Changing Higher Education

Update on Perspectives on the elephant of college pricing

A year and one half ago I wrote a post called Perspectives on the elephant of college pricing. In it, I looked at the increasing cost of higher education from three perspectives: the public's view; the student and parents view; and the college view.  In all cases, I focused on private, non-profit four year institutions. Given the changes in the economy since that post was written, it seems worthwhile to give a quick update on each of these perspectives.

Data mining higher education records in search of improved outcomes

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has just funded a potentially very interesting and useful study at WCET. Unfortunately, I have to go through a few explanatory layers of acronyms in order to explain that sentence, but stick with me. WCET stands for the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies, while WICHE stands for The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. WICHE was created to facilitate sharing of resources among the higher education systems of the West, and has 15 member states.  

The grant focuses on identifying variables that impact student retention and progression.  The study itself will involve data mining of student records from an interesting mixture of instituions: American Public University System, Colorado Community College System, Rio Salado College, University of Hawaii System, University of Illinois Springfield, and University of Phoenix.  The aggregate data to be analyzed contains records of over 400,000 students:

Each of these postsecondary entities has performed extensive research on their own datasets.  The combination of large data sets across a wide variety of types of institutions (public/private, two-year/four-year, traditional/non-traditional) will seek to find patterns identifiable only through analyzing large data sets representing a widely diverse set of students.

What does society have to pay for a student to get a bachelor's degree?

Jorge Klor de Alva and Mark Schneider have just published a paper -Who Wins? Who Pays?: The Economic Returns and Costs of a Bachelor's Degree- that will certainly cause considerable controversy and discussion. While there are many aspects of the specifics of the study that undoubtedly will be challenged and refined in the future, in a very real sense the great significance of the paper is that it introduces a perspective to the ongoing discussions of higher education that is new and critically important. 

National and state governments obviously are struggling  to come to grips with the new era of constrained budgets.  As they have tried to simply continue the old paradigms of higher education and its support into this era of constraint, results have generally been quite negative.  Resulting higher education cuts have led to significant decreases in the numbers of students who can be accepted and educated in most state systems. Often the cuts have been deepest at institutions that serve primarily lower income students.  On the private side, the recession has pummeled many endowments, and the sector depends on annual tuition increases that average inflation + 3.5%, a model that faces increasing resistance. Federal student aid support to all sectors is facing increasing scrutiny, with some of Obama's goals for increases being scrapped before the budget wars really start.

One of the major problems that all of the individuals, agencies and legislatures face as they seek to find new and sustainable directions for higher education that serves its various constituencies is simply lack of data, which then leads to a lack of understanding of the implications of aspects of current funding paradigms.