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In today’s issue: advice for the Class of 2024; the surprising history of the report card; and why sleep is important for college performance.

EVENTS

👉 Join me next week for the virtual Next Office Hour: Thursday, June 20 at 2 pm ET/11 am PT.

We’ll discuss how to make deeper partnerships between institutions work.

Partnering in higher ed is nothing new, but most of the alliances between colleges are in shared purchasing and perhaps back-office operations. That’s not going to move the needle in the years ahead as hundreds of institutions face an existential threat.

I’ll be in discussion with:

• Harriette Scott, Vice President for Postsecondary Education, Southern Regional Education Board
• Kathy Ulibarri, CEO, Collaborative for Higher Education Shared Services
• Thomas Chase Hagood, Senior Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Office of Undergraduate Studies, University of Utah

🚨Register for free here to join live or get an on-demand recording afterwards. (Support from Workday)

THE LEAD

Effortless is a myth.

It’s only a point.

Life is bigger than the court.

It’s worth watching the whole thing. A commencement address is one of the hardest speeches to give. You have to be short, memorable, give advice, add humor, and connect with the graduates in some way.

Federer’s speech prompted me to dig into my files for two commencement speeches I gave to see how they held up to the test of time. Both were given right before the pandemic: one in 2018, at the masters ceremony for the Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences; and one in 2019 at the undergraduate ceremony for Merrimack College near Boston.

Although the speeches are a few years old, three pieces of advice still seem appropriate for the Class of 2024.

1. It’s OK not to know what you’re going to do after graduation. Think about it as your searching mindset and embrace it. Transform it from a weakness into a strength by becoming more flexible than your peers, by being continually curious, and by committing to a lifetime of learning.

2. Focus on the work that is most meaningful to you. And if you don’t know what that is, keep trying to discover it. If you don’t know what makes you happy, never stop looking for it. If you do know, do that thing. And if you feel you’re on the wrong road, take the next exit.

Tough decisions rarely have the life-and-death consequences they seem to threaten. In fact, I’ve usually found that what I thought was a really bad decision actually proved to be a really good decision – but in a way I never could have foreseen.

3. Be prepared for an opportunity to fall into your lap–and sometimes fall out of it. There’s a story with this one: In 1995, after I graduated from Ithaca College, I headed to Phoenix for a summer fellowship at The Arizona Republic. My first day, the business editor looked at me and said, “You’re young, you must know something about technology.” The tech reporter was on leave for the summer. I was now the tech reporter.

It happened that summer, Microsoft was about to launch Windows ’95. One afternoon, we got a call saying a Microsoft exec was leaving a conference in town and would be glad to be interviewed on his way to the airport. I got the assignment and met this man at his hotel for what was supposed to be a short trip. It wound up lasting 90 minutes due to traffic. We talked about Windows, MSNBC, and where the Internet was headed.

I said my fellowship would end in a month, and he said, “Call me.” He took out his business card, wrote his cell phone number on the back and gave it to me. That was unusual at the time since very few people even had cell phones. I stuck it in my pocket and went back to the newsroom.

Unfortunately, this tale doesn’t end the way you and I hope it might. I never followed up. In fact, I lost his card. Only much later did the importance of this executive hit me. He was Steve Ballmer, number-two after Bill Gates, appointed CEO of Microsoft in 2000.

I went on to start a great career at a newspaper in North Carolina, but I’ll always wonder what might have been had I called Steve Ballmer.

🎓 Good luck, Class of 2024. Oh, and always double check you have those business cards (even if they’re not paper anymore).

The Surprising History of the Report Card

Beyond commencement, the end of the academic year also tends to put a focus on grades, and report cards, more specifically.

Recently, I caught up with Wade H. Morris, the author of Reports Cards: A Cultural History. I’m fascinated by books that cover an issue that we might confront every day, but never think an entire book could be written about them: the library, addresses, fast food.

Here’s part 1 of 2 of my conversation with Wade (edited for space). Part 2 will be in a future newsletter.

Q. Why write a book about report cards?

A. The idea for a book about the history of report cards came from the confluence of multiple events. First, I’m a teacher. For two decades I’ve seen the power that report cards have over my students and their parents: anxiety, fear, pride, etc. I found the obsession over grades fascinating. Still do.

Second, I am a parent. I first started researching the roots of systems of academic reporting around the same time that my own daughters received report cards for the first time. All of the sudden, I could empathize with the parents of my students. I found that these elementary school grades were dictating my moods. They were a barometer for me to judge my performance as a dad. It was bizarre to me.

And finally, as a scholar of educational history, I was looking for a literary device to enter into the world of schools in the 1830s, 1870s, 1910s, etc. I wanted report cards to be the lens through which I could tell the stories of how generations of ordinary teachers, students, and parents navigated systems of academic ranking. I wanted the book to be more than just a history of administrators and pedagogues creating bureaucratic efficiency like grading systems. Instead, I wanted the book to be a journey through American history with relatable characters and the report card became the anchor around which to build each chapter’s narrative.

“From the 1840s onwards, systems of grading have been a measure for how well we are doing as parents.”

Q. You write in the book about how report cards were “a tool of control.” But they are also incredibly not standardized. At a time when American colleges are moving away from standardized tests, there is some concern that using the high school transcript— the report card— isn’t a good substitute because they aren’t standardized. Why not and how do you think about how report cards are used by American college admissions offices?

A. I would argue that the origins of our conception of college admissions emerged in the first three decades of the twentieth century. At the start of the century, colleges were competing for students. By the Great Depression, students were competing against each other for the colleges.

The emergence of the SATs has gotten a lot of attention from historians but efforts to standardized grades in the early 20th century was equally important, in my opinion. You’ve written about James Bryant Conant using standardized tests to make universities admissions more meritocratic. The same progressive movement that produced Conant led to something closer to standardized report cards. The early 20th century witnessed the popularization of the A through F grading standards. Essentially, reformers saw this as a more flexible alternative to the 100-point scale but also a clearer conveyor of information about student abilities than the dozens of grading systems that had emerged in school districts around the country.

College admissions were a major force for what was a haphazard, chaotic standardization process of report cards in the early 20th century. We look back now and wonder why the reformers did not go further in unifying the system, but on the other hand, this age of reform accomplished quite a lot in changing what was a much, much more chaotic system.

“If you think that you have an irrational obsession about your child’s grades, that is exactly what the system was designed to do.”

Q. I kept my report cards, although to be honest my grades weren’t very good by today’s standards. I want to show my kids that grades are not the only measure of success in life, yet I like the data on outcomes that the report card provides to me. How can parents and teachers balance that contraction— both wanting/needing grades, but not making them the end all, be all of school?

A. Classroom teachers from the 19th century – the same people that created the modern system of academic bookkeeping – explicitly stated that sending home periodic rankings of student performances was intended to win over the support of parents at home, to push parents to take more of an active role in supporting the school.

So, if you think that you have an irrational obsession about your child’s grades, that is exactly what the system was designed to do. And grades were not created by a sinister overlord. It came from my tribal group – classroom teachers – to control our natural enemies: surly parents. Likewise, I was fascinated how 19th century parents navigated this push and pull of grades so I dug into dozens of archives to find the diaries and letters of parents who made reference to the report cards of their children. Nineteenth century parents were just as self-aware about the power of report cards as we are today. I found evidence that parents from all walks of life – wealthy and working class, urban and rural, Black and White – all obsessed over scores on their child’s report cards. From the 1840s onwards, systems of grading have been a measure for how well we are doing as parents. I think it is one of the great inventions of modernity that has transformed parenting in ways that we are still struggling against.

How do parents restore balance? This may be self-serving as an educational historian, but I think that it helps for parents to develop historical consciousness. We, parents of students, can recognize that we are living through a giant epoch of history. This epoch is lasting centuries. We are not alone in our attempts to navigate the neurosis that grades produce. We must also recognize the necessity of report cards in efficiently conveying information. We can understand that we are responding in normal ways to an abnormal system that is both relatively new in the grand scope of human civilization but at the same time firmly entrenched in our daily lives. For me, at least, I find historical self-awareness quite comforting.

SUPPLEMENTS

🚦Risky Boards. Higher ed “routinely offers examples of how board dysfunction can lead to…interfere with the core mission of universities,” Moody’s Investors Service wrote in its most recent quarterly report. In the latest episode of Future U., Michael Horn and I talk with two board members at public universities about how boards balance their governance role with that of management by the institutional leaders–and don’t always get it right. (Future U.)

🌎 A Different Foreign Student. “Pre-pandemic, the typical student-visa holder was an undergraduate from China — the country that accounted for one of every three foreign students — as enrollments at that academic level shot up nearly 90 percent over a decade,” Karin Fischer writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Now the typical international student is in a graduate program and from India or, to a lesser extent, from sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere in South Asia. In fact, there now are more foreign graduate students in the United States than there were international undergraduates during their pre-pandemic heyday. And those gains have been especially strong in master’s-degree programs.” (The Chronicle of Higher Education | registration required)

💤 Get Some Sleep! We know sleep is important for productivity. In a new National Bureau of Economic Research paper, researchers working with college students show that incentives for sleep (personalized bedtime reminders with morning feedback and immediate rewards) increase both sleep and academic performance. They found that immediate incentives have larger impacts on sleep than delayed incentives or reminders and feedback alone. Bottom line: the immediate incentives slightly improve average semester course performance and “significantly decrease average screen time.” (National Bureau of Economic Research)

Until next time, Cheers — Jeff