Changing Higher Education

Another sign that the business model for higher education is broken

The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) put out a report yesterday that bravely tries to put a good spin on the tuition news:

Private College Tuition Rises at Lowest Rate in 37 Years
NAICU Washington Update

June 29, 2009

With families facing one of the worst economic crises in the nation's history, private, nonprofit colleges and universities have responded with the smallest average increase in tuition and fees in 37 years, according to the final results of a membership survey conducted by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

It is great to know that higher education has responded well to this crisis! So what is the result of this wonderful restraint?

The 4.3 percent increase for 2009-10 is the smallest since 1972-73, when average tuition and fees at private institutions rose by the same rate. The increase is slightly higher than the 2008 Consumer Price Index of 3.8 percent.

Oops!It is, of course, customary to compare next year’s academic year tuition increase to last year’s calendar year CPI increase, and by that standard the tuition increase that is only .5% above inflation shows some restraint.   However, these have not been ordinary times in the CPI world. While the first half of last year was reasonably well-behaved, the second half was much less so as jobs and equity vanished at a rapid rate - a trend that has continued to this date.   Another comparison that might well be made is next academic year’s tuition increase compared to the CPI increase over the past 12 months. Not only would that better describe today’s economic realities by including  the recent tumultuous times for the economy, it has the benefit of being almost an academic year CPI increase that we can compare with an academic year tuition increase. .

If we use this CPI increase for the most recent 12 months available (through May) for our comparison, we see a vastly different picture. According to the June 17 report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics the (unadjusted) CPI has actually decreased by 1.3% over the past 12 months.  Plus 4.3% for tuition no longer sounds restrained - or responsible - when compared to minus 1.3% in CPI! 

Whatever CPI one wants to compare the 4.3% increase to, it obviously is a very significant increase at a time when unemployment at all income levels is at a very high level, and uncertainty about economic security is on the minds of most families.  Unfortunately, for all of the NAICU  rhetoric about new “innovative affordability”ideas, this result demonstrates clearly that the higher education business model still demands price increases that are well above CPI increases.

As Stein’s Law assures us, “If something can’t go on forever, it will stop.”   A model that demands that prices always rise significantly faster than CPI clearly will break down at some point.  It is time to work harder imagining a new, more sustainable model, and to spend less time trying to defend what in the end will not be defensible .

Is online learning ready to become a disruptive technology?

In 2000, I wrote an article in Change discussing major disruptive impacts on higher education that distance learning might produce (see, How about distance learning, March 3, 2006).  In it, I brashly postulated that:

The experience will certainly be different from that found in the classroom of a great teacher, but in the end DL may well provide a competitive or even superior way to learn.

A recent analysis by the Department of Education of learning outcomes achieved by various on-line learning courses compared to those of traditional courses finds that my “in the end” may actually be now!

The DoE identified over a thousand empirical studies of online learning between 1996 and 2007. From these studies, they chose a set to subject to meta- analysis with the goal of answering 4 research questions:

1. How does the effectiveness of online learning compare with that of face-to-face instruction?
2. Does supplementing face-to-face instruction with online instruction enhance learning?
3.. What practices are associated with more effective online learning?
4. What conditions influence the effectiveness of online learning?

The analysis selected from all of the empirical studies using three stringent conditions:

Limit the search to studies of Web-based instruction (i.e., eliminating studies of video- and audio-based telecourses or stand-alone, computer-based instruction);
Include only studies with random-assignment or controlled quasi-experimental designs; and Examine effects only for objective measures of student learning (e.g., discarding effects for student or teacher perceptions of learning or course quality, student affect, etc.).

The results of the meta analysis are both impressive and thought provoking :

•    Students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.
•    Instruction combining online and face-to-face elements had a larger advantage relative to purely face-to-face instruction than did purely online instruction.
•    Studies in which learners in the online condition spent more time on task than students in the face-to-face condition found a greater benefit for online learning
•    Most of the variations in the way in which different studies implemented online learning did not affect student learning outcomes significantly
•    The effectiveness of online learning approaches appears quite broad across different content and learner types
•    Effect sizes were larger for studies in which the online and face-to-face conditions varied in terms of curriculum materials and aspects of instructional approach in addition to the medium of instruction

There are many data, and numerous caveats, behind each of these conclusions.  I strongly recommend a reading of the report to better understand what these conclusions mean.  However, a couple of these results deserve some comment here.  First, the result that online students who spent more time on task than students in face to face conditions learned more is at some level somewhat of an obvious outcome. More time spent, more material learned.  However, this response involves an acknowledgment of relatively equal time- learning efficiency coefficients for both approaches, which would be a step forward for some.  It also begs the very interesting question of why the online students were motivated to spend more time on task than their classroom peers.

The last of the results above regarding effect size emphasized that online and face to face courses had the more nearly equal learning outcomes when the courses were most similar.  Thus, since online courses seem to be more effective in general, most online courses are differentiating themselves from the face to face courses in ways that lead to increased learning outcomes.  Unfortunately, the data are not robust enough to produce many clear differentiating factors. There is too much “context”hidden in the data  - undefined differences in instructor behavior and content.  Time on task does emerge as important, as do methods that encourage student reflection.

All in all, this report provides both a powerful signal (warning?) that online learning is rapidly growing up, and a call for additional well controlled studies that will show how to further increase the effectiveness of the online experience.  It also raises some interesting policy questions regarding various regulations that view online courses as necessarily being of lower quality than face to face courses.

New on the for-profit higher education front

Apollo Global announced on April 29 that they are in discussions with BPP Professional Education, with an eye toward a possible purchase (for background, see my earlier report on Apollo's international activities). BPP Professional Education teaches a variety of professional development courses in areas such as accounting, finance, law, etc. The web site describes teaching centers in 11 countries (plus the UK), and many programs are also taught using distance learning. More notably, however, BPP contains the BPP College of Professional Studies, which in September 2007, became the first publicly owned private company in the UK to be awarded degree granting  powers.  The College is composed of a business school, and a law school. Should the discussions lead to a purchase, the price is estimated to be around $460M US.

On the home front, many smaller non-profit colleges have been struggling for years with declining enrollment, and increasing debt.  The current economic downturn is providing the "last straw" for some of them, and they are finding that the only practical solution is to be absorbed by a well-funded for-profit higher education corporation. In the past few weeks, Daniel Webster College, the College of Santa Fe, and Waldorf College have all taken steps in that direction.

On the 24th of April, Daniel Webster College announced that it had sold itself to ITT Educational Services.   Daniel Webster is located in Nashua, NH, and has about 1000 students, 750 of them residential. According to an article in the Nashua Telegraph, Daniel Webster had been considering a sale for several years because of financial difficulties.  According to this article:

Daniel Webster College President Robert "Skip" Myers said ITT has plans to eventually expand Daniel Webster into a regional and then national brand of schools.......
Daniel Webster College will remain autonomous from any of ITT's technology-oriented programs, with the faculty continuing to run academics and complete separation, Myers said. The name will remain except for a minor alteration: After the sale, it will be eventually known as Daniel Webster University. Distinction as a university will allow Daniel Webster College to not only increase students and faculty on the Nashua campus, but it would fit with the school's and ITT's goal to offer a "learning network" that will stretch across New England and eventually the country, Myers said.

This would be an interesting new strategy for ITT should it come about.

The College of Santa Fe has also been running a large deficit for considerable time. The College has only about 800 full-time students, and discussions with other non-profits regarding mergers,etc. had not worked out. Over a year ago, the College of Santa Fe entered into discussions with Laureate Education about a sale (see my earlier report on Laureate's move into the US).   Laureate was interested, but negotiations with creditors over existing debt apparently did not go well, so Laureate seemingly dropped out of contention. In December, it appeared that New Mexico Highlands University might take over the College, although there seemed to be no idea of where the necessary resources might come from.  The newspaper article describing the Highlands bid also stated that the faculty of the College had "surrendered" tenure "in order to court the for-profit education corporation, Laureate."  However, on May 1, Laureate rose like the Phoenix, and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson announced a partnership between the State of New Mexico, the City of Santa Fe, and Laureate to "Save College of Santa Fe": 

The partnership envisions the City of Santa Fe, with support from the Governor’s Office, purchasing the college and then Laureate operating the college under a lease.

The Governor has pledged $11M to the deal. Even better of Laureate, the Governor has pledged his support in negotiating with creditors to bring the existing debt down to manageable levels.  So there is a reasonable chance that the College of Santa Fe will soon join the Laureate International Network.

Waldorf College, is a small (670 students) liberal arts institution in Forest City ,Iowa, affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Waldorf has also encountered serious financial problems for some time, including a shrinking student body and large debt. The College has been seriously investigating options for over two years, but the downturn in the markets made it clear that it was time to move.  On May 8, Waldorf officials announced that the College would be purchased by the for-profit Columbia Southern University.  Columbia Southern bills itself as the "Premier Online University for Distance Learning."  Waldorf leaders said in their announcement that the College would remain a residential college, so this may reflect a move in a new direction by Columbia Southern.  In any case, with help from their new owners, Waldorf soon will be introducing new majors and degrees. As in the College of Santa Fe case, faculty will have to give up tenure. Scott Jaschik has a very nice discussion of this purchase in Inside Higher Education, including some thoughtful comments from a faculty member at Waldorf.

All of these purchases in the US have the characteristic that the purchased entity has the highest form of accreditation -  regional accreditation.  Although the accreditation does not move automatically when ownership changes, it is likely in these cases that it will.  Thus, three different for-profit higher ed organizations have profited from the current economic downturn to add regionally accredited institutions to their networks.

Two more, very different, meetings

My friend Joe Duffey keeps sending me announcements about meetings in some vain hope that he can keep me more aware of what is happening in the world.  I feel compelled to comment on two of his recent alerts because they do say a lot about what is going on. One depresses me, the other I find very hopeful.
1. The World Summit on University Ranking- this is the depressing one. 
Readers of this blog know how I feel about university rankings: I dislike them greatly.  I could spend a day listing all of the reasons why, but will just run over a few. First, the idea that the overall quality of universities can be reduced to a single number in silly.  Every great university has some really terrible programs, and many otherwise mediocre institutions have some superb programs.  When trying to rank programs (as the NRC does), one finds that the reputational data are squishy (who really knows very much about the programs at more than a hand full of rival institutions?), and the “harder” data are rather arbitrarily chosen (it can be easily measured).  In the end, the statistical uncertainties of the data leave almost everyone in a statistical tie, but that doesn’t stop anyone from dropping the uncertainties and using the numbers as absolute. 

Because research data are easier to obtain than teaching data, rankings focus on the research.   This effective devaluing of teaching and learning in our self analyses is not healthy, and at some point will lead to difficulties in our relations with the societies that support us.

Whatever data are used, some person then must decide how to weight different inputs in order to add it up to a definition of  the best university.  Obviously, however, there is absolutely no unique way to combine the data.  One way is arguably as good as another.  This does not stop anyone either.  In fact,  the rankers like this aspect, since it means that an almost endless number of rankings can be published, each leading to a happy financial or reputational ending for someone.

Rankings are, of course, a celebration of the status quo.  Consequently, they punish institutions that are trying to respond innovatively to the changing world.   This would be of little importance if so many governing boards and presidents were not focused on “improving their rankings”.  Thus badly needed innovation - including cost cutting innovation - becomes even more difficult to carry out.

Finally, when making “world” rankings, most often the criteria are based on venerable Western universities.  Why? Why should looking like Harvard be a good idea in many countries of the world?

So overall, I think we can all be quite concerned that we now have an International Rankings Expert Group.  They are producing a product that by definition is flawed, and serves almost no good purpose.

2.The Global Higher Education Forum 2009-  this is the hopeful one.
This is almost the anti-meeting to the one described above;

The Global Higher Education Forum (GHEF) brings together scholars, policy makers, researchers, academics and administrators to reflect, analyse, discuss and debate on a wide variety of issues pertaining to global higher education in a south-south context. In particular, GHEF2009 will focus on the theme of Global Higher Education, seeking to ponder and reflect on the benefits and challenges and at the same time, envision the way forward for emerging and expanding, rather than for established, higher education systems.

This is a group that actually wants to think about alternative approaches to those which are celebrated above- approaches that may be enormously more valuable for the countries involved. As pointed out in the Background and Rational of the meeting:

In view of the many similar initiatives by different regions and groups to promote the development of higher education through a common platform (which is increasingly biased towards European/American models), the deliberation on the practicality and appropriateness of Asian, Latin American and African countries following the same pathway is timely. The current global economic meltdown presents another interesting backdrop and context to analyse and deliberate on the suitability of European/American models for expanding and emerging higher education systems in Asia, Latin America and Africa.

There is a wonderful article in GlobalHigherEducation written by two members of the organizing committee, Morshidi Sirat and Ooi Poh Ling, describing the goals of this forum. We should all wish them success.

Bologna finally comes to the US

Thanks to the Lumina Foundation, an exciting educational experiment is underway. InsideHigherEd reports that Lumina is leading a US project that applies the  “Tuning” approach of the Bologna process to  several different undergraduate majors.   Numerous higher education institutions of differing size and mission in Utah, Indiana, and Minnesota are participating. 

The Bologna process, overall, tries to bring some consistency to the meaning of degrees around the Bologna region in order to facilitate movement of students around the region, and acceptance of degrees by employers (see The Bologna process - a significant step in the modularization of higher education, Sept 12, 2008). At the same time, the process does not seek to challenge the differences in approach and viewpoint that characterize the various member states. Thus, there is agreement on the intellectual capacities that should describe someone who has attained a degree of a certain level, but no limitations on the approach that got the student to that point.   Clifford Adelman has just published another detailed and very insightful report on the process,  The Bologna Process for U.S. Eyes: Re-learning Higher Education in the Age of Convergence. Highly recommended.

The Tuning approach is the discipline specific part of this process. The approach seeks to create guidelines that faculty can use as they develop statements of expectations for such things as learning outcomes and  levels of learning for individual disciplinary degrees.  The process involves surveys of graduates, employers, and academics to get a clear picture of the learning outcomes that should be expected of specific disciplinary degree programs in the 21st century.  The process has moved along well in Europe, and has led to the formation of a Latin American Tuning Process that now involves institutions in about 18 Latin American countries.  High time the US joined the world and experimented with the approach! 

It is disappointing, but no surprise, that InsiderHigherEd reports that Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, is concerned that all of this could provide a threat “academic freedom”.  This is the usual argument advanced to derail attempts to define desired learning outcomes or to measure them. However, at one level, Nelson is certainly correct.  If faculty do not participate fully and creatively in helping to develop appropriate and meaningful statements of desired learning outcomes, someone else will eventually impose standards - and those externally  imposed standards quite possibly will provide a threat to academic freedom. 

Another sad story about outcomes assessment

Kevin Carey has written a number of very compelling articles relating to the use of outcomes measures in higher education(see Educational value added, Sept.1, 2006) .  One of his more recent was an op-ed, Blocking Public Comparisons Obstructs Knowledge, Too, in the Chronicle of Higher Education.   His “case study” for this article is the State University of New York at Buffalo, which apparently is suffering mightily from the economic downturn.  The President, John B. Simpson is turning to the legislature for both increased aid, and the ability to raise tuition.  However, as Carey points out:

Yet even as the SUNY system lurches toward financial crisis, it has squandered a golden opportunity to make its case to the taxpayers and their elected representatives, to demonstrate success in doing what the majority of those people care most about: helping students learn. By refusing to provide public, comparable measures of student-learning results, New York's great public-university system has sown the seeds of long-term marginalization. In that, too, it has plenty of company nationwide.

The situation facing President Simpson is particularly difficult because in 2003 the SUNY Trustees passed a resolution calling on the SUNY system to come up with uniform “before-after”measures of student attainment of general education goals. In other words, value added measures in the core area of general education.

What Carey describes as happening after that is not surprising -nor is it the type of response that is limited to the SUNY system:     

But in the year following the resolution, SUNY leadership was subjected to intense pressure from New York's Faculty Senate and other interest groups opposed to the plan. As a result, SUNY put in place a watered-down scheme in 2004. Value-added estimates of learning growth were no longer required. Instead of common systemwide measures, every university would choose its own standards, tests, and sampling procedures, making institutional comparisons difficult. They would also be made impossible because campus-specific data would be "used for confidential in-house discussions." The results, it was stressed, should never be used to "punish, publicly compare or embarrass faculty, courses, programs, departments, or institutions either individually or collectively.

Unfortunately, as Carey points out, even the resulting hodgepodge of measures contained some embarrassing results for specific programs, so additional efforts were required to water down the program.  He reports that a system task force studying implementation of the assessment program stated:

Institutions responded very strongly against the requirement that institutions must report to System Administration the percentage of students who 'exceed, meet, approach, or fail to meet standards

Economic value of international students: Australia

An important issue when thinking of national policies toward globalization of higher education is, quite simply, whether such globalization can provide a positive impact on the economy.  For example, NAFSA estimates that in 2007-2008, international students contributed $15.54B to the US economy. There are, however, many countries that have more actively reached out to international students than has the US.  How have their efforts translated into economic benefits?

Kris Olds at  GlobalHigherEd.com has several posts that look into different aspects of that question.  A recent post looks at recent data on the economic impact on Australia of international students.  The data comes from a report entitled The Australian Education Sector and the Economic Contribution of International Students.  The report shows that the economic impact of international students is very significant, making education the third largest export category earner for Australia.  Olds provides an overview and brief analysis of the data, and discusses the origins of the report itself. 

I have only skimmed the report, but it appears that the economic impact analysis looks only at international students coming to Australia.  The economic impact of the international students being taught at offshore sites of Australian universities is not considered, although this is clearly important for a number of Australian universities.  I also found Table 5-7, which looks at the number of international students who were granted visas to stay in Australia after study to be very interesting. 

Columbia goes global following a different track

Columbia University today announced the opening of several global research centers:

In a concerted effort to deepen its already extensive global perspective, the University is establishing Columbia Global Centers in Beijing, China and Amman, Jordan. They are the first of what the University plans as a network of centers around the world to promote and facilitate international collaborations, new research projects, academic programming and study abroad, enhancing Columbia’s historical commitment to global scholarship... ..
Columbia Global Centers will provide flexible regional hubs for a wide range of activities and resources intended to enhance the quality of research and learning at the University and around the world. The goal is to establish a network of regional centers in international capitals to collaboratively address complex global challenges by bringing together scholars, students, public officials, private enterprise, and innovators from a broad range of fields.

This is a very exciting new approach to globalization for higher education.  I discussed a very similar approach in an earlier post Modularity in university higher education: Research, June 16, 2006. It builds on the understanding that “optimization” of research and teaching in a globalizing world involves putting together the most effective teams, using the best researchers around the world.  Regional centers provide an anchor that give the teams stability and breadth beyond that which can be achieved with typical multi-investigator projects.  A fascinating - and overdue - experiment!

Losing the world’s best and brightest: America’s new immigrant entrepreneurs, Part IV

The title of this new report from the Kaufman Foundation tells you a lot about its conclusions.  The authors, Vivek Wadhwa, AnnaLee Saxenian, Richard Freeman, and Alex Salkever used a Facebook based approach to interview over a thousand foreign national students at US institutions of higher education.  The report does not claim to be definitive in any way: it was not designed with random choice of interviewees, does not have a longitudinal component, etc.  However, it does make some very important points that will probably resonate with many of us who come into contact with international students on a regular basis.

The title also lets you know that this is part of a Kaufman Foundation series looking at immigrant entrepreneurship in the US.  As stated in the press release for this report:

Immigrants have contributed disproportionately in the most dynamic part of the U.S. economy—the high-tech sector—co-founding firms such as Google, Intel, eBay and Yahoo. In addition, immigrant inventors contributed to more than a quarter of U.S. global patent applications. Immigrant-founded U.S.-based companies employed 450,000 workers and generated $52 billion in revenue in 2006.

Many of these immigrant entrepreneurs arrived in this country as students, were trained at US institutions of higher education, and stayed here to follow their dreams.  Thus, the future plans and aspirations of  members of the current generation of international students are likely to have important implications for the health of the US economy in the future.  This report has good news and bad news on that front.

Failed experiments in offshore campuses

Kris Olds has a very nice post in GlobalHigherEd looking at recent closings of offshore campuses by US universities. He makes some quite pertinent points about the importance of learning -collectively- from these experiments.  Highly recommended