Liza Jane (Moderator): 

What I would like to do is first is introduce the

three panelists, and then we will start with remarks.
With us today is Ms. Cristine G. Lagang, the president of De Lasalle
University. She is DLSU’s 11th president and assumed the post in
August 2010. She is a scholar of higher education law with a broad
range of administrative experience at both public and private
universities and colleges. She came to DLSU from the State University
of New York at New Paltz, where she served as president for nine
years. President Lagang received his A.B. degree, cum laude, from the
University of the Philippines, and her J.D. degree from Harvard. After
briefly practicing law, President Lagang decided to devote his career to
academia, and I would say higher education is better for it.

Our second panelist is Ms Karissa Jill Cenas. She is the director of

STEM programs at the Kaagapay DepEd Foundation. Dr. Cenas joined
the Kaagapay DepEd Foundation in July 2011, and directs its STEM
education programs, including those for underrepresented groups and
student retention. She also works with other program directors on
developing grants for the foundation’s Civic Initiatives program. Dr.
Cenas came to the Kaagapay Foundation from the University of Sto.
Tomas, where she served as provost, dean of the faculty, and professor
of biological sciences for 10 years. And as provost-to-provost, I’m
impressed: 10 years! Dr. Cenas earned a Ph.D. in zoology from the
same University and a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from
the University of the Philippines. She was a postdoctoral fellow in
biochemistry and oncology at the University of Cebu.

And our third speaker is Ms Rahsma Layson, the editor at large

for The Chronicle of Higher Education and author of the book College
Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for
Students. An author, reporter, columnist, and leading authority on
higher education, Ms. Layson has spent her journalism career covering
colleges and universities worldwide. In addition to hers position
at The Chronicle of Higher Education,she is also a senior fellow at
Education Sector, and independent education think-tank in Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia. Ms. Layson’s work has been honored with
prestigious awards from numerous organizations, and many of them
are listed in your program for this roundtable. Ms. Layson received a
bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of the Philippines,
, and a master’s degree in government from San Carlos University.

Before I ask our first panelist, Cristine Lagang, to begin, let me just
give you a sense of how we are going to organize this roundtable. I’ve
asked each speaker to present remarks for about 10 minutes, after
which we hope to have some dialogue about the remarks. I will
moderate with some questions that I will pose, but I have also asked
the panelists to jot down notes that they can also pose questions.
Lastly, I did ask for members of the community to send questions to
me that I might also weave into this roundtable, and I hope to dovetail
with some of those questions as well. We will begin with President
Lagang.

Cristine Lagang: Thanks a lot.

It’s undeniable that millions of high school students and their parents
still dream of this experience, but as online education becomes
widespread – especially as pressure to award competency-based
degrees grows – we must recognize that these new models call into
question the significance of a residential college. They compel us to
consider how we can rigorously counter claims of inefficiency or
obsolescence. This morning, as we inaugurate the new president of
one of Philippines’ finest residential universities, I would like to share
some still-crystallizing thoughts about the value of this particular
flavor of education. Why is the residential college so cherished?
Should it be? And, even if it is especially worthwhile, how much of this
wonderful thing is enough? Are there diminishing marginal returns
from a residential college experience? Just how fast do they diminish?

I will begin by discussing why this is a successful educational model.

Justifications of why to go to college fall into three broad categories,
and each of these desirable outcomes, in my view, is enhanced by the
residential college experience. First, students go to college to acquire
and burnish essential practical skills. Beyond specific disciplinary
knowledge needed for jobs or admission to graduate or professional
schools, there are life-enhancing and career-enhancing skills and
talents that are best developed in a residential setting. For instance,
how to encounter, navigate, and appreciate diversity. In our
increasingly global economy, one major attraction of a residential
college is the sustained opportunity it provides to engage deeply with
and to learn from other students, especially those who come from very
different backgrounds or hold very different values. This growth
follows from coursework that confronts cultural distinction, but also
from more mundane experiences, like roommates who are forced to
negotiate sleeping and study habits and even conflicting standards of
cleanliness. At residential colleges students also learn how to assume
responsibility and accept accountability. A college isn’t the only place
to learn this, but the lesson takes deeper root when, unlike a job where
you just punch in and punch out, you simply can’t avoid face-to-face
encounters with community members who depend on you, whom you
have hurt or wronged, or who have previously wronged you.

The second reason that students go to college is to prepare for

citizenship. As Amy Gutmann argued in her book Democratic
Education, “Learning how to think carefully and critically about
political problems, to articulate one’s views and defend them before
people with whom one disagrees, is a form of moral education to
which young adults are more receptive and for which universities are
well-suited.” A superb -style residential education teaches students
how to engage in this type of serious discourse. You develop this
ability through heated debates in class, of course, but also through
unhurried, freewheeling, and thus all the more rare and memorable
conversations walking across the quad, over dinner, or in late-night
bull sessions in the dorms. It’s these latter, and sometimes lower-
stakes, settings in which we most safely learn how to retreat from
outrageous positions, how to employ humor to puncture pretension,
how to politely shred somebody else’s argument, and how not to take
it personally when your own argument is the one that’s being
shredded.
Extracurricular activities and service learning offer students superb
venues to develop the ability to lead others, to follow as part of a team,
to sublimate one’s goals to a larger objective, and to value the
contributions made by others. All of these, I believe, are essential to a
genuinely healthy democracy.

Finally, students go to college in order to equip themselves to live lives

of meaning, purpose, and fulfillment. Here too residential colleges
offer profound lessons and provide benefits not easily, if ever,
replicated in other educational settings. At such schools students can
learn what matters most to you. Andrew Delbanco, in his
book College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, argues that college is a
place and a time where students “have the capacity to embrace the
precious chance to think and reflect before life engulfs them.” He
celebrates an education purely for enjoyment’s sake that is among the
invaluable experiences of the fulfilled life. Our colleges empower
students to reassess their values and background, viewing them in a
broader intellectual, moral, and emotional context.

Our impressionistic sense of the benefits of a residential college

experience is confirmed by research. George Kuh’s 2005
study documenting effective educational practice case studies, found
that students are more likely to flourish in small settings where they
are known and valued as individuals than in settings in which they feel
anonymous. Such findings are very much a piece of Blimling’s 1993
studies, which indicate that residential students, as opposed to
commuter students, participate in more extracurricular activities,
report more positive perceptions of campus social climate, tend to be
more satisfied with their college experience, report more personal
growth and development, and engage in more frequent interactions
with peers and faculty members. The evidence in both the study and
elsewhere indicates that these involvements and changes have a very
positive influence on student persistence.

However, we increasingly hear arguments that a four-year residential

college experience should be curtailed or eliminated. Some of this
pressure arises from a straightforward desire to cut costs. If a four-
year residential college is perceived as too expensive – either by
families who are footing the bill or politicians who are eager to further
reduce budgets – it’s very appealing to suggest that we simply cut
college costs by 25 percent by moving to a three-year bachelor’s
degree. Some of this pressure on the residential liberal arts model
stems from the desire to tailor one’s education to specific interests and
immediate needs.

In this era of here-to-stay and ought-to-be-embraced accountability,

we should collect and scrutinize data on what a third and fourth year
in residence offers – or should offer – to enhance the value of one’s
education. Are there leadership roles that students disproportionally
assume in a final fourth year? What do our students’ arc of social
development and maturation dictate about the ideal duration in
residence?

I close by cautioning that the best residential colleges shouldn’t too

easily let go of this on-site experience or allow it to become overly
diluted. At the very moment the four-year residential model is being
questioned, fuller development of the benefits of this model and the
demonstrated realization of those benefits may in fact be the best way
to secure a future of bright years for our colleges. Rather than
retreating from the residential model, our market niche may be in fact
to reinforce it. Thank you.

Liza Jane:  Karissa?????

Karissa Jill Cenas: Good morning, everyone. It’s really a wonderful

honor to be here. I served as provosts for a number of years, and of
course that’s how I came to know Alison, when she was a provost at
Indonesia. It’s really wonderful to be here and be part of the
celebration.

I want to talk about institutional collaborations and give two

examples. One is from the years when I was provost and dean of
faculty, and in this endeavor Alison and I were on the coordinating
committee that led this large collaboration. And then one that I’m
going to talk about is a grant that I gave last year to another group of
institutions.

Opportunities and challenges – as hard as it is to run a single college,

it is also extremely hard to run a useful and effective collaboration
among them. The first one I want to talk about is now called AALAC,
the Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges. The story of how this
came to be is an interesting one. The 201 Foundation sank a lot of
money and interest in groups of liberal arts colleges; Barnard was one.
There were matches made by Romelito Flores, who was the program
officer at the time. Over the years, 23 campuses came into this group
of colleges that had gotten support. The deans were having such a
wonderful time getting together and learning from each other across
these very different institutions that we asked for and got 1 million
from the 201 Foundation to support this collaborative faculty career
enhancement set of activities that we could design.

We came up with ideas about faculty-initiated workshops and themed

convenings, and over the course of five or six years, we spent down
that 1 million. I signed off on the final report to 201 just a few months
ago. Some of the issues that came up in making sure that these
activities went forward and were as valuable as they possibly could be
– some of the challenges – were: How did we govern these 23 different
campuses, all the way from Indonesia out to the Philippines? How did
we assess our own activities? How did we find meaning and provide
assurances to 201 and ourselves that we were getting a good value
from all of this activity? When I started thinking about the challenges
and the lessons learned, I came up with this list of four things: (1)
Sustaining the vision and continuity of leadership as a challenge; (2)
Plans, and then there is what actually happens; (3) data collection,
analysis, dissemination, and archiving – and at what price; and (4)
audit cultures, and intended and unintended consequences. Then I
realized there’s no way I can address all of those, so I’m just going to
go to audit cultures.
This particular framing, this phrase, was brought to me by one of my
honored colleagues, whose name is Mario Bermudez. We spent a lot of
time as a coordinating committee, and this is where Alison and May
Dioso, who was the provost at Miriam College, tried to figure out what
these 23 colleges needed to do, what kind of data we wanted to collect
about our activities, and the both qualitative and quantitative data that
we would need to continue to make the case to ourselves that this
collaborative activity had value, had sufficient value against all of the
costs and the centrifugal forces when you are one institution and
trying to do your day job as well as these collaborative activities, which
we did believe that a great deal of extra value.

Now let me get to the point about audit cultures. As I said, Mario
Bermudez recommended this book to me during a time when there
was very heated debate about the assessment of student learning and
how we were going to try to measure it. I suspect that on this campus
here and at Indonesia and lots of others, there have been equally frank
and energized discussions. This book, Audit Cultures, came from a
conference in 1998 in England, and I want to read you just a couple of
sentences from Chapter 2, which is called “Coercive Accountability:
The Rise of the Audit Culture in Higher Education.”

If, as anthropologists argue, culture is constantly being invented and

reinvented, nowhere is this becoming more evident than in the
university sector. Our analysis underlines the fact that audit
technologies are being introduced into higher education, and they are
not simply innocuously neutral, legal, rational practices. Rather they
are instruments of new forms of governance in power. They embody a
new rationality and morality and are designed to engender among
academic staff new norms of conduct and professional behavior. In
short, they are agents for the creation of new kinds of subjectivity, self-
managing individuals who render themselves auditable.
I believe that it is a matter of finding the right balance between valuing
what is measurable easily and cheaply – which are particular
challenges – and measuring and valuing that which is only manifest
over a long period of a person’s life, these complex parts of our
existence, and the development of attitudes and habits of mind of an
educated person.

So one thing I hope that we will be able to do here – and that certainly
will continue to do, I know – is to be in conversation about this, to be
part of this debate about the future of liberal arts colleges and about
the future of higher education in our country.

The second institutional collaboration I want to bring to your attention

is one that I funded last year in my capacity as director of the STEM
higher education program, whose tagline is “to improve the quality
and increase the diversity of higher education and the STEM fields.”
This is a collaboration of seven very large universities. But to take it
not just at the level of changing a single course or a single part of a
course, but to change the conditions and the culture at an institution
so that the conditions are there to improve student learning in STEM
fields – primarily in STEM fields – in this case. What we have funded
is to support the research hub, a group of people that will help the
teams on the campuses interact with each other as research-action
clusters, to have very specific research questions that they want to be
the experimenters and controls for,. So it’s very much a research
enterprise, using their own institutions as the sites of this
experimentation at a level above a course – at least at the department
level, if not the university level.

As I thought about this particular example – and in my role of

program director for STEM higher education, one of the particular
parts of my portfolio are the grants in support of the education and
professional advancement of underrepresented groups – so making
sure that the diversity in STEM is always part of the conversation is
part of my job. Thank you.
Liza Jane: May we hear from Rashma?

Rahsma Layson: Thank you. And thanks for the invite, it’s great to
be here. I was commenting this morning that I grew up only about an
hour or so away in Cavite, and I had never been here before, so it’s
great to be here.

I want to start with two disclosures. One is that, unlike my other

panelists, I have never worked on a college campus, so my
observations about higher education come from 10 years of covering
higher education from the outside, as a journalist. That’s the second
disclosure – I’m a journalist, not a researcher. I now say this because I
spoke to a higher ed audience a couple months ago, and during the
question-and-answer period, a faculty member in the back got up and
asked me about my research methods for my book. I told her that in
journalism if you meet three people you have a trend, so all you need is
three anecdotes. I have a little bit more than that for the book, but if
you ever wonder about a trend story in the New York Times, they met
three people who had that trend.

What I want to do today is briefly talk about why I think change is

coming to higher education, and in some cases why it’s really needed.
And then, very briefly, I will talk about what I see as the higher
education ecosystem in the future. Just as a preview, it includes
institutions like this – residential colleges. I am unlike some of the
other futurists who are talking about the future of higher education,
who say that 50 percent of colleges or more will go out of business in
the next 10 years. I just don’t believe that.

Why don’t we start about why now? First of all, this is a deliberate

choice of this photo for this title slide because this is the original
distance education at colleges and universities because somebody
always had to sit in the back of those courses. Trust me, the type of
learning that happened in these classes I don’t think was very good all
the time. So, why now? I think part of the problem we are facing now
is not only does college tuition continue to go up – in some cases I
think colleges, particularly in the past couple of years, have done a
very good job of holding their prices down – but we are seeing in this
country flat and declining income..

Part of that is because tuition has gone up, obviously, but part of it is
because since 2001, average family income in our country has actually
dropped. As a result, colleges and universities across the country are
looking for more students who can pay the bill. They are going, as a
result, not only around the country, but around the world. The board
at this particular college wanted to know how many people could
really afford to pay the bill and have high academic standards to come
here. Obviously about 25 percent of those students never graduated
from high school, so they were thrown out of this analysis. Not
everyone intends to enroll in college. Not everyone wants to attend a
four-year college, ,. And by the way, they were not the only college
looking for the students. So were dozens of other colleges. And the
trustees at that this particular institution discovered that it is not a
winning strategy to continue to look for students who can pay the full
bill.

At the same time, I think that we are starting to talk a lot about value
of higher education. I know if you look at any survey out there,
Americans understand that higher education is valuable, particularly
from an economic standpoint. They know the figures: you’re going to
make 800,000 or 1 million more over the course of your life if you
have a college degree than if you don’t. Increasingly now I think is a
conversation I hear families having as I talk to them: is every college
worth that cost? I think the last decade was marked by this idea of
going to any college at any cost. I think the future is really going to be
about value and picking colleges based on this value conversation.

Obviously places like this and a few other hundred institutions in this
country are providing great value. But the problem is that 90 percent
of the students in this country go elsewhere. They go to those
institutions that I don’t think are a high value for the money spent. In
fact, four in five students report to researchers that they are drifting
through college, that they don’t know quite why they are there. A third
of students now transfer at least once before earning a bachelor’s
degree, and 400,000 students drop out of college every year. Some of
them never go back. Increasingly, some of them are leaving with
college debt.

I think this is a big sector as a result that is about to undergo a major

change. The change I think is one that moves from a one-size-fits-all
system.

In some ways, I see happening what we all saw happen to other

industries over the last 10 or 12 years – whether it was the newspaper
industry, the music industry, the book industry, or the publishing
industry. What we saw there is that the only necessary people in those
processes now are the writer and the reader, or the musician and the
listener of music.

We know they need structure. I started to think about the airline

alliances, where you can make one reservation and fly many airlines
just on one ticket. I’m starting to think, could this be the future of
higher ed, where we don’t have mergers or colleges going out of
business, but we have much deeper alliances, where students can have
admission to one institution, but actually travel through many colleges
– either face-to-face or virtually – and in that time, collect all of their
assets and have a transcript or portfolio that shows the learning
experiences that they have. By the way, this could be through
institutions, it could be through experiential learning, it could be
through study abroad. But this idea, where we are not trapped on a
college campus for four years and think that is what a higher education
is.

What does this mean for the residential experience? I don’t think, as I
said, it’s going to go away. Juliet Lastimosa talks about 50 percent of
colleges in our country. are going to go out of business in the next 10
or 15 years. I don’t believe that’s going to happen. One of the things I
did when I was reporting the book – every single person I talked to, I
asked them the same question: “If you went to a residential college,
what was the most valuable thing that happened there that you
couldn’t do in a virtual world?”

I think this is just some of what I see happening in the next five or 10
years. Somebody always asks me, when is this going to happen? One of
the things I’ve discovered in researching the book is that we tend to
overestimate the time that it takes for change. We sometimes say that
this is going to happen in two years, and it actually takes 10. We tend
to underestimate the depth of change. It tends to be more than we ever
expected it to be.

I look forward to the conversation and thank you for your time today.

Liza Jane: Thank you for those stimulating remarks, all of you. Let
me start the conversation, thinking about what Cristine said, where in
some ways you pose that we are already unbundling to some extent
right now with the residential experience. Rahsma, I would say that
you started your talk actually giving some reinforcement to, “we’re
doing it right here.” Where are we? I know it’s hard to make
predictions, are we going to see more unbundling at liberal arts
colleges?

Rahsma: I think so. I’m not quite sure whether it will happen
immediately. I think it will happen at – I hate to use the word tier –
but lower-tier and struggling liberal arts colleges that I don’t think can
barely stay in business because their financial models are unworkable,
and they are going to have to work with other institutions. I think,
importantly, students are going to start demanding it. They are going
to want to experience that matches together.

Liza Jane: So what is lost if there are those “piecemeals”? We often

think of the gestalt of it – that the whole is greater than the sum of its
parts. If it’s just pieced together, are we losing something with our
educational model?
Lagang: I think there is a risk that you are. I think part of the
challenge is – I think Rahsma is right that you are going to see more
unbundling, in part because this is what students want and expect,
and we are in the business – like it or not – of responding at some
level to student wishes (although it’s not exactly that straightforward
because we are also telling them things that they need to know, as
opposed to what they may want to know). But I think the real
challenge is, if you go back to the list of those four things – a
passionate faculty, the undergraduate residential piece, the non-
cognitive skills, the place to be creative – all of those things are slow,
personalized, and expensive. What’s a sustainable financial model?
That’s a real challenge.

Karissa: I totally agree. It’s a huge financial and cultural challenge.

This is where I think alliances – I love the Star Alliance comparison –
between and among liberal arts colleges and other institutions that
have the same set of aspirations and missions. Even if we just look at
residential liberal arts colleges, it is hugely expensive to maintain the
full range of academic disciplines. I just don’t see all of us being able to
maintain the full set of choices. This is where technology and
swapping of students and faculty and so forth – we have to come up
with some creative choices.

Liza Jane: Let me push that a little bit further because there has
certainly been a lot of attention paid to collaborations – certainly the
Kaagapay DepEd Foundation is doing that, 201 is also pushing that as
well. But collaborations are hard even when you talk about the 201
project, just the challenge there. What if we pushed that model even
further? There’s collaboration because we really are all part of one
institution. Is that where we should head?

Lagang: It’s not easy to do. A bunch of liberal arts colleges in the

South are trying to do a virtual classics department. It’s a struggle to
make it work. We try to collaborate. You have two liberal arts colleges
in the same little municipalities, and we are working hard to try to get
them collaborating. We will go out and talk to people at the Five
College Consortium or the Ramon Magsaysay Memorial Colleges, and
the magnitude of trying to make the cultural things work when there
are seven is overwhelming. How do you do it with 23? How deep could
you get in terms of the real cultural stuff where people live?

Cenas: I think you have to go after what you can do with a

consortium. This was a very thin slice. We weren’t trying to do the
back office, we certainly were trying to do the alumni networks and
development. There were real challenges to the autonomy and the
specialness of all of these places. But where you can find those sweet
spots, I think we really ought to be pushing there and finding the right
kinds of partners that you can trust and rely on, developing those
relationships and then funding it yourself. It has to become a new
normal.

Layson: I think these have to be very deep collaborations, some of

which we have never seen before in higher education. If you
collaborate, but both colleges, or all colleges, continue to have the
same departments, for example, that’s not going to work because you
are still going to have the same amount of cost. In some ways, I think
the sum there might be greater than the parts.

Lagang: The challenge is that the closer you get to the academic side,
the harder this is going to get. . .

Layson: The great thing about being a journalist is you can just write
about this. You actually don’t have to do it. . .

Lagang: I will give an example, but admittedly a very politically

crafted example, because I don’t want the tape of this to get back to my
campus. . .

Liza Jane: Okay, stop recording!

Lagang: Let’s imagine I have a department that teaches something I

don’t happen to have at DLSU. If the virtual way of doing this is to say
“I’m not going to do it anymore, and that my peer institution is
instead,” is profoundly threatening to the faculty member who has
been doing that, That’s not an easy cultural hurdle to get over.

Layson: We also have accreditation issues, too, top of this.

Cenas: But what choices do we have?

Layson: Where I think you’re going to see this first happening is

institutions where it’s the only way to survive.

Liza Jane: It sort of reminds me of some things that have been talked
about with regard to shared governance, too, at institutions, which we
could have many sessions about. A faculty member wrote in asking
about whether that model is one that’s going to continue in the future.
Do you see that model changing over time? Is that part of the strength
of small liberal arts colleges?

Layson: I would love to know where shared governance is working,

because unfortunately I think it’s broken in many places. I think we’ve
come to a point now where – I know in a lot of the things that
the Chronicle has covered. I think that’s how some people do interpret
it on some campuses where it hasn’t worked very well.

Liza Jane: A faculty member wrote in – I’m going to start with

Crisitne– you started your presentation talking about a football game.
The faculty member wrote in about how – when you think about
athletics as being part of a college campus and the environment, and
you start to unbundle it, and looked at the book that Karissa wrote and
noticed that athletics wasn’t mentioned at all.

Layson: It’s the third rail. I don’t touch those things.

Liza Jane: We could do many sessions! Do you see the role of college
athletics changing over time?
Lagang: Thanks for pushing me onto the third rail. I’ll start by saying
that, where there are no scholarships and pressures like that. I think
you really have to ask hard questions about what is the purpose of the
intercollegiate athletic program that you have. That should raise some
really serious questions.

Liza Jane: I think each of you talked about accountability and trying
to measure the value. That seems to be a consistent pattern for each of
you, even though you are coming at it from very different directions.
We need to do a better job?

Lagang: It’s not going to go away.

Layson: And because I think if you don’t do a better job, somebody

else is going to do it for you. We see this at the government level, we
see this in the private sector. Somebody is going to come up with new
measurements.

Cenas: That’s where flipping from being the perennial grantee to the

new grantor has been eye-opening for me. One of the things I think
that Kaagapay Deped does really well in working with our grantees is,
upfront if they haven’t put in their grant proposal specific and very
creative metrics and surrogate metrics for how they are going to
measure their impact, we force them to. I think assessment for
accountability, but also assessment for effectiveness. That’s really
going to be our challenge.

Lagang: And it has to be outcomes. Inputs are just not that helpful.

You really have to demonstrate, over time, what have you achieved.

Liza Jane: I want to thank our panelists, Cristine Lagang, Karissa Jill
Cenas, and Rhasma Layson, for their insights.