The Learning Cloud

Quality AND cost

The article excerpted below should remove any doubts that the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education (recently announced by President Bush's Secretary of Education, Margaret Spelling) will focus on accountability -- the improvement and reporting of institutional performance -- and the federal role in assuring accountability.

UT board vet hopes to make quality and cost national issues
By Matthew Tresaugue, Houston Chronicle (9/27/2005)

Charles Miller did not become the chairman of a new national commission on higher education to leave well enough alone. The retired Houston money manager brings to the unpaid post an understanding of how colleges and universities work and specific ideas on what should be done. He also is a friend and informal adviser to Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who appointed Miller to lead the 19-member panel last week. Spellings wants the group to explore issues such as access, affordability and America's competitiveness globally, and to devise a national strategy for higher education.  ....  Miller is known for a sharp mind and gravitas. He leans to the right politically, but has worked effectively with Democrats. He also is a strong proponent of accountability, once advocating mandatory testing for college students. "He always wants to know if there is another way of doing something," said Arturo Madrid, a commission member and professor of humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio.  Read more ...

Addressing IP issues in Arizona

The article excerpted and linked below underscores how the three large public universities in Arizona are cooperating to share online courses and programs as a way to address classroom capacity issues and students' need for more flexible academic program and course options.  If the universities would also apply the common course redesign strategy to the courses that they are teaching in common and articulating with each other, then they could also improve learning accountability (better learning outcomes) and improve the credit-hour capacity of the faculty, thereby improving expense accountability and the affordability of access.  Perhaps are they are doing exactly that, and the reporter failed to mention it.

Arizona universities expand online courses
By Eric Swedlund, ARIZONA DAILY STAR

Arizona's universities will deliver more than 115,000 credit hours to students via the internet this year. The growing demand for distance-learning services has the Arizona Board of Regents expanding online course offerings at the three state universities. The Arizona Universities Network - AZUN for short - and a new Web portal linking all the online course offerings at the University of Arizona, Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University are part of an effort now, led by NAU, to harness the growth in demand for online courses. Read more ...

Outsourced grading

The Kentucky Community and Technical College System, under the leadership of President Mike McCall, is focused on improving system and institutional performance in order to fulfill its mission of affordable access to a quality education.  I recently visitied there and found that KCTCS is leading the way in accountability and innovation, as this excerpt from Inside Higher Ed makes clear

Outsourced Grading

Many colleges these days outsource their bookstores or cafeterias or dormitories, based on the idea that private businesses may be able to provide better service at lower prices. Not everyone agrees with that idea, to be sure, but outsourcing of non-academic functions has become common. But what about academic functions? In a move that may take outsourcing past traditional levels, Kentucky’s community colleges this fall have started a pilot project in which an outside company is reading and providing evaluations of student essays in freshman composition courses. The program is small to date — only 48 students are having their papers assessed in this way — but Kentucky officials are enthusiastic about the potential for expanding the effort. And the company — Smarthinking — sees this as a service it would like to offer other colleges. Read more ...

"No Child Left Behind" for colleges

A few days after announcing the creation of a "Commission on the Future of Higher Education," Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings submitted to Q & A following her speech at the National Press Club on 9/21.  One exchange paraphrased and reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education is particularly pointed:

Q. "Does the administration have plans to develop an accountability system for higher education -- a sort of "No Child Left Behind" for colleges?"

A. "I don't know yet. Public-policy makers lack the information to figure out what to do. We have to start with information before we start with accountability. ... I can't think of any other area of public policy where we have so little information to act on."

Chronicle subscribers can read more ...

Market smart and mission centered

University Business has excerpted Remaking the American University by Robert Zemsky, Gregory R. Wegner, and William F. Massy. The excerpt goes a long way toward explaining how higher education acts as a market -- in particular, how some "market smart" institutions are not necessarily "mission centered" and are even resistant to public scrutiny of their learning outcomes other than their six-year graduation rates.  The excerpt offers insights into why higher education is becoming more a private good than a public good, even in the market for public colleges and universities where unchecked costs are driving up price (tuition) because someone (a combination of student and government) will pay the price.

For additional insights into the book's content and point of view, you might also want to read the interview of the authors conducted by Inside Higher Ed .

Why outsource IT?

A recent report from the Institute for Higher Education Policy, Is outsourcing part of the solution to the higher education cost dilemma, was equivocal in answering its own question. What interested me, however, was the report's synopsis of a recent NACUBO survey on outsourcing. Because I work for SunGard Collegis, a company that operates solely in the higher education market to provided outsourced IT management and related academic and administrative support services, I was pleased to learn, for example, that 79% of respondents would consider or are already outsourcing IT. Why would traditional colleges and universities consider outsourcing IT? There are many reasons, but three main reasons stand out in connection with the institutional performance theme of this blog:

• Improve student, faculty, and staff satisfaction with the quality and responsiveness of baseline IT systems and services.
• Position the institution to use IT innovatively to redesign academic and administrative service processes, including instruction, for the purpose of accountably improving service quality, flexibility, and unit cost structure.
• Take advantage of external expertise in academic and administrative service process redesign to support and manage performance improvement initiatives.

In other words, the issue is not whether outsourcing IT will reduce IT costs.  It may or may not, depending on the existing level of investment in IT.  But without a quality, accessible, responsive IT and information resource infrastructure / service environment, there is no way that an institution can hope to improve the quality and flexibility of its other services, including instruction, while simultaneously reducing their unit costs.  IT is a necessary ingredient in any systemic attempt to improve institutional performance, but, more to the point, only the combination of a high-performing IT organization and an institutional commitment to IT-enabled innovation will suffice to create a high performance institution.

Federal regulation on the horizon?

Through this blog, I've argued that measurably improving performance is higher education’s highest priority. I infer from the article below that the external political pressures on higher education to improve its performance have reached a critical point – indeed, that if higher education doesn't respond to performance pressures, then the US Department of Education may impose new performance regulations. Will the new commission referenced in the article have more to say than was said in the recent report of the National Commission on Accountability in Higher Education? For example, will the new commission, unlike the NCAHE, recognize that performance improvements will require systemic technology-enabled academic and administrative service process redesign? Chronicle subscribers who want a more complete account of the new commission than is given in the Associated Press article linked below can go to http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/09/2005092001n.htm

Federal panel to strategize for higher ed
By Justin Pope, The Associated Press

America's system of colleges and universities is famously decentralized, producing experimentation and variety but making it hard to tackle big-picture issues such as access and affordability on a national scale. Today, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings plans to announce a major initiative to address that problem: a commission charged with developing "a comprehensive national strategy for post-secondary education," according to a speech she plans to deliver today. The commission will be led by Charles Miller, former chairman of the board of regents of the University of Texas system. Read more ...

Accountability, affordability, and efficiency

Here's another example of a state, South Carolina, in which the social compact between the state and its public colleges and universities appears to be broken.

Tuition hikes stir debate at hearing
By Jeff Stensland, Staff Writer for The State.com

ROCK HILL — Gov. Mark Sanford said Tuesday that college tuition in South Carolina is outpacing families’ ability to pay and he will once again call for capping tuition hikes in his annual budget proposal. Sanford met with higher education officials at Winthrop University in the first in a series of statewide public budget hearings. “We’ve got to look at some way to better coordinate the higher education system to make it more accountable, more efficient and more affordable,” Sanford said   Read more ...

The Quiet Crisis

University Business interviewed Peter Smith, author of The Quiet Crisis (Anker Publishing), a new book that claims higher education is failing America. Peter, former Congressman and former president of Cal State University-Monterey Bay, is an astute observer or higher education. He offered interviewers Susan Walsh Veronikas (Texas Tech University) and Michael F. Shaughnessy (Eastern New Mexico University) this comment, among many other interesting responses.

"Higher education, as currently structured, is expensive in both time and cost. That is why we are losing market share to all sorts of other opportunities for learning. Higher education has to stop thinking that it’s the only game in town. Some data suggests that more than half of all people going to school now aren’t going to higher education in traditional mode, postsecondary. I don’t know if we have actually reached that point or not, but we simply have to wake up and understand that in this media-rich world, students can, will, and are shopping in different places for programs that they believe will meet their needs."

Higher ed's growth demographics

According to the article below published on 9/12/05 by Rebecca Aronauer in the Chronicle of Higher education, demand for a higher education will continue to increase enrollments through at least 2014. Of course, that will require nonprofit higher education to increase its capacity for access if it is to participate in the market's growth. This is a good time for higher education to realize that it could use IT to become more productive and more responsive to demand without having to lay off faculty and staff as a result of increased productivity. In contrast, layoffs have recently been common in the commercial sector because demand became stagnant or declined at the same time that productivity increased under the force of technology. 

College Enrollments Are Expected to Continue Rising Through 2014, Report Says

Enrollment at degree-granting colleges and universities will continue an upward trajectory until at least 2014, according to projections released on Friday by the National Center for Education Statistics. The projections, which appear in an annual report from the Education Department's statistical arm, include predictions on graduates, teachers, and expenditures for degree-granting institutions as well as for elementary and secondary schools. Total college enrollment is expected to go up by 15 percent to 20 percent from 2002 to 2014 at degree-granting institutions. Considered by type of degree, the center predicts a 16-percent rise in undergraduate enrollment, a 22-percent rise in graduate enrollment, and a 32-percent rise in enrollment for first professional degrees. Private-college enrollment is expected increase 17 percent, and public-college enrollment 19 percent. The growth is expected to be seen in every demographic segment. Enrollment of full-time students is projected to rise 20 percent and of part-timers to grow 14 percent. The center also predicts a 16-percent jump in students who are 18 to 24 years old and a 5-percent increase in students 35 years old and over. The report, "Projections of Education Statistics to 2014," indicates that trends outlined in last year's report are likely to continue.