The Learning Cloud

Is privatization of public institutions about price or cost?

The opinion piece below by Nicholas Van Hoffman at first glance gives the impression that states have retreated from funding their public universities.  Indeed, the percentage of tax dollars going to higher education in most states is shrinking.  Those who read further will discover that Van Hoffman also cites the process by which public schools receive state and federal dollars as problematic -- relatively more tuition grants and loans through the student than direct funds to the institution, a process that Van Hoffman claims serves private institutions well and, perhaps, favors them over public institutions.  Van Hoffman ends his article by citing the deleterious effect of current public funding models on poor and middle class students, who must burden themselves with debt or their parents with an inadequate financial base for retirement. 

In my opinion, however, the story shouldn't end there. The missing part of the story was captured by Larry Faulkner, President of the University of Texas at Austin, when he keynoted the annual 2005 meeting of the American Council on Education. Connecting price (tuition) to cost, Faulkner said, “We must address costs. More specifically, we must mount serious, effective efforts to limit the rate of growth in the educational cost per student. It is in the range of 4.5 percent per year, a substantially inflationary figure, but more important, a figure significantly larger than the long-term growth rate of the economy.”

As long as they can avoid putting relatively wealthy parents and students at financial risk, many private institutions have little incentive to limit costs. In contrast, public institutions arguably have an obligation to reduce or stabilize unit costs -- costs per student -- and that is the untold story in Van Hoffman's article below. The trend toward privatization of public institutions reflects, in part, a rejection by public institutions of the obligation to mitigate the spiraling cost of educating a student, which the wise use of information technology would permit.

The Increasingly Private Public School
by Nicholas Van Hoffman for The Nation, October 25, 2005

They call it a public institution and it sounds like one from its name, but 92 percent of the money to run the University of Virginia comes from private sources. At the University of Michigan the figure is 82 percent; at the University of Illinois a mere 75 percent. The privatization of the nation's greatest, once-public institutions of higher learning is well under way. "America is rapidly privatizing its public colleges and universities, whose mission used to be to serve the public good," Katharine Lyall, president emeritus of the University of Wisconsin, told the New York Times. "Public control is slipping away." Graham Spanier, president of Pennsylvania State University, blames never-ending tuition increases on "public higher education's slow slide toward privatization." (Eighty-seven percent of his budget now comes from private sources.)  Read more ...

Preserve the status quo: Podcast!

I'm commenting on the article excerpted below because the use of the technology (podcasting) it describes appears to be regressive. I do believe that podcasting has some educational uses. One of those may be, as the report suggests, capturing the lecture attended by a student who later and for whatever reason would like to review the lecture. But that idea and the idea of letting students avoid the live lecture via its podcast appear to enshrine the lecture as the most effective instructional methodology. There is a mountain of evidence, much of it related to the reporter's opening observations, suggesting that the only redeeming value of the lecture is its opportunity to inspire and motivate, which it too seldom seizes. So, to capture 50-minute lectures in audio format and suggest that students can learn from listening to them (for 50 minutes) is akin to sending students to the library to read and get smart. Teaching and instruction should about guided and individually structured learning. Today's technologies give us so many new opportunities to refocus teaching away from the lecture (as content delivery featuring occasionally inspiring and motivating comments) and onto more engaging methodologies for motivating students to become active learners. Yes, podcasting can be a convenience for students when overlaid on the traditional lecture model, but can't we do better by our students with our investments in IT? What do you think?

Lectures on the Go: As more colleges use 'coursecasting,' professors are split on its place in teaching
By Brock Read, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 28, 2005

Take your typical college student — bright, curious, but probably a bit sleep-deprived and short on attention span. Stick that student in a lecture hall with a professor droning on for 50 minutes about macroeconomics or teleology. Then give the student a laptop with wireless access to the Internet, which lets him or her furtively chat with friends via instant-messenger software. What you have is a situation in which a professor's teachings do not completely sink in, says Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, an assistant professor of international relations at American University. That scenario is all too familiar to Mr. Jackson, who aptly describes his speaking style as "blitzkrieg speed" and his students as voracious consumers of technology. But the professor says he no longer worries, as he once did, that pieces of his lectures will slip through the cracks. And for that, he credits a technology known as podcasting. Podcasting allows anyone with a microphone and an Internet connection to create audio files that others can download automatically to their iPods or similar digital-audio players. Listeners can download the files one at a time, or they can subscribe to a podcast and have a series of recordings transferred to their players whenever they hook the devices up to their computers. Podcasts allow students to go over passages while, for example, working out at the gym or jogging to lunch. More and more professors, including Mr. Jackson, are turning to the technology to record their lectures and send them to their students, in what many are calling "coursecasting." The portability of coursecasting, its proponents say, makes the technology ideal for students who fall behind in class or those for whom English is a second language. And some advocates say that coursecasting can be more than just a review tool, that it can also enliven classroom interaction and help lecturers critique themselves. But many professors remain wary of the technology. Critics suggest that it will lead to empty classrooms or serve as a crutch for late-sleeping students, and some worry about coursecasting's intellectual-property implications.  Chronicle subscribers can read more, if they haven't already read enough.

The right way to look at ROI in IT

Steve Reynolds, my friend and SunGard Collegis colleague, called to my attention to an article by Edward J. Leach, VP of the League for Innovation in the Community College. In Community and Technical Colleges, Information Technology, and Revolutionary Times, Ed describes the role of IT in the community college and the issues attaching to that role in the years ahead. One paragraph particularly caught my attention -- the italics are mine.

"Funding for large- and small-scale information technology projects will continue to be an issue for many community and technical colleges. Still, through thoughtful strategic planning and careful negotiations with key vendors, colleges with tight budgets can find opportunities to upgrade and deploy information technology advances, especially those improvements that are academic rather than administrative investments. Rightfully so, past experiences with cost overruns as well as funding concerns will move colleges to more closely examine the connection, if any, between dollars spent in information technology improvements and increases in student achievement and employee performance. Although some community and technical colleges have deferred recent large-scale information technology projects because of lack of sufficient funding, many institutions will once again consider undertaking major IT-related projects, especially at those institutions recently able to pass bond measures."

Lumina Foundation blog on affordability of access

According to a blog sponsored by the Lumina Foundation:

In higher education, no issue is more important than affordability -- keeping the doors of opportunity open, particularly for students from low-income groups. Over the past several years, dramatic increases in college costs have raised the issue's importance even further. To emphasize this issue and begin a national dialogue, Lumina Foundation, in collaboration with the James B. Hunt, Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy, will sponsor a national invitational summit on November 2, 2005. More...

The Foundation has selected and published 10 papers on its "course corrections" agenda of containing tuition increases at http://www.collegecosts.info/solutions/.

The meaning of "moderate"

Compounded annually, a 7 percent tuition increase would approximately double tuition in 10 years time.  It's highly unlikely that median or mean income will double over the next 10 years! Does the College Board really consider a 7 percent rate of tuition increase moderate? Or is that the view from the Chronicle of Higher Education -- see the Chronicle excerpt below. It's certainly not the view reported by Peter Y. Hong for the Los Angeles Times in an article titled Financial Aid Can't Keep Up With College Tuition: The result, two reports say, is that enrollment and graduation rates hinge on family income.

Public Colleges Tame Tuition Costs, but Poorer Students Fall Behind
By Elizabeth F. Farrell, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 19, 2005

Public four-year colleges have managed to rein in the escalating cost of tuition at their institutions, according to the College Board's annual tuition survey, released on Tuesday. But thanks to colleges' increasing use of merit-based aid instead of need-based aid, and the stagnating value of Pell Grants, needy students found it more difficult to finance their higher education. The survey, which the College Board presented in three reports, found that tuition at public four-year colleges rose by 7 percent in 2005-6, the smallest growth in four years, and a much lower rate than last year's 10-percent surge. Tuition increases also slowed at public two-year colleges, rising only 5 percent, the smallest increase in three years. At private four-year colleges, however, tuition rose 6 percent, identical to last year, and more than the 5-percent increase in 2003-4. In the 2005-6 academic year, average tuition and fees at four-year public colleges rose $365, to $5,491, per year. The average cost of attending a two-year public institution edged up $112, to $2,191, and tuition and fees at four-year private nonprofit institutions rose $1,190, to an average of $29,026. Chronicle subscribers can read more ...

The government weighs in on credit transfer

The brief excerpt below points to one of the major learning accountability issues facing higher education: accounting for students' prior learning by transferring credit.

Report Recommends Change in Credit-Transfer Policy for Colleges That Receive Federal Student Aid
By Karin Fischer, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 19, 2005

Congress should prevent colleges eligible for federal student aid from rejecting academic credits earned by transfer students at institutions accredited by national agencies, the Government Accountability Office said in a report released on Tuesday. The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, recommended that lawmakers amend the Higher Education Act to require colleges to issue a statement saying they will not use an institution's type of accreditation to determine which of its courses are creditworthy. "Because of the federal government's large investment in student financial aid, it is in the best interest of taxpayers that transfer students do not unnecessarily repeat course work, since such repetition could result in additional financial-aid awards," the report states. Chronicle subscribers can read more ...

Goals of the new national commission on the future of higher education

Though the new national commission may not have formally adopted it goals yet, a recent report in the Chronicle of Higher Education -- Chronicle Subscribers can go to http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/10/2005101801n.htm -- offers us some insight by noting that:

"The Education Department says the commission's main focus in not the reauthorization, but bigger-picture issues like access, affordability, accountability, and work-force preparedness."

"So far, the secretary [Margaret Spellings] has defined the commission's task in the broadest of terms, saying that it will tackle such global issues as access, affordability, accountability, and productivity."

Parents understand performance

The parents of today's traditional-age first-year students are demanding attention to the ROI generated by their investments in a college education for their sons and daughters. They have their eyes not only on the now diminishing gap between the earning power of a high school diploma and that of a college degree, but on the way that colleges are spending their resources while relentlessly increasing tuition. The excerpt below makes the point.

The High Cost of College: an Increasingly Hard Sell
By William Strauss and Neil Howe, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 21, 2005

When we have raised the issue, we have found that, far more than boomers, Gen Xers are likely to recall college in hindsight as a waste of time and money. Their recollection of their own college years has morphed into a profound skepticism bordering on cynicism, a demand for standards and accountability, and a keen interest in the bottom line. Considering what they have done as school parents, it's not hard to predict how they will behave as college parents. This get-real generation will focus on standards, transparency, measurable results, accountability, and (especially) cost. They will ask, perhaps very pointedly, whether courses and the professors who teach them are worth the money. After carefully checking out the college dorms, food, gyms, and career-counseling services, they will ask about "ROI" (return on investment). Some will wonder whether class discussions focusing on issues of the 60s and 70s, still so intriguing to many boomer professors, teach anything their kids need in the workplace. Many will ask why, in recent decades, whatever the economic climate, higher education has relentlessly risen in cost relative to inflation. At colleges with large endowments, many will ask why, especially in those years that endowments have grown significantly, keeping tuition low hasn't been given a high priority in the use of endowment funds. Many will ask whether student loans are, in fact, "financial aid" or rather just an inducement to enroll — much as car loans are not "car aid" but a mere inducement to buy a car. Chronicle subscribers can read more ...

More on new national commission

Economics professor Rich Vedder of Ohio University is a member of the new national commission on the future of higher education. His voice should be a persuasive one, as he comes to his new duty informed by data. He argued compelling for change from the evidence he gathered and reported in his recent book, Going Broke by Degree. From his words excerpted below, we can conclude, as I did in an earlier post, that the new commission is focused on institutional performance in the form of the three accountability obligations and the three accessibility obligations identified in this blog and used to index its posts: learning accountability, program accountability, expense accountability, affordability of access, capacity for access, and convenience of access.

OU prof named to federal commission on higher education
Jon Peters, The Athens News, October 13, 2005

"If you break down our mission, we're basically examining accessibility, affordability and accountability within the context of higher education," Vedder said. "Our role is to frame the national debate and to foster dialogue about constructive change."

One of the major issues slated for discussion concerns tuition costs, which have risen sharply above inflation for the last century. "We need to consider whether the status quo is turning colleges into havens for the elite," said Vedder, author of "Going Broke By Degree: Why College Costs Too Much."

Vedder was skeptical of the notion that this creation of a federal commission represents a power-grab of higher education by the Bush administration. "It's possible the commission could constitute a federal power-grab but, gauging from my conversations with (Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings), and because each major political party is roughly equal in representation, I don't think that's the case," he said.  Read more ...

Getting serious about the nation's educational needs

The National Academies' Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy has just released Rising Above The Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future (2005). The report calls for a number of substantial changes in federal support for research and education. These changes include 25,000 new, federally financed college scholarships in mathematics and science and a doubling of federal funds for basic research in the physical science -- all designed to ensure that the United States economy and defense remain strong. This approximately $10 billion dollar proposal asks higher education and the federal government to take more responsibility for program accountability -- to meet the nation's need for more mathematicians, scientists and engineers.