Changing Higher Education

Multiple views of globalization of higher education and of place

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.  

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

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%! 

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.