Access to Public Universities in the Chronicle

After three years working at a large private institutions, I decided I was committed to working at large, flagship public institutions.  I graduated from one of these (UW Madison) and have worked at two (UC Berkeley, UW Madison).  I know that there’s a lot that’s unique to these institutional environments when it comes to information literacy initiatives.  And I’d like to believe that we’re part of an important enterprise to provide a high-quality education to a broad population of students — education as a public good.   There’s a lot of data out there that demonstrates that we’re not living up to this ideal.

This week, the Chronicle of Higher Education includes several articles on this topic.  Universities at Risk: Seven Damaging Myths, is by Christopher Neufeld, who just wrote a book Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Harvard University Press, 2008). The other is “Public Universities at Risk: Abandoning Their Missions.”  That article (“commentary,” not a research study) takes a look at equity in access to education at large, flagship institutions like our own.

Referencing an Education Trust report, “Engines of Inequality: Diminishing Equity in the Nation’s Premier Public Universities,” the author writes, “our flagship public universities have become less accessible to low-income and minority students since 1995.”    There has been a decline in enrollment of Pell Grant-eligible students and public universities have become “less representative of the racial composition of the nation’s high-school graduates.”  This challenges some of our assumptions and ideals about the environment where we work.

At our WiscNet presentation about K-20 information literacy, Jo Ann Carr presented some statistics about the UW system that painted an even more depressing picture.  UW Madison, our flagship, fits this picture.  But if I remember correctly enrollment at the colleges is even less diverse than that at UW Madison.  I’ll ask Jo Ann to share those stats with us in a broader forum, because it’s so important for us to have a realistic picture of the characteristics of the students we’re working with.

ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and IT ‘08

The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and IT 2008 was released today.  You can link to the key findings here, but the full findings are also freely available online.

This year’s study includes some information literacy questions based on the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education.  At first glance (I haven’t read the full report yet), these look like student self-report of selected items related to searching web-based sources (freely available and licensed databases).  Here’s what they found:

• 79.5% rate themselves highly for their ability to “use the Internet effectively and efficiently to search for information,” with almost half rating themselves as “very skilled” and another third rating themselves as “experts.”
• About half of respondents also say they are “very skilled” or “expert” when it comes to “evaluating the reliability and credibility of online sources of information” or “understanding the ethical and legal issues surrounding the access and use of digital information.”

I’m looking forward to examining this section more closely, but if anyone else gets to it first I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts.

This year’s report also includes a special focus on social networking sites.  One of the PIs for this study, Judy Caruso, is right here at Madison and I heard her talk about ECAR last year at a brownbag.

First Generation Students

Do you ever feel like you’re stating the obvious to new students?   Don’t take for granted that they already know it all.

A campus news item this week details a study by Claire Huhn that “takes an in-depth look at the characteristics of first-generation students at UW-Madison and the ways in which UW-Madison supports this population.”  Things I found interesting:

• 21% of our 2008 freshman class are first generation college students
• first generation students are female to a higher percentage, slightly older and more frequently come from rural Wisconsin.
• 49 percent of first-generation freshmen are eligible for financial aid, in contrast to 19 percent of freshmen whose parents have college degrees

I’ll listen for presenters at campus meetings who can talk to us about these kinds of studies, which really help to understand the students we work with.

Ithaka Report Generates Good Discussion of Library as Instruction/Learning Partner

The new Ithaka Report is out.  According to a summary in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “[between 2003 and 2006], faculty members across the disciplines have shown a marked decline in how devoted they are to libraries as information portals. Eighty percent of humanities scholars are still devoted to library research—although that may be not because they’re traditionalists but because they can’t yet get what they need in digital form. But only 48 percent of economists and 50 percent of scientists value libraries as gateways.”  We could talk about the nuances of those findings all day.

But what I found even more interesting was that the Chronicle article linked to Stephen Bell’s commentary on ACRL’s blog.  Bell commented about The Question they Forgot to Ask, which is about the importance of libraries’ emerging instructional role.

Bell’s analysis has since been commented by both authors of the Ithaka study.  Roger Schonfeld clarified some questions about the data set and wrote, “I’ve made a note of your suggestion that we add a question about the learning partner role should we pursue a 2009 faculty survey. Through other research areas and our affiliated organization NITLE, we have an ongoing interest in the support of teaching and learning, and these surveys could do a better job of addressing these interests.”   Then Ross Housewright wrote “I took a look at the data to see how questions addressing the value of the library varied between faculty who self-reported seeing themselves as more of a teacher or as more of a researcher. In general, more faculty who considered themselves as primarily teachers felt that the role of the library had continuing importance than did those faculty who considered themselves primarily researchers.”  (for the full text see the comments to Bell’s post).   It’s really heartening that the authors of studies are reading the posts and taking the recommendations seriously and I hope there is a new study that takes on these questions.

Understanding Students & Faculty: Susan Gibbons talk at CUWL Conference

Today at the statewide CUWL meeting and conference , Susan Gibbons, Dean and Vice-Provost at the University of Rochester River Campus Libraries, discussed their user research program. They are a small residential campus but an ARL member. The library’s work with anthroplogist Nancy Fried Foster is the subject of a recent monograph (free for download from ACRL) and a lot of positive press.

The presentation began with a discussion of characteristics of the “Net Generation.” As a group, these students are relatively more sheltered than previous generations. For example, they regularly seek advice from their parents on their schoolwork and have absorbed Mr. Rogers’s “you are special” message. They expect services to be customized, personalized, one-stop shopping, and in the “Mommy model” of service. These students feel pressured to succeed; 21% of those aged 15-17 have been diagnosed with some type of emotional disorder. They want to know the rules, are team-oriented, and want to collaborate in person and online. They tend to ask peers, not experts, for information. They are multitaskers, and value speed over accuracy in their work.

The next topic was techniques we can use to understand our students…

UW Alumni Profiles Project

Thought this excerpt from a press release about 2008 Alumni profiles was interesting…  http://apa.wisc.edu/Alumni/alumni_profiles.html

“Alumni Profiles answer some broad questions about where undergraduate alumni live, if they are employed or enrolled in educational programs, and how much they value their UW-Madison education.   Alumni Profiles are available for schools and colleges and for undergraduate majors.”

Among UW-Madison alumni who graduated within the past 10 years: (a few highlights)

• 88% are employed full-time (81%) or part-time (7%).  Nearly half of alumni have provided detailed employer and job title information
• 80% of those employed say that the skills they developed at UW-Madison in problem solving, written and verbal communication, and other general skills are related or highly related to their current position
• 59% of those employed say that their current position is related or highly related to the major of their UW-Madison degree

Faculty Compensation: Chronicle of Higher Ed Writes about UW’s Struggle to Compete

The April 18, 2008 Chronicle of Higher Education includes the article, “Wisconsin’s Flagship is Raided for Scholars.” If you don’t have a subscription, you can look for the article in Lexis-Nexis. A few highlights:

• “Even if a professor is getting research grants, producing journal articles, and writing books, the most he or she would have received over the past few years is about a 2-percent annual raise.” (compared to 3.8% average nationally, per the AAUP)
• “Madison’s average salary is at the bottom of a list of 12 public universities that it considers its peers. The university paid full professors $103,543 last year, about 13 percent less than the average for that group.”

Interestingly, the article talked about a variety of factors (e.g. cuts in benefits other than salary such as travel and release time), but addressed the fact that Madison publishes salaries by name only by way of a little story about a faculty member recruited by another university. I’m all for public information and transparency, but salaries have not been published at this level of detail at other universities, even many public ones. It sure makes it easier for other universities to “shop” for faculty.

Of course, there’s the issue of academic staff and staff salaries. Whatever a study there would reveal, I think the national spotlight on faculty salaries confirms the need to keep academic staff salaries coupled to faculty salaries. This issue has been on the table at both UC and UW over the past year, and while I’m certainly not an expert on the issue, no one is writing cover stories about the need to compete in this area.  I’m not at all familiar with the issues around staff salaries, but again, the issues are not as publicized.

Will we still be teaching “finding”?

This is a topic that I’ve been grappling with lately, and I know that others have too. It seems like in library instruction we mostly start with “finding” for a variety of reasons: finding has been difficult, finding is the “library part,” finding connects users to our collections, and finding is where we can show off what we know best. Of course many of us spend time on other skills in library instruction sessions – topic formation, evaluation, citing. And some of us work, usually in collaboration with faculty, to promote other skills such as analysis.

But in my recent experience, our (perceived?) focus on finding creates some negative publicity for library instruction programs. Why are we so focused on teaching people to search when library interfaces are becoming easier to use, people will be discovering all content through Google, and so on. These all seem like valid questions, and my initial thoughts have been that if finding really does become such a non-issue, there will certainly be plenty of other areas where learners need our support, like evaluating the results of a Google search.  But I also think that there’s plenty of research that people are not so good at finding, so we really need to look into the “finding is easy” assumption first.

A very interesting post on ACRLog refers to some new research by the very famous web usability expert Jacob Nielsen on this topic. According to Nielsen, users face three problems: inability to revise their strategy, inability to understand search results and evaluate for potential usefulness, inability to sort through search results. I’m still figuring out the distinctions between the last two, so go to the source for the full story. The ACRLog post includes some other interesting leads as well.

Impact of the library on retention and student success

About a week ago, Amanda Werhane posted a query to infolit-l looking for studies on the impact of the academic library on student success. She had read a news item about a NY K-12 study, “Syracuse Researchers Link Higher Test Scores with Certified Librarians in Schools” With Amanda’s permission, I sent the query out to the national Information Literacy and Instruction List, ILI-L. This is a list sponsored by the ACRL Instruction Section, and I think the list of studies I got show what a great resource it is! We got the following suggestions. I posted this list to our infolit-l listserv and ili-l as a summary, and hope to create a fact sheet in the near future to make it more convenient to repackage this type of information for various presentations, publications, etc.