Voter Guide 2014 - The Questions

VOTE by Theresa Thompson is licensed CC BY 2.0

I received my voting guide in the mail today, which reminded me that - ah, yes! - it's time to exercise my franchise. So, I put on my coat, put the leash on it, and gave a quick tug.

Nothing happened.

I gave another tug, a little more forceful this time. Still nothing. However, my franchise finally paid some attention to me, looking at me with tired eyes, as if to say, "How about warming me up a bit first, hmm? Maybe letting me stretch a bit first?" That's when I realized that I was about to exercise my franchise without properly preparing it for the ordeal ahead. So, I sat down, got to work, started massaging its enfeebled muscles, and began my own personal voter guide.

Today I'm going to cover the statewide questions in Nevada this year.

Statewide Question No. 1

Shall the Nevada Constitution be amended to create a Court of Appeals that would decide appeals of District Court decisions in certain civil and criminal cases?

My vote: NO

This question has been on the ballot several times over the years, and, each time the voters have shot it down pretty resoundingly. So, why does it keep coming back? Good question - and there's a good answer. The Nevada Supreme Court is a busy, busy court. Last year alone, the Supreme Court heard 2,373 cases, or 339 cases per justice. That's almost one case per day, including weekends, being tried by each of the justices - or, at least, it would be if each judge was allowed to try cases individually. Instead, the Nevada Supreme Court uses two groups of three-justice panels to try most cases, with the Chief Justice filling in as needed and otherwise supervising the groups. This means that, in order to keep up with the current caseload, each panel must somehow try over 1,000 cases each year.

There's no way justice is being served at that rate.

The proposed solution in Question 1 is pretty straightforward - create a Court of Appeals to handle some of the caseload and add an additional layer between the District Court system and the Nevada Supreme Court. By itself, this actually isn't a bad idea - since appellate justices can handle cases individually, while higher courts traditionally handle cases as a body, a few individual appellate justices can clear out casework considerably more efficiently and effectively than an extra few Supreme Court justices. This also prevents the Supreme Court from having to unofficially create a court of appeals by hearing cases in small groups, only for each group to contradict each other and then have to rehear the case (or hear a similar case in the future) as a full group to sort it out. 

So what's the problem?

The biggest problem is that the proposed Court of Appeals is way too small. Assuming that the same number of cases are appealed as there are now, each justice would still have to somehow handle over 700 cases each per year. Given that kind of a caseload, there would be considerable pressure to simply push the cases out of their hair and into the Supreme Court as fast as humanly possible - or, worse yet, categorically reject appeals out of hand regardless of merit. The result would be a traditional Nevada solution - a well meaning, half baked, inadequate mess that makes a bad problem just that much worse. 

Eventually, if the political will is there, it's possible that the Legislature might expand the Court of Appeals - if Question 1 passes, that's certainly on the table. However, this is the Nevada Legislature we're talking about; the only time our august body exercises anything resembling "political will" is when a rich tycoon shows up and promises riches beyond the dreams of avarice, if only someone will zero out his tax bill. Consequently, we can be guaranteed to see a still-overloaded Nevada Supreme Court with a harried Court of Appeals running interference - the worst of both worlds.

Statewide Question No. 2

Shall the Nevada Constitution be amended to remove the cap on the taxation of minerals and other requirements and restrictions relating to the taxation of mines, mining claims, and minerals and the distribution of money collected from such taxation?

My vote: YES

Before I go any further with this, I'd like to take a moment to outline my overall political philosophy. I generally lean heavily libertarian - not full Anarcho-Capitalist, for reasons I'll get into one of these days - with a twist of utilitarianism sprinkled in for good measure (as opposed to a Deontologically-minded Libertarian; again, I'll go into the difference some other time). What this means is that I'm generally against taxation and generally against the growth of government, but not exclusively so. For example, regarding Question 1, I'd be willing to technically grow the size of government if it meant we would have a faster, more effective justice system since I value an effective justice system without bottlenecks over a categorical opposition to the growth of government under any and all possible circumstances. Ideally, of course, I'd rather see a private solution to the problem - I have to imagine independent arbitration is pretty popular here - but, in the absence of that, I'd rather have an effective justice system than one that's doing its best imitation of India's oft-maligned court system. 

This brings me to Question #2. I'm not naive - I know why this measure is on the ballot. It's to enable the legislature to raise mining taxes. I'm against that. I know friends and family that would be directly affected by this measure. I've spent a considerable amount of time in rural Nevada and will undoubtedly continue to do so in the future. And yet... I'm going to vote "yes". Why?

The answer? Equality before the law.

Here's the thing - I value low taxes and less government, but I value fairness and equality before the law more. This is part of the reason why I wouldn't mind seeing a faster, more effective court system; as India and countless other examples throughout history have proven, a slow, underfunded mess of one is prone to corruption, specially carved out "fast lanes", and other distortions that are several orders of magnitude worse than the confiscatory effects of a slightly higher tax rate. It's also part of the reason why I'm going to vote in favor of this measure - simply put, I don't think it's right that the mining industry has a special tax arrangement carved into the Nevada Constitution. 

Mining's arrangement is particularly special indeed.

As outlined nicely by the Nevada Taxpayers Association, the Nevada Constitution sets a taxation cap of 5% of all net proceeds from a given mine. This is not only less than Nevada's current sales and use tax rate, which ranges from 6.85%-8.1%, depending on the county you live in, it's also the only industry-specific tax exemption listed in the Nevada Constitution. On top of that, most mining activity takes place in Nevada's expansive BLM-owned territory, which, being federal land, isn't taxed at anything approaching fair market value. 

The deontologically Libertarian answer here is to say, "Fine - let's set everyone else's taxes at 5% and be done with it." If that answer was on the ballot, I'd vote for it in a heartbeat. Since it's not, however, I'll go with the best option that's available to me. To quote Coyote Blog, who wrote about a similar example of politically connected cronyism:

I used to be OK with anything that reduced taxes for anyone, but now I have come to realize that discounting taxes for one preferred crony just raises taxes for the rest of us.

That's about where I am as well. It's time for the mining industry's special exemption to be written back out of the Nevada Constitution - honestly, it never should have been added in the first place.

Statewide Question No. 3

Shall the Nevada Revised Statutes be amended to create a 2% tax to be imposed on a margin of the gross revenue of entities doing business in Nevada whose total revenue for any taxable year exceeds $1 million, with the proceeds of the tax going to the State Distributive School Account to be apportioned among Nevada's school districts and charter schools?

My vote: NO

To give you an idea of how little trust people in Nevada have for our government, I talked to a couple of openly progressive individuals about this tax measure. One had an Obama sticker on the back of her Toyota in 2008. The other makes regular trips to the Bay Area and has political opinions that generally blend in nicely there. I asked them how they were going to vote on the measure.

Their answer: No.

Both gave near-identical reasons - they flat out don't trust the Nevada Legislature to let this money actually add to education's funding. They agree that something must be done, that our schools are woefully underfunded and that our education system needs some serious help, but they also agree that the Legislature is almost certainly guaranteed to simply cancel out any gains in education funding this measure might provide by pulling that money out of the General Fund and giving it to some other special interest somewhere.  They're concerned that, if this measure passes, the Legislature will take 2% out of the pockets of every business in Nevada and use it to build stadiums, provide targeted handouts to well-connected corporate interests, and a whole host of other frivolous things that have nothing to do with educating students and everything to do with lining the Legislature in yet another layer of graft and corruption. 

Why? Because the Nevada Legislature has done it before. See STAR Bonds. 

If this measure passes, it will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that discounting taxes for one crony just raises taxes for the rest of us. If we really want to fix education by throwing more money at the problem (and, personally, I'm not sold about that fix but I'll concede the point for now), get rid of STAR bonds, get rid of the various special interest exceptions that dot Nevada's tax code, get everyone on a more or less even footing, and then let's talk. I personally bet that getting rid of all of the political carve-outs would get us to a close enough number in the General Fund where we can talk about funding education without pulling 2% out of every single receipt in the state. 

Now you know how I'm voting on the questions and why. Agree with me? Disagree with me? Tell me why in the comments below. Next up... candidates!

Windows 10 Enterprise in Hyper-V

It's October 1. Windows 10 Technical Preview is out. I'm an IT Manager. Guess what I'm doing today?

After downloading the ISO for Windows 10 Enterprise, I figured I'd try it in Hyper-V in Windows 8.1 first, just to get a feel for how it works. Since it's a newer version of Windows, I figured it'd work as a Generation 2 virtual machine. So, I followed the wizard - gave it a name...

Chose a generation...

Gave it a pile of RAM because, hey, why not...

Connected it to none of your business, thank you very much...

Created a default virtual disk...

Set it to install an operating system from my newly downloaded ISO...

And then tried to boot it, only to get this charming error message:

So, what happened? Well, it turns out the key is in how Microsoft builds their Windows installation ISOs and how Hyper-V's implementation points and laughs at them. For a lovely overview of the details, click here.

The solution? Well, there are a couple of options:

• Create a Generation 1 VM and install the ISO on that. This is what I ultimately went with.
• Edit the ISO to somehow overcome Hyper-V's EFI implementation.

Since my attempts at mounting the ISO so that I could edit it led to this wonderful message:

I decided I was better off hitting the "easy" button and going with the way that led to a working VM within this lifetime.

The Up Side of Down - Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

Available from Google Play

I've been a big fan of Megan McArdle's work for years, in no small part because I frequently find myself agreeing with her. She's libertarian but not dogmatically so, she's generally thoughtful and careful about whatever she writes - heck, she even used to work in small business IT support like I did. Consequently, I suppose it's no big surprise that, once I finally set some time aside to read her book, that, surprise!, I frequently found myself agreeing with her. However, the reason I'm writing what amounts to a rather informal and tardy book review is because, deep down, I really want you to read her book and maybe, just maybe, agree with her too. If that doesn't happen, don't panic - I'd settle for you reading her book and then explaining in graphic detail why I'm horribly wrong and hopelessly misguided. I wouldn't mind having a little more of that in my life anyway.

But first, in order for that to happen, I need to convince you to read her book. So let's get started.

To begin with, the book isn't particularly long - in eBook form, it's less than 160 pages. In terms of total reading time, it took maybe 4-6 hours, give or take; I didn't keep a stopwatch on me while reading it, but it took me less than a week of occasional 5-30 minute stretches to get through it, if that helps. So, the opportunity cost sacrificed by reading this book is really quite minimal.

That's not doing it? All right, let's talk about what this book is about.

The crux of the book, and of quite a bit of Megan's previous blog posts, is about how we as a society deal with failure and why it's important to not only deal with failure but allow it to continue. It starts with the results of a simple experiment - how tall of a structure can you make using spaghetti noodles? It turns out the people that do the best at the experiment aren't structural engineers, though they do quite well - it's kindergartners. Why? Well, it turns out small children will try just about everything, including asking for more spaghetti (nobody said you couldn't) or just piling a bunch of spaghetti up into some sort of starchy Ziggurat. However, in the process of blindly trying everything, they initially fail, oftentimes spectacularly. No problem, though - they don't care because, hey, they're playing with spaghetti - so they brush themselves off from whatever imaginary psychic slight they should experience from failing to build something with starch worms made from durum wheat and try something else. Then something else. Then something else. Until they eventually get something built.

The remainder of the book is a series of anecdotes, some personal to Megan like a serious relationship that soured, and others not, each detailing how different failures happened and how those failures ultimately led to bigger and better things. One of the best stories of the bunch was toward the end. It focused on Hawaii's HOPE probation program. She starts with the following question:

I’ve spent most of this book talking about risk and redemption. I’ve exhorted you to eschew blame and understand failure as the natural consequence of risk and complexity. I’ve asked you to do your best to recognize when you’re on the wrong track and to focus on fresh starts rather than retribution. But sometimes people do things that are not just risky, but wrong. Sometimes people deliberately break the rules that society has set up to protect itself. Some of those things are directly harmful to others, like theft and assault. Others, like skirting food safety regulations, create an unacceptable risk to fellow citizens. People who break the rules do not just need a fresh start. They need to be punished. 

But not too much. The economists Anna Aizer and Joseph Doyle recently investigated what happens to juvenile offenders who are sent to prison, compared with those who commit the same sorts of crimes but are put under less harsh forms of supervision. The juveniles who went to of costs associated with investigating, arresting, convicting, and imprisoning them. 

So how do we punish people in a way that doesn’t ensure they emerge from the experience ten times worse?

The answer, it turns out, is swift, consistent, steady corrective action. Part of the problem with people caught in the corrections system is that many of them have a very poor "internal locus of control":

Successful people have what psychologists call “self-efficacy” or an “internal locus of control”: they feel that outcomes mostly depend on what they do. People who believe that they can control their fate are more likely to have happy futures even if they’re wrong about the extent of their control. A person who believes he can grow up to be president is probably incorrect, statistically speaking. But the person who believes he can’t is never wrong.

The solution is to instill a locus of control, to show that it's possible to make meaningful changes to one's life through personal choice, by creating a probation system that renders immediate, sensible consequences for choices. If someone on probation in the HOPE system does something, they will be swiftly punished, but not excessively so. If good choices are made, punishment is avoided or minimized. If poor choices are made, punishment is swift and escalates.

This is actually a pretty profound concept for a lot of people currently stuck in the corrections system, in no small part because they were never raised to see a connection between cause and effect. In a lot of households, rules are sporadically enforced at best, and when they are enforced, they are often done so capriciously and violently. Children raised in that sort of environment don't learn that actions have consequences - instead, they learn that authority is something random, unpredictable and should be feared, like an earthquake or a volcano. This lesson, or the alarming lack thereof, is then reinforced by our random and capricious probation system, which allows those on probation to get away with missed appointments, failed drug tests, or the inability to maintain employment... until, one day, for no apparent reason, it suddenly doesn't. Then, the person on probation suddenly finds themselves locked in jail for 10 years.

It should go without saying that people raised in that sort of environment are going to fare rather poorly in a traditional educational system.

This gives me an opportunity to take this book review - seriously, read the book! - into a sharp turn to explore something else. As I've discussed a couple of times previously, I work for a for-profit vocational school, and things are a little different here than a traditional university. The most immediately obvious difference relates to how we deal with classroom attendance. At the university I went to, the general attitude was, "Well, you're all adults - show up or don't, do the homework or don't, we don't really care, but don't expect to do well if you don't bother to participate." Where I work, however, it's very different - first, instructors actually have to take roll. If a student misses more than two days of class, the instructor has to fill out a sheet and counsel the student on their attendance. If a student misses more than a week's worth of class in a phase, they're placed on academic probation. If they fail academic probation - fail to maintain a sufficiently high GPA and keep their absences to a minimum in the next phase - they're potentially kicked out of the school.

I didn't get it at first.

Our students are adults, right? Who cares? Well, our students are adults, and many of them have excellent internal locuses of control that help them make positive choices, but that doesn't mean all of our students do. The ones that don't are a problem - if we pass them through provided they don't defecate on the final, turn in an occasional homework assignment, and maybe show up to a lecture or two (I got through a couple of classes in college doing not much more than this), there's a strong chance they'll take the same work habits they used in school into the workplace. Considering the stellar reputation already enjoyed by for-profit vocational schools in the employment market, we simply can't afford that kind of a black eye, not if we actually want any of our students to get gainful employment and pay the occasional student loan back. There are also moral and ethical issues involved as well in charging students five figures for a credential instead of an education - those, I'm sure, would be what my boss would much rather I focus on in this paragraph instead of the craven self-interest of student debt repayment.

There's a reason I'm responsible for our IT and not, say, the Admissions Department.

So, for several really good reasons, we have to instill locuses of control into students that might not have them. For us, this means lots of strict, consistent, small punishments that more or less mirror what they'll experience in an idealized workplace. This means swiftly catching people that show up two minutes late for class, swiftly marking them as tardy, consistently counseling them on showing up on time, counting tardies as absences if it happens often enough, and then putting them on the micro-punishment path of the attendance policy if the behavior continues. It means swiftly catching people that aren't turning in their homework or not putting much effort into it, swiftly grading it (within 24 hours, more often than not), and quickly counseling them at any point where their grade gets below passing, even if it's the middle of the second week of class. It means driving home the point that actions have consequences.

At the same time, however, my employer also follows Megan's advice (more or less) and lets students fail - but not permanently. If a student fails out of one of our public universities here, nobody's making phone calls or even acknowledging that the student failed - financial aid will stop cutting checks, the student won't be able to enroll in their classes, and, suddenly, they become a non-person, pretty much just like that. Failure is permanent, or challenging enough to reverse where it might as well be. If a student fails academic probation or fails some classes at my work, however, it's not the end of the world - not only are they welcomed back, we actually call them and ask them to come back. Then we walk them through which classes they can retake without getting hit with a financial aid penalty, we walk them through getting their GPA and attendance back up, and we get them back into the program. They suffer the sting of a six week leave of absence - just enough to let them know that, yes, they made a serious of unfortunate choices - but then it's done and it's time to forgive and forget. This still isn't enough for every student, but for each student it is enough for, it's one more student that completed college, picked up a marketable skill, and is now living a little bit better because of it.

I bring all of this up not because I'm looking to cheer on my employer. I bring it up because this book helped me understand a pattern in my employer's behavior that, to be honest, I suspect might have manifested itself as much as a response to market conditions as anything else. Whatever the motivation, it turns out we're on the right track, and thanks to reading The Up Side of Down, I can now explain why to any unfortunate soul silly enough to ask me about it.

Seriously, read this book. I'm not going to promise you'll pick up an epiphany or two as well, but... you never know.

What the Tesla deal is and isn't

"Tesla Visit 3" by Windell Oksay is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Earlier today, the tax deal that drove Tesla to Nevada was finally revealed and it was major - $1.25 billion over 20 years. Let's take a moment and look at what it is and, just as importantly, what it isn't.

Nevada's paying Tesla $1.25 billion?

No. What Nevada's doing is promising not to collect certain taxes from Tesla for extended periods of time (primarily by not charging sales or property taxes). The total is estimated to add up to $1.25 billion during specified periods (20 years for sales taxes, 10 years for property taxes, plus other breaks). Considering how there's no factory there now, Nevada's not losing money on this - it's just not getting any of the money it would normally collect from a new factory. Now, if the sales and property tax breaks also apply to current and future Tesla dealerships, that actually would be money that Nevada's taking off the table since Tesla already has a dealership in Las Vegas, though I'm not 100% sure if that's a franchise or a factory-owned one.

This, coincidentally, is why Nevada's not able to arbitrarily pull $1.25 billion out of its hat for education or anything else - in order to give education (or whatever) $1.25 billion, Nevada would actually have to collect it in taxes from someone first. In this instance, Nevada's just going to continue to not collect tax money that it's already not collecting right now since Tesla doesn't have a tax paying factory in Nevada presently.

But Tesla's using Nevada's infrastructure, right?

Right, and, in fact, Nevada's promising to add additional infrastructure by buying out USA Parkway - currently a privately owned street - and extending it all the way to US 50. That purchase, coincidentally, is less of a handout to Tesla and more of a handout to Lance Gilman and the owner of Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, who's been trying to get Nevada on the hook for USA Parkway for years. It's also one of the few spots where Nevada's actually spending money instead of simply not collecting it; to pay for that purchase, along with whatever improvements will be necessary to get USA Parkway up to state highway standards, will need to come from somewhere. Assuming the package being announced today sticks, it's primarily going to come from the insurance and film industries, which had special carve-outs previously.

So how does Nevada come out ahead?

In business terms, it's best to think of Tesla's factory as a "loss leader". The idea is to get the factory here without collecting anything from it, then watch as the factory workers drive up property values, improving property tax receipts, while buying more in state, driving up sales tax receipts. This doesn't get into "indirect" business support, like whatever taxes construction companies will end up paying in the process of building the factory, what taxes will be collected from the lithium mine(s?), and so on. The state won't receive as much as it would receive if Tesla paid all of its taxes like other companies would, but the financial picture should still be better than it would be if Tesla's workers weren't here making money and if Tesla's local vendors weren't making money from Tesla. 

Theoretically.

Theoretically?

This wouldn't be the first time that a small state tried to land a new automotive company, succeeded, and then lost its shirt. New Brunswick, for example, loaned Bricklin $4.5 million to build a factory; it was never paid back and nearly bankrupted the provincial government. Northern Ireland's government, meanwhile, lost money when Delorean's factory closed shop in the '80s. 

The good news is that Nevada's not actually loaning or giving any money to Tesla - thankfully, that's illegal in this state - so there's little risk of the sort of exposure that hurt New Brunswick and Northern Ireland in the last century. The bad news is, if the factory doesn't work out and Tesla goes bankrupt, there's going to be a big mess to clean up out there and very little money to pay for it. The market for "used electric car factories" is not particularly robust, to put it mildly, so, were Tesla to go bankrupt, it's a near-certainty that the factory, or at least the shell of it after the banks sold off any valuable equipment inside, would end up sold off at a steep discount in a property tax auction.

What do I like about this deal?

We're not spending much money on this. The only money Nevada is spending out of pocket is the money required to get USA Parkway up to speed - I'd rather we didn't do that, but it is what it is. The electricity discount is also a little worrisome; I'm assuming without looking at the details that Nevada would just be waiving any taxes that Tesla would normally pay on their power bill. Obviously, the benefits in terms of well paying, skilled jobs and economic diversification speak for themselves. Reno's been doing a pretty good job of transitioning into a post-casino economy; if Tesla's factory comes in and is successful, that should finish the job.

Also, as someone that works at a vocational school that is effectively training students in fields that Tesla will be interested in (welding and industrial electronics), it's good to know that our placement rate should be high enough to keep me employed for a while longer.

What don't I like about this deal?

Tesla won't be the only company to get a deal like this - legally, it can't be. The legislature is going to have to write Tesla's tax breaks in a way where other companies can theoretically receive them. Granted, the legislature can set those conditions pretty narrowly - Nevada's "no brothels in counties with over 700,000 people" law is a fine example as it effectively bans brothels in only Clark County since it's the only one with over 700,000 people in it. However, other companies, knowing that these sorts of tax breaks are available now, will ask for and expect them if we want them to move to Nevada. That's not a good precedent.

There's also the issue of whether Nevada should be waiving taxes for some businesses and not others. It's my sincerest hope (though I'm not particularly hopeful on this) that the negotiations with Tesla revealed to Nevada's politicians which taxes are particularly onerous for non-gaming businesses in this state and should thus be restructured or, better yet, removed entirely. Considering Nevada's long, arduous history of carving out special tax exemptions for various industries - mining, for example, has had one baked into the Nevada Constitution since 1989 - however, this is one bet I wouldn't take.

Finally, battery factories may be cleaner than they have been previously, but you're still talking about a lot of toxic metals being placed in an area that's awfully close to one of Nevada's rare above ground freshwater sources. If Tesla's financial position sours, or if someone slips up, and they lose track of what's going where, Pyramid Lake is going to be in for a rough time.

Obviously, as the details flesh themselves out and the Special Session starts, I'm sure everyone in Nevada will find something else to love and hate about this deal. In the meantime, Jon Ralston is keeping a live feed going on Twitter for those that wish to keep track of today's developments as they happen.

Working at a For-Profit College - Instructors and Students

Who's ready to drink the Kool-Aid with me?

In my last installment, I explained why for-profit colleges like the one I work at exist and why, at least at a basic level, they meet the needs of our students in ways that more traditional post-secondary educational institutions (a fancy way of saying "universities and public community colleges") usually fail. Today, I'm going to go into greater detail while exploring what it's like to work at a for-profit institution. Before I do so, however, I want to point out that I'm a graduate of a traditional university - I received my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Nevada, Reno almost a decade ago. That degree opened doors for my career in IT that I'm reasonably certain wouldn't exist otherwise, even including my current job. I mention this because, in my last installment, I was pretty harsh on traditional universities and I'm going to remain a little harsh, but I want to be clear about something - there's room for both approaches in this world, and it's important that we have opportunities for everyone to pick the path that's appropriate for them. I am in no way trying to infer that anyone is a fool if they pursue a university education, unless they're going to graduate school in a liberal arts program, in which case they're only fools if they're expecting a job in their field after graduation.

Having said all that, I want to point out something that should be really obvious - there's absolutely no reason an auto mechanic must learn the Nevada Constitution.

It's at times like these that I remember that Nevada's Constitution requires the state to foster institutions for the insane, blind, deaf and dumb.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that learning the Nevada Constitution isn't a worthwhile endeavor. I'm not saying an auto mechanic, bricklayer, welder, medical assistant, or whatever wouldn't benefit from a better understanding of Nevada's Constitution or English literature. However, if someone could explain to me, using simple, declarative sentences, why it's vitally necessary that all tradespeople in the State of Nevada absolutely must learn the contents of the Nevada Constitution before they receive a certificate from a post-secondary school that says, yes, they're nominally qualified to perform work that pays halfway decently, I am all ears.

Ears and, well, shucks, maybe a kernel of corn or two as well.

Point being, some people just want to learn how to get the job done without a giant pile of imposed distractions so they can go out and get jobs done. So, how do for-profit schools do that?

It's all about... speed.

Remember Summer Break? And Winter Break? And Spring Break? Remember how, when you were in college or high school, you spent about half the year actually in class while, the other half of the year, you partied with your friends, or played video games, or read Emily Dickenson poetry or something? Well, for-profit schools have breaks, too, only instead of 180 days worth of them each year, we take more like 28.

Total.

Okay, I exaggerate slightly. We also get snow days, at least where I live, plus probably another week or so if you add up the days we get off for three day weekends like Labor Day, Memorial Day, and so on, but the point is, once you're in school, you don't leave until you're done. Consequently, the longest program where I work is an 18 month program which, at its conclusion, gives you an Associates Degree. Remember, at a public community college, it would normally take you at least two years to get one. That's six extra months of earning a higher wage after graduation right there.

In order to make that possible, though, there's a catch...

Academic independence? What's that?

Instructors don't write their course curriculum where I work. They don't write their homework assignments. They don't write their syllabuses. They don't pick their textbooks. Instead, this is all the responsibility of their department chairs, who, in turn, are accountable to the Academic Dean and must submit any and all changes in their classes to the Dean before they're allowed to implement them in class.

Any professors reading this post right now just felt the hair on the back of their necks stand on end and started muttering profanities in Coptic Sumerian.

Thing is, this is an absolute necessity for two reasons - first, we don't employ professors. Our instructors are people that used to work in the field. They know how to do one thing - whatever job it is they're training students how to do. What they don't know, at least not right off the bat, is how to write homework that makes sense, how to write fair tests, how to set grading criteria, how to write up a syllabus, how to pick a textbook, or any of that. Consequently, all of the academic paperwork has to be taken off their hands so they can do what they do best, which is show someone else how to do what they know how to do. Another advantage of this approach is that, if an instructor decides they've had enough and it's time to go back to the field - and that does happen - another qualified instructor can pick up right where the syllabus left off without drastically changing what's taught in the class.

It's not all bad for instructors, though...

Adjuncts? What are those?

You know how, in most universities these days, graduate students and adjunct professors teach undergraduate classes in exchange for just enough to buy some ramen and boil some water?

We don't do that.

Oh, don't get me wrong, we have part-time instructors too, but, for the most part, they're part-time because they already have full-time jobs in the field and don't want to leave. It's not that we're not willing to hire them full-time - in fact, given our rather aggressive schedule, we usually prefer instructors we can hire full-time because they're much more flexible. However, there are certain topics we teach that make far more money in the field than any college can afford to pay without effectively doubling or tripling tuition. Since it seems a little unfair to charge students who make less than $15/hour enough in tuition to pay an instructor the low- to mid-six figures they're capable of earning for the same skill set in the private sector, we take what we can get when and where we can get it.

Oh, and graduate students? Students don't teach students at our school. Period, end of discussion. For what we charge in tuition, students deserve to be taught by people that actually know what they're talking about.

Wait, flexibility?

Yes, flexibility. A lot of our students have day jobs. What does that means for us? It means we teach at night. Until 10:30. Some students, however, work in the afternoons, so we also teach in the mornings, starting at 8:00. Some instructors end up working split shifts, teaching a class for a few hours in the early morning, then heading home for a nap and coming back in the evening to teach the same class to a different group of students. We try to avoid that, but it happens from time to time. We're even looking into weekend courses.

Student schedules must be a mess, then.

Quite the contrary. Students pick a block upon admission - morning, afternoon, or evening. Each block is filled with classes and takes about 4.5 hours to complete from start to finish. Assuming they pass their classes, don't take a leave of absence, or request a block change, they'll stay in that block from start to finish and have their schedule automatically chosen for them all the way through. No fuss, no drama, no "I hope I can get into that class," none of that.

If they fail a class and have to retake it, things start to get a little complicated, but only a little - it happens enough where we're prepared for it. At worst, they'll come back in a phase or two when they can hop back on to their original block schedule.

Phase?

Oh, right - you know those "semesters", "quarters", or whatever that traditional schools have? Yeah, they don't exist where I work. We have six week phases. You start class, you do your homework, you sit in lectures, you participate in some labs, and six weeks later you take your final. Then, the following week, you start another phase with another set of classes.

No rest for the weary.

Didn't you say you were going to talk about what it's like to work there?

Indeed I did, and this is as good of time as any to bring up a rather interesting point - because of the constant, grueling schedule, working as an IT Manager here is more like working in IT at a casino or a retail establishment than a school. Maintenance is done in very tight windows that assiduously avoids any downtime for students or instructors as much as possible. Scripting is used religiously - if something can be done repeatedly, it can be done automatically at 0300 on a Sunday. Network upgrades are done very carefully, usually during one of the four weeks a year that we're not holding classes. Even then, though, the building is open and staff is working.

Coincidentally, as awkward as this is for IT, remember that instructors and department heads are operating under the same constraints. There's no time to completely overhaul a class between one phase and the next, so all class changes and improvements must be done iteratively. If you'd like, you can think of each phase as a six week scrum.

Back up a second. If the people that are teaching the students aren't in charge of what's in the curriculum, how do you know the students are learning the right material?

Oh, that's easy - we ask employers. In fact, even department chairs don't get to make arbitrary changes to the curriculum without asking a committee of employers about the possible change or without soliciting input from employers about other changes they'd rather see instead.

A good example of the difference between our approach and a university would be the use of Linux in our curriculum. At UNR, Linux is all over the place, especially in the Computer Science program, which makes sense - it costs nothing to install and the code is open source, which makes it really easy to show future programmers what's going on, where, and why. Where I work, however, our curriculum is determined by our students' future employers, and, truth is, at least in Reno, more Linux in our curriculum would be nice, but not as nice as what we already have in there. Thing is, employers think it would be "nice" if our students knew more about Linux; on the other hand, employers think it's "imperative" that they know something about Cisco and Windows. Consequently, when we teach Linux, we have to be kind of sneaky about it - if it doesn't fit in a class we already teach that has already been approved by the employers, we can't use it.

It's not that we don't want to teach Linux - it's just that the people that hire our students would rather they learn just about anything else instead first. Believe me, I asked.

So, how do you pick which programs to teach?

This is where I'll pause and point out I'm an IT Manager, not an Academic Dean, so my understanding of the details is square in the middle of what I like to affectionately think of as the "Dunning-Kruger Zone". However, from what I've been able to piece together, it looks something like this:

1. What skills are employers looking for that they're not getting enough of from the community right now?
2. Can we find people in that field that are willing to teach these skills?
3. Are students willing to learn those skills?

The last point is actually a pretty big issue. Our best paying and highest placing programs after graduation are also frequently our least popular. Why? Because a lot of students think those programs look too hard for them. Maybe the program takes to long, maybe the program promises to teach a set of skills that the prospective student can't even conceptualize. Which actually brings something else up...

We have to start from scratch.

So, what, like "not fast food?"

No, scratchier.

Oh, okay! Scratch!

Still not scratchy enough.

Now?

Almost there...

Uh...

Perfect.

A couple of months back, I had to take over an Introduction to Computers course at work. The class itself is pretty straightforward - the first half of it focuses on typing exercises, with the latter half focusing on using Microsoft Word to write a basic letter. Based on my previous IT consulting experience, I knew that there was a better-than-even chance that I might go too fast, so I was encouraging them to raise their hands and stop me if that happened. It's not because the class was stupid or I was so smart - it's just that, well, my father's a programmer who got the family a computer when I was three, which was over thirty years ago. Long story short, I've been eating, drinking, breathing, and sleeping computers almost since birth while I was partially raised by someone who's been making a living doing the same for longer than I was alive. When you're exposed to something that long and that early, there are a lot of assumptions you take for granted, like "double-clicking on something opens it", "Delete and Backspace do different things", "the left mouse button does something different from the right", and "you really don't need a mouse to use a computer", among other things. Trouble is - and I knew this from working in the field - most people haven't spent literally decades internalizing these lessons. 

Don't get what I mean? Perhaps this will help:

Bear in mind that the computer they were struggling with is not only the same computer I had at home (more or less - ours was an Apple ][e, not the Apple ][+ shown in the video), it was also the same computer that I and my classmates saw in every single computer lab from 1985 until the early '90s. Seriously, those things were the Volkswagen Beetles of the early educational computing world. It's hard to overstate how ubiquitous those things were in schools. If you put one in front of me right now and told me to use it, I'd be halfway to finishing this blog post on it in no time. The kids in the video, however, never had to deal with a computer like that, so all the things I took for granted growing up - flipping a disk over, inserting a disk in general, typing simple commands at a prompt to make something happen (yes, I remember PR#6) - are completely lost on them. They never had to deal with it.

Okay, maybe that's not a fair example. How about a Sony Walkman? That's easy enough, right?

With a little bit of trial and effort, they eventually figure it out... sort of. Again, though, it's easy to forget when you were raised around these things and everyone had one that there's really nothing particularly intuitive or obvious about a cassette tape player if you've never held a cassette in your hand in your entire life. 

Now, pretend those weren't naturally inquisitive kids figuring out a Walkman but were instead adults - many of them somewhat older - trying to figure out a computer for the first time. 

Wait, what's that? The first time? 

How is it possible for any American to use a computer for the first time in the 21st century, you ask? Does Northern Nevada have a surprisingly large Amish population or something? No, and that's not the crazy part. Most people in the class I was teaching that hadn't meaningfully used a computer before were younger than me. A lot of them were students in their early 20's. Maybe a little younger. The older students had at least used a computer or two at work at some point in their lives.

But, what about Computer Literacy courses? Computer labs in elementary schools? Did their parents sign permission slips exempting them along with the sex ed waivers or something?

No, but here's the thing - and, if you're the type of person to read blogs, this is going to be near-impossible to believe - a lot of people, and I mean a lot of people, don't actually have computers at home. Even now. Or, if they do have a computer at home, they rarely power it on and never, ever let their children touch it. After all, if you're a financially struggling parent with minimal computer literacy, spending a few hundred dollars on anything is a stretch, much less something you barely understand how to use. Add in a few moral panics about social media and viruses and you'll be firmly convinced that, if your child touches your computer, they'll break your expensive computer on the way out the door and get kidnapped by a sexual predator they met online on the way to school. Naturally, after being told by their parents that "computers are forbidden" over and over again, when children actually get a chance to touch one at school, they'll either be too afraid to do anything or, just as likely, they'll just ignore it at school just like they learned to at home. 

So, what we have to do where I work is not only teach people that have never had a real chance to use a computer before how to use a computer - all jobs these days are requiring them in some capacity or another - we also have to overcome that initial fear of computers that has been purposefully instilled in them their entire lives. Adding insult to injury, we have exactly six weeks to somehow accomplish this educational and psychological breakthrough; if we don't succeed, we have to fail them and they'll have to retake the course, only next time they'll be carrying the added internal shame of failing one of their first courses. Not surprisingly, that really doesn't help.

This, coincidentally, comes back to why some of our best paying programs are also our least popular - the ones that pay the most use computers extensively, either to keep networks running, or manipulate robots, or something else entirely. The most popular programs are the ones that use computers in their curriculum as little as humanly possible.

This looks like as good of a stopping point as any - next time, I'll discuss what happens to the students when they're done and some of the things we have to be careful about along the way, along with a little more detail about the experience of actually working at a for-profit college.

***
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Working at a For-Profit College - Why Do They Exist?

Morrison University

Last night, the local news in Reno announced that Morrison University, a for-profit university, was closing its doors due to Anthem Education, its corporate parent, filing for Chapter 11. This follows an extended meltdown of Corinthian Colleges, which is currently undergoing a criminal probe, ongoing financial issues at ITT Tech, and increasing pressure on the University of Phoenix over its how it conducts its operations and the programs it offers to veterans. Since I currently work at a for-profit college and have been for almost a year, I'm understandably... not alarmed, but concerned about the direction my employer's industry is going. While reading about the state of the industry I work in, however, I noticed something missing - our side of the story.

So what's it like working at a for-profit school, anyway?

Before I begin, I'll point out that I'm not a cheerleader. If you want to hear stories about how for-profit schools change students' lives for the better, leads them to better opportunities, and so on, contact the admissions department of any nearby school. They'll be happy to chat your ear off about all of the success stories they've seen, tell you all about our placement rate, and so on. That's not why I'm writing this today. I'll also point out that I'm rather fond of my job and rather fond of my employer, so if you're looking for a harsh exposé on the for-profit college sector, that's also not why I'm here. There are plenty of those already anyway. So, with that, let's begin.

Why do for-profit colleges exist and why do students enroll in them?

[NOTE: When I first started this post, I expected this section to be a couple of paragraphs at most. As I started writing, I realized this section deserved its own post, so I'll pick up on what it's like to work at a for-profit college in subsequent posts.]

In many countries, students get the Sorting Hat placed upon them fairly early in life - in the early teens, if they're academically inclined, they'll be placed on a university track, where students experience demanding college prep courses. If they're not, they're placed on a vocational track, where students receive training in various careers, ultimately focusing on a particular career of their choice by the end of graduation.

The United States, however, doesn't do this for a variety of cultural and financial reasons. Culturally, we're highly allergic to telling people what they can and can't do, and this allergy turns anaphylactic when we talk about our children. No parent wants some faceless bureaucrat (okay, highly accessible public school teacher or school administrator, but they're all government workers and government workers in America are automatically "faceless others" by default, right?) telling them that their child isn't good enough to go to the best schools and become cowboy astronauts, even if - no, especially if - that's true. Financially, meanwhile, it's a lot less expensive to hand a student a book or two and place them in a desk than it is to buy expensive shop equipment and hire instructors at halfway competitive wages away from industry jobs to teach students how to use the shop equipment without inadvertently lighting themselves on fire. Put the two factors together and you get a muddled mess of an education system where, theoretically, every student is placed on a "college bound" track, but where in practice, a majority of American college students have to take remedial education courses after high school to prepare themselves for college-level coursework and absolutely nobody comes out of high school with any sort of useful trade skills.

Why didn't school teach me what these white plastic things are and how to open them?

Once students graduate and become adults, however, we're more than happy to let them sort themselves as they wish. Trouble is, most companies would rather spend as little time as possible training employees and more time getting useful, productive, profitable work out of them. Consequently, most jobs that pay tolerably well require some sort of post-secondary training, either in the form of a college diploma, an accepted industry certification, or some other proof that the prospective employee has spent some of their own time and money on learning how to do the job they're applying for.

This job requires a Master's in Computer Information Systems, CompTIA A+  and Security+ certifications, and at least five years of previous job experience.

To meet this need, the United States has two parallel tracks of post-secondary education available. The first track is the traditional university system, which descended from the old universities in Europe and New England and has since been radically expanded; the second track, meanwhile, are vocational schools. Both tracks have been around for quite some time and have interbred considerably; land-grant universities were originally conceived as vocational-oriented universities. After World War 2 ended and the Cold War started in earnest, however, the United States, noting that people with university educations were generally paid better than their vocational counterparts and noting that we needed more scientists to blow stuff up, collectively decided to throw as many people into the university system as possible.

There have been a few problems with this, though.

For starters, universities were originally designed to teach students how to embrace a "life of the mind". This had roots in universities' original role as "finishing schools" - they were more about the connections made between fellow aristocratic and wealthy classmates and instilling similar interests than actual educational attainment or (the horror!) learning how to work. Since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, universities have largely transitioned from a philosophical "life of the mind" to a focus on theory - a scientific "life of the mind" - over practice, educating students on how the world should be, at least from the view of the Ivory Tower. In order for this focus on the theoretical over the practical to be possible, universities, which were already naturally insular to protect their aristocratic clientele, increasingly became worlds unto themselves, as separated as possible from the practical world outside; this separation, when taken too far, that has led to several far-reaching consequences.

Another issue with university educations is cost - not just money but time. Since university educations focus on theory, it's important to not only understand the theoretical underpinnings of whatever field of study a student chooses to follow, they also have to understand some of the theoretical underpinnings of those theoretical underpinnings. For example, a Computer Science university student, who normally would end up as some sort of programmer after college, wouldn't just need to know the theory of how programming languages work - they also need to know the mathematical theories that underlie the theories that underpin programming languages. Otherwise, there are large sets of programming problems that are simply unsolvable; linear algebra, for example, is used extensively when dealing with large, sparse data sets, like simulating whether there are dust particles in a particular simulated cube of air, or large demographic simulations. For most students, this takes a minimum of 4-5 years, with many Computer Science students these days opting to spend 2-3 more years in school and get a post-graduate degree of some sort. This sometimes means that professionals aren't even starting their careers until their mid to late twenties; in order for that to be financially possible, either someone in the family needs to support the student, the student needs to receive funding (usually student loans) from another source for several years, and/or the student has to pick up some part-time employment somewhere to make ends meet.

Finally, there's the simple matter of aptitude. Not everyone is interested in going to school for several years as an adult, no matter what the financial end result might presumably be. Not everyone possesses the necessary academic talent. Not everyone has the required time management or study skills. Some people are just practical-minded people and have no interest in living a "life of the mind" - they want to go out and do something without spending years of their lives dedicated toward establishing why that something did anything in the first place. There's nothing wrong with this - though it certainly doesn't hurt for, say, a well driller to understand the underlying geology that they're drilling into, it's usually not imperative for them to understand it as fully as a geologist.

So what's the alternative? In a theoretically ideal world, public community colleges. They're cheaper than universities and, frankly, for-profit vocational schools. An Associates degree usually only requires two years, which is considerably shorter than the four or more required for a Bachelor's or a Master's. They're usually a little smaller, which keeps them from getting quite as insulated as larger universities. The academic coursework is usually considerably more relaxed. So what's the problem?

Well, who runs public community colleges? Oh right - the same people that run universities.

This is a problem for a couple of reasons. First, the people running universities are going to be more interested in running universities, not in making sure a bunch of students that wouldn't make the cut at their carefully manicured and groomed institution of higher learning actually get a decent education. Secondly, when the people running universities actually take an interest in running community colleges, they'll do what anyone else that spent their lives not running community colleges would do - they'll run the community college like a university. Consequently, if you want to study to become a bricklayer, you'll need 3 Credits of "Diversity", 6 Credits of Communications/English, 3 Credits of Social Science, 3 Credits of Human Relations, 3 Credits of US and Nevada Constitutions, 3 Credits of Science, and 3 Credits of Mathematics, most of which need to be taken before you can even think about taking a class that lets you touch an actual brick and lay it on something. The goal, of course, is to provide a "well-rounded education" for someone that just wants to learn how to lay bricks; that these "General Education" requirements happen to provide teaching jobs to otherwise employment-challenged liberal arts university graduates is just a textbook example of regulatory capture nice side effect.

This is where for-profit vocational schools step in.

Unlike a public community college, a good for-profit vocational school is accountable to two groups of people - the prospective students that want to get in, get the skills they want and only those skills, and get out, and the people that are interested in hiring those students. The result, when everything goes well, is a faster paced, far more focused education that provides the students exactly with the skills they need to find work in the field and provides employers with fresh labor with precisely the skills they're looking for. Where things go wrong is when the school stops listening to one or both of those two groups, usually because the school is busy listening to a third group. In the case of the schools listed above, all of them share one common trait - they are also accountable to these guys:

What's better than a public school? How about a publicly traded school, preferably funded through piles of government debt? What could possibly go wrong that hasn't gone wrong with the economy since, oh, 2008 or so?

The trouble with public stockholders is most of them are interested in making a profit right now, not after a few years of steady growth. Since most stocks don't pay dividends anymore, this puts pressure on management of any publicly traded company to pursue business decisions that boost profitability immediately, thus quickly boosting the stock price, regardless of what that'll do to the company or its customers in the long term. For a publicly traded college, this means letting anyone with a pulse into any program they want, regardless of whether they have an aptitude for that program or whether that program will lead to a job, and jacking the tuition as high as someone is willing to pay. Sure, it'll lead to the college's reputation in the employment community becoming more radioactive than Pripyat and it'll lead to most of the college's graduates' credit scores becoming more radioactive than Mayak after they refuse to pay back loans for a college education that didn't do them an ounce of good, but it'll make the stock look good right now, which will let the stockholders sell right now, which will let them profit...

Right.

Luckily, my employer isn't publicly traded.

Tomorrow I'll dig into what it's like to actually work in a for-profit college, along with how it's different from a more traditional university approach.

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