Small Is Beautiful | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The John William Pope Center for Education Policy provides a treasure trove of information suggesting the better path forward in regards to North Carolina's number one issue - public education. Public education, at all levels, requires a significant amount of funding from our state government, and all one hundred North Carolina counties, so it is essential that leaders effecting education policy get it right, and know that concerned entities, like the John William Pope Center, will be minding their progress to do so. We welcome the John William Pope Center for Education Policy to our growing readership, and expect our readers to learn all they can to do their part in this wise endeavor to better educate our People.

    The author of this post is George Leef.

    The small, new University of Minnesota Rochester is a model for a real learning community.

    About 65 million years ago, the huge dinosaurs went extinct, but small, quick mammals that could adapt to the new environment thrived. And about 25 years ago, mammoth steel mills gave way to more efficient mini-mills.

    If we can extend this trend into higher education, our large universities may be replaced by new, innovative educational delivery systems such as Coursera, StraighterLine, and Udacity.

    To that list, add the University of Minnesota Rochester (UMR).

    While online education is getting most of the attention these days when the subject of change in higher ed comes up, the UMR shows that the old-fashioned professor-facing-students-in-a-classroom model can be reworked so that it gives serious students a true education at reasonable cost.

    First, a short history of UMR.

    Rochester, Minnesota, is best known as the home of the famed Mayo Clinic. IBM also has a large presence in the city. Going back to the 1960s, Mayo, IBM, and other leaders pressed the state for a higher education institution and their efforts resulted in a community college and a branch of Winona State University in the city. Predictably, those off-the-shelf educational models didn't do much for Rochester.

    Business and civic leaders kept angling for a full University of Minnesota campus and in 2006 that wish was granted when the state designated University of Minnesota  -  Rochester as a "full and official coordinate campus."

    At that point, however, there was no campus. Nor was there any plan for what to do with this new entity. Minnesota might have set up UMR like almost every other state university campus, with lots of departments, degrees, dormitories, sports teams, and so forth. Had that happened, the country would have had one more cookie-cutter university, churning out graduates who have had a good time but learned little during their college years  -  and doing so at high cost.

    Fortunately, that did not happen. For one thing, Minnesota didn't have the money for a "real" university. More importantly, the man chosen as the chancellor of the new institution, Stephen Lehmkuhle, insisted on thinking outside the standard higher education box. Lehmkuhle is a psychologist who is interested in how people learn. He had been the top academic administrator at the University of Missouri and saw UMR as a clean slate for developing a college that would maximize student learning.

    Also, the small budget he had to work with made him think like an entrepreneur: How can I get the most benefit from my very limited resources?

    Lehmkuhle decided that UMR should focus on just one thing, namely training people for careers in medicine and related fields, a perfect fit for the Mayo Clinic's headquarters. UMR only offers a B.S. in Health Sciences. The curriculum includes a liberal arts component in the first two years, alongside rigorous grounding in the STEM disciplines. In their last two years, students are immersed in studies that prepare them for their careers, including a capstone senior project.

    One of the unique features of UMR is the absence of academic departments. Colleges and universities are almost always an assemblage of numerous departments, each requiring considerable overhead expenses, and often squabbling among themselves for money and prestige. Lehmkuhle saw that UMR could not afford that, so the faculty is all one team rather than a group of jealous departments.

    Another remarkable feature of UMR is its approach to tenure.

    At nearly every college and university that has tenure (about 98 percent according to this somewhat dated report), the decision to award it rests overwhelmingly on how much research the faculty member publishes. That causes those who seek tenure to concentrate so much on getting published that teaching students becomes an onerous chore; a distraction from the work that really matters. Moreover, the published works often have nothing to do with knowledge that is useful in the teaching of undergraduates.

    UMR's approach to tenure is altogether different. Its tenure criteria reflect Chancellor Lehmkuhle's focus on student learning. Candidates for tenure must first of all demonstrate excellence in teaching.

    To show that, professors can present an array of evidence including their efforts at developing community-based learning activities for students, how they have interacted with student projects, course evaluations and letters from students, and their advising, mentoring and supervising of capstone experiences. (Professors usually teach 12 hours, and are also expected to devote around 20 hours per week to student contact.)

    UMR also requires faculty research, and the research obligation has two aspects.

    A professor's primary research needs to "advance the field of inquiry of student learning." That is to say, professors must study and write about how to improve educational results. What an idea  -  telling professors that if they want to keep their jobs, they'll have to focus on the effectiveness of their teaching.

    The second area of research is the standard work in one's academic field  -  the sort of research that is usually all that counts. Not at UMR.

    In addition, once tenured, professors can't simply coast because there are post-tenure reviews.

    At UMR, the probationary period for professors seeking tenure is eight years, so the school, which only opened its doors in 2009, has yet to say yes or no to anyone. But knowing the tenure policy has a strong incentive effect. If any faculty member might be inclined toward what Murray Sperber calls the "faculty/student non-aggression pact," he'll quickly abandon all such thoughts. That approach can succeed elsewhere, but clearly won't at UMR's learning community.

    "Learning community" has become an educational buzzword, but it is evident that one has actually formed at UMR. Reading articles on the school, such as this Minnesota Public Radio piece, we find that students revel in the "intense academic environment" and enjoy the chance to work closely with professors. None of those massive lecture classes where the professor or a TA drones an accompaniment to power point slides, or office hours that are a joke.

    As for the faculty's involvement, one student said, with regard to UMR's Just Ask Centers, "For five minutes or an hour (professors) sit there and work with you. I was actually studying for pretty much my entire organic chemistry final at the center last year. I got to sit with the professor and a few other people and worked through the problems."

    Naturally, UMR isn't for everyone. The attrition rate for the first class (only 57 students) was nearly 25 percent. Too much work (most students report that they devote at least 35 hours per week to their studies, outside of class) and too little fun for those who transferred out.

    At that point, most college administrators would have started thinking, "How can we change the school to retain more students?" Instead, Chancellor Lehmkuhle decided to improve the school's marketing to the kind of student who'd be a good fit for the serious intellectual environment. That's apparently working and UMR has grown to 475 students.

    Tuition is the same for all students  -  no discount for Minnesotans  -  and a year costs about $13,000. The school receives about $5,000 per student from the state, which is only a third of the subsidy it gives the flagship campus in the Twin Cities.

    And one more tidbit about UMR: its "campus" is in a shopping mall.

    As we at the Pope Center have been arguing for years, the educational environment is changing. Many of our traditional colleges and universities grew fat and happy during the years after the passage of the Higher Education Act, just like the dinosaurs who fed well on the lush Jurassic vegetation. But the halcyon days are past. More and more Americans are figuring out that the typical college experience costs far too much and often delivers little if any educational value.

    UMR is built for survival in the quickly-arriving future where educational programs sink or swim based on their ability to teach students who want an education and not just a degree.

    Could there be many other institutions similar to UMR, offering an intense learning environment for students who are focused on a particular field? Certainly, both public and private. Would it make sense to dismantle some existing universities and refashion them as a group of UMR-type learning communities? Perhaps that would make sense, much as old industrial facilities have been colonized by small businesses and function as vibrant commercial spaces.

    In any case, I am convinced that UMR shows us one workable, survivable, model for higher education in the future.