Changing Higher Education

Harvard inaugurates its Initiative for Learning and Teaching

2012-02-09T17:33:21-08:00

ON ONE HAND:

The good news is that Harvard is beginning to play a public leadership role in increasing student learning! The Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) had its inaugural event, a symposium, on February 3. HILT was founded as the result of a generous $40M gift from Harvard alumni Gustave and Rita Hauser. The invitation only event brought in several outside luminaries with considerable expertise in learning, such as Physics Nobel Laureate Carl Weiman, and around 300 people from the Harvard community including Harvard's own luminary in the field, Eric Mazur.

The poor state of undergraduate student learning over all has been chronicled in many books and studies (see an earlier discussion here). One of the most readable of these books was written by Harvard's own Derek Bok - Our Underachieving Colleges, so the issues are not unfamiliar at Harvard itself. As Bok (and many others) pointed out, the problem is not that there aren't many well documented ways to greatly increase student learning, it is that these methods have not been adopted widely by colleges. The powerful forces of the status quo have dominated teaching and learning.

Harvard's Clayton Christensen (also at the symposium) and BYU-Idaho's Henry Eyring (CE) recently published The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out. In it, they focused on the development of Harvard over the centuries to show how the evolution of colleges from small local entities to huge research universities produced changes both positive and negative for society and the students themselves. Among the changes was that student learning played a ever decreasing role in the reward systems of the institutions. Thus, the learning (or lack-of-learning) results described by Bok and others becomes an understandable outcome of the growth of the research university.

CE argue that most institutions are, at their own level, seeking to emulate Harvard in ways that they can. While CE's focus on the uniqueness of Harvard as a role model might be considered to be a bit overdone, it is nevertheless true that the research universities are at the very pinnacle of the higher education prestige ladder, and of course, Harvard is certainly to be found in the very top echelon of the research universities. It is not unexpected that many, if not most, institutions have an understandable desire to move up the prestige ladder, thus, indeed, becoming more "Harvard-like".

So Harvard is certainly a very visible, very important role model in higher education. While it cannot dictate change in higher education, it certainly provides a fantastic bully pulpit from which to promote an important point of view. And significantly increasing student learning is of critical importance in this time of globalization and change. Thus the "better learning" movement has to cheer the appearance of Harvard on the stage with HILT.

BUT ON THE OTHER HAND:

There is a downside, however. As CE argue, teaching and research actually are carried out following very different business models. Research shows that organizations that run multiple business models simultaneously incur very significant overhead due to the complexity of balancing those models. CE argue that much of the high cost of higher education can be traced to the multiple-business-model nature of the business, and the resulting high overhead.

More negative than the high cost, in many ways, is the reality that if multiple business models are carried out together, the resulting constraints imply that no one of the business models can be optimized. In the research university (e.g. Harvard), the research business model is optimized as much as possible within the constraints, meaning that the teaching business model is greatly suboptimized. Or to put it into a more concrete articulation, for a faculty member, doing research conflicts with teaching, and the system rewards doing research most highly. Thus teaching (and learning) will naturally suffer, and this will be particularly so if doing teaching more effectively requires that the faculty member consecrate additional time and energy to learning a new field (pedagogy).

So this new Initiative suggests increasing the optimization of the teaching component somewhat - which almost certainly will decrease the optimization of the research component. At the simplest level, if the faculty member spends more time and effort on teaching, less will be spent on research. Some faculty will undoubtedly suggest that they can maintain research levels if they have lowered teaching loads reflecting the additional time requirements for learning new approaches (which are often more challenging for the professor than the old, if truth be told). This will mean that cost/student for the students they teach will go up, thus increasing upward pressure on tuition - another no-no. Former Tufts President and now member of the Harvard Corporation Lawrence Bacow summarized this box well at the symposium:

All ways of improving the teaching/learning environment will only add costs to our system. That can’t go on forever. These things come to an end and usually it’s not pretty.

It may well be that Harvard is rich enough to find a way to thread this needle - maintain its high research profile, increase learning outcomes, and control costs - without making any major changes in approach. But for most institutions, this needle will only be threaded through major changes that address the very high costs of the multiple simultaneous business models and the current lack of significant economies of scale.

So the danger is that Harvard is taking up a leadership role in increasing learning - and offering a model that only it can afford.

A valuable new offering at StraighterLine

2012-02-02T05:30:00-08:00

A key issue for one of our potential disruptors, StraighterLine, has been creating credibility among four-year institutions so that its students can transfer their credits easily when they are ready to enter a bachelor's program. Although their courses have been blessed by The American Council on Education's College Credit Recommendation Service, with current, input-focused approaches to accreditation, StraighterLine is unlikely to be able to achieve the stamp of approval of accreditation for its courses. Recently, in a very interesting move, StraighterLine has begun an effort to shift the focus away from input-focused accreditation towards student outcomes.

Beginning in the Fall of 2012, StraighterLine students will be able to purchase a set of core skills and information literacy tests:

Starting in the Fall of 2012, students will be able to purchase an individualized version of ETS’s iSkills™ assessment, the ETS® Proficiency Profile and CAE’s Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). The iSkills assessment measures a student’s critical thinking and problem-solving skills in a digital environment. The ETS Proficiency Profile assesses critical thinking, reading, writing, and mathematics skills in a single test. Through the use of authentic, performance-based qualitative and quantitative measures, the CLA assesses a student’s ability to think critically and write well, including their capacity to problem solve, reason analytically, and write in a persuasive manner that exhibits proper and accepted mechanics.

These assessments will provide a neutral evaluation of some of the student's accomplishments and capabilities at the end of their StraighterLine experience - something they can show prospective employers and admissions officers as they move on in the educational system.

Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, authors of Academically Adrift, have just published (with additional colleagues) a new study, Documenting Uncertain Times: Post-graduate Transitions of the Academically Adrift Cohort , that shows some interesting correlations with outcomes on the CLA. The report looks at a number of educational variables, including CLA at graduation, and relates them to a number of variables in the post-graduate lives of the cohort studied in Academically adrift. Among the results is the following:

Graduates who scored in the bottom quintile of the CLA were three times more likely to be unemployed than those who scored in the top quintile on the CLA (9.6 percent compared to 3.1 percent), twice as likely to be living at home (35 percent compared to 18 percent) and significantly more likely to have amassed credit card debt (51 percent compared to 37 percent).

The conclusion of Arum, as quoted in InsideHigherEducation, is that:

It documents that these skills and competencies that are measured by the CLA matter for many important early-adult life-course outcomes. They matter for successful adult transitions.

The report also shows that demonstrated growth in score over the college experience correlates well with a number of desirable early-adult life-course outcomes.

This new report helps to demonstrate the importance of the CLA, which should make it of significant value to StraighterLine students as they move on. However, the report does indicate that tests that StraighterLine will be offering might well have even more weight if they were given both at the beginning and the end of the StraighterLine experience since improvement is an important variable. Data on growth of the scores would also be very valuable to StraighterLine as it works to continuously improve its offerings.

It will be interesting to see if other higher education institutions - both non-profit and for-profit - follow the lead of StraighterLine in offering these tests to their students.

The State of the Union on college costs

2012-01-30T05:31:00-08:00

So let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down. Higher education can’t be a luxury. It is an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.

Barak Obama, State of Union 2012

Does this speech signal that the time has finally arrived when the government - which pays a good part of the bill - will step in to limit the rapid and seemingly never ending growth of tuition? In normal times, the answer would likely be "yes" given that politicians from both sides of the aisle have been introducing bills that would cap tuition in one way or another for almost a decade. Thus, we might expect to see a quick moving bipartisan effort.

These, of course, are not times when bipartisan efforts go very far, so Obama's statements will probably push Republicans into fierce opposition to the idea. The response of Representative Virginia Foxx, the North Carolina Republican who is chairwoman of the House Higher Education subcommittee, is probably a pretty good representation of what we will now hear from the Republican side:

The president is saying that people can’t afford to go to college anymore, and that just simply is not true. Tuition is too high at most schools, but it isn’t the job of the federal government to punish those schools. It’s very arbitrary, and the president sounds like a dictator.

So this probably won't be the tipping point for this issue. But before the higher education community breathes a sigh of relief, its members should note that a President of the United States views the issue as important enough, with enough broad voter appeal, to put it into a State of the Union address, and he is continuing to speak about it at public events. It would be surprising if we didn't hear a lot more over the next two years about the relationship between tuition increases and taxpayer support. And, despite the negative initial overall response of Representative Foxx, it should be noted that she agreed that tuition is too high at most schools - hardly the position that makes a strong ally in this matter.

The reported responses from the academic community to Obama's speech, sadly, fall pretty much as one would anticipate -The current system is close to perfect, and any constraints (fiscal or administrative) will lead to declines in educational outcomes. This is indeed the likely outcome if educational institutions try to handle the constraints without changing their basic approach.

However this speech makes it increasingly clear that the reality must be faced - it is simply not possible for higher education costs to increase at 3% above inflation forever, and the end of the period of rapid increases is getting closer. Educational leaders that refuse to come to grips with this reality are ensuring that the negative outcomes they describe will indeed occur.

It is highly likely that the changes that will be required will involve things that most people in traditional higher education find undesirable because they break with comfortable traditional standards of "how things should be done". But the economic realities of the United States (and most of the rest of the world) are such that "undesirable" actions have been, are, and will be required of almost every segment in order to transition to new, viable configurations. Does higher education have the leadership to rise to the challenge of this kind of tranformative change, or will it simply sink into mediocrity while defending the status quo?

Potential disruptors in the higher education space. II

2012-01-28T18:12:35-08:00

In an earlier post, I described some potential disruptors in the higher education space. In this post I would like to add another set - several non-profits that are trying to provide essentially free education : the Khan Academy, the University of the People, and the Saylor Foundation .

The Khan Academy's self-description is straightforward:

We're a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere.

It does this through over 2700 10-20 minute long videos on a huge number of K-16 subjects. Most videos are made by the founder Salman Khan, but some come from other sources. Individuals can simply go to the web site and start learning. However, by signing in, the student can access a number of tools that help to visialize progress and the growing knowledge map. Similarly, teachers who use Khan material can get class statistics.

Both the University of the People and the Saylor Foundation focus on college-level courses. They both make use of the fact that there is an enormous amount of educational material now available for free on the the internet. They repackage this material into majors, and incorporate it into their individual educational approaches.

The University of the People, founded by Shai Reshef, describes itself as:

.. the world's first tuition-free online university dedicated to the global advancement and democratization of higher education....University of the People offers a unique learning experience that combines educators, collaborative learning, information technologies and the internet.

At present, the University of the People offers study in only two fields: business administration and computer science. Each of these fields has a dean and a board of advisors who define degree requirements. Basic course material is assembled from open educational materials, some from the Open Courseware Consortium, and given to course designers who modify and enhance the materials. An in house group develops assessment standards for the degrees. Peer to peer learning is considered core to the approach, so students in a course are divided into groups of 20-30 that work together online on weekly assignments. Each group has an instructor who facilitates the peer to peer process by e.g. assuring that it is working towards correct outcomes, and suggesting other sources of information as needed. There are 5 terms in the year, with courses starting only at the beginning of the terms in order to create these cohorts. Admission is almost but not quite "open": applicants must be 18 or over, have a high school diploma, and be proficient in English. Although there is no tuition, there probably will be in the future rather small charges associated with taking the exams. Students who successfully complete the degree requirements are awarded a bachelor's degree by the University of the People. The University is not accredited, but the website says that it is seeking accreditation at this time.

The Saylor Foundation was founded in 1999 by Michael Saylor. It's mission is:

...to make education freely available to all. Guided by the belief that technology has the potential to circumvent barriers that prevent many individuals from participating in traditional schooling models, the Foundation is committed to developing and advancing inventive and effective ways of harnessing technology in order to drive the cost of education down to zero.

At present, Saylor is focusing on working to identify, develop, and organize the material a student needs to know in order to earn the equivalent of a degree in any of the top ten majors in the United States. The foundation works with faculty and peer-review teams from various higher education institions to package primarily open license educational materials into degree level programs. Learning goals for each course and each program are well described on the website. Any person can sign up for a course at any time, and it does not appear that there is any peer learning involved at present. It is not clear whether Saylor intends to offer a degree to students who succeed in passing the prescribed courses.

Saylor is collaborating with both p2pu (one of the potential disruptors described in part I of this series) and the University of the People to create and share courses, and some of Saylor's math courses come from the Khan Academy. Thus there seems to be a community working with some cooperation towards similar goals.

Both the University of the People and Saylor are providing the equivalent of degree programs, but lack accreditation. With current accreditation approaches, which depend almost exclusively on inputs (number of full time faculty, library facilites, etc.), accreditation for institutions of this type will be very hard to obtain. Yet, if accreditation were to focus on outputs e.g. what students actually learned, we might find that institutions such as these would fit well into the "outcomes" spectrum of accredited institutions.

I have not looked at a University of the People course, since one apparently needs to matriculate in order to do so. The courses of both the Khan Academy and Saylor are rather rudementary in terms of use of pedegogy and technogy compared to what one finds in well funded online programs. Thus, at this point in their development, the disruptive component of this group is not likely to be in the format and approach of the education being offered. Rather, it is likely to be in their demonstration that in this new era where information and content is everywhere, a reasonable college education can be produced at very close to zero cost.

Cost and price in higher education, again

2011-12-15T21:46:07-08:00

These administrators are like cookie monsters… They seek out all the resources that they can get their hands on and then devour them

Ronald Ehrenberg in Tuition Rising

As economic conditions around the country (and world) impose increasing limitations on funding for higher education, it is worthwhile to review some of the major reasons that higher education costs are so high and rise so rapidly. An understanding of these reasons is critical to making rational responses that preserve (and perhaps even strengthen) important components of institutional mission. This is, of course, a subject that has been extensively written about over the past several decades by many authors, but since responses to the current economic situation seem to generally ignore what is known about the problem, perhaps another brief review is justified. Interested readers will find my many earlier takes on this issue collected here.

The quote above is basically a brief restatement of what is known as Bowen's Rule, which appeared in one of the earlier (1980) extended studies of cost in higher education. Bowen pointed out that budgeting in higher education is basically the inverse of that which occurs in most industries: first you see how much income you can raise, then you spend it all in pursuit of an elusive goal of "excellence" and brand. I put excellence in quotes because it is a concept that primarily is internally defined by academe itself rather than by its customers.

Interestingly, however, a recent work by Christensen, Horn, Caldera and Soares (CHCS) called Disrupting College showed that many of the cost issues in higher education actually correspond extremely closely to well - studied cost issues in other industries. Turns out there are cookie monsters everywhere! I will lean heavily on their analysis, because it gives a somewhat different perspective and brings in data from other industries that demonstrate the difficulties of finding simple, minimalist solutions to cost problems.While the terminology used may be offensive to some in higher education, the insights to be gained are, I think, worth the discomfort that may result.

I want to focus on research universities, because that is where much of the public debate is focusing. Both cost and price are of importance, of course. I will not differentiate between public and private research universities, because in reality, most of the difference between the two sectors comes in how the price is allocated to different types of customers. To a high degree, the costs are the same in both sectors, and by Bowen's Rule, the prices are therefore the same (or vice-versa). As I mentioned in the first paragraph, it is important to consider both why the cost is so high, and why the cost has risen for three decades at an annual rate well beyond that of inflation.

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First, why does higher education cost so much? CHCS lay the problem squarely at the feet of our intertwining multiple missions of teaching, research, and social growth of students:

There are three generic types of business models: solution shops, value-adding process businesses, and facilitated user networks. Each of these is comprised of its own value proposition, resources, processes, and profit formula.Universities have become conflations of all three types of business models. This has resulted in extraordinarily complex—some might say confused—institutions where much of the cost is tied up in coordinative overhead rather than in research and teaching.

CHCS identify research with the solution shop model, which focus on diagnosing and solving unstructured problems; teaching with the value-adding process model, which uses resources and processes to turn incomplete inputs into more complete outputs of higher value; and social growth with facilitated user networks in which participants exchange things with each other.

This conflation of different models in the university causes a big problem, since research in corporations show that mixing different types of business models in one organization is extremely expensive - it demands a mix of resources (including personnel) and processes that is very inefficient and expensive when looked at from the perspective of any of its component models. In fact, the overhead costs in such mixed-model organizations can dwarf the actual production costs. And, according to CHCS, this is just the real cost problem in a research university:

Our best guess is that the overhead burden rate in conventional universities is between 4.0 and 5.0. In other words, universities spend four to five dollars on overhead for every dollar spent in teaching, assessment, and research....

Traditional universities trying to emulate the prestige of Harvard are structured ....in order to optimize the “solution shop” activities of their faculty. The value-added process activities of teaching students are sub-optimally force-fit into this structure.

And, one must add, the social growth- facilitated user networks are similarly sub-optimally fit into the structure. One must also emphasize that the solution- shop research activities of the faculty are simply optimized within the constraints of the existing multi-model organization, rather than in an absolute way. Most faculty will tell you that all that teaching and service seriously interferes with their research!

Most of what has been written previously about the cost of higher education can be fit into this framework. What seems to be important to me about this perspective is that it tells us that corporations known for efficiency (relative to universities, at least) have the same cost issues when running a "conglomerate" organization. Thus, the problem is not that universities are inefficiently run, it is that they are built on a model that intrinsically carries a huge overhead. The model itself will have to be changed in major ways in order to reduce costs appreciably.

Let me turn briefly to price and how it relates to this picture. The price that captures everyone's attention is that which is attributed to the educational component - tuition and fees, plus State support for educational activities in the public sector. The other prices of major importance for the university are the prices charged to funders of research (primarily government and corporations), and room and board, which covers a component of the socialization activities. Given market forces that limit the prices that can be charged in each of these areas, the sum of all of these prices is not sufficient to cover all of the costs of all of the activities in these areas that the university wants to have. As a consequence, additional resources must be found e.g.philanthropy, patents, to balance the books.

Universities don't keep their books in a way that makes it easy to calculate how costs are allocated to the various functions, but it is clear that cross subsidization of activities is at the core of budgetary operations. Thus, the "educational function" actually carries many of the costs of social growth, e.g. recreation centers, student affairs, as well as of faculty research. The most obvious example of the latter is the very significant increase in cost and loss in productivity that comes when teaching faculty who teach four or more courses per semester are replaced with much more expensive research intensive faculty who teach two or fewer courses per semester. And, it must be noted, there are no data that suggest that student learning at the undergraduate level is better when such a replacement is made - this is simply part of the optimization of the "solution shop" activities mentioned by CHCS, and an example of the excess overhead that appears in this mixed model. In the end, however, what purports to be the price of the educational function is, in reality providing significant price subsidization for other activities of the university.

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Let me turn now to the reasons behind the rapidly increasing cost of higher education - 3%/year above the CPI for the past three decades. One traditional explanation also looks at the corporate side, and points out that enterprises whose major costs are for highly skilled workers who move in a broad market tend to see costs rising faster than the CPI. Simply a question of paying competitive salaries for desirable workers. Some have argued that although this cost increase is real, it has been mitigated by turning to low cost graduate students and part time adjuncts for more teaching. This is certainly true for some institutions, but universities have not uniformly turned to this solution. Thus some portion of the average increase probably still is due to this effect.

CHCS provide us with an alternative/additional explanation of the rapid cost rise based on corporate data:

Our observation has been that as a general rule, head-on, sustaining competition among competitors with comparable business models, which lack economies of scale, drives prices up 6 percent to 10 percent per year in nominal terms.

Universities certainly all have comparable business models, and we lack economies of scale, so this shoe seems to fit. In our case, our sustaining competition has been called an arms race of ever upscaling athletic facilities, student services, lecture halls, big-name professors, etc. And, in addition some part of sustaining competition for higher education generally is mission creep - adding a master's degree to an undergraduate institution, etc. So the good news here is that higher education has actually kept price growth in better control than the corporate sector since we only grow at a nominal CPI plus 3% rather than the 6-10% found by CHCS! The bad news is it seems to be a universal effect seen across very different industries with very different drivers, so getting rid of the effect is probably not a reasonable goal.

If one sees price containment as absolutely necessary in the current reality (as I do), then one must look at the obvious caveats contained in the quote above: all competitors have the same business model, and there are no economies of scale. Thus an organization that hopes to contain real increases in price (as opposed to cost) either will have to try a very different business model, or find economies of scale, or both.

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The discussion above certainly does not suggest that universities should not try to improve efficiency and productivity by e.g. adopting approaches such as have been described by the National Center for Academic Transformation that demonstrate increased learning outcomes while decreasing costs by the order of 40%. Such innovations should be part of any program to control costs. However, because overhead costs dominate the actual cost of teaching, such improvements will lead to only marginal decreases in total costs. Larger decreases will depend on more aggresive changes to the basic business model.

The CHCS analyses strongly suggest that in organizations having a conflation of business models similar to ours, no individual business model is optimized. This opens the possibility that through rational but creative reorganization and adoption of new procedures, we could create a model in which the efficiency and effectiveness of each and every one of our missions was increased - at a lower total cost.

In this day when we hear constant warnings of approaching doom from our academic leaders as they look at ever more constrained resources, this analysis suggests that doom is only inevitable if the leaders lack the vision and resolve to look beyond the current model. Studies in other domains strongly suggest that we can achieve better outcomes with less - with leadership.

What will The College of 2020 look like?

2011-11-10T16:02:18-08:00

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future

Niels Bohr

(Note: the following was first published as an invited contribution on The College of 2020 in parts 1 and 2. I reproduce it here for the benefit of my readers by permission of the editors of the College of 2020)

What will the College of 2020 look like? It probably will be similar in at least one way to the College of 2011 -there isn't any one archetypical College of 2011 and there won't be any one archetypical College of 2020 either. US higher education consists of about 4,500 accredited colleges of 2011 with an incredible diversity of sizes, approaches, missions, and resources. I would expect the same to be generally true in 2020, with some important caveats: I think there will be significantly fewer accredited colleges in 2020, and the mix of sizes, approaches, missions, and resources will be quite different from today.

These changes will be driven by two forces that push from different directions, but each leading to increasing fiscal constraints on higher education. On the one side, local and national governments are finding it increasingly difficult to support higher education at traditional levels. There a world-wide movement towards decreasing the role of government in providing social goods, and the US reflects that movement. In addition, other governmental costs such as health care, prisons, and retirements are growing rapidly and squeezing out areas such as education. On the other side, all of higher education utilizes a model whose costs over the last 30 years have steadily grown about 3% a year above CPI increase. In the tuition-dependent private sector, tuition has grown apace, i.e. roughly CPI plus 3% every year for the past three decades. The costs of higher education are reaching a point where government, parents, and students are beginning to question if the product is worth the price. The answer is increasingly "no" for private institutions that have lower brand value, but the "no" likely will move upstream in the value ladder over time as costs increase until only a relatively small number of high brand value private institutions are immune. On the public side, the answer is increasingly, "no, not given our fiscal constraints" no matter what the brand value of the institution.

Thus what we will likely see over the next decade in higher education is an attempt to create models that provide high educational value (often, perhaps, higher than at present) with less cost per student. So to imagine what the future might look like, we need to understand why costs are so high and increase so rapidly, and how that can be changed. Oversimplified, a few reasons for the high costs are:

In this world in which institutional aspirations are increasingly homogenized around a model set by the richest institutions, there is a continuing "arms race" to upgrade and increase teaching, recreational, living and dining facilities; expand student activities and student services; and broaden curricular options – all very costly "improvements"
Physical plants are generally are very expensive for the number of students served
Increased bureaucracy is needed to manage the growing fruits of the arms race and ever increasing government regulations.
Arms race expansions of the breadth of course offerings lead to lowering the average number of students/class, thereby decreasing teaching productivity (students educated divided by teaching costs).
Colleges increasingly are being asked to remedy the educational failings of secondary education, and this diversion to a non-core mission adds a costly overlay
Teaching approaches have varied little over the centuries and consequently there currently is little room for increased productivity in this core function.
Costs tend to increase faster than CPI in any sector where costs are driven by personnel costs, the personnel are highly skilled, and no productivity increases occur.

Another significant driver of educational cost increases has been attempts by many institutions to move up the brand-value chain by increasing emphasis on faculty research. This results in significant cost shifting from faculty research into undergraduate education e.g.:

Research faculty command higher salaries than teaching faculty and those higher costs are spread over fewer students because of reduced teaching loads. Thus teaching productivity gets a double blow.
Research facilities and instrumentation are more expensive than teaching facilities, and research sponsors and donors seldom if ever pay the complete costs of building and maintaining those facilities and purchasing this instrumentation, leaving costs to be covered by unrestricted funds – which are generally primarily tuition income.
Government regulations and the bureaucracies needed to respond to them go up exponentially as research comes in, and research funding almost never covers these costs completely, again adding pressure on unrestricted funding.

Different institutions will begin to respond to the financial constraints in different ways depending on their particular conditions and missions. One of the most widespread responses, however, is likely to be a stepping back from the increasingly homogenized view of what "quality" means in higher education. Perversely, "quality" is not currently defined by learning outcomes for students, but by costly surrogates such as quality of student services and amenities, quality of physical plant, quality of faculty research – in short, the elements of the arms race which is defined by reference to the richest educational institutions. Lowering overall costs will require in most cases that institutions define their own unique educational niche – stepping back from the rich-institution inspired arms race. This entails sharpening and redefining institutional missions in order to create niches that are both valuable for students and society, and fiscally sustainable. Different institutions will deemphasize components of the present arms race in different ways, and will create some new, less expensive value propositions in their stead. For example, one component of the response of many may be to narrow their curricular focus to a relatively few popular majors, or to focus on pre-professional training. Happily, many will probably decide that a key component of their new value proposition will be an increased focus on learning appropriate to their new sharpened mission, and on demonstrating that effectiveness. Thus the colleges of 2020 may well show a much wider aspirational profile than what we see today, and one which is more focused on demonstrated learning rather than surrogates.

Another response that likely will be widespread is to increase utilization of physical plant. This can be done by admitting more students, possibly moving to year-around operations. Of course, this only is beneficial if savings on plant are not spent on increased instructional costs. For many institutions, this will mean that faculty will be expected to teach more courses and forego summers away from campus- and many students will have the opportunity (and obligation) to break out of the traditional fall-spring academic year. Online learning will also likely play a major role in enabling more students to be taught without increasing plant or instructional costs proportionally.

In fact, one response that will be almost universal is greatly increased use of technology to improve both productivity and learning outcomes. In particular, online (and blended) learning likely will be a central component of cost cutting, increased learning, and increased access. For stronger brand institutions, targeted use of online and/or blended learning will lead to increased learning outcomes, greater student satisfaction, and better utilization of faculty. It will also be used extensively for projecting the brand beyond the current geographic boundaries of the institutions. For weaker brand institutions, the same uses will be found, but with much more aggressive implementation required in order to achieve fiscal sustainability. For example, groups of weaker brand institutions might jointly share an online curriculum, and differentiate themselves through individual tutoring support and student-life amenities.

Online learning of all types and levels of quality will become readily available as colleges and corporations rush into one of the few areas that holds promise to increase productivity in higher education. A number of these programs will involve visible, major scholars working with the best experts in pedagogy, and have demonstrated high learning outcomes. The widespread availability of such programs will provide a major challenge for institutions that provide a "generic" education that can be easily and cheaply replaced by a high quality online program. (In fact, many of these low brand- differentiation institutions already have significant financial problems because they have few competitive advantages.) These low-brand- differentiation institutions will need to change mission and approach in order to create a differentiated niche that provides value and competitive advantage. Many will not be able to respond creatively in a timely fashion, and will not survive.

Lower ranked research universities will find it increasingly difficult to afford their current profiles - research universities are by far the most expensive form of higher education yet invented. In addition, overall research funding is likely to fall significantly over the next decade, thus making many lower ranked programs even less viable. Options will range from completely leaving research and totally changing faculty profile, to intermediate scenarios that involve a larger teaching faculty and significantly smaller research faculty. Overall, the value proposition for this group of institutions likely will shift in the direction of high quality student learning.

All of this is on the cost side- but some additional changes will work on the side of the price students pay to get a degree. Numerous institutions probably will emulate the Western Governors University and move to competency –based evaluations that enable students to move through the system at their own pace. Such approaches allow students to acquire knowledge from many sources, including work or online programs of their choosing, and get credit from the "home" institution by demonstrating competency. Bologna-like approaches will also provide educational outcomes measures that will greatly facilitate transferring of credit from one institution to another, thus providing a diversity of different cost pathways to a degree. As a consequence, many four year institutions may find that their first two years have been "hollowed out" by less expensive two year organizations specializing in quality transferrable core courses. This loss of enrollment in the more profitable core courses will put additional pressure on the budgets of the four year institutions, thus forcing additional mission change.

So for 2020 – increased diversity of institutional missions, greater use of online and blended learning, 12 month academic calendar, fewer research universities, increased transfer opportunities, not all existing institutions will still be around, and student learning will be a key differentiating factor. Now what was it that Bohr said about predictions?

Multiple views of globalization of higher education and of place

2011-10-24T03:54:00-07:00

I had the pleasure of attending the Laureate International Universities' annual Leadership Summit last June. As readers of this blog know, Laureate is a for-profit corporation that runs a world wide network of higher education institutions, both brick-and-mortar and online. Laureate is one of my potential disruptors. Not surprisingly, while listening to some of the talks at the Summit, I found myself musing about some of the very different ways that various players in higher education are conceptualizing globalization, and how this was related to the place-based identity of most higher education institutions.

I have written about what I called the place-based identity of higher education institutions, and how it impacts globalization efforts. Most higher education institutions were created in response to local needs, typically with funding either from individuals of the area or local (or state) government. They initially served primarily students from their surrounding regions. Thus, they responded to the special contexts of their regions - they were place-based both physically through their campus and also programmatically through their focus on response to local conditions and needs . As time went on, the contexts of regions changed and became more complicated, and successful institutions responded to those changes, keeping in step with those changing regional contexts. In addition, some institutions began to view themselves as national, not regional, institutions and so the context to which they were responding became much larger and national in scope. However, the simpler, geographic component - the campus- of place-based identity generally did not change in any significant way. Most institutions continued to maintain one main campus right where it started. If there were offshoots, they were generally small and designed to better serve their region. This maintaining of the original campus as the "main campus" further connects today's institutions to their origins even as they change to respond to new contexts.

For most higher education institutions, globalization efforts are simply a response to another change in regional or national context. The forces of globalization have impacted conditions in every region of the globe, and educational institutions must respond accordingly in order to continue to serve their traditional local constituencies. Thus, for most in traditional higher education in the US (and the West generally), globalization implies actions that improve the education of our home campus students: e.g. bringing international students to our campuses and sending our students abroad to study; and hiring more international faculty.

More recently, we have also been establishing branches in other countries in order to bring a US higher educational experience to offshore students - or as one recent meeting announcement put it, "export of the US university model abroad." In general, this process involves exporting our place-based model to a situation in which the context is very different from that of the original. NYU's new campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai provide one model of this approach, and each promises to create a learning experience "identical" to that found in New York City. Indeed, a place-based university such as NYU is under considerable pressure to ensure that the international campus does provide an "identical" experience to that of its home campus in order to preserve its place-based brand.

In fact, as we look around, we find significant demand from countries around the world to have branches of US universities that promise to provide education "identical" to that of their home campus, or to have help from US universities to set up a local US-style institution. One can reasonably argue that universities modeled on the US universities will come to be the dominant model of the globalized world. Ben Waldavsky makes a good case for this point of view in The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World. But to what extent will this dominant model be "just like" the US originals? How important is place and its context?

There are some obvious rejections globally of the entire US model. A recent meeting organized by the Universiti Sains Malaysia ( Science University of Malaysia) called The Conference on Decolonizing our Universities brought together delegates from four continents to decry the the influence of western universities:

Too many of (our universities) have become pale imitations of Western universities, with marginal creative contributions of their own and with little or no organic relation with their local communities and environments. The learning environments have become hostile, meaningless and irrelevant to our lives and concerns....

We leave Penang with a firm resolve to work hard to restore the organic connection between our universities, our communities and our cultures. Service to the community and not just to the professions must be our primary concern. The recovery of indigenous intellectual traditions and resources is a priority task.

Some at this conference called for a rejection of essentially everything that could be called Western, including Western science. This position is unlikely to find widespread traction, given the demonstrated successes of numerous aspects of the Western approach as detailed by Waldavsky among others. However, one sees the theme of the organic connection between our universities, our communities and our cultures appearing in numerous globalization efforts of non-Western universities. This theme is just another definition of place-based, and so its appearance should not be surprising given its centrality in the origins and growth of American higher education.

For example, a more nuanced expression of this theme is reflected in the recent announcement of a partnership between Yale and the National University of Singapore (NUS) to create a new liberal arts college in Singapore. According to several well placed colleagues (but not confirmed by anything in writing that I am aware of), this desire to enforce organic connections between the new college and the local culture was behind the decision of the Singapore government to require that Yale have a Singapore partner, NUS, in the new college. Indeed, while this new venture will have most of the characteristics of a Yale undergraduate experience, its curriculum has an interesting, non New Haven, variation:

The new curriculum will synthesize Western and Asian perspectives with an integrated general education spanning the first two years of study before concentration on a major.

This point was emphasized by Tan Chorh Chuan, the NUS President, in the joint announcement:

The most distinctive feature of NUS' education is that it is global, while at the same time, addressing the contexts of Asia. NUS' landmark partnership with Yale will give students at the Yale-NUS College the benefit of the unique strengths of both universities, brought together to create an enriching liberal arts educational experience that is both global and Asian.

Few would deny that NUS is a successful and prestigious global university. However, Professor Tan's comments emphasize that it was not built responding to the issues and conditions -contexts- that formed the US model of higher education, but to Asian issues and conditions. This does not mean that NUS does not have many characteristics in common with the US model (it does), but that it itself is place-based -- but created to respond to Asian contexts rather than American contexts. And the new college has been created by taking many of the characteristics of an American college and modifying them in a way that makes it place-based in Singapore, not New Haven.

This theme of fundamental connection to local place can be found in mission statements of many institutions that are incorporating some aspects of the American university model. For example, The Tecnológico de Monterrey is one of the largest private universities in Latin America and has a growing global presence. Its website states:

Since its foundation, Tecnológico de Monterrey has lived a continuous innovation process to respond to the educational demands that emerge from social, economical, scientific, labor and technological changes, and to the challenges that the country development faces.

Similarly, KAUST seeks to have many of the characteristics of an American research university, but its mission statement makes it clear that it also is place- based while global:

KAUST advances science and technology through bold and collaborative research. It educates scientific and technological leaders, catalyzes the diversification of the Saudi economy and addresses challenges of regional and global significance, thereby serving the Kingdom, the region and the world.

Thus, what we may see growing most rapidly in the near future is not "just like" copies of US universities, but equally place-based institutions that incorporate some elements of the successful American model while being firmly part of their own communities and cultures.In other words, it appears that everyone is building place-based institutions, with the limitations that that puts on their potential responses to globalization.

But there is another model, and that brings me back to the thoughts I had while listening to the folks at Laureate International Universities. Laureate has no historic "home campus". It has grown primarily by buying existing higher education institutions around the world. However, Laureate recognizes that place is very important in an educational institution, and has not tried to homogenize its institutions around any single model:

Every institution in our network operates as its own unique brand, guided by local leadership, proactively involved as a member of the community in which it operates.

Laureate improves the value of the individual brands by suggesting best practices in both administration and education, offering specialized programs from one campuses to others, making available infrastructure and expertise for online learning, etc. How and when such aid should be used is left up to the local leadership, who are best able to evaluate how it can best be used in the context of their campus. Thus, Laureate International Universities might be described as "places- based" rather than "place-based".

This difference provides some important benefits in a globalizing world. For one, there is the ability to match each campus to its context without worrying that differences from the "home" campus will cause brand damage. With this worry out of the way, expansion to additional sites is much less problematic. In addition, the variety of contexts that exist in the Laureate system enables much broader educational experimentation than is possible in a one-context system.They might get it right first! Finally, the whole issue of student exchange programs takes on a new perspective when the exchanges are within one system:

Across our network of more than 55 institutions and more than 100 campuses in 27 countries, Laureate International Universities students are encouraged to take advantage of ever-expanding opportunities to study abroad through affordable and life-changing international learning experiences.

Issues of credit transfer and affordability do not go away, but become more manageable.

A bad 4 years for family income, a good 4 years for college prices

2011-10-11T10:40:02-07:00

Gordon Green and John Coder recently published an ominous report entitled Household Income Trends During the Recession and Economic Recovery. In it, they looked at real (inflation corrected) median household income over the period beginning in December 2007 when the most recent recession began, through the recovery which began in June 2009, ending in the near-present, June 2011. Over that period December 2007 until June 2011, median real household income fell by 9.6%. I will talk about some of the details below, but would first like to compare what happened to price in higher education over that period.

I have written about what has happened to real average published tuition and fees in private non profit colleges and universities over an extended period ending with the academic year 2010-2011, based on College Board Data. I haven't found data for the AY 2011-2012 from College Board, but NAICU reports from their surveys that the increase for 2012 over 2011 is 4.6% in constant 2011 dollars. Putting this together with the previous College Board data and the CPI increase 2010-2012, one find that the percentage increase in real average published tuition and fees for these institutions going from 2007-2008 until 2011-2012 is 10.6%.

Combining these two data, one sees that the percentage of median real family income required to pay the average real tuition and fees increased over this four year period by 22.3%!

Obviously "published tuition and fees" differs from what is actually payed for many students, and many will say, as does the College Board, that increased student aid narrows this income gap. However, as I pointed out recently, much of this increased student aid is in the form of loans. In fact, the loan component has been increasing at about 2% a year above inflation for several decades, only slightly lower than the increase in published tuition and fees. While the loans are important, and enable many to attend college who could not attend without them, they are nonetheless a component of the price of college ultimately paid by the student and so should not be considered to be "aid".

As detailed in this report, the temporal nature of the decline in family income is astounding. Most of the decrease came not in the period of the recession itself - but during the subsequent "recovery". The period from Jan 2009 to present shows an almost uninterrupted sharp decline in family income. In addition, there are caveats and details everywhere that emphasize that no family is "average" or "median". There is a wealth of data in this report looking at different segments of the population and how their real income has be impacted by the downturn.

Suffice it to say that almost every group studied shows a significant drop in earnings - including families headed by someone with a bachelor's degree. However, families headed by someone with less than a college degree generally see a significantly larger drop in real income than do the bachelor's degree families. Although family income is not one of the variables studied in this report, other studies show a strong correlation between educational attainment and household income. Thus, the large drop in income for lower educational attainment families, along with the continuing rapid increase in tuition and fees, combine to suggest that the issues of access for children of lower income backgrounds are rapidly becoming even more serious.

It is well worth looking at the entire report, and considering how its details might inform future pricing decisions in higher education.

2011-10-06T11:45:22-07:00

I have a guest post on The College of 2020 website http://collegeof2020.com/college-of-2020-lloyd-armstrong-1 . The post is entitled "What will the College of 2020 look like?" , and will be published in 2 parts. Check my twitter feed for the appearance of part 2.

An educational system built for another time, another student demographic

2011-09-28T14:32:58-07:00

Complete College America has just released a very interesting and important report entitled Time is the Enemy: the surprising truth about why today's college students aren't graduating- and what needs to change. The report moves beyond typical IPEDS information that focuses on full time students who enter as freshmen, thus ignoring part time and transfer students. Thirty three states provided information on their public systems that went into this report. A couple of caveats: The data do not track educational pathways of individual students (as is now available in a few instances), but rather use gross data such as entries, graduations, drop-outs, transfers from one part of a state's public system into another part of the same system. Thus, for example, transfers to private (either non- or for-profit) institutions and public systems in another states are not included. In addition, the labels "full" and "part-time" student are defined by the status of the student in the first term of enrollment, which may or may not be descriptive of the way many of today's students follow their education.These and other similar caveats aside, this report provides an excellent first look at a much larger and broader set of students than are described by IPEDS.

The report contains two striking demographic facts that underline problems in the way that we typically view higher education:

40% of public college students are able to attend only part time
only 25% of college students are "traditional" in the sense that they are attending full time, attending a residential college, and have parents that are are paying most of their bills

Unfortunately, most of the arguments and discussions one hears concerning higher education take place in some imaginary world in which students are traditional in the sense above. This is probably because much of our education system originally was designed around the traditional student and his or her needs, and the leading institutions in the system still serve primarily the traditional student. As a consequence, potential changes in educational approach or organization are most often judged according to whether or not they will benefit those traditional students who enjoy the benefits of residential life and a manageable financial burden. But, as this report describes, times have changed, the composition of the student body has changed, and because many of our institutions have not changed accordingly, the results are not pretty.

In particular, the report focuses on the plight of part time students, and shows that graduation rates for part time students at all levels - certificates, associates, and bachelors - are only about 40% as high as for full time students (if one looks at a time period twice the nominal period required for graduation). Graduation rates for both full time and part time students who are African-American, Hispanic, older, or low income are considerably lower than for the general student body, and the part-time "penalty" is somewhat higher than for the general population.

The report concludes that at least part of the problem can be solved by getting more students into full time study. To this end, they make an number of excellent proposals that include block schedules that pack courses into a more compact period, online technology to minimize class times, competency based advancement, common general education courses with guaranteed transferability throughout the system, and capping allowed credit hours to force students to move straight to degrees. Special focus is reserved for remedial education:

Remedial classes have become the Bermuda Triangle of higher education. Most students are lost, and few will ever be seen on graduation day.

A number of excellent suggestions are made here as well - although it is clear there is not a "magic bullet" solution to this issue, perhaps because higher education is being asked to do a job that is not part of its core competency.

All in all, a very important report, with sensible and meaningful recommendations. I can't give it an A, however, because I think its basic conclusion in not bold enough - and maybe not even correct. The recommendation is basically to fiddle the system to enable part time students to behave more like full time students, assuming that if they can behave more like full time students they will graduate like full time students. That is not a bad idea, of course, but why not start from the premise that the system itself needs to be redesigned so that it focuses on the needs of the part time students? Maybe the problem is not simply the full time/part time divide, but that the system responds or does not respond to the many and highly varied needs of part time (and by extension, non-traditional) students.

That student focus is what the University of Phoenix originally used when it set up classrooms wherever there were concentrations of students - it went to the students rather than making them come to a physical central campus. Phoenix then moved into online presentation when the technology allowed, thus making it even easier for working students to participate. That focus is what Western Governors University used when it pioneered competency based learning, so that students could get credit for pertinent knowledge gained anywhere by any means, and introduced pricing models that enable students to move as rapidly as they can through the system.

And what about curriculum? Many part time students have an understandably sharp focus on gaining skills and knowledge that will be useful in the workplace. Much of our traditional curriculum does not provide the obvious contact with workplace skills that might stimulate more non-traditional students to persevere in their education. However, there are institutions in both the for- and non-profit sectors that work closely with employers to ensure that their curriculum provides the skills and knowledge needed to enter into the workforce. Perhaps we could learn things about curriculum from these institutions that would improve graduation rates for part time students.

A very important contribution to a very important problem - but I have the feeling that to really make an advance, we have to stop trying to fit the student into the existing box, and start trying to remake the box to fit the student.