The third draft of the report from the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education is out now, and news reports indicate that it is acceptable to most members of the Commission. Thus it is probably pretty close to the final report, and as such interesting to look at in some detail.
One of the more confusing aspects of the report is that it is really about just one part of higher education - undergraduate studies. There is nothing wrong with that focus, but it should have been made clear in the report. In addition, by leaving out graduate and professional training, and research, many of the discussions about cost containment miss the boat. More on that below.
At the outset let me say that I think the report hits most of the proper points about the current situation in higher education, and makes a number of suggestions that are in the right directions. One (especially a professor) can always argue about emphasis and detail, which is mostly what I shall do.
An underlying discomfort I have with the report is that it is only minimally focused on global changes and competition. There are numerous comparisons of how we compare today with other countries, but no analysis of where the competition is moving tomorrow. Similarly, there is no mention of the movement up the educational ladder of the offshoring of jobs (see Offshoring moves up the education ladder, March 7, 2006 ), and what that might mean for our educational system. The report is also focused on domestic students (understandably), and gives rather short shrift to the importance international students play in higher education and our economy generally. Other countries have recognized importance of international students to their global prestige and general welfare, and have created national strategies to attract the best and brightest (e.g Australia and Great Britain). No such overall strategy is called for here, although the relatively few recommendations made by the committee in this area have great merit.
The report describes weaknesses in learning outcomes and educational innovation in our institutions. The committee rightly points out that most educational research is ignored in the classrooms of K-16, and outcomes measures show clearly that our students suffer greatly from that ignorance. Although I would have argued for stronger, broader and more detailed statements (see How people learn, May 1, 2006; A D- in science education, April 14, 2006; How are we doing teaching cognitive skills, July4, 2006 ), the concerns are stated clearly. In the report, however, sections on these elements follow those on access and affordability, implicitly giving primacy to these concerns. Access and affordability are certainly important, but mean little if the product is not up to the quality and focus we need to compete on the world scene. I hope that the ordering of the concerns described in the report does not lead higher education and the public to focus on spirited discussions regarding access and affordability, which are at the periphery of the academic enterprise, while ignoring the very real warnings contained in this report about the core of the enterprise, the quality of the learning we provide. Committee support for increased educational innovation is welcome and needed.
The transparency and accountability sections point to a real problem, but I am not sure the solution is at hand. It is important - especially at today’s prices - that the consumer have a much clearer idea of what can be expected from an institution. However, the desired product of higher education is multidimensional, including not only subject matter fluency, but also development of critical thinking, postformal reasoning, coping mechanisms, social and political skills, etc. For some of these things we have some idea how to test, for others we do not. The ultimate problem with testing is that eventually most institutions will teach for the test. So before we begin to test, a national discussion of what our students need to be able to do in this globalized world is imperative. Having said that, an emphasis on measuring and reporting student learning outcomes is to be welcomed, as it is a critical component of our being able to see how well we do our job, and as I will suggest below, our survivability.
The cost/price discussion is terribly important, but much more complex than the report acknowledges. First, however, let me note that, in my opinion, the AAU comment on this part of the draft exemplifies very well the report’s statement that “History is littered with examples of industries that, at their peril, failed to respond to - or even to notice- changes in the world around them..” The AAU gives a long list of excellent reasons why it is appropriate that costs are growing so rapidly, and emphasizes that great efforts are being made to limit increases. However, similar arguments have been made by a large number of industries that proceeded to price themselves into bankruptcy as they exceeded the capacity or interest of customers to pay (see, Disruptive technologies: When great universities fail?, March 3, 2006). People of good will can argue over exactly the point at which the average debt of graduates reaches societially counterproductive levels, or the burden on families becomes too high. Those same people can debate how much political pressure to lower costs of education governments will endure before they say “enough”. And governments do deservedly have a voice because they support higher education massively through financial aid, tax exemption, etc. However, any rational analysis must lead to the conclusion that increasing educational costs at rates described in the report (no matter how justified it may be) can only go on for a period of time before those trigger points are reached. And the problem is that those costs will be very difficult to control without some major changes in the industry. In my experience, the cost cutting measures described in the report will not be sufficient to handle the very real cost pressures described by the AAU.
As pointed out in the report, “prestige is often measured by resources”, or more precisely, by resources spent. Because quality is very difficult to measure in higher education, the public looks to surrogates to define quality. Cost is actually one such surrogate - the “Cadillac effect” leads one to think the more expensive it is, the better it must be. Monies spent on facilities, on star faculty, social infrastructure, breadth of course offerings are all taken by parents and students to be surrogates for quality.(see Competitive higher education, March 3, 2006) One has only to listen to prospective students and their parents discussing the fitness centers at various institutions to understand why there has been a growth in expenditures in these areas. The institutions wouldn’t be increasing spending in these areas if the customers were not demanding it through their choices. Any money saved by cost cutting at the present time would likely be redirected into additional spending on some of these quality surrogates rather than in a cost reduction, because prestige leads to better students and faculty, more grants and increased philanthropy, etc. It is certainly possible that this use of cost as a surrogate for quality could over time be broken if real, credible measures of quality could be developed. I have discussed above some of the difficulties in doing so. In any case, a societal change in value metrics will be required, and that will be difficult to accomplish.
The issues of cost become much more complex if one throws into the mix graduate education and research. In a research university, cost shifting and cost sharing among undergraduate education, graduate education, and research are a way of life. Faculty and facilities play multiple roles, supporting all three of these missions in a flexible and overlapping way, making it essentially impossible to assign costs to any one function in a way that contains any significant measure of reality. Because of this multiplicity of roles, and because universities are organized in such varying ways, cost comparisons, performance benchmarks and the like are likely to be largely fictitious, and provide little valuable information.
Industry has become efficient in large part by breaking their operations into modules that can be fit together to create the final product (see The many pathways to globalization, April 21, 2006. ). One can then understand the costs of each module, and work to maximize its efficiency within the constraints of the design of the final product. Only by breaking apart our interrelated roles into modules can we expect to apply corporate levels of oversight to costs in research universities. However, to do so would put at great risk the great synergies of the research university that come from these three roles being intrinsically interrelated. Thus focusing on cost reduction in the research university must not be done in a simplistic way that does not take full account of the multiple missions of these institutions
A few words about price and cost. The price to the consumer (undergraduate or graduate student, purchaser of research) is essentially always lower than the cost. In public institutions, this difference is made up primarily by state support, and increasingly, endowment payout and philanthropy. At most private institutions, the difference is made up primarily by endowment payout and philanthropy. This is essentially an unstable relationship over time, due to the enormous variation in endowments across institutions and continuing decreasing governmental per capita support of higher education. A dozen or so universities and colleges are sufficiently well endowed that they can either move the price to nearly zero, or raise the cost (in terms of what is spent on their education and research) very significantly. That is, under the current value metrics, they can increase their prestige or quality perception very substantially, more or less at will. In a sort of winner-take-all situation, they could then attract the best students and the best faculty, leading to increased philanthropy and research grants. If, as suggested by the Committee, there were to be a “change from a system primarily based on reputation to one based on performance”, there could be a considerable leveling of the playing field, and an increased stability for our system of higher education.
Finally, I regret that the Committee does not recommend to the government that a reasoned analysis of the proper role of government in higher education as we move to a market state is called for. There are undoubtedly certain roles that higher education must play if the market state is to thrive - what can or should the government do to assure that higher education can play that role? I rather suspect that such a recommendation was not in their charge, however.
Overall, I find this is a useful report that raises some very important issues and suggests some useful responses. Now will anyone read it - and act on it?
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