Simplify, simplify, simplify
Henry David Thoreau got it right long ago
“BIG DATA mounts in state to boost college grad rate,” announced the recent frontpage headline in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. It sounded very much up to date in this post-modern, post-common sense era.
“Big data has made its way into higher education,” announced the lead sentence of the news story. Better to settle for what Henry David Thoreau advised a century or so ago: Simpler is better. Just as being true to one’s self is better than chasing after the herd of public opinion. As Thoreau put it: “If a man does not keep pace with his compatriots, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”
Somebody, maybe Mr. Garfield, once observed that the ideal education would put Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and the student on the other. Then there would be no need for a lot of verbal rigmarole like this paean to Big Data, which may only be there to make sure students graduate and so add to the statistical case for more student aid or graduate assistantships or whatever your purely statistical goal is at your college—as opposed to a real education. And we do mean as opposed to.
Instead of a lifelong love of learning and virtue, the goal seems to be raising the graduation rate and therefore the share of the state’s funds that each supposedly educational institution can reap. It’s a base rather than noble goal but there are many who happily pursue it under the impression they’re seeking an education rather than a jump-start on merchandising their dubious wares.
“I expect to hear a lot more of the schools adding these types of dataanalytics products to their student information systems for early alerts, especially for those students who are marginalized,” says Maria Markham of the state’s Department of Higher Education. She might start by speaking plain English instead of the technocratic-bureaucratic jargon she now seems to specialize in. As in: “The new formula is going to incentivize [ouch!] doing a good job with certain populations—not just getting them enrolled, but successfully getting them through the pipeline. [Like so much sausage through a meat grinder?] So since the focus has shifted . . . it’s very likely to prompt institutions that don’t have these types of capabilities to go out and get those capabilities.”
DOES ANYONE know anybody who talks that way in real life? If so it must make for a lot of less than stimulating conversation. Lord help them and the rest of us poor souls who might have to pretend to be listening instead of praying and hoping that this, too, shall pass.
Almost two-thirds of the 458 students at the University of Arkansas at Monticello who began their studies there last fall needed help, and how. Two out of five of them are getting purely financial help through federal Pell grants that don’t need to be repaid, and so they may begin their studies with an anvil of debt tied around their necks.
To quote Chancellor Karla Hughes of UAM, administrators, bureaucrats and their staffs have to consider what a successful college education would be—which should have been their very first question instead of being put off till this late date. “For us,” she now says, “the idea of outcomes-based funding has introduced a real need to understand and look at the data for our students . . . what data do we need, what our data is telling us and, based on that, where do we need to put our resources.”
What our data is telling us? Forget about brushing up your Shakespeare. Just a refresher course in simple English grammar might be invaluable now and forever.