Welcome to Mile Markers, a bimonthly newsletter about rural higher education. I’m Nick Fouriezos, an Open Campus national reporter who grew up at the crossroads of suburban Atlanta and the foothills of Appalachia.

Today’s Roadmap

01: Postcards: How will new rankings effect rural institutions?

01: Postcards

Tim Knowles holds a fascinating position in American education.

He is the 10th president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, an organization that has shaped American education for the past century, creating Pell grants, the Education Testing Service (ETS), and standards for engineering, law, medicine, and schools of education.

Yet despite that history, his position holds has a distinctly entrepreneurial bend. Every decade or so, the organization hires a president and tells them not to live in the present, but the future.

“The charge is to look around the corner, and tell us what we should be thinking about not tomorrow, but five to 10 years out,” Knowles said. The entrepreneurial kick suits him, given his previous experience as founder of the Academy Group and of the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute and its Urban Labs.

The Carnegie president enters at a time where one could argue that looking ahead is more critical than ever, with the pace of change ever increasing. In this conversation, I discuss with him how rural communities are being affected by the debates shaping education today. This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Q: How do our current systems often miss rural students?

When we analyzed "portraits of a graduate" — visions of what students should be able to do after high school — we discovered what I'd call an invisible American consensus across rural, urban, suburban, red, and blue communities. Despite our supposedly divided times, communities consistently prioritize the same core skills: communication, collaboration, critical thinking, curiosity, civic engagement, creativity, and hard work.

These are precisely the skills that predict success and are in high demand from employers. Yet until we can reliably and validly measure these things, they won't have real currency, and we will use where you went to school as primary proxy for quality. 

Think about a student in rural Iowa who wakes up at 4 AM, works on the family farm, gets to school on time every day, does their homework, maintains good grades, and holds a weekend job. Those activities, aggregated up, are clear signals of persistence. We need to figure out both how to capture that and then make it legible to employers and the post-secondary sector.

This is particularly important for rural communities, where there's often evidence of excellence that isn’t made legible in traditional metrics. Complicating matters, the skills we're talking about are also highly context-specific — the same student might show incredible persistence in certain settings but struggle in others. Understanding and measuring that complexity is key to leveraging the extraordinary talent across the United States and creating meaningful change in education.

Q: Where do you think the American higher education system is shifting?

One of our most lasting and influential contributions that emerged from the Foundation, sharing both the K12 and the postsecondary sectors is the Carnegie Unit or ‘credit hour’. The credit hour is the bedrock currency of the education economy. It has infiltrated everything. It shapes the daily work of teachers and professors, it determines what goes on a transcript, it’s how we define accreditation, and it is central to who gets financial aid. In essence, the Carnegie unit has become the system, essentially conflating times with learning. I am convinced that’s really ripe for disruption.

++ The inspiration for California’s ‘grand experiment’ at community colleges? Wisconsin (via our partner CalMatters)

++ California wants to give degrees based on skills — not grades. It’s dividing this college (via our partner CalMatters)

It was literally in 1906 that Carnegie stood up and said “a 4-year degree should be 120 credits,” and, today, it remains 120 credits. But we have learned a huge amount since then, from neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists and learning scientists, about what knowledge is and how it’s acquired.

The idea that time and learning (and place and learning) should be conflated doesn’t take into consideration what we now know. If all goes well, in the decade ahead we will see a renaissance across the post secondary sector, as new models come to be that are more affordable, more experiential, and don’t walk in lock step with the Carnegie unit.

Q: How is Carnegie rethinking its classifications for postsecondary institutions?

While we're maintaining the research classifications (like R1 institutions), we're also introducing a new universal classification focused on economic opportunity. For every institution that receives federal money — about 4,000 of them — we'll look at two main factors: access (who they are enrolling, using Pell grant data) and earnings outcomes eight years after graduation.

++ Texas universities seeking top research status will have a clearer path under new rules (via our partner The Texas Tribune)

Importantly, this isn't a ranking system. We're grouping like institutions and comparing them to each other. For instance, we'll look at how rural two-year associate degree programs compare to similar institutions in terms of increasing access and improving outcomes. This distinction is important. You can't compare what someone might make in a rural area to suburban Los Angeles, let alone rank them against one another. So we're doing a lot of work to get these measures right based on available data.

Q: How will rural education and students be affected?

This could particularly benefit rural institutions that serve disproportionate numbers of low-income families. About 25 states already have laws or regulations connected to the Carnegie classifications, and federal departments like NSF, NIH, and NASA use them to direct resources. 

We want to identify and support institutions that are actually delivering for large numbers of low-income young people in meaningful ways. This is about making the post-secondary sector a much more vital engine for social and economic mobility. And in rural areas particularly, we need to better recognize and support the unique ways that schools and colleges contribute to their communities.

Q: Why do you feel like there is more of an appetite for actually changing higher education now, compared to in the past?

There are many forces driving change in postsecondary. The cost of higher education is out of reach for millions of Americans. Confidence in higher education is at an all time low.  And there are fewer college age students in general. All these factors are putting real pressure on higher education to explore new designs. The demand I see for a new approaches is remarkable. And it is not just at the post-secondary front. 

There are a lot of states that are saying the K-12 system isn’t working nearly as well as it could. They are reinventing the high school diploma and degrees to ensure more young people earn credentials that don’t conflate time with learning, and instead focus more decidedly on outcomes. For instance, in Indiana, they are making earning a real-world credential a requirement for all high school graduates. 

++ Ivy Tech auto students hope EV skills will help their careers (via our partner Mirror Indy)

You’re also seeing a massive lean toward CTE, supported by unusual bedfellows, with many conservative states making it more available to more students, and even Randi Weingarten and the American Federation Teachers (the largest teachers’ union in the nation), making it a priority of the institution she leads. 

And clearly, the pandemic has created significant momentum for change, leading to precipitous drops in literacy levels, and giving license to young people to "vote with their feet", resulting in serious and well documented challenges with chronic absenteeism — that aren't going away nearly as quickly as hoped.  These negative trends are also powerful forces for change. 

At the end of the day, we need to ensure our systems are valuing and measuring the right things. Of course this includes algebra and math. And it must include the skills we know predict success in work, in school and in life. 

My hope is that by focusing both the K12 and post secondary sector on outcomes that matter, and directing public policy and public capital to the places that create genuine opportunity — even if they’re doing it in ways that don’t fit traditional models — the nation can accelerate economic opportunity for everyone.  

To sponsor a future newsletter, please email [email protected], or check out our advertising information page. Support my work with a donation to Open Campus. You can also help by sharing this newsletter with your friends. They can sign up for their own copy here.