The Learning Cloud

States and public institutions: Are they serving the citizens

The excerpt at the bottom of this post is representative of the increasing failure of states to guarantee (on a multi-year basis) per-student subsidies, whether to public institutions and/or students (scholarships). Without some reasonable assurance of per-student funding based on state demographic projections, it is difficult for public colleges and universities to plan for and accommodate enrollment fluctuations.

On the other side of the public funding equation, however, public institutions have failed to plan and account for their per-student annual operating expenses as a first step toward increasing their productivity through the wise use of capital-offsetting and per-student-expense-reducing technology-enabled program and service redesign. They have failed to use technology-enabled service process redesign to increase their enrollment capacity on a reduced per-enrollment expense basis.

The result of institutional productivity decreases and unpredictable state per-student funding patterns has been extra-inflationary tuition increases year after year, including the latest increases just reported by the College Board (details on its website) as follows: 

• "At public four-year institutions, in-state tuition and fees average $6,185, or $381 more than last year, a 6.6 percent increase. In 2007-08, average total charges (which include both room and board and tuition and fees), are $13,589, a 5.9 percent increase over last year. The average full-time student at a public four-year school receives about $3,600 in grants and tax benefits, which lowers the average tuition and fees to a net price of about $2,600."
• "At public two-year institutions, tuition and fees average $2,361, a $95 or 4.2 percent increase. The average full-time student in this sector receives about $2,040 in grants and tax benefits, lowering the average tuition and fees to a net price of about $320."

Community colleges are doing better than their four-year public counterparts in maintaining the affordability of access.

State colleges getting choosier: Florida high school seniors face a tougher time getting accepted into a state university; many universities reject at least half of applicants.
Donna Gehrke-White & Fred Tasker, Miami Herald, October 21, 2007

Hubert Phanord considers the irony cruel: He couldn't get into his mother's alma mater, Florida International University. But he was accepted at Atlanta's Morehouse College, a private college that is the alma mater of Spike Lee and Martin Luther King Jr. ''Why are they not admitting [more] Florida residents?'' wonders Phanord, a graduate of Archbishop Curley-Notre Dame in Miami, about Florida's university system. He is attending Broward Community College to improve his grade-point average in the hope of earning scholarships to defray Morehouse's yearly $17,000 tuition. His question is pressing for tens of thousands of high school seniors facing a grim reality: Almost 30,000 would-be college freshmen were turned away from Florida's 11 public universities in 2006, 70 percent more than in 2000. Read more ...

Fees R us

A fair query to any public institution that is increasing fees in the manner described in the excerpt below is "what have been the longitudinal trends in annual operating expenses per credit hour over the past 5-10 years?" I suspect that most public institutions have done little to control unit operating costs. Improving unit cost structures and simultaneously improving (measurably) academic performance, should be among the hallmarks of an effective public institution.

As Support Lags, Colleges Tack on Student Fees
Jonathan D. Glater, New York Times, September 4, 2007

When Emily McLain decided to enroll at the University of Oregon, a significant part of the appeal was low tuition. She had not counted on all the fees that unexpectedly appeared on her bill. “I had my dad calling me asking, ‘What’s this for?’ ” said Ms. McLain, 22, a political science and international studies major now entering her last year at the university. This year, for instance, the university is charging a $51 “energy surcharge” for rising electricity costs. A $270 “technology fee” for computer service. There is the $371.25 fee for the campus health center, a $135 fee to maintain buildings and grounds and a $624 “incidental fee,” for student activities. And more. All told, fees add up to $1,542, or nearly an additional 40 percent on top of tuition of $3,984. That does not even count additional fees charged for taking certain courses. College administrators say public universities are increasingly tacking on fees for the same reasons that some are experimenting with differential tuition for different majors: state support for higher education has languished, and legislatures shy away from approving tuition increases. Fees can often be set by individual campuses. Read more ...

Affordability of professional programs

The article excerpted below is further confirmation of the accelerating trend among public universities to differentiate tuition rates by degree program by assigning higher rates to high-demand programs, primarily programs serving lucrative professions such as business, law, engineering, and so on. This trend may lock out worthy but financially disadvantaged students from the high-tuition professions. This may not be a significant issue for well endowed flagship universities whose high-demand professional schools are themselves typically well endowed. It will, however, compromise most other public universities' obligation to maintain affordable access to professional programs for all academically qualified students, including those from the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

Regents approve major fee hikes for 34 UC programs. The 3-year increases will push the annual cost at certain business and law schools to $40,000.
Richard C. Paddock, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer September 21, 2007

The University of California Board of Regents approved a three-year plan Thursday for major fee increases at 34 professional schools that would push the cost of some law and business schools to $40,000 a year by 2010. The increases will take effect next year and range from about 7% at most of the schools to a high of 15% at UC Berkeley's law and business schools. The board voted to enact similar raises in the following two years but agreed that it would ratify them separately each year. Advocates of the plan, including Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley, said the increased fees would help the school maintain its excellence and attract some of the best professors and students. "I can't overstate how critical this was for our future," Edley said after the vote. "I agree completely with the desire for more state funding. But the political reality is that California has been reducing money for K-12 and higher education for a generation." Read more ...

Reauthorization of the HEA, finally?

Congress has mounted several attempts during the past five years to reauthorize the Higher Education Act.  According to the first excerpt below from a NACUBO report, reauthorization may be at hand -- if it is not derailed by policy disputes around unresolved issues, such as the Federal role in accreditation. The second excerpt, from USA Today, offers a more consumer-oriented version of the reauthorization that is awaiting the President's signature.

Congress Advances HEA Update; More to Follow
NACUBO, September 18, 2007

Over the August break, leaders of the two congressional committees charged with renewing the Higher Education Act completed the process of blending the House- and Senate-passed versions, which contained changes with implications for federal spending. President Bush’s signature on the act will mark another chapter in the five-year effort to update HEA, which governs the allocation of federal student financial aid and the rules and requirements for institutions that participate in programs covered by the law. In order to ease passage of this legislation--the College Cost Reduction and Access Act--Congress used rules associated with the budget process. As part of that process, the House and Senate committees with jurisdiction over HEA were instructed to develop legislation that would reduce entitlement spending during the next five fiscal years, albeit by relatively small amounts. Both the House and Senate have passed legislation conforming to this requirement, and each bill achieves the required savings through cuts in payments to Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program lenders and guaranty agencies. Both bills actually generate substantially higher levels of savings in mandatory spending than were required by the budget directive. The additional savings are intended to offset costs associated with a broad array of new or enhanced student-aid benefits. However, one requirement of using the federal budget process, known as "reconciliation to minimize legislative barriers," is that Congress can only make changes to the law that will either increase or decrease federal spending. As a result, other programmatic changes to the Higher Education Act were dropped during the development of the compromise legislation and will need to be addressed separately. The path that this separate bill might take and the timing for its consideration on Capitol Hill are far from clear. Read more ...

White House gets $20B college aid bill
Sandra Block, USA Today, September 18, 2007

Democratic leaders formally signed a $20 billion college aid bill Tuesday that will boost federal grants for low-income students and lower interest rates for student loans. Supporters say the bill, which President Bush is expected to sign within 10 days, is the largest investment in college education since the 1944 GI bill provided tuition aid to millions of World War II vets. "This is obviously a very big day for students and their families," said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. Read more ...

Cross-border learning accountability

Comparability of learning outcomes assessment data -- rather, the lack thereof -- has become a major federal and, therefore, national issue.  See, for example, the centrality of this issue to Judith Eaton's recommendations in Institutions, Accreditors, and the Federal Government: Redefining Their "Appropriate Relationship," in Change (September/October 2007, pages 16-23). The Chronicle excerpt below reveals that the issue is not unique to the U.S. Indeed, the OECD is entering the fray and pursuing a cross-border, international set of standards for assessing and comparing learning outcome. 

Quest for International Measures of Higher-Education Learning Results Raises Concerns
Aisha Labi, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 19, 2007

A fledgling international effort to develop comparable assessment standards for measuring how much students are learning at higher-education institutions throughout the world is provoking concern from several quarters, even though the project is still in its preliminary stages. The push is being led by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, whose 30 member countries include many of the world's most advanced economies, such as Australia, Japan, the United States, and several European nations. The effort grew out of a meeting last year of the group's education ministers and secretaries, at which the apparent dearth of available data on student-learning outcomes prompted discussion about how to fill that void. "It became evident that there are a lot of measurements about research outcomes at institutions of higher education, but what about the learning outcomes?" said Barbara Ischinger, director for education at the organization, which is known as the OECD. The push to formulate global standards for assessing higher-education learning outcomes coincides with efforts by some national and regional education systems -- for example, in the United States and in the 47 European nations that are synchronizing their degree system in the decade-long Bologna Process -- to develop standards within their own spheres. Chronicle subscribers can read more ...

California's Master Plan, then and now

California's Master Plan for higher education has long provided an aspirational model for advocates of public higher education in other states. The article excerpted below reveals how the forces of globalization and competition have compromised the Master Plan at the expense of the student. If the benefits of higher education are to remain available to all the state's citizens and the state, the three systems of higher education in California will have to lead structural change, especially in reducing per-student operating expenses to increase productivity and improve affordability withour compromising quality.

California dream of free college wilts under fiscal pressure
Michelle Locke, Associate Press, August 18, 2007

It was 1962 at Berkeley and the campus crackled with possibilities for freshman John Garamendi, football player, business major, future lieutenant governor. Annual cost: About $170. In 1985, freshman and budding journalist Jeff Chang strode on to Cal's redwood-shaded acres. Issues of the day were diversity, how to handle it, and apartheid, how to stop it. Average annual cost: About $1,300. California's come a long way from its 1960 goal of free college for all its residents. Technically, in-state students admitted to the prestigious 10-campus system still pay zero tuition. But assorted fees that once were minimal are creeping up, which some consider a costly mistake. “We are making a fundamental policy error, a strategic policy error in allowing the fees to increase,” says Garamendi, who has children in the UC system and now sits on the system's governing Board of Regents in his role as lieutenant governor. California's promise of free public higher education began as a way to deal with Baby Boomers headed for college. Under the state's Master Plan for Higher Education, UC draws from the top 12.5 percent of high school graduates; the 23-campus California State University draws from the top one-third; and everyone with a high school diploma can attend the huge network of community colleges. At the time, it was a revolution; plan architect Clark Kerr made the cover of Time magazine. Read more ...

Does business care about higher ed's performance?

Well, I'll answer my own question with an indirect, "yes." The Wall Street Journal, the most highly respected newspaper in the business sector, recently reported on higher ed's performance thusly:

Accountability 101: State Colleges Prepare To Measure Their Own Performance
David Wessel, Wall Street Journal, August 9, 2007

The American medical and higher-education systems regularly boast, with some justification, that they are the best in the world. But in recent years they have been forced to confront tough questions: How do we know we're getting our money's worth? ...  Dan Fogel, president of the University of Vermont and an early advocate for greater accountability, argues that all this is a necessary response to widespread public concern "that higher ed costs a lot and nobody is sure it's really worth it." But he argues that isn't the sole reason: "We have a profound ethical obligation to ensure that our students learn most things that we are trying to teach them." (That's a hard one for skeptical faculty to rebut.)  ...  Lawrence Summers, Harvard University's former president, is also a fan. Not only are these measures "a counterweight to what is otherwise the overwhelming tendency for universities to be accountable only to their faculties," but they are crucial to self-improvement: "Unless you have some way of noticing when you are doing a better job of educating, you're not likely to do a better job of educating," he says. Assessing individual performance, of course, isn't new to universities; that's what exams are supposed to do. But measuring a college's performance and publishing the results is a change, one that might prod the best higher-ed system in the world to get better. "Few universities sit still with consistently bad football teams," Mr. Summers says. "Why should they sit still with consistently bad results in educating and satisfying students?"  ...  Read the full article.

Is college becoming less affordable?

In a front-page story in USA Today on April 9, 2007, Mary Beth Marklein wrote that "today's freshmen are financially better off than ever before, and the gap is widening." She was reporting on research from UCLA's Cooperative Institutional Research Program, which has been tracking trends in higher education for about 40 years. The UCLA report didn't include community college freshman but is, nevertheless, an alarming indication that college may be unaffordable to an increasing percentage of potential students outside the upper reaches of family income. The UCLA data indeed indicate that an inexorably increasing percentage of incoming freshman in four-year public and private nonprofit institutions are from the upper reaches of the U.S. income demographic. A possible explanation, though not a logical certainty, is that four-year nonprofit institutions have become unaffordable to an increasing proportion of the pool of qualified potential students.

I'll follow up this post with another that presents my evidence-driven explanation for this explanation that I believe to be, in fact, a verifiable trend.

Catching up

After three busy months of conferences and travel that left little time for blogging, I'll catch up by offering this lengthy post recalling a few recent references and resources that confirm the growing external and internal attention to institutional performance in higher education.

On 09/26/2006 the U.S. Department of Education published its Action Plan for Higher Education: Improving Accessibility, Affordability, and Accountability, which is prefaced by a quote from Secretary Margaret Spellings: "Over the years, we’ve invested tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer money and just hoped for the best. We deserve better.” The action plan, of course, derives from the recommendations of Secretary Spellings' Commission on the future of Higher Education and its final report, A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education (September 2006).

Secretary Spellings was subsequently interviewed on National Public Radio: on 09/26/2006 by Michele Norris and Melissa Block on All Things Considered and on 10/02/2006 by Michelle Martin on Talk of the Nation. In these interviews, Spellings highlighted some of her major concerns, all of which will require the wise use of technology to redress systemically. (That the "wise use of technology" is required is my claim, not hers, a claim that has been substantiated elsewhere in this blog through other sources and directly by me.) In the Martin interview, Spellings explicitly cited the need to increase the productivity of higher education, a need which is at the heart of the necessity to apply technology to redesign (disruptively) academic, financial, and student service processes to improve their measurable effectiveness, convenience, and per-student cost basis -- improved productivity and service flexibility.

On 11/14/2006 shortly after the mid-term election, the USA Today headlined the debate over Spellings' call for increased "transparency" (in Should government take a yardstick to colleges? by Mary Beth Marklein). The article describes Spellings' reaction to higher education leadership responses to the Commission's report as a "give-us-more-money-and-leave-us-alone" strategy. Marklein reported one higher education leader to believe that the "secretary does not seem to appreciate the extent to which colleges are already voluntarily looking at how to measure their effectiveness," and that there is no need for a "federal one-size-fits-all solution."

In the same issue of USA Today, Marklein also wrote College gets lowdown on how students do to highlight how Earlham College is using the National Survey of Student Engagement to provide indirect evidence of student learning and the Collegiate Learning Assessment to measure more directly the learning value added by the College. Marklein's two articles, when synthesized, suggest that higher education leaders understand the need for learning accountability, are not practicing it as diligently and urgently as policy makers would like, and most certainly do not want government to regulate it. Nor do I want government to regulate learning outcomes, but we can do better in improving and measuring learning outcomes in several areas of the curriculum -- redesigning for improved learning and reduced per enrollment costs the 20-30 high-enrollment courses taught in common at almost institutions, requiring the Collegiate Learning Assessment or similar assessment of basic fluencies and critical thinking, increased reporting of aggregate scores on professional board exams in law, medicine, engineering, etc.

On October 31, I participated in the first meeting of the Tenth Anniversary Commission of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA). We will meet two more times before offering advice to CHEA about the future of accreditation. The first meeting was to focus on accountability, and, from my perspective, it broadened the agenda by discussing not only how to account for performance in higher education, but also how to improve performance. 

At no recent conference I attended has the need to improve and account for performance been more front and center than in November's annual AASCU meeting. Chancellor William Kirwan's call to reduce per-student-FTE costs was notable, as was the update provided by Charles Miller, Chair of Secretary Spellings' Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Miller applauded the draft Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA) developed by NASULGC in consultation with AASCU, and went on to brief the AASCU audience on the Commission's work. I chatted with Mr. Miller at the airport and asked about how the Commission viewed the role of IT in its recommendations to higher education.  He spoke knowingly of how IT can be used to account for learning and other performance mission obligations -- the data gathering and reporting functions that are highly dependent today on technology. Alas, the call to board our planes came before I had a chance to ask him about the role of IT-enabled strategies for improving performance -- in addition to reporting it.

When the USA Today was dropped at my door on January 12, the cover story shouted Rising costs make climb to higher education steeper (by Sandra Block). The "costs" in the title refer, of course, to price (tuition), and the article is yet another national article on how spiraling tuition increases are making it more difficult, if not impossible, for not-so-affluent students to go to college. Indeed, according to the College Board, even after adjusting for inflation, tuition at four-year public institution has increased on the average by about 6% annually over the past five years for a total increase of 35% -- a fact reported in more detail in an earlier post to this blog.

The new Congress has vowed to address the tuition issue, and, indeed, this morning's USA Today (January 17, 2007) reported that House OKs bill that cuts student loan interest rates (by Jim Kuhnhenn of the Associated Press).  This kind of legislation will make only a negligible dent in the affordability of access, but it does signal the intent of federal policy makers to continue to focus on the price of access to college.

What went around may stay around

With the Congress back in action, many are wondering whether Democratic control bodes well for higher education -- reprieve from the recommendations of the Spellings' Commission, for example. Writing in Inside Higher Ed on November 8, 2006, Doug Lederman quotes a lobbyist as saying: “Higher education is on notice regardless of which party is in power that there are concerns about costs, concerns about accountability. I don’t think that changes.” Read more ...