not enough to create much of a buzz; but more unfortunately, not sufficiently connected to each other to form a community that perpetuates itself, as does the overwhelmingly white developer community in Silicon Valley.

Beyond Under-representation
The traditional challenge to educators of black students was to provide them with appropriate learning opportunities that would enable them to develop their inborn talents to their full potential. But another challenge must also be given prominence in today's hyper-connected society; that challenge is to help generate viable communities of creative practitioners whose members can draw upon each other's skill sets to accomplish achievements that are orders of magnitude greater than what they could accomplish on their own. The Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s was such a creative community, as was Motown in the '60s and '70s, as is the New York Hip Hop scene today. But Black America has yet to produce a creative community focused on high technology.

A High-Tech Incubator for Black Students
Howard University, my long-time employer, offers an array of courses in computer science and information technology, as do many other HBCUs, wherein our students can learn the concepts and procedures that are the foundations of whatever computer skill sets are currently in hottest demand, e.g., developing applications for smart phones, tablets, and other mobile platforms. What it didn't have was a broader community of talented business majors, law school students, communications majors, computer science and information technology majors, and other academic disciplines that could transcend the boundaries of their separate courses and departments, a community whose members could pool their diverse skills and perspectives in order to develop high tech goods and services that they could barely imagine if they working separately.

The lucrative market for mobile apps offers an unprecedented opportunity for all institutions having substantial black enrollments to create such interdisciplinary student communities because the tools required to produce mobile apps are so affordable, i.e., they range in price from cheap to free.

A few weeks ago, Howard University recruited eight students from law, business administration, and computer science to become the founding members of a high tech group (ultimately a community when enough additional students join) called "Howard-Apps-Dev" -- which is short for "The Howard University Applications Development Group." The University has also provided this group with a supportive "incubator" -- a few Macs and PCs reserved for the group's use in two of its computer labs, plus technical support from eight of the University's most astute computer systems experts and managers on its faculty and staff who have joined the group in an advisory capacity.

As stated on the Home Page of its blog (http://howard-apps-dev.blogspot.com),

"This incubator is located at Howard University but will operate as openly as possible in order to encourage black Americans everywhere to become developers of applications for mobile devices and other non-PC/non-Mac workstations ... educational apps, business apps, games, etc"

Howard-Apps-Dev will post all of its non-proprietary files on its public blog site in order to encourage black students everywhere to consider becoming developers of applications for mobile devices, active participants in what is rapidly becoming the largest and potentially most profitable software market in the history of information technology. When Ms. O’Brien’s documentary asked why there were so few black high tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, the best answer seemed to be prejudice. But if the Howard-Apps-Dev group is successful, and if its success inspires the launching of similar groups elsewhere, then five years from now if Ms. O'Brien asked her question again, the best answer might be “Because black high tech entrepreneurs are hanging out at Howard University ... and those that aren't at Howard are at some other HBCU ... or at some other minority serving institution ... or at some other college or university with a substantial black student enrollment ... because black Americans are closing the Digital Divide ... :-)

___________________
Related notes:

Response to a Very Important Comment ... with a P.S.

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 04:59:00 +0000

Earlier this evening (3/22/12), Mr. Kalimah Priforce submitted the following comment to an earlier post on this blog, Fight or Flight (revised)

"Racism to Blame, Not Affinity Groups, for Lack of Minorities in Tech - http://bit.ly/GNZcaH"

When I tried to post a lengthy response to his comment, Murphy's Law suddenly suddenly went into effect. No matter how I reformatted my comment, the IntenseDebate widget that I am using would not post the full comment. I will figure out what went wrong tomorrow, but right now I will post my response below because I consider Mr. Priforce's comment to be sufficiently important to warrant an immediate reply.

My response:

Dear Mr. Priforce,

I won't pretend to be "objective" about my daughter's book, so my response may contain more bias than I'm aware of. However, she does have data, as does anyone who followed Silicon Valley's development for the last forty years, that the pipelines from the Valley back to Berkeley and Stanford have always been major conduits for white entrepreneurs, and more recently for Asian entrepreneurs. So she focused on those pipelines. Her next book, if she wrote one, might look at the sources of black talent from outside the Valley.

But aside from this difference of opinion, I was excited to read the article you cited because it reinforced my own hope that black wannabe high tech entrepreneurs would recognize the wisdom of the Indian professor who advised the entrepreneurs in Soledad O'Brien's documentary that prejudice was so strong in the Valley that they might well consider using white sales reps from Berkeley or Stanford. The article you referenced also underscored the existence of strong prejudice. He also told them that the only help they would get would be from themselves -- which is a point that you also agree with. And he noted the dangerous sense of "entitlement" to special treatment that is shared by too many black Americans, but clearly not by the members of your group of entrepreneurs.

I am excited to learn about your group's existence and would like to link it to a group of applications developers that I am helping to organize here at Howard University. We will be holding our first meeting tomorrow afternoon (Friday 23 March). I will call your article and the references that it contains to the attention of our group that includes students, faculty, staff, and senior administrators. Indeed, I hope we can call upon you for recommendations as to how we can get off to a fast, but productive start.

We would like to function as openly as possible so as to encourage other HBCUs and minority serving institutions to launch similar groups. Please check out new our blog at (3/24/12):

http://howard-apps-dev.blogspot.com/

And you might also check out two recent notes that I've posted on this blog (HBCU-Levers) that address the opportunities to make progress in closing the Digital Divide by encouraging more of our best and brightest to do what you and your colleagues are already doing.

Thank you again for posting your important comment. And I hope you will not offended by my fatherly pride in my daughter's work. No piece of scholarship can cover everything. That's why it usually takes a community of scholars with common interest in a major topic to cover all of the most important aspects of such a topic over a period of time.

Although Stanford and Berkeley can claim to be "innocent" with regards to the prejudice in the Valley, they and all other universities must accept responsibility for not helping their black and other minority students become better prepared to cope with prejudice, rather than back away under the shadows of "stereotype threat." Beyond this, they must also do a better job of providing their black and minority students with the necessary technical skills to launch start-up operations and exposure to important technical and financial networks... And HBCUs are not exempt. That's why I'm helping to start our applications developers group here at Howard. To date, my beloved institution has not done much to help our student wannabe high tech entrepreneurs fulfill their dreams. But I'm going to do my best to help put an end to this neglect ... and my determination to do something has been heavily motivated by my daughter's findings ... :-)

Respectfully,
Roy L Beasley, PhD

Post Script (added on Friday 23 March 2012)
When I read Mr. Priforce's vehement assertion that racism, not self-segregation was keeping blacks out of Silicon Valley, I was puzzled. Having read every line in my daughter's book many, many, many times from her first drafts to the final published versions, I knew that her book never denied the existence of racism in the Valley. Her book focused on the students' reactions to their perceptions of racism. A few recognized that racism is still a fact of life in these United States of America, and refused to let racists limit their career aspirations. But others "opted out" -- changing their majors to fields that were "racialized" which is my daughter's term for fields that already have a substantial number of black practitioners. Indeed the title of my note on this blog was "Fight or Flight" -- which expressed my dismay that gifted and talented black students, certified members of our Talented Tenth, would not choose to hold their ground in the face of bigotry. Where would any of us be today if Charlayne Hunter Gault or Medgar Evers had "opted out" back in the 1960s?????

A few moments ago, I read one of the articles that Mr. Priforce cited in the article linked to his comment ... and I understood his misunderstanding. The article was a reporter's summary of an interview conducted by another reporter who quoted my daughter out of context. Having myself been misrepresented by reporters in major media from time to time when I was much younger and far more ambitious, I learned the hard way that one never talks to reporters without handing them a printed press release beforehand that summarized my opinions that I myself had prepared. I still bear the psychic scars from having my opinions grossly distorted by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek magazine before I learned the preemptive value of the printed press release. My daughter's views have been misrepresented a few times since her book was published ... and now I have every Daddy's most cherished compliment == > my adult daughter's admission that I was right!!! She understands how "wise" I was in urging her not to talk to reporters without receiving their solemn assurances that they had read her own one or two page summary of her findings ... :-)

Indeed, it is a cruel irony that Mr. Priforce should imply that my daughter was unaware of racism given the fact has she has just emerged triumphant from a harrowing confrontation with the most vicious kind of academic racism -- the stuff of the worst nightmares of the students in her book who opted out. I am proud to say that she stood her ground in the face of blatant and career threatening bigotry ... and she won. As my own Daddy taught me when I was a kid, winners never quit because quitters never win ... :-)

_______________
Related notes:

Closing the Digital Divide at HBCUs

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 14:12:00 +0000

Way back in the mid 1970s, I was an energetic, ambitious young professor at an HBCU. I had a capacity for envisioning sophisticated computer applications and a talent for cutting a lot of computer code real fast. One of the hottest buzzwords in the business press back then was the notion of a "paperless office" -- a super-efficient white collar workplace wherein all documents were digital. No typewriters. No copiers. No inter-office snail mail. No file cabinets. No paper.

So I decided to write an application on my university's mainframe that would be accessed by students via the dumb terminals located all over our campus, an application that would support a "paperless classroom." In today's terms, it was a combination of word processing and email. I would generate assignments from the dumb terminal in my office, post them on the mainframe, and notify my students via the email package. They would read the email, do the research required for the assignment, then compose their answers to the problem assignments on the dumb terminals and zap them back to me via the mainframe. The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote a story about my application in the late 1970s that included a "rock star" photo of yours truly and an assertion that this was the first such all digital classroom application in the country.

But what really added sizzle to my classes was my decision to organize my courses in a behavioral modification framework. At the beginning of each course, I informed my students that they should decide what grade they wanted to receive. As I recall, my system required that they earn at least 120 points to get an A, 100 points for a B, 80 points for a C, and 60 points for a D. Each assignment, test, and exam carried a point value. For example, our fall semester classes started in late August, so if a student wanted a B and earned 100 points by the Thanksgiving holiday, he or she didn't have to come to any more classes nor take the final exam. And being a "good guy" I gave my students extra assignments from time to time if they wanted to increase their point scores. But I was also a "bad guy" who would hit them with a 5 point penalty for each piece of paper they handed to me for whatever reason after the first two weeks of class -- no exceptions. And I was also a "to-the-bone-fair-play-Libra" guy so I awarded each student a 5 point apology for the "insult" for each piece of paper I inflicted on him or her, no matter how small -- no exceptions.

To this day I still get a big chuckle whenever I flash back on how quickly I was able to bring each class under "stimulus control." Even though I warned my students on the first day of class about the power of my behavioral mod point system, and even though each class would invariably scoff at the idea that such a crazy system would make them work harder, it was almost scary how hard they were working on each assignment by the middle of the semester and how they would jump up and down like baby chickens peeping at me to give them bonus point opportunities. And of course my bonuses became smaller with each passing week, while the amount of work required to earn a bonus point got larger and larger and larger. What was even funnier is that they all knew exactly what I was doing ... but boy did they want those bonus points!!! ... :-)

By the third time I offered my paperless course, I knew that my students were also getting another benefit, a benefit that was far greater than the subject matter they were learning. They were seeing how computer applications were really written. Time and again they spotted flaws in my application's design. Perhaps the assignment form didn't leave enough space for their responses or it didn't allow them to submit corrections. And time and again, my students suggested ways to improve my design and would have the pleasure of watching me change my design to suit their re-specifications. Of course part of their motivation for helping me improve my application was the fact that program defects impeded their capacity to earn more bonus points ... :-)

In other words, my students were learning that computer applications weren't divine revelations; that they sprang from human hands; that some of those hands were my black hands; and, on occasion, some of those hands were their own black hands. The reader won't be surprised to learn that many of my students not only crossed the Digital Divide; they changed their career paths and became IT specialists. In other words, they were far more impressed by what I was doing with information technology than the subject matter they were learning in my IT-based course ... And, oh yes, their involvement with information technology was all the more intense because of my course's "diabolical" behavioral modification framework ... :-)

Of course, one black professor's experience at an HBCU doesn't "prove" anything ... except for the fact that my own experience is far from unique. The United Negro College Fund has long noted that HBCUs are more productive sources of blacks in STEM fields than non-HBCUs. How is this still possible given that the STEM resources at HBCUs usually aren't as good as those at non-HBCUs? What is the secret of the continuing success of HBCUs in this regard? To me the answer is obvious -- but we really should do whatever research is required to confirm this hypothesis:

Some of the black professors who teach STEM courses at HBCUs are still finding ways to engage their black students in intensive, creative collaborations.

_________________________
Related notes:

Closing the Digital Divide -- Another Opportunity

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 20:33:00 +0000

The Persistence of the Digital Divide

The Digital Divide appears to morph, to shift its shape from time to time; but deep down it remains the same. Unfortunately, its changing skins-of-the-day have distracted attention from its underlying structure, i.e., the stronger communal networks that sustain increasing affluence on the "white" and "yellow" sides of the Divide vs. weaker networks associated with the shrinking shares of the nation's income and wealth on its "black" and "brown" sides.

For example, fifteen years ago most people focused on visible gaps between the hardware and software found at HBCUs and non-HBCUs, on the HBCUs' lack of connectivity to the Internet, lack of computer labs, etc. Those particular gaps have largely vanished, but the Divide persists and in some ways is wider than ever. One of my younger colleagues succinctly summarized this paradox by saying,

"The most powerful computer in the world is the one you already have access to, but aren't using to its full capacity."

In other words, the Divide between the haves and have-nots is amplified by the differences between the creative uses they make of whatever have.

Silcon Valley

An important recent manifestation of the Digital Divide is the lack of black hi-tech entrepreneurs, a gap that was examined in Soledad O'Brien's brilliant TV documentary "Black in America, the New Promised Land: Silicon Valley" -- the latest in her series on CNN that was broadcast last fall. Those of you who saw this documentary were probably inspired, like I was, by the grit and determination that the eight black entrepreneurs who were featured in its reality-TV format showed in confronting prejudice and other obstacles. They were not cowered by "stereotype threat"; they faced bigotry head-on. Unfortunately, the one hour limitation of Ms. O'Brien's show prevented it from addressing the immediate causes of the problem ==> Why were there so few black hi-tech entepreneurs in Silicon Valley?

Some answers to this question have been provided by my younger daughter's book, Opting Out, Losing the Potential of America's Young Black Elite (Maya A. Beasley, University of Chicago Press, November 2011). Ironically, her book was published at about the same time as the first airing of Ms. Obrien's TV show last fall.

Many hi-tech entrepreneurs have degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and two of the most important pipelines between academia and Silicon Valley originate at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.
My daughter's book is an exploration of why so few of the highly talented black students at these academic powerhouses obtained degrees in STEM fields. More specifically, she explored the impact of perceived prejudice within those fields that motivated so many members of this Talented Tenth to op out of STEM and switch into careers that were more "racialized" -- her term for fields that already contained substantial numbers of black professionals.

My daughter's book concludes with a number of cogent recommendations to Stanford, Berkeley, and all of the other non-HBCUs as to what they can do to reduce their black students' perceptions of prejudice where prejudice doesn't exist, to fortify their black students' resolve to confront prejudice where it does exist, and to increase the exposure of their black students to crucial information networks about career opportunities. However, readers of previous posts on this blog will not be surprised by my pessimism as to the prospects that her recommendations will be widely implemented. Left to their own devices, why should non-HBCUs be more successful in closing the gaps in STEM enrollments between their black and non-black students than they have been in closing the broader gaps in retention rates and six year graduation rates?

Killer Apps for Smart Phones and Tablets

A few weeks ago, one of my university's senior vice presidents sent me an email requesting that I provide technical support for one our student's IT initiatives. As it turns out, this second year law student had some interesting ideas about killer apps for smart phones and tablets, but had minimal STEM skills -- a deficiency that has not deterred lots of successful white entrepreneurs in the last ten years or so. That's when I had my "Eureka!" moment. And like most Eureka moments, this one involved a blinding perception of the obvious.

MY HBCU educates students in STEM and students in non-STEM; but successful hi-tech entrepreneurs need access to technical skills plus marketing skills and legal skills and management skills, etc, etc, etc. So whereas my law student saw the "big picture" of a killer app that "only" needed technical skills to bring it to life, I now saw the "bigger, big picture" of a developer community within our university that would be composed of faculty, staff, students, and senior administrators who would pour their diverse skills into a creative cauldron wherein killer apps could be cooked to perfection ... :-)

Of course, this insight already has a name because it's been invented and reinvented many, many times before, and probably at my own university. It's usually called an "incubator" or an "accelerator." But this particular incubator has the good fortune to be conceived at a most fortuitous time when the creative, white hot center of the developer community is focused on the explosive demand for apps for smart phones, tablets, and other non-workstation devices:

Apps whose developer tools can be obtained for cheap or for free from the Web;
Apps whose prerequisite developer skills can be learned for cheap or free from the Web;
Apps that can be developed on garden-variety workstations; and
Apps that can be distributed for cheap or for free via an Internet cloud

So the only things that are missing are the main ingredients ==> the will to make the most creative use of whatever IT resources we have, and the will to organize ourselves into a community whose members cooperate so as to maximize each other's creative output.

It didn't take long to identify 10 charter members of our ad hoc developer group that will have its first face-to-face meeting next week; and yes, the charter members include faculty, staff, students, and senior administrators who share this vision of the "bigger, big picture" and high expectations about what we can achieve.

What Every Young (and not so young) Developer of Killer Apps for Smart Phones and Tablets Should Know

One of the first items on our agenda will be the identification of a "core curriculum" whose fundamentals must be mastered as quickly as possible by our community's techies. As of today (3/12/12), the very rough initial draft of this core has four levels. Because of the bifurcation of the markets between Apple and Google, we anticipate the need for two distinct components at each level:

Introduction to the major operating systems ==> iOS and Android
Languages ==> Fundamentals of Java (Android) and fundamentals ObjectiveC (iOS) ... plus JavaScript, HTML 5, and CSS for both platforms
Minimal coding developer environments ==> for iOS and for Android
Major Websites that provide useful prefabricated widgets ==> for iOS apps and Android apps

HBCUs as Keepers of the Dream

Although I remain hopeful that non-HBCUs will make more progress in the next twenty years than in the last twenty in closing the Digital Divide between their black and non-black students, I am also, for reasons spelled out in my previous notes on this blog, more hopeful that far greater progress will be made if the efforts of non-HBCUs are guided, if not led by HBCUs. I am especially hopeful with regards to the capacity of HBCUs to move more black entrepreneurs to the producer side of the Divide by incubator initiatives, such as the one described in this note that I am helping to launch at my own long-time employer, Howard University.

We are not conceiving Howard's initiative as something bounded by its brick and mortar walls because we know that our success will be greatly amplified to the extent to which we throw open opportunities for participation in our efforts via the Internet to wannabee black entrepreneurs among our own alumni and among the current members of other HBCU communities and among their alumni. We also intend to participate in the incubator efforts sponsored by other organizations devoted to assisting minority entrepreneurs, e.g., other HBCUs, the NewMe Community, etc.

Your Comments and Suggestions

Howard's plans are still on the drawing boards, so we will probably gain more benefit from constructive comments and suggestions at this stage than at any time in the future. Therefore on behalf of my colleagues, I sincerely request your help in getting our initiative off to a good start.

Please use the "Comments" form at the bottom of this note to share any ideas or suggestions that you think might be useful to what we are trying to achieve, especially with regards to our "core curriculum". And I promise that as we get going, we will return these favors by offering our help to other HBCUs and to other organizations that launch similar programs for black hi-tech entrepreneurs.

P.S. Speaking of killer apps for smart phones, please click the following HBCU headline, "SPELMAN COLLEGE JUNIOR INVENTS A TOP-RANKED DOWNLOADABLE APPLICATION OFFERED BY APPLE'S APP STORE" (September 1, 2009)

Yes! We can!!!

__________________

Related notes:

Affirmative Action Strategies -- 2

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:38:00 +0000

Yesterday's announcement (2/21/12) of the Supreme Court's agreement to hear a major affirmative action case brings this controversial initiative to the top of the nation's education policy agenda once again. See "Justices Take Up Race as a Factor in College Entry" (NY Times, 2/21/12), "U.S. Supreme Court to Hear Texas Affirmative Action Case" (Diverse Issues, 2/22), "Counting Justices" (Inside Higher Education, 2/22/12), and "Supreme Court Takes Up Challenge to Race-Conscious Admissions at U. of Texas", (Chronicle, 2/21/12).

Perfect Storm

It's possible that the Court's decisions will be narrowly focused, resulting in marginal expansions or restrictions of the use of affirmative action by the nation's colleges and universities. Unfortunately, the stated broader objectives of the plaintiffs in this case make it likely that the Court will be asked to hand down sweeping decisions that may substantially reduce or possibly eliminate the use of affirmative action altogether. If so, this would unleash yet another adverse wind in a perfect storm of rising disadvantages imposed on America's minorities in general, its blacks in particular:

Rising economic inequality, wherein the rich have grown richer through deregulation, i.e., the nation's top one percent are accumulating grossly disproportionate shares of the nation's wealth and income
Rising political inequality, wherein the Supreme Court has empowered the rich and super rich to make unlimited campaign contribution to Super Pacs
Rising educational inequality, wherein the use of affirmative action is severely restricted or banned by the pending Supreme Court decisions

The irony of the source of these adverse winds demands notice: government policies -- legislative and judicial, enforced by the executive. Who would have believed back in 1981 that President Ronald Reagan's dictum would ever again have such powerful applicability to the plight of black Americans, "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem" (First Inaugural Address). Fifty years after the federal government banned segregation and promoted equal opportunity in the 1960s, the policies of that same federal government now pose increasingly insurmountable obstacles to the achievement of Dr. King's dream.

HBCUs as Keepers of the Dream

Readers of previous notes on this blog can anticipate my assertion that HBCUs must play a leadership role in the effective use of whatever affirmative action opportunities remain after the Court's decision in the case before it now. As the keepers of the dream, HBCUs must not only ensure that the 10 percent of the nation's black students who attend HBCUs gain access to the benefits of well-designed higher education programs; they must expand their agendas to include oversight of the affirmative action programs offered by non-HBCUs in order to ensure that the other 90 percent of the nation's black students also have access to well-designed opportunities.

To be specific, HBCUs should collaborate to provide collective oversight of the major affirmative action initiatives run by public and private non-HBCUs, especially the non-HBCUs within their own states. We cannot continue to stand by and watch bright, ambitious young black students recruited into compensatory affirmative actions programs that are so poorly designed that the failure of these unsuspecting students is so predictable as to be preordained, failures that will then be blamed on the student victims themselves instead of on the incompetent and/or irresponsible designers of these defective programs.

Perhaps the most critical component of good design is sufficient funding to pay for the additional resources that will be needed for black students to overcome the deficiencies in their preparation. These students are likely to require special tutors and mentors, have access to developmental courses, take longer than usual to graduate, and need more financial aid to cover the costs of their longer enrollments. Nor should affirmative action be too ambitious. For some degree programs, black students whose GPAs and SAT scores are substantially lower than the GPAs and SAT scores of the non-black students may not pose a substantial disadvantage over the course of their four or five years of study. But for other programs, especially the harder degree programs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), such gaps will be insurmountable. For example, the notion of engineering programs admitting black students whose SAT scores are one standard deviation below the average scores for non-black students is a cruel absurdity.

HBCUs should conduct periodic assessments of the effectiveness of the affirmative action strategies implemented by non-HBCUs. Effective programs should be lauded; ineffective programs should be damned. If a mind is a terrible thing to waste, it is all the more terrible when wasted by poorly designed programs wherein such waste is inevitable. Innovations within the effective programs should be identified and disseminated; and the deficiencies of the ineffective programs should be highlighted and discouraged.

_______________________

Related notes:

Black History -- A Personal Note

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 02:58:00 +0000

This being Black History Month, here's a personal addition to the record.

Bad Health and a Bad Fall
Last week, my good friend and mentor -- and a former Dean of Howard University who is now 80 years old and in very bad health because of repeated bouts of heart failure in the last four years -- fell down the stairs to his basement and smashed his skull on the concrete floor. Being a stubborn, rugged individual, he got up, went back upstairs, and tried to ignore the headache that began immediately. He didn't call call for help until two days later, by which time his headaches had become extremely painful. So I rushed to his house and drove him down to the Emergency Room (ER) of Howard University Hospital.

The CT Scan showed blood on his brain, i.e., a "subdural hematoma" ... to be healed either by time or by surgery ... as in "brain surgery" ... as in the "rocket science" of surgery. After 48 hours of observation, it was determined that additional time would heal the injury; therefore my friend was discharged. Someone else drove him home. I was pleasantly surprised when he called to say how much better he was feeling.

So you can imagine my concern when he called me again two days later to ask me to meet him at the ER because he was being driven back to the ER. The blinding headaches had returned.

Brain Surgery
Having worked at Howard University for almost 40 years, I can sing the old school songs as loudly as any 40 year old, drunken alum at a frat reunion, but given a choice for brain surgery between Howard's Hospital and Johns Hopkins, my first choice would have been Hopkins in Baltimore … or Sibley Hospital here in DC, which recently became an affiliate of Hopkins. Howard has a strong reputation in urology and oncology, but I never heard anyone rave about its neurosurgeons ... until this fan letter that I am now posting on the this blog because some really good things aren't supposed to be secrets ... :-)

Surgery was scheduled for 8:30 p.m. By 7:30, the junior members of the surgical team and the anesthesiologist began to file into the surgery intensive care unit (SICU) to chat with my friend and explain the procedure. I was struck by the low key, but unmistakeable professionalism of their demeanor. Yes, this is a big game, but this is what we do. You understand? This ... is ... what ... we ... do.

At about 8:05, the surgeon arrived -- hereafter referred to as “Dr. Good Hands” ... which, as I learned the next day, is what some of the senior nursing staff call him. Dressed in a black leather jacket, Dr. Good Hands rolled into the SICU like a Rock Star, exuding confidence, checking with his team, with his patient, and with me -- shaking my hand with a powerful grip that instantly assured me that my friend’s skull and brain would be cut precisely where this doctor's Good Hands intended to cut, but no more and no less than was absolutely necessary.

Three hours later, my friend was wheeled from the operating room back into the SICU, where I watched him sleep peacefully for about half an hour, just to be sure that everything had gone as well as it seemed to have gone.

On the Road to Recovery
I'm posting this note a few days later and my friend's recovery is still on track. His headaches are gone and, as far as I can tell, his mind is as incisive as ever, perceiving all manner of verbal nuance as keenly as before. His recovery gives me great relief because he's such a good friend and because his recent health has been so incredibly bad. Did I mention that I've driven him to the ER more than 10 times in the last four years? Indeed, given my aged friend's incredibly bad health, if I were a religious man I would swear that his recovery from the fall and from the required brain surgery was a miracle. But I am not a religious man, so his recovery fills me with immense Black Pride for the incredible surgical skill that made his recovery possible.

Thank you, Dr. Good Hands.

Yes, we can. Yes, we can! Yes! We can!!!!! ... :-)

________________
Related notes:

Fight or Flight

Why are HBCUs Still Needed? -- Part III

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 02:18:00 +0000

Declining Market Share

Relentless financial pressure from the continuing Great Recession ensures continuation of the long-term decline in the percentage of black American students who attend HBCUs. Within a few years the HBCU share will drop below 10 percent. So I return, once again, to the question that I have addressed a few times before on this blog: "Why are HBCUs still needed?"

I begin this effort where my last left off, with the assertion that HBCUs have to let go of their historical justification. In a hyper-modern, fast moving economy, nobody cares about what any kind of institution has done in the past. So yes, one more time, let's all stand up and loudly cheer, "All hail the glorious contributions that HBCUs made to black higher education in times past!!!" OK? Now, back to reality. Looking forward, the existential challenge is brutally focused: "What can HBCUs do for all black American college students right now and in the foreseeable future?"

We have to be concerned about all black students, not just those enrolled in our own institutions; otherwise we doom ourselves to increasingly marginal positions as the market share of HBCUs continues its inexorable decline. Indeed, HBCUs should have no legitimate future in an integrated society that lived up to the historic commitment to equality won by the Civil Rights Revolution in the 1960s ... except for the sad facts of the actual record since the Revolution that makes their continuing existence an absolute necessity.

The Promise and Failure of Integration

I can remember asking myself back in the tumultuous 60s, how long it would take to close the most significant gaps between black and white America, and I can remember persuading myself that forty or fifty years, at most, would be sufficient. Why? Because I was absolutely certain that the biggest gaps in black and white achievement had the same root cause: segregation. Segregation systematically assigned the best opportunities to whites, and left us blacks with little or nothing. So I was certain that it would take no more than fifty years of integrated equal opportunity, two generations, to render obsolete the historic roles of the black colleges and universities, mostly located in the newly desegregated South.

I was certain that the beloved institutions that had educated so many prominent black Americans would no longer be needed because black Americans would find "better" opportunities for higher education at the better funded, integrated colleges and universities located throughout all of the nation's fifty states. Once the inequities within the nation's broken system of higher education were repaired, I was absolutely certain that, given sufficient time, the system would automatically produce equal outcomes, especially with substantial boosts from initiatives that greatly expanded access to these better educational opportunities, such as President Johnson's Affirmative Action programs. Fifty years, two generations, was surely a sufficient amount of time.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. Our situation improved dramatically in the 70s and 80s. But somehow we got stuck in the 90s and society began to roll sideways. Gaps in the academic achievements of blacks and whites have become persistent and profoundly disturbing. To be sure, substantial progress was made, so the glass became half full ... but for too many black students throughout the land, the promise of the 60s is still a dream deferred because for them the glass is still half empty. So the vast majority of our black students now attend integrated colleges and universities, but their retention rates, graduation rates, and GPAs are also substantially lower than their non-black peers. And our best and brightest, our "Talented Tenth", are not pursuing degrees in STEM, finance, and other complex fields as intensively as the best and brightest non-black students, degrees that would launch them on careers that offered higher pay, higher prestige, and greater opportunities to use the black power of their higher status to help other black students follow their pioneering paths to success.

Twelve years into the New Millennium, I find no reason to continue to blindly trust that the "invisible hand" of the desegregated American system of higher education, correction, the desegregated systems of American education at all levels, will automatically develop more effective teaching methods that will enable black students to overcome their residual historic handicaps and thereby close these persistent gaps in academic achievement. And even when more effective methods are identified, I can no longer blindly trust that our current systems of education will automatically allocate the resources required to ensure that these more effective teaching methods will be disseminated throughout all systems down to all of the classrooms wherein black students are enrolled -- not even with substantial support from government programs or with the well intended and well funded assistance from the Gates, Lumina, and other enlightened philanthropies. To the contrary, the discouraging record of the last two decades compels me to anticipate that things are going to continue to drift sideways ... and possibly downwards. Many will benefit, but most will not.

Keepers of the Dream

Unless ... unless ... unless an extensive network of institutions makes it their collective mission to boldly assert a collaborative leadership role in the identification and dissemination of teaching methods that are more effective for all of the black students who are currently enrolled everywhere. Now let me think. Does our society have any institutions that are dedicated to providing black Americans with the best possible opportunities for higher education? Hmmmmmm ... :-)

______________________

Related notes:

Affirmative Action Strategies -- 1

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 16:08:00 +0000

Not all affirmative action programs are the same, nor should they be. Unfortunately, when affirmative action programs are discussed in the media, in policy forums, and even in scholarly publications, the significant differences among these programs are often denied and/or glossed over. As a first step, I suggest that it's useful to distinguish between programs that are based on diversity strategies vs. those based on compensatory strategies.

Diversity Strategies
When a college or a university employs a diversity strategy, it seeks to recruit students from groups that are underrepresented in its current student body; but it does so by recruiting members of these underrepresented groups whose academic aptitudes and preparation are comparable to the students currently enrolled.

For example, in its earliest decades Harvard University was a regional institution that recruited most of its students from Massachusetts and its neighboring states in New England. Over time, Harvard diversified geographically by recruiting students from other states in other regions of the country and eventually from other regions of the world. As its curriculum diversified, it recruited students with aptitudes for the new disciplines. And though it began as an all-male institution, by the end of the twentieth century it had diversified by gender to the point where its female students outnumbered its male students.

Of course when Harvard diversified with regards to blacks and other minorities, its goal, again, was to recruit minority students who were academically indistinguishable from its majority students (except during an unfortunate, but brief period in the late 1960s and early 1970s). So the reader will not be surprised to learn that the U.S. Department of Education's College Navigator Website reports that the six year graduation rates for the cohort of Harvard freshmen who enrolled in 2004 were as follows = (White, 97%) (Black, 97%) ... In other words, Harvard's 600 black undergraduates were academically equal to the other 9,400 undergraduates when they entered, so they graduated at the same rates as the others. Note that the graduation rates for other minorities were also similar: (Native American, 100%); (Hispanic, 97%); and (Asian American, 100%).

Achieving diversity that subsequently yields equal performance requires higher recruitment costs up front, costs that are affordable by affluent, highly selective private institutions like Harvard. However, such cost differentials would be difficult to justify at public institutions where there would be understandable pressures to invest those additional funds in more scholarships, enhanced science labs and other facilities, and more competitive salaries for faculty.

Compensatory Strategies
But even if the governors and the trustees of public institutions could be persuaded to invest the extra funds required by diversity strategies, they would encounter insurmountable barriers that are the inescapable consequences of centuries of previous mistreatment of the nation's minorities: there aren't enough academically equal minority students to go around. How could it be otherwise? As President Johnson declared in his historic speech that introduced the compensatory strategy that is most commonly associated with the term "affirmative action" today:

"In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope ... But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates."
President Lyndon B. Johnson, Commencement Address at Howard University, 1965

In other words, a diversity strategy can only be employed by a fraction of the nation's colleges and universities. If the nation is to provide opportunities for higher education to all minority students who have the intellectual aptitude to benefit from such opportunities, most of its colleges and universities will have to employ "compensatory" strategies, i.e., strategies that recruit students who have comparable intellectual aptitudes but have deficiencies in their prior academic preparation.

Our colleges and universities must recruit these students with a firm commitment to provide them with sufficient compensatory resources after admission that will enable them to overcome their initial deficiencies, resources such as developmental courses, tutors, mentors, and study groups. Access to these additional resources will enable the minority students to master the missing fundamentals as quickly as possible, move into the mainstream, and graduate with qualifications that are comparable to the qualifications of non-minority students with respect to the pursuit of graduate studies or entry into the work force. Note that compensatory resources are not required by the academically equal students recruited by diversity strategies. In other words, diversity programs incur additional costs in their recruiting processes; whereas compensatory programs incur additional costs after their minority students are admitted.

Some minority students will only be marginally less prepared than their non-minority peers; hence they will have minimal need for compensatory resources. Such lightly compensatory cases could be regarded as modified diversity plays.

But other minority students will have substantially less preparation than non-minority freshmen; hence they will require substantially greater compensatory support and should be expected to take substantially longer to complete their studies if they are to become as qualified as non-minority students for graduate studies or entry into the work force. Of course, their substantially longer enrollments will also require substantially greater financial aid to cover the additional tuition, books, fees, food, housing, and other living expenses during the additional time required for them to complete their studies.

Not all compensatory programs are the same, nor should they be. On the one hand some institutions have higher standards across the board than other institutions; and the courses in some fields of study are "harder" than the courses in other fields within the same institutions. In other words minority students will need more compensatory resources if they are admitted to more selective institutions; and they will need more compensatory resources if they major in more difficult programs , e.g., science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

When Compensation Fails
I submit that inadequate design is the root cause of the perceived failure of many compensatory affirmative action programs, i.e., the so-called "mismatch problem." It's not just a matter of money. Even if compensatory programs could be run for free, there are practical limits to the size of the gaps in prior academic preparation that compensatory initiatives can overcome. For example, when I read about engineering programs in selective universities that admit black students whose SATs are more than one standard deviation below the SATs of the non-black freshmen in these programs, I have to shake my head in anger and wonder as to why these institutions are posing such insurmountable challenges to their black freshmen.

STEM programs, but especially the programs in engineering, provide the biggest challenges to institutions implementing compensatory affirmative action strategies. Their sequences of prerequisite and co-requisite courses are more tightly prescribed than in most other undergraduate programs. Hence failure to master the content of the early sections of some courses will lead to failure in later sections of the co-requisite courses; and failure to master pre-requisites denies admission to the later courses in a sequence. And, yes, these programs are more difficult, i.e., their work loads are generally heavier than in most other programs.

Therefore minority students who have substantially deficient preparations on entry will either require substantially greater natural aptitude for more difficult subjects or access to more intensive compensatory resources ... or they will find it necessary to transfer out of engineering into "easier" programs or drop out of school. The good intentions of the designers of such compensatory programs are only a first step. The proof is in the performance. High rates of transfers or high rates of failures should wave bright red flags. Rather than blaming the victims -- the minority students who transferred out or flunked out -- these institutions should be demanding that the designers of their compensatory programs revisit their flawed designs.

A second explanation is more insidious: racism. More than three years into the President Obama's Administration, it will hardly be news to anyone reading this note that racism survived his election in 2008. When it comes to more difficult fields like STEM, the labs and IT resources of HBCUs may not be as extensive as those found at some of the wealthier non-HBCUs, but racism is never a factor in HBCUs. Their abundant supply of black role models and black mentors ensures that black students are never made to feel that they can't master difficult subjects just because they are black.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for non-HBCUs. Therefore higher-than-expected transfers or drop-outs from STEM and other difficult majors should also raise bright red flags that at least some of the students who transferred or dropped out did so because of their perceptions of racism within those departments, departments wherein black instructors and black mentors are usually few and far between. Perhaps the cruelest irony emerges when poorly designed compensatory strategies are applied to the most difficult undergraduate majors, e.g., engineering, that demand the strongest academic aptitudes. The mismatched enrollment of black students whose aptitudes are beneath this threshold may reinforce stereotypical notions about the "inherent inferiority" of all black students among the program's non-black students and among the program's non-black faculty. These fallacious notions may then be applied to the best and brightest black students, students whose intellectual capabilities are every bit as high as those of their non-black peers.

Note: The distinction between "diversity" and "compensatory" strategies was first proposed by Maya A. Beasley, PhD, in her senior honors thesis at Harvard University in 1997 in the Department of Sociology under the supervision of Professor William Julius Wilson. Her recent publication, Opting Out, Losing the Potential of America's Young Black Elite (University of Chicago Press, 2011), provides an extensive examination of the influence of perceived prejudice on the decisions by some of the nation's brightest black undergraduates to transfer out of STEM and other complex disciplines.

Author's Note: The immediate stimulus for this essay was the following report that was posted on one of Duke University's Websites, "What Happens After Enrollment? An Analysis of the Time Path of Racial Differences in GPA and Major Choice"

________________________
Related notes:

Fight or Flight (revised)

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 06:15:00 +0000

The Greatest and Second Greatest Generations
As a black American, I am especially mindful of a group of pioneers, the successive generations of courageous black activists who pushed the frontiers of freedom in wave after wave, beginning with their emancipation. Whereas some have argued that the "Greatest Generation" of (mostly white) Americans were the brave soldiers and sailors who fought against tyrannical enemies in World War II, I have long believed that the "Greatest Generation" of black Americans were the ex-slaves who lifted themselves and their children up from mass ignorance into mass literacy in the decades following the Civil War.

And my nominee for the "Second Greatest Generation" of black Americans would be the courageous activists who risked their lives to wage the successful Civil Rights Revolution in the 1960s in strenuous efforts to complete the journey of black Americans from slavery to freedom.

Unfortunately, the journey wasn't completed, so there is still much work to be done. Many of us anticipated that far greater progress would have been made between the audacious 60s and today than actually occurred. Significant achievement gaps between blacks and whites narrowed, then displayed an obnoxious persistence. Obviously we need a few more waves of pioneers to reach our destination.

But as I grow older, I am saddened to note that courage, like other human qualities, ebbs and flows from one generation to the next. One generation's record breakers may be followed by another generations' regression to the mean. My sadness has also tempered some of the elation that I would have otherwise felt by the publication of my younger daughter's first book, Opting Out, Losing the Potential of America's Young Black Elite (Maya A. Beasley, University of Chicago Press, November 2011). Warning: the next few paragraphs contain shameless plugs from a very proud Daddy ... :-)

My daughter's book is an expanded and greatly enhanced version of the PhD dissertation that she wrote while she was at Stanford University. She begins her "Acknowledgements" as follows:

"The inspiration for this book comes from my time in Palo Alto toward the end of dot-com boom. As a graduate student living on a small stipend, I was keenly aware of the immense wealth flowing through Silicon Valley and the opportunities being taken up by young professionals. As a woman of color, however, I was also acutely aware of the dearth of African Americans that were a part of this phenomenon. I had known many intelligent, creative black students during my college years at Harvard, and as a graduate student at Stanford I had encountered a diverse undergraduate student body. I wondered how it was that Harvard and Stanford had relatively large black undergraduate populations, yet so few of the professionals I observed off campus were black."

After reviewing the relavant literature that provides extensive support for her findings, her book presents an exploratory study of the career decisions that were made by 30 black undergraduates at Berkeley and Stanford . She focused on the decisions that many of them made not to pursue careers for which they were qualified in high paying, high prestige fields -- e.g., science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and finance -- after they correctly or incorrectly perceived the existence of racism among the predominantly white members of the faculty who taught the courses that led to the degrees that provided entry to those professions and among the practitioners of those professions. Many of these elite students opted instead for careers in more "racialized" fields, her term for fields that already contained a substantial number of black professionals. In other words, they chose not to become pioneers.

My daughter sent me chapters from time to time as she was writing her dissertation, and I recall my blood pressure soaring by thirty or forty points on each reading. Her quotes of the students' explanations for why they were opting out were all the more galling to me coming behind her quotation from one of my personal intellectual heroes at the beginning of her first chapter,

"The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men." (W.E.B. DuBois, "The Talented Tenth," 1903)

Given such golden opportunities, how could these highly talented youngsters not want to become pioneers?

The Third Greatest Generation and Second Thoughts

When I wrote the first version of this essay about two months ago, I stopped at the end of the preceding paragraph. I was not only saddened by my daughters' findings that so many of the students in her sample underperformed in the face of racism as per psychologist Claude Steele's findings about "stereotype threat", but by the painful irony that, even as her book was being delivered to the stores, my daughter was confronting circumstances in her own employment that were uncomfortably akin to the ones the students had hoped to avoid.

But since then, I have been re-reading sections of her book, especially the sections that indicated that the students' perceptions were not based so much on their own direct encounters with racism, but on the more extensive experiences of their parents and other friends and relatives in their parents' generation, the generation that walked through the doors in the 70s and 80s that were opened by the Civil Rights Activists in the 60s. They learned from their elders what racism looks like when you're one of the first to integrate an organization or a work place, how ugly it is, and how painful it can be.

But as my daughter and I continued to discuss her findings, a new possibility emerged. Perhaps the students she interviewed at the beginning of the New Millennium had only learned half of the lessons their parents and relatives might have taught them? Perhaps their parents didn't teach the other half because they were hoping that times had changed enough so that those other lessons wouldn't be necessary?

Whereas the Second Greatest Generation fought their integration battles in the glare of the nation's media, the battles fought by the generation that followed them through the doors of integration were solitary skirmishes and barely noted. Like soldiers coming home from an unpopular war, there were no media to mark their triumphs, no parades to thank them for their service. So the question is:

How did that next generation, the Third Greatest Generation if you will, conjure up the courage to persevere unnoticed, to quietly become the first black Americans to integrate so many fields and so many work places that were hitherto bastions of segregation that their children had the option to fall back into these now safer "racialized" occupations because the racists had been quelled?

And then I watched Soledad O'Brien's excellent documentary on CNN, "Black in America, the New Promised Land: Silicon Valley" ... actually, I watched it on TV, then downloaded it to my Mac and watched it three more times!!! If you haven't seen it yet, stop reading this essay, click the link in the previous sentence, download the video from iTunes, and watch it right now!!!

OK, I apologize. That's a bit over the top. But the video is a brilliant example of TV journalism at its best. Whereas Ms. O'Brien noted that there were no black entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, my daughter had identified the blockage in the pipeline at the source, at Berkeley and Stanford, the elite colleges that supplied a hefty percentage of the Valley's engineers-turned-entrepreneurs. If talented black students were opting out, it follows that Ms. Obrien's camera crew would have difficulty finding any black entrepreneurs ... except for the ones who just moved from all over the country into the high-tech boot camp in a house in the Valley for nine weeks to prepare to make do-or-die presentations to fat-cat venture capitalists. These were the black entrepreneurs whom the camera crew followed around day-after-day as the stars of Ms. O'Brien's reality TV documentary.

I won't spoil your fun by summarizing the video, except to say that for me, the high point came when an Indian professor, as in, a dark-skinned professor born in India, challenged the entrepreneurs to acknowledge three undeniable facts:

Many black Americans seem to feel that past injustice will entitle them to special treatment in the future. It doesn't work that way.
The only substantial help they would receive would be the help they gave to each other
Prejudice in the Valley was still so powerful that they should seriously consider hiring well-spoken white students from Berkeley or Stanford to make their presentations to venture capitalists on their behalf -- which is what the dark-skinned professor had been advised to do many years ago when he was starting his own company.

After he rubbed their noses into the harsh realities of ongoing prejudice, after the shock of his comments settled in, the black wannabe entrepreneurs did not emit a "stereotype threat" response. They didn't opt out. They buckled down and helped each other make the best presentations of their lives!

Yes, courage ebbs and flows from one generation to the next, but the good news from this video is that it's flowing again. It's flowing ... :-)

______________________
Related notes:

The Paralysis of Racism

noreply@blogger.com (Roy L Beasley) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 02:07:00 +0000

By the end of the 20th century, "racism" had become such a "bad word", so politically incorrect that even racists took offense at being called "racist" ... Of course this didn't mean that racism had vanished; what it did mean was that our society had made substantial progress in the hundred years between the aftermath of the Civil War and the legacy of Civil Rights. In the heat of the moment it's sometimes difficult to keep things in perspective, to suppress one's feelings that nothing has changed.

Nevertheless as an African American, I must never delude myself into thinking that I have ever been subjected to the kind of violent racism that was inflicted on my mother's father, who was born a slave. Things have gotten substantially better, yet not nearly as much as justice demands. But as the world's Jewish community raised its fists and cried "Never Again!" after the Holocaust, American blacks raised theirs to say that the only acceptable direction is forward, that we are never going back to "that", ever, never.

It's useful to distinguish between two kinds of racism: individual and institutional. Individual racists betray themselves by the racist things they say and do; whereas institutional racism is built into an organization's structures and operating procedures, so its exposure usually requires statistical analysis.

For example, our suspicions would be raised if we discovered that only 5 percent of the police force was black in a city whose population was more than 30 percent black.

Or we might become suspicious of a city's voter registration requirements if only five percent of its black residents were registered.

Of course, both of these examples are so clear cut as to preclude explanations other than institutional racism. But in the real world, the data is rarely so indisputable nor are individual racists so clumsy as to utter the "N" word.

Nowadays, politically correct racists invoke euphemisms, e.g. Governor Romney's recent "anti-entitlement campaign strategy", and achieve their racist objectives by quietly perpetuating the structures and procedures of institutional racism. Worse still, politically correct racists cite the very statistics that should be used to demonstrate institutional racism to insinuate the inferiority of its black victims. As an educator, my favorite example is using statistics that document the persistent achievement gaps between black and white students, not as evidence that our schools and universities are failing our black students, but to insinuate that the black students are inherently inferior. As one of my black students said to me a long time ago in one of the first classes I ever taught, "Statistics is the white man's trick bag"

This misuse of institutional statistics by crypto-racists, like Governor Romney, paralyzes the thought processes and discussions that are essential for our society to continue to make progress in eradicating institutional racism. I must admit that whenever I detect racism, I become hypersensitive and furious ... and then I notice my non-racist white friends and colleagues moving on quiet tiptop out of range. There can be no dialogue until I calm down. Of course, being a to-the-bone-Libra, I eventually do calm down and coldly perceive the real danger: the inconvenient truth that lurks within the misused stats, a truth whose burdensome, unfair implications cannot be ignored.

For example, most of the professors in most colleges have minimal teaching skills. This should surprise no one because most professors receive no formal training as classroom instructors. Nevertheless substantial learning occurs in all colleges, even in classes taught by the most incompetent instructors. Why? Because students come to class with varying degrees of prior preparation and motivation that compensates for the pedagogical deficiencies of their instructors. Students who come with better preparation usually do better than students with less; and those with less have to work harder for their A's and B's. White students generally come to college with stronger academic backgrounds than black students; so the black students have to compensate for their deficient preparations by working harder. Like my grandmother once told me when I was a small child, a black man has to be "twice as smart as a white man and work twice as hard to get half as far." That's unfair, but so what. Black students have no choice but to grit their teeth and work harder.

For educators, especially for black educators like myself, the challenge is to develop more effective teaching methods that would make it easier for students with entering deficiencies to master the missing fundamentals as quickly as possible, then move into the deeper, more interesting aspects of a course's subject matter. And this is what makes teaching such an exciting opportunity today. Information technology has finally given educators the tools we need to meet this challenge ... but the challenge won't be met if blacks and whites are distracted and/or paralyzed by racism.

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Related notes:

Fight or Flight
Playing the Race Card
The White Man's Trick Bag
Academically Adrift -- A Dissenting View
At the Gates of Distraction