Have you ever been the new kid on the block, knowing that you can play street hockey with the best of them, but you never get picked for the team so don’t have the chance to show your talents? Have you ever applied for a job that will give you exactly the experience you’ve been trained for but get turned down for lack of that very experience? We feel a bit like that with regard to student loans. Here’s the story–and what you can do about it:

We are as accredited as any graduate school in the province or country or even the world. Our professors are top-notch educators AND clinicians, and I don’t think there is a better program for masters-level professional education in psychology. We are pioneers and innovators, with the only Master of Psychology program in Canada. And we do all this without taking a penny from the government.

Our students will eventually be able to get loans from the province through the OSAP program, but in order to qualify, we have to graduate two cohorts of students, which will take two to three years. Now, this is not generally a big problem for our students because most of you have jobs or other ways to qualify for loans or lines of credit from your banks or credit unions, once again not asking for taxpayer support.

However, we have discovered that the banks use the list of government loan-approved schools to determine if our students are enrolled in a legitimate degree-granting institution. This is a national list (www.canlearn.ca), but getting on it happens at the provincial level, which requires experience we can’t get without enrolling and graduating students. That is, the banks don’t want to loan money unless you don’t need it (i.e., unless you can get it at taxpayers’ expense).

BUT ALL IS NOT LOST!

I had a conversation with a very helpful man at the Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities. Scott will be in charge of our file when we do apply for OSAP. He wondered why the banks rely on the government loan-approval list, which was developed for different purposes. The crucial determinant of whether we are a legitimate degree-granting institution is not that list, but whether we have a letter of consent from the Minister, as confirmed by the website of the Postsecondary Education Quality Assessment Board www.peqab.ca/completed.html.

If you otherwise qualify for a loan from you bank, here’s what you can do to get the loan you deserve without being subjected to inappropriate restrictions:

1. At least one bank has told us they won’t make a change to their national policy of using the canlearn.ca list, but that individual branches may make exceptions. Refer your branch  personnel to the PEQAB website: www.peqab.ca/completed.html to prove that we are legitimate. We can also forward a copy of the Minister’s consent letter to your bank. And we’ll speak with or email your bank on your behalf.

2. Shop around to other banks and credit unions. We are in the process of interviewing potential lending institutions, and we’ll keep you informed of results in this space.

3. Consider a loan with the Travellers Tuition Plan. They’ve already picked us for their team. Contact Raj Nathwani (rnathwani@AdLearn.net or 416 923 4419 ext 224) for information.

Ours is a relatively expensive program, but boy can we score when it comes to professional education–we just have to get in the game!

Linda J. Page, Ph.D.
President
Adler Graduate Professional School
Toronto, Canada
www.adler.ca

Recent criticism of private for-profit universities ignores their benefits and provides guidelines for correcting their weaknesses. A closer comparison of traditional and 21st-century institutions of higher learning, including graduate-level professional schools, suggests that “for-profit” might better be termed “demand-driven.”
Criticism has focused on low graduation rates among for-profit universities, which, combined with extensive use of student loans, ends up being a financial windfall for institutions when students hand over loans for tuition but don’t stick around for classes. This is as much a sign of successful promotion of lifelong learning, albeit tempered by an over-estimation of follow through, as it is of profit motives trumping educational values. That is, there is a demand for education that existing public and private not-for-profit institutions cannot fill.
For those in for-profit universities who do complete their degrees, especially at the undergraduate level, criticism is directed toward the difficulty of their finding jobs, but this problem is hardly limited to for-profit institutions. It is also true that the line between private not-for-profit and public universities on the one hand and private for-profit universities on the other is blurring, as private-(read corporate)-public partnerships increase. This is an attempt to square cutbacks in government support for education with greater demand for educational opportunities.
In higher education, there is a trade-off. Elite private institutions like Harvard and Princeton in the United States restrict admission to very few highly-qualified students, who are then showered with learning resources. If large numbers of students, some of whom are marginally qualified, are admitted in order to serve a growing demand for degrees, as in public universities in Ontario, then one would expect more resources to be allotted to ensure that those students perform to a minimum standard. Although lip service is paid to this principle, current economic hardship limits substantial growth in public support for higher education in Canada. Even more reprehensibly, some very large for-profit institutions south of the border sacrifice student care to concerns only for the bottom line, thus turning the demand for education into unconscionable profit-taking. But there are solutions to this dilemma for private for-profit institutions: keep enrolment small and limit decisions about academic standards to the academics, not the business people.
Benefits of Including For-Profit In the Ontario Postsecondary Mix
Not only are there quality-maintaining ways of organizing a private for-profit degree-granting institution, especially at the graduate level, these schools bring benefits that large public institutions are simply incapable of providing. This is particularly true in the specific domain of professional education.
Academic institutions move slowly. They have traditionally attempted to provide their faculty and students with the freedom to think about and learn whatever ideas they choose, unsullied and unlimited by “real-world” demands of utility and application. Professors whose long-term appointment is protected by tenure design a curriculum according to what they learned and how they learned it, so the “…fundamental knowledge base communicated to students changes in a ten- to fifteen-year cycle.” (Boyatzis, Cowan & Kolb, 1995, p. 1) While this may be barely acceptable for undergraduate liberal arts programs, it is entirely unacceptable for programs that hope to prepare professionals for a job market that can change radically between a student’s enrolment and graduation.

The success of a large university is measured by the extent and impact of its academic research activities, and the evaluation of its faculty depends on their research grants and publications. Excellence in combining theory and practice for professional education is, at best, secondary. In contrast, small graduate professional schools reward their faculty and build their reputation on the basis of how well their graduates fulfill public and professional demands for practitioners.
Anthropologists have found that innovation often comes from the outskirts, from communities considered to be “marginal.” Small private graduate schools that focus primarily on professional education may be considered marginal to research-oriented academic institutions, but they are central to educational innovation. This is true for the great wave of distance education that has swept across the landscape of postsecondary education in North America and, increasingly, globally. Although not exclusively the domain of for-profit schools, the rise of distance education has surely been enhanced by how quickly for-profit schools adopted the technology in order to respond to the environment in which their graduates had to compete.
How to Avoid the Down Side
Preparation for many of the most respected professions (e.g., law, medicine, psychology, dentistry, management) occurs at the graduate level. Curriculum for these professions cannot be relevant if stuck in a ten- to fifteen-year cycle of renewal. Ideally, a top-tier graduate professional school would be one that takes advantage of the flexibility and innovative potential of an independent profession-oriented (as opposed to primarily academically-oriented) faculty yet avoids the pitfalls alluded to above. Here are ways to do that:
1. Hire faculty who are practitioners, who must face the demands of the job market themselves on a regular basis. However, make sure that each is a thoughtful scholar-practitioner or scientist-practitioner who keeps up with research in the academic disciplines that feed the practice in question.
2. Train the faculty to be professional educators—not just educators for the profession being taught, but professionals in transforming teaching into learning.
3. Create a firewall between business decisions, guided by potential for profit, and educational decisions regarding admissions standards, curriculum, and graduation requirements, guided by values of academic integrity and quality.
4. Seek ownership among those who subscribe to academic values and service to the public and the profession, limiting participation by nameless investing entities that are purely profit-driven.
5. Keep the institution, and each program within it, small. A size of about 150 people including faculty and staff makes it possible for everyone to know and interact with everyone else. The community itself then becomes the most important learning resource.
6. Orient scheduling and delivery of learning experiences to the needs of midlife career changers. Traditional graduate (and undergraduate) institutions assume a student trajectory of high school, undergraduate, graduate, professional. A longer lifespan, emphasis on self-exploration, and changing job market mean many more people come to professions with valuable prior experiences and limitations on when and where they can attend classes. This provides even more learning resources for the whole community, especially if attention is paid to developing that community.
Using these approaches, a small, values- and quality-driven graduate professional school can fill a demand that traditional institutions cannot, by focusing on midlife career changers and serving as incubators for innovations that may be adopted by their larger and slower-moving academic cousins.

2011-02-01
By Linda J. Page, Ph.D.
President, Adler Graduate Professional School

Reference:
Boyatzis, R. E., Cowen, S. S., Kolb, D. A. (1995). Innovation in professional education: Steps on a journey from teaching to learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

I recently attended a workshop to learn about social media marketing. I’m sure you’ve all heard about or use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other online community-building resources. The ability to exploit these tools gives coaches, trainers, authors, and schools a marketing advantage. That’s not particularly new–that’s just another way of getting one’s message out, like advertising or public relations.

My first reaction to using social media as a marketing tool is dismay: I am so tired of hype and hustle. So many messages I see are attempts to disguise a sales-hungry pitch with warm fuzzy clothing of friendliness and sociability. Are we all becoming marketing wolves in social media sheeps’ clothing?

Then I temper my mistrustful thoughts with the realization that people don’t buy things they consider to be worthless. How judgmental of me to think otherwise. If we don’t get to know one another, how do we know what clients or customers or students find worthwhile? So the value of social media networking is, at least in part, the opportunity to discover value. That’s a straightforward marketing justification, also not particularly new.

But I have come to what I consider a more thoroughgoing reform: social media change the playing field, not only for marketing books and speaking engagements, which was the topic of the workshop I went to, but also for developing professional education, going beyond mere training and into solid degree programs.

Here’s the old story for books: the author in her attic reads and researches a topic, organizes a proposal, and sends it to a publisher. The publisher, based on past experience, what else is selling at the time, and expertise of editors, decides whether the book will sell, and agrees to publish it if the decision is positive. The author finishes the book, the publisher edits, prints, and distributes it. Somewhere near the end of this process, the marketing department comes up with a plan for how to market the book.

This story of publishing is going through a major rewrite: At the workshop, Steven Piersanti, President of Berrett-Koehler Publishers gave a talk entitled “The 10 Awful Truths About Book Publishing,” ending with number 10: “The book publishing world is in a never-ending state of turmoil.” That is, it is changing rapidly. What will be the outcome? I think social media could play a part in quite a new process for publishing.

The widespread use of social media has put the old story of writing and publishing a book into a mixmaster–or, because it is much more powerful, a VitaMix. The very development of what to write about and how to write it and even specific content can be a collaborative process for the author who uses social media. An already-developed community of people who are fans, and who even consider themselves co-authors, of the book make it more likely a publisher will recognize its potential. If no publisher sees this potential, the existence of this community makes self-publishing more viable. In writing the book, the author is already marketing it.

If that is so, the same potential exists for developing curriculum for professional education (going beyond mere workshops and training). The old story for curriculum development is that a qualified academic expert is given a course title, brief description, and learning outcomes and is asked to write a course outline. But higher education is experiencing almost as much turmoil as publishing. Students in class tweet one another in real time with comments about the lecture. How can the power of social media be harnessed to provide greater value for students, elicit more of what instructors have to offer, and avoid the passing on of information that is no longer current or useful?

Given that professional education at Adler is primarily for adults who already have a wealth of experience, can social media play a part in the very development of curriculum? Any of us who have had the privilege of teaching mid-career-changing adults know that students in a class learn as much from one another as they do from the instructor. How can this exchange be built into the very design of a course, rather than waiting for students to come together for it to begin? How can the very designing of a course engage the people who will apply the material in their work lives?

I am not advocating a free-for-all approach, where the curriculum designer abdicates responsibility for organizing material and the instructor ignores responsibility for presenting it effectively. There are certain things that students need to know and certain things they need to do to get credit for a course, and these standards have to be decided upon and upheld by the school and faculty. But I believe the adult learning principles of collaboration that serve modern professional training so well can be applied earlier in the process of developing a degrees, to the benefit of students, faculty, and the professions involved. How could social media help in implementing this reform?

Linda J. Page, Ph.D., President

Graduate Professional School
www.adler.ca
416 400 5871
ljpage@adler.ca
twitter: adlergps