Dana Blankenhorn

The Great Education Opportunity

2010-03-12T06:41:00-05:00

Think of this as Volume 13, Number 11 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

What we have learned in the last 15 years is that, for the Internet to take over an industry, the old industry must die -- or go through a near-death experience.

Many industries have died and been reborn online since the Web was spun. Travel agents once dotted every corner. The Yellow Pages was once the most-thumbed publication in the house. Newspapers once weighed more than magazines. Each has gradually been replaced by the Web.

Some industries have adapted, usually when they lacked profits with which to fight back. Libraries are still vital because they have Internet-linked computers and broadband, and because they use the Web to let people get the books they want, not just those on the local shelves.

But profit-making industries die harder deaths. The death of newspapers has been tough to watch, and since the Web has yet to replace them on a local level, its advocates have a case. Health care is mid-way through its transformation, but meanwhile we have a system where the poor outbid the middle class for care.

The latest industry to feel the lash is education. A lot of people, especially young people, are terribly stung by this. The cause of this crisis is the current economic slowdown, but that only exposed obvious flaws in higher ed's business model.

In other words, higher education is a great opportunity.

Everywhere I go in Atlanta these days I am surrounded by two types of billboards. Some advertise lawyers who will help you after an accident. The others advertise online colleges.

I can't tell you how good Troy University or Herzing University or DeVry or Phoenix are. I can't compare them to the Rice University I attended in the 1970s. I know most of those who work in the field insist they're not comparable at all.

What I do know is that, until now, most have had a limited number of offerings. They have cherry-picked the easy to serve career fields, like medical technicians and computer server operators. They offer business degrees and basic science. You can't take Chinese there yet, or the higher callings the big schools have.

You will also find that your Herzing degree does not get you much respect. But it may get your foot in the door. You will get your chance.

What most critics don't understand is that schools like this have been competing for years against Community Colleges, the lowest-cost and highest-volume rungs on the higher ed ladder, and they have been competing well. They have been growing. They have honed their business models.

They are ready to fly.

Most undergraduate lesson plans are as standardized as high school. If you're at the University of Florida your classes aren't going to be much different than they are at Texas A&M. The reason both those schools spend millions becoming sport franchises is to maintain the political support they need to keep building and maintain their reputations.

Undergraduate education, in other words, is a commodity. Sports are the political payoffs meant to sustain a fading industry.

This is where the online schools can now step in. They can expand their offerings and pick up market share states are throwing away. They can do this because their costs are low. By doing most of the work online they extend the value of every staffer's online hour. You can do lectures on the Web, with whiteboard work done as at GotoMeeting. Why do you need to physically be there all the time?

Oh, socialization. You mean getting drunk? Oh, lifelong friendships. Can't you make those in your community?

Increasingly the extra cost of a college education is not matched by its value. Those colleges that specialize in teaching kids, as opposed to research, have two choices -- change or die.

This is a very good thing. Massive change only happens under stress. Those businesses -- and state-supported colleges are businesses -- must change or die.

Schools like Troy and Central Michigan prove that change is possible. These are real schools, with real campuses. They are also big in online education, with facilities in distant cities supporting their online infrastructures. They even have football teams. Troy beat my alma mater, Rice University, in a bowl game a few years ago, and in retrospect it was a serious rite-of-passage.

Which is not to say Rice is doomed. Schools like Rice, and Stanford, and Harvard, are already graduate institutions, not undergraduate ones. They make their money from research. Professors are no longer teachers, but team leaders. Professional programs like law and medicine still pay for themselves with enormous tuitions that are paid-back in the form of prestige and higher salaries. Their business models still work.

This is not true for, say, Kennesaw State, which chose to grow its undergraduate base just as the cost structure of that business was collapsing. The Rice Owls will go on. I'm not sure of the Kennesaw State Owls.

What is happening in California is tragic. But it should be seen as the sound of opportunity. If I were them I'd designate one school -- a good one -- as the center of a new online curriculum focus. I would cut even deeper at other schools and push for excellence in the online curriculum of the chosen one. (And if I were to choose, I choose the University of California.) I would work to take its real curriculum, its high-end curriculum, and put that online. I would hire teachers and graduate students from failing faculties to staff this online college, and I would offer a full academic program.

You can still do some lab work on campus. You can still meet in buildings. But most of the infrastructure of California's undergraduate system needs to go away. Same with every other state.

They can ignore this call, but what they will find is not that education disappears, that bright high school kids wind up on the streets with nothing to do. What they will find is that kids go to the Internet, that the online schools grow even faster, and that in five years it's the University of Phoenix that will belong in the Pac 10, not UCLA.

This is the beauty of Internet competition. It's the beauty of the online universe. When costs force offline cuts, we move forward and take the market.

And as online higher education grows, we're going to find that a lot of niches that are going begging right now -- like local investigative reporting -- find a cadre of trained professionals with the skills to build businesses that take up the slack.

Using the Past to Control the Future

2010-03-05T06:37:00-05:00

Think of this as Volume 13, Number 10 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

One of the most difficult aspects of imposing a new political thesis is that, when you start, there's no vocabulary to describe it.

Every political era develops its own vocabulary as well as its own belief system. Once these are imposed, a generation has a common set of touchstones with which to discuss policy.

Lincoln's concept of Union meant southerners were subservient to the north's political will, and could only take command of the government through a loose coalition that included northern political machines and political reformers. Republicans could “wave the bloody shirt” if Democrats became too overt, and did.
Theodore Roosevelt's concept of Progressivism offered a common vocabulary based on progress, on the public good, on the need to balance the interests of the rich and the poor slowly and carefully. In practice this is very close to the Obama Thesis of Consensus.
Franklin Roosevelt's concept of Unity meant that “politics stops at the water's edge,” and that all groups had a stake in what the nation was doing through the growth of the middle class, that everyone in fact was part of the middle class.
Richard Nixon's concept of Conflict held that majorities had to protect themselves from various minorities. Only those who were inside the Thesis deserved protection. Outsiders (and this concept eventually extended to all Democrats) were suspect. Their motives were not those of “us,” they were “them” and they had to be defeated for “us” to be safe.

In practice the Nixon Thesis worked by constantly narrowing the definition of “us” when the coalition grew too large. This was necessary to maintain the sense of being surrounded necessary for the assumptions to be maintained.

It was easy to be a Republican in 1970, in other words. You just had to not be a Democrat. Gradually moderates, feminists, mainstream protestants, blacks and browns were thrown over in favor of tightly-controlled groups I call Wall Street (economic), Church Street (social) and Easy Street (military-industrial) Republicans.

The final coalition, under George W. Bush, wound up having a lot in common with coalitions of church, oligarchs, and soldiers who have controlled Latin America under caudillos for two centuries, with disastrous results. It was no surprise that America ran off the rails. You run your country like Argentina and you're going to get Argentine results.

This is a long-winded way of saying that there is no present vocabulary for how President Obama wants politics to work. The Roosevelts are dead and can't be resurrected.

So when the President tried to bring Washington together around a conference table recently, what he got was not a negotiation, but political theater. John McCain went off on an irrelevant rant that dominated the news. Eric Cantor brought props, John Boehner offered rhetorical talking points. Theater is how we do politics under the Nixon Thesis.

The irony is that Health Care Reform should be a no-brainer. If Republicans really believe that health care is a privilege, a choice, how can they accept the existence of Medicare and Medicaid? In rhetoric, they can't, even if in practice they must. Even the cost-benefit success of the VA and military health systems must be questioned, because it conflicts with ideology.

What grassroots Republicans wind up endorsing is a system where the poor are taken care of, and the elderly are taken care of, and even children are taken care of as a matter of right, but the broad middle class – the people their Thesis was supposedly designed to defend – are left without real health care of any kind. Working people can no longer afford what insurers and hospitals must charge in order to make up for losses those for whom an entitlement exists.

It's really crazy. An unemployed New Yorker has better access to, and a greater entitlement to health care, than a hard-working middle class family in Atlanta or Houston. In practice it's indefensible.

But ideology is not about practice. It's not about reality. It's about an ideal. Those who support the ideal will be protected, those who oppose it must be destroyed.

But here's the lesson. At a time of crisis you may proclaim a new set of rules, but you must play with the rules as you're given them by the past. Only the past can control the future.

Nixon was “The One” as in a man who could re-create an FDR-like unity of purpose. FDR himself ran in 1932 as a “Progressive Democrat,” as an heir to his distant cousin Theodore's legacy of slow, steady progress. Teddy himself came in as a Vice President, the hero of San Juan Hill, a military leader in the mold of Republicans like U.S. Grant. And Lincoln sought, throughout his term, to echo the sense of common purpose espoused by his own political mentor. Henry Clay.

Barack Obama has no choice. He must play this hand by Nixon's rules. You can't impose new rules until you've won enough hands that the old rules no longer apply. That means narrow, partisan majorities, and intense organization of his own people against the common enemy that is the modern Republican Party.

Even though he doesn't believe Republicans have any ill motives, he must in the near term convince the rest of us they do, or we go back to Argentina and America will never come back.