Take Me to Your Followers

Just a brief thought today. So, the computers are grading student essays now. How can we honestly tell our students that we are preparing them for a future working with other humans? On the other hand, it's good to know that there will be a labor force ready to serve our robot overlords.

"Crowded Out"

In the thick of finals week with no time to do a real post today, but you all should read this from Inside Higher Ed. (I guess I need to rethink this old post a little.)

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h/t Josh Klugman

Throwing Aspirin at Social Problems

I'm teaching a couple frosh-only sections of a critical thinking course again this term that is unique to our institution. The major final project for the class is a group problem-based learning (PBL) exercise. It works like this. I reveal pieces of a hypothetical scenario involving a local individual over several weeks. The students are charged with identifying the structural causes of the intersecting social problems befalling our imaginary friend. Finally, the students propose a solution(s) to the social problems.* One issue that I've run into in the past is that the "solutions" that students propose are not really solutions at all. In order to get them past this, I came up with this analogy that I used for the first time this morning:

Imagine that you are suffering from excruciating headaches that are recurring and that you just can't shake. Finally, you go to see your doctor about it. After describing your symptoms to her, she prescribes an aspirin a day. How would you feel about this?

The students generally agree that they would be angry because the doctor really didn't try to treat the cause of the headaches; the aspirin may alleviate the symptoms but doesn't really get at the root cause. I then tell the students not to throw an aspirin at their social problems. A paper that proposes increasing welfare benefits as a "solution" to poverty, for example, would be aspirin. The students all shook their heads and seemed to get it, but I guess we'll see.

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* - I adopted the PBL model for this course after being selected for a workshop on campus that essentially required that we implement it. I'm not entirely sold on the pedagogy, but that's fodder for a different post.

College, Graduation, and Timing

When people talk about graduation and retention rates, they're also inevitably concerned with timely graduation, and rightly so. We don't do our students any favors by allowing them to languish in limbo, hanging around our halls for five, six, or more years. The logical extension, then, has been to encourage early graduation. At my institution, there are several majors that are redesigning their programs to facilitate three-year degrees (which invariably include online coursework, something I've taken up here and will likely revisit in the future) and even some that allow students to finish both a bachelors and a masters in four years. All of this, I think, raises an important question: do the economic benefits of graduating college early outweigh the social benefits of a traditional four-year college experience? Here are the things we'd need to quantify (assuming eventual completion of the degree) to be able to make the calculation:

• What is the average overall cost, including lost wages, of a year of undergraduate education?
• What are the long-term social benefits of an average year of undergraduate education?
• What is the economic value of the average social tie made in college?
• e.g. What is the value of generating a social network capable of creating career opportunities?
• What is the economic value of an additional year of emotional, psychological, and social maturity?
• What is the economic value of an additional year of memories (both fond and ill) from a unique and unrepeatable period in one's lifecourse?

I hope that it's obvious that most of the concepts in the tail end of that list are not (easily) quantifiably operationalizable. In other words, you can't put a dollar amount on your experiences, memories, or friendships, all things that are truncated by early graduation. My point is that while the economic costs of higher education are important considerations, the social benefits of higher education are equally--if not more--important, and while we may not be able to force them into a mathematical equation, that does not mean that they shouldn't be part of students' decision-making process. (That was tough for a quantitative sociologist to write. ;) )

Mowing a Path to Graduation

I saw this massive wall-cling poster recently, and it reminded me that, for many students, work is not a choice but a necessity.

Students who need to work in the summer to pay for school end up at a disadvantage because they take longer to complete college than those who don't need to work, delaying graduation, delaying a career, and increasing overall college costs. The sign also makes the assumption (albeit parenthetical) that parents are helping with college costs, an advantage not enjoyed by all students--particularly those who would need to work during the summer. Advertisements that frame summer classes in the language of "choice" do several things. First, they highlight what is likely the shortsightedness of well-intentioned administrators who do not recognize the diversity of students' socioeconomic situations. Second, they hide the fact that students are often structurally constrained. Finally, they alienate working- and lower-class students who are already underrepresented at most four-year institutions.

And don't get me started on the push to online classes.

Grades: Progress Marker or Finish Line?

I recently made my way through the backlog of SociologySource podcasts. They are great! (Co-host Nathan Palmer has told me that the podcast is on hiatus but will hopefully return in a few months so keep an eye out for new posts.) In their episode titled "Grading Students Fairly," Nate and Chris discuss, among other things, grading students on marginal improvement instead of or in addition to grading students against a gold standard. I understand the argument. As I blogged before,

Ideally, all students would graduate high school with the requisite skills to succeed in college, but there is incredible variation among this group.

Sociologically, we understand that there are a number of factors, including race and class, that have given some students advantages and other disadvantages as they enter college. Given this, we are right to be apprehensive about directly comparing (1) a poor, male student of color who is the first in his family ever to have attended college who shows significant improvement over a semester even if not meeting all of the course learning objectives to (2) an affluent, white, female student whose parents both have college degrees but shows little or no improvement over a semester even if she has mastered all of the learning objectives of a course. Does student 1 deserve an F for not meeting those benchmarks? Does student 1 deserve an A for effort? Does student 1 deserve an A for marginal improvement? Does student 2 deserve an A for meeting expectations? Does student 2 deserve an F for effort? Does student 2 deserve an F for not showing improvement? Should student 1's grade be at all related to student 2's grade? I think these questions really get at the foundation of what grades mean. (See some previous posts about grades here, here, and here.) It's an important conversation that we seem reluctant to have.

I do, however, have one major reservation. Grading on marginal improvement seems dangerous as it might mean that we graduate some students who do not meet the standards of a college degree, and by doing so, we run the risk of devaluing higher education. Both in terms of imparting a new way of thinking, new skills, and new knowledge and in terms of signaling employability in the job market, it seems to me that a college degree ultimately needs to be more gold standard than marginal improvement. I think, again, that the solution is to improve secondary education.

The False Dichotomization of Teacher-Student Relations

Professors like to worry about the boundaries between themselves and their students. I've written about it. SociologySource has podcasted about it. John the SLACer has a couple posts on the topic. I'm increasingly convinced, however, that dichotomizations like profession/personal[1], student/teacher, and front-stage/back-stage are problematic in post-secondary education. By compartmentalizing and fragmenting our lives, we educators break down the pedagogical milieu that makes college unique. This is doubly true for those of us who work at liberal arts institutions. I suspect that the concern is part of a larger k-12-ization[2] of higher ed., an infiltration of a set of once-unheard-of ideas into colleges and universities in a post-NCLB world. (See here.) Along with standardized testing and value-added language, concerns of appropriate boundaries are seeping into our awareness and conversations. But, college is not "high school just a bit harder," and it certainly isn't "high school, part two." College is qualitatively different than the type of education that goes on at the primary and secondary levels. One way that it is different is that the students are adults, no longer children. It's tough to overstate the significance of this. There are very good arguments to be made for disconnecting adult teachers from their minor students, but those arguments mostly fall apart when the students age into adulthood. That said, the student/professor relationship is still one that is--even if lamentably--imbued with a power differential, which requires caution.

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[1] In the broader context, the professional/personal dichotomy serves to alienate us further as workers from the products of our labor. In this way, the professional/personal dichotomy serves as a culturally hegemonic tool of capitalism. The product in this case is not the student. Education is not about satisfying customers. Instead, the product is the knowledge or wisdom generated by the students.

[2] h/t Stephanie McClure. My stab at it was "high-schoolification."

Online Courses "at" a Liberal Arts College

Everyone seems to be talking about the promises of online higher education. Here is the problem that I think most in the world of traditional brick-and-mortar higher education are slow to realize regarding online courses: MOOC's will win, and the rest of us will lose. Given the choice to take a course online from Mitch Duneier at Princeton or from Brad Koch at Georgia College, students will invariably (and correctly) elect for the former. The Georgia Colleges of the world will always lose to the Princetons of the world--if we try to play the same game, that is. Liberal arts colleges offer a very distinctive product to students. It is a residential experience on a small(er) campus with few(er) students and direct, intimate contact with their professors. The difference between MOOC's and liberal arts colleges is like the difference between televangelism and an old-timey tent revival; the message is essentially the same, but the experiences are worlds apart.

When institutions like Georgia College uncritically float along with the shifting tides of higher ed, they misallocate resources and dilute their brand. We cannot--and should not--compete with MOOC's. We should instead own the value of our unique identity and fill our niche.

Orgtheory has a nice series of posts related to this topic (here, here, and here).

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UPDATE (2/6/2013): A interesting related article here.

Funding Tied to Graduation

In line with a larger conversation currently going in higher education, the University System of Georgia, of which the college where I work is a part, is tying graduation rates to institutional funding. Graduation and retention in higher ed is certainly a problem when students are taking on debt without securing the credentials that will countervail those costs with the increased chances for lifetime earnings. It's like getting a mortgage from the bank but spending the loan money on rent instead of a home. Without the college degree, the money spent on tuition, fees, and materials as well as lost wages over that period amount to a loss instead of an investment. On that, I think we can all agree.

If only it were that simple.

In these kinds of conversations, we often conceptualize college as producers of graduates without considering the preparatory role of secondary education and the gatekeeping role of admissions offices. Even as college is becoming a prerequisite for middle-class employment and students are enrolling in colleges at increasing rates, in general, secondary education has not significantly changed what it is doing. In other words, more students are going to college, but not all of those students are adequately prepared for college. Compounding this, admissions offices (and arguably high school academic counselors) are not adequately directing students to the institutions for which they are optimally suited. Ideally, all students would graduate high school with the requisite skills to succeed in college, but there is incredible variation among this group. Each institution, however, cannot be all things to all students. It is far more efficient to sort students by ability, capacity, and trajectory than to de-differentiate and re-mission all institutions. Many students are better suited to technical/vocational certification than to a traditional college experience. Many students need a year or two at a community college. Some students are more likely to be successful at regional commuter institutions. Some students will do well at regional residential universities. And, a minority of students are primed for success at more selective liberal arts colleges and flagship universities. The problem is that students are usually ill-informed about the differences between these options and require assistance. A rejection letter from an institution to which one is poorly suited is best for the student.

I do think that there are two major points of concern here. First, I worry that an unintended consequence of tying graduation rates to funding will be for more-selective institutions to only admit students who are the most likely to graduate (e.g. affluent white women) in order to better ensure funding. The social consequence is that this would magnify the advantage of those who are already privileged and to exacerbate the disadvantage of those who are underprivileged (e.g. poor black men), essentially reproducing and further entrenching the social stratification that is already a problem in the U.S. Second, professors could simply lower academic standards to increase graduation rates, graduating students with inadequate qualifications. Both situations are disastrous.

So, what for solutions? None of this should be misconstrued as a passing-of-the-buck. Colleges and universities have to increase graduation and retention rates. This can only happen, though, in a more comprehensive and contextualized discussion of the issues related to higher education today. By focusing our attention on the symptom (i.e. low graduation rates), we ignore the systemic causes (e.g. college-ready students).

Stressgate

This recent article has caused quite the stir among academics and has launched countless rebuttals, including this one. I want to go on record as saying that my job is not very stressful. Sure, there are moments--typically predictable--that are more stressful than others (e.g. end-of-semester grading), but by and large, I am privileged to experience a lot less stress than most people. Let me point to a few reasons why I think this is. First, my job is incredibly flexible. Some have incorrectly stated that professors get lots of vacation time. I don't get summers off. For some stupid reason, my employer only pays me 10 months of the year, but I get year-round benefits, am salaried, and am generally expected to be productive during the summer months, even if I am not teaching. In fact, working at a teaching college, summers are my only real time to get research done, research being one of the three criteria by which I am evaluated. All said, though, summers--while not partytime--are mine to determine. Even beyond that, my school year is flexible. For example, I live about 70 miles from campus and only commute three days a week for classes and office hours, working two days a week from home. That's certainly not the same as getting two additional days off every week, but I do have unprecedented discretion with my time.

Even more than that, though, the job prestige enjoyed by professors affords us a class privilege that can mitigate what stress we do experience. Regardless of pay, the autonomy, interpersonal valuation, and, by definition, over-education of professors places us and our families in the upper class. It is similar for most physicians and attorneys. If you are a professor who claims to be middle class, you are deluding yourself.

Let me end with a note on personal ambition. Many, possibly most, professors have a lot of career ambition. We are socialized to be so. Ambition is the self-imposition of stress. Moreover, the valuing of such ambition is uniquely American. It's not enough just to do one's job successfully; one is supposed to give "110%." The hegemony of overwork--even among those who study such things and should know better--is taxing. I will be the first to admit that I actively avoid such stresses. I have done enough to be on track for tenure but am careful to avoid stretching myself too thin. Many would classify that as a "mediocre" mindset (though, I would dispute that). Even that word, however, becomes evidence of my point. "Mediocre" has not always carried a negative connotation. It originally just mean "ordinary" or "in the middle." By definition, most of us cannot be extraordinary. I, for one, am content to do my job well and be done with it. If you judge that poorly, that says more about you and our Protestant ethic than it does about me. I am happy to be happy now instead of delaying happiness for the unguaranteed prospect of increased happiness in the future.

Race, Proportionality, and the Liberal Arts Institution

I'm working with some colleagues and students on research involving mission differentiation. Essentially, state university systems need to have their campuses offer different types of education. California was the first state to really do this in a serious manner. Here in Georgia, there was a similar push a few decades ago. Part of that push resulted in Georgia College (GC), where I work, becoming the state's sole designated public liberal arts institution. This meant (in theory if not practice) that GC could cap growth to protect the traditional liberal arts experience, including smaller class sizes and smaller student-to-teacher ratios (again, in theory if not practice). Our research looks at changes in student diversity related to mission shift.

In conversations about our research, something dawned on me: smaller class sizes are bound to compound the experience of race for students apart from campus diversity. Think about it this way. Large classes mean that diversity is more obvious. 13 black students in a 100-person classroom would be proportional and noticeable. Small classes, however, like those in liberal arts institutions, hide that diversity. 1 black student in a 10-person classroom, while still proportional, feels a lot different. As a student of color in our program put it, looking around a classroom and noting "I'm the only one," is a world away from "Oh, there's another one." Our human brains process absolute numbers better than statistical proportionality. (Just ask the students in my statistics class!)

What does all this mean? Despite efforts to make our campuses demographically representative of the larger population, the experience for minority students could still be marginalizing if classroom sizes (i.e. samples) are intentionally limited. This is not to argue that the answer is larger class sizes, only that discussions of campus diversity and minority recruitment and retention need to bring other considerations to the fore at smaller/liberal arts colleges.

Women, Coding, and Coding

I'm making my way through the archives of the Office Hours podcast, and I was recently intrigued by a "discovery" that the hosts presenting. At the beginning of this episode, they share research that shows that women's participation in open-source coding is disproportionately low. The researchers attribute this effect to implicit bias, gendered and otherwise coded language in the subculture, as well as some structural constraints to computer access and training. I'm guessing that there might be something a little simpler going on. I'd speculate that since I assume there is higher (any?) pay and benefits in the proprietary coding world that women, who are already more likely to receive lower pay than their male counterparts regardless of the field, are predisposed to work in the proprietary realm over the open-coding realm. We see this going on in higher education as well. Women are increasingly outnumbering men in colleges and university as students in part because they are well aware that unlike men who are still better able to get a job with reasonable pay absent a college degree, women need a college degree if they hope to have a job that offers livable (albeit inequitable) pay and benefits. Perhaps the same social forces are at work in the software industry that are at work in high ed.

Battling Late-semester Instructional Fatigue

This week marks the end of the third quarter of the semester on our campus. Every semester at about this time, I start to feel fatigued in the classroom. The daily grind has taken its toll, and any charismatic pull I might have had with my classes has begun to give way to more routinized patterns of behavior.  Additionally, attendance rates typically dip. One strategy that I've worked into my courses, particularly lower-level classes, to overcome the inevitable creep of malaise is to ramp up my use of non-traditional instructional techniques, which for me means less lecture and class-wide discussion and more media and small-group discussion. Even this, though, will only get one so far in re-energizing a group of students. Because of this, I am constantly on the lookout for new ideas. Anyone out there with suggestions?

The "Value-added" Concept in Higher Ed

On our most recent annual Assessment Day, I first heard the term "value-added" mentioned in relation to higher education. I found it odd, then. Now, I find it scary. Essentially, value-added assessment claims to be able to measure the contributions of an individual instructor to a student's or students' learning over a semester, academic year, or other period of instruction. (However, the methods, models, and statistical tools used to do this often are not adequate to disentangle the teacher from other compounding contextual factors [i.e. parental involvement at home].) Short of all the methodological concerns, though, the very language and theory of the "value-added" is a radical re-framing of education. It represents a commodification of the institution of education and the labor of educators. This shift in perspective is in and of itself disconcerting. More on this later.

Withdrawal and Grade Inflation

I got a couple great questions from "Daniel," who happens to be a colleague of mine, in the comments to yesterday's post. I'll take up the first of them here today. He asks, in part, about my objection to the timing of the withdrawal deadline. One of my primary objections to the ability for students to withdraw from courses is that it contributes to grade inflation, that the process exists at all. I'll offer up data from my classes as an example. (The data are publicly available from the University System of Georgia.) Below, I'm posting two charts. Both are grade distributions from all of the courses I've taught over the last three years. The first includes only those people who completed the course, while the second also includes those who withdrew from the course. (These data do not include those who "dropped" the class within the grace period at the very beginning of the semester.) I make one important assumption here for the sake of simplicity, that those who withdrew would have otherwise earned an F in the course. (Of course, I don't believe that would be the case; to the contrary, I believe that most would have been able to earn passing grades which makes it all the more infuriating.)

What we can glean from the difference between the two charts is that the W's change the distribution. By allowing withdrawal, we mask the rarity of certain scores, thus devaluing them. For example, ignoring W's leads us to believe that one is about 2 percentage points more likely to receive an A than is the case. B's are even more deceiving, appearing about 4 percentage points more likely.

My larger point is not that we should make A's artificially rare or that grades need to be more normally distributed; instead, I'm arguing that W's fundamentally devalue one measure of educational success, a measure that matters for graduation, for grad school applications, and to potential employers, not to mention mattering for students' self-evaluation of progress.

"But I'm not a C student!"

The dynamics of my introductory-level courses invariably change the day after I return their first major assignments. We're all happy-go-lucky, and they like my demeanor--until they see that their score does not match their inflated sense of self. Over the semesters, I've noticed four categories of responses from students.

1. Most students do nothing. They show up as if nothing has changed. I suspect that these are the students who have done well on their assignments and those who are too lazy to actually open the email attachment that includes comments and their score.
2. Several students simply drop the course. I absolutely hate that this is an option. At my institution, there is a ridiculously late drop deadline and an equally ridiculously high cap on the number of courses the students can drop in this manner. Seriously, what else can this be teaching students except that it's better to quit than to put forth the effort to accomplish something that, while difficult, can be truly transformative? (More here.)
3. A few students get angry--and aren't afraid to let me know. It is dangerous to read tone into electronic communications, but the passive-aggressive emails I occasionally receive are hilarious if not unfortunate; though, face to face confrontations are exceedingly rare.
4. A handful of students do what students are supposed to do; they show up for my office hours and ask about how they can work to improve on the future assignments.

Despite increased and regular warnings to my students that the class is challenging, that they will received a great deal of feedback from me and that that feedback is a statement about how much I care about them and not a personal rebuke, etc., I have found it difficult to funnel students who would otherwise align with the first three responses above into the fourth. I suspect that this is because, instead of being an individual problem for me, it is actually an institutional problem by which I mean one that is endemic to the way that we do education in the United States, not one that is particular to my college. Students, and specifically the type of students who attend a liberal arts college (i.e. disproportionately white and affluent), come to us with a general sense of entitlement having been coddled by parents and teachers through 13+ years of schooling. Granted, most of these students were among the most highly ranked in their high school classes, but this alone does not seem to explain the most likely behaviors listed above.

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UPDATE (10/19/2012):

SLACer has this to add, and I think he's right on.

The (Future) Value of the Liberal Arts Education

SLACer has a great post on the changing value of a liberal arts education. He writes:

...[T]he public seems to increasingly favor specialized degrees while the job market is moving toward uncertainty, meaning that students with specialized skills are less likely to get the jobs they are trained for. For today’s job market, it appears...that what students actually need is a well-rounded education that will prepare them to think through a variety of potential situations rather than to perform any particular task. Two recent articles reveal that I’m not alone.... I wonder when the public, and those in charge of the shrinking higher ed budgets, will catch on.

I think he really hits the nail on the head there but probably not in the way that we all would hope. As budgets continue to shrink or, slightly more optimistically, stop hemorrhaging, college in general, but especially private liberal arts college, will become increasingly less possible for the average student.

Teaching How to Avoid the Passive Voice

Students often get confused trying to figure out how to avoid the use of the passive voice in their writing. I didn't figure it out until several years into graduate school after grading tons of undergraduate papers as an instructor. There are two reasons why one would want to avoid the passive voice. First, it tends to read awkwardly. Good writing is clear writing. (Just ask Fabio.) Second, it's easy to hide misunderstanding behind the passive voice. For example, take this sentence: "The woman was assaulted." By whom? Well, typically, women are assaulted by men so a more appropriate sentence would read, "A man assaulted the woman." A world of sociology lies in the difference between those two sentences.

(Though not about voice, per se, here is a great example from Nathan Palmer about how language can hide privilege. Nate also has a good post about writing here.)

Here are a couple tips for students (and faculty) trying to spot and avoid the passive voice:

First, if you can ask "by whom?" of the verb or if "by" shows up in the sentence, there is a good chance that its in the passive voice. "Lower wages are earned [by whom?] by manual laborers."

Second, think about the relationship between the subject and the verb. In the example "Lower wages are earned by manual laborers," the subject (i.e. wages) is the target of the action (verb = is earned), which makes it passive voice. To make it active, we just need to rephrase it so that the subject does the action: "Manual laborers earn lower wages."

Whom Is Service Learning Servicing?

Service Learning, or less commonly Civic Learning, is all the buzz in higher education currently. On the surface, Service Learning seems great. It (perhaps) facilitates greater student learning by forcing them to apply in the real world what they have received in the traditional classroom. I'd like to point to two problems that I see with Service Learning.

First, at least as far as I have seen, most Service Learning projects do not actually attempt to implement the academic lessons with which they are associated. Take a common one, poverty. Students will spend some time in the classroom reading, discussing, and being lectured to about how we define poverty, the demographics of poverty, the history of the academic and political responses to poverty, and the structural nature of poverty. Then, professors will take their students to volunteer for a few hours at a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter. These are typical "Band-Aid," surface-level responses to poverty, not fixes. Moreover, these kinds of responses in practice buttresses the status quo which actually perpetuate poverty. Students learn that while those crazy ideas they read about are all well and good, they can pat themselves on the back for being morally righteous people having done something deceptively simple. Service Learning of this kind actually undoes the critical learning that we claim to value.

Second, our collective academic memory is short. There is rarely anything truly new under the sun, and Service Learning is no exception. Karl Marx early on charged that "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." Later Marxians labeled this imperative Praxis. The academe generally dismissed Praxis and, instead, focused on pure research and education. It was one thing to talk and write with relative impunity about controversial ideas, but it was deemed far too radical to attempt to follow through with the application that these ideas suggested. I fear that Service Learning does the same disservice. It is difficult both practically and politically to implement a Service Learning project that would do justice to the lessons we hope to teach our students.

So, while I am quite skeptical of Service Learning as it is currently done, I do believe that, if recontextualized, it could lead us to revisit Praxis as a neglected part of the universal mission of the academy.

"Liberal Arts College & Regional University"

Fewer than a third (8/26) of the member institutions of the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges (COPLAC) are designated by the U.S. News & World Report College Rankings as "National Liberal Arts Colleges." Nearly two thirds (16/26) are designated "Regional Universities." (1 is a "Regional College," and another is in Canada and not in the rankings.) (I have the full lists below.) As an employee at one of those COPLAC "Regional Universities," I get a little nervous. On the one hand, this is the U.S. News & World Report, and I really shouldn't worry about it. On the other hand, many parents and students put undue weight behind these rankings so they're real in their consequences. Additionally, trying to retain a liberal arts designation within a public university system can be tenuous, and if the (self-appointed) rankers disagree, it could be fodder for revocation.

National Liberal Arts Colleges

• Fort Lewis College
• Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts
• New College of Florida
• St. Mary's College of Maryland
• University of Minnesota Morris
• University of North Carolina at Asheville
• University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma
• University of Virginia's College at Wise

Regional Universities

• Eastern Connecticut State University
• The Evergreen State College
• Georgia College & State University
• Henderson State University
• Keene State College
• Midwestern State University
• Ramapo College of New Jersey
• Shepherd University
• Sonoma State University
• Southern Oregon University
• State University of New York at Geneseo
• Truman State University
• University of Illinois at Springfield
• University of Mary Washington
• University of Montevallo
• University of Wisconsin–Superior

Regional Colleges

• University of Maine at Farmington

Canadian

• University of Alberta, Augustana Campus