Over the weekend, a few papers on higher education gave me mental whiplash: Andrew Kelly and Rick Hess’s Beyond Retrofitting, a brief for unbundling of higher education; and Sara Goldrick-Rab et al. on very tentative evidence of success by Single Stop USA. (Instead of heading to a white paper that will quickly become obsolete, I recommend you read Goldrick-Rab’s more general column at the Chronicle of Higher Ed.) Kelly and Hess argue that the best thing we can do to improve higher education is dismantle the idea of a package of education embodied in single institutions. Goldrick-Rab and her coauthors suggest that Single Stop’s service for working-class community-college students is a potential model to provide more support for those students, including and especially for underfunded two-year colleges. While the jury is out on Single Stop’s specific business model and practices, Goldrick-Rab and coauthors suggest that community colleges focus on making it much easier for students who are eligible for aid to apply for and receive aid… and not just at the college, but with SNAP (formerly food stamps) and WIC support for their families, and in general whatever is available and would help the student continue in college. To me, this looks like Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s “nudge” approach applied to community college student services, or maybe nudge combined with a bit of concierge service.
There already are students who receive concierge-level service in college, including staff members applying semi-paternalistic nudges to help students progress through college. The recipients of college concierge services today: student-athletes, and in some institutions recipients of merit aid. Unlike many other faculty, I have no problem in theory with the level of support services provided to student-athletes (as long as it doesn’t extend to cheating). What I have a problem with is the fact that student-athletes receive concierge services, but the same level of support is unavailable to other students at the same institutions and entirely absent at most two-year colleges. It is important to keep in mind that there is as yet no definitive, refereed evaluation of individual models such as Single Stop USA. But if there is evidence of effectiveness of some level of concierge services, we need to make it available where it can have the most success in helping students complete a college education.
So why the mental whiplash? On Twitter Saturday night, Kelly argued that one could imagine an equivalent of Single Stop for unbundled higher ed, and then Goldrick-Rab entered the conversation:
https://twitter.com/AndrewPKelly/status/366398472183750656
https://twitter.com/AndrewPKelly/status/366400516105830400
https://twitter.com/shermandorn/status/366400943731912704
https://twitter.com/AndrewPKelly/status/366401418699091969
The notion of coordinated, sort-of-concierge student services is difficult to fit with unbundling, at least at a first glance. The whole point of Single Stop USA is to catch students in one place — it’s a bundling of support inside the bundling of education that we call a college. Yes, there are plenty of businesses that provide what you could call a la carte concierge service to individuals, but they tend to (a) cater to the economically stable/wealthy and (b) serve industries that engage in a large amount of bundling to begin with. So you may go to an insurance agent who helps you sort through the chaotic bazaar of auto and home insurance, but those things in turn tend to come in packages — you don’t buy windstorm insurance from one company and fire insurance from another. Concierge businesses take advantage of the fact that sorting through a huge market of complex, only semi-compatible choices is often unpleasant, especially where you incur risks by making choices. For those who have money, they can use a concierge business to save the cognitive costs of reading the fine print on insurance policies.
Kelly and Hess argue for unbundling explicitly as a way to break up existing practices in colleges and universities. The problem is that unbundling attacks both the good and bad in college, and I fear that the winners are not going to be the students who most need support to complete college. How would something like Single Stop USA (or any financial-aid or general student services operation) work in an unbundled world? If such a standalone operation is to survive, it would have to sit in a physical location where it can gather traffic, or it would have to pay recruiters to bring people in. (No, I do not think an internet- or phone-only service would work well in this context.) There are all sorts of problems with that, from lack of visibility to potential conflicts of interest. Among other things, I can imagine a standalone student service center getting paid by commission by vendors who receive the financial benefit of the service center’s operation.
Bottom line: the argument for unbundling is designed with savvy consumers in mind. But for those who have the initiative and spare time today, enough of college is unbundled already as long as you don’t care about the credential. On the other hand, for those who need the credential and for those who need support in college, unbundling is a dream without concrete plans for such mundane details as financial aid, student services, or student privacy.
Part of the problem with out-sourcing student services is that the current accountability model does not allow it.
Also, of course, out-sourcing student services would have to be approved by the accreditor, and without clear and robust lines of accountability, this would be denied. Out-source to India maybe? Could be. But only if approved as a “substantive change” under 34 CFR 602. Did SS do this? I doubt it.
Oddly, no mention of this potential roadblock and how SS managed to get around it.