Universities Suffering
from Near-Fatal 'Cost Disease'
William
Bowen, president emeritus of Princeton, sounds the alarm, says the current
higher education model is untenable.
With
state colleges and universities enduring dire cutbacks, tuition hikes
ubiquitous, and indebted students a staple of political speech-giving, there's
little doubt in the mind of William G. Bowen that we are approaching a crisis
in higher education.
"There's going to have to be a re-engineering of all
this," Bowen remarked Wednesday evening in the first of two talks
presented as part of the annual Tanner Lectures on Human Values. The series
includes two evening lectures and two discussion sessions.
Bowen, president emeritus of Princeton University and of
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, collectively titled his lectures "The
'Cost Disease' in Higher Education: Is Technology the Answer?"
The
"cost disease" refers to a university's inability to implement
efficiency measures to maintain productivity, like, say, a manufacturing plant
might do. Russian teachers, for example, can't be shifted to the Spanish
department. Another difference is the very definition of productivity. It is
"maddeningly difficult in the field of education to measure both 'outputs'
and 'inputs,'" Bowen said, but there is no question that returns to
college students have gone up, both in dollar terms and otherwise. In general,
he said, "college is a very good investment." Also, research
productivity has risen hugely, thanks to technological innovation.
But there's no question that efficiency could be
improved. As all citizens of a university campus know, there is duplication,
centers that don't seem to do very much and ingrained institutional resistance
to flexibility. Decisions are often compartmentalized in ways that make little
sense, Bowen said, implying that business models are being imposed from the
outside according to non-university criteria.
Furthermore, at elite universities such as Stanford,
there is upward pressure in the form of salary and amenities competition, what
Bowen called "the relentless pursuit of reputation" fueled, in part,
by college rankings. Top-tier schools increasingly will do whatever it takes to
ensure the best educational experience. Though competition does yield results,
he said ? which is why many American research universities are the best in the
world ? there is such a thing as "too much competition."
Many schools have programs that serve no real purpose, he
said. As a result, students take ages to graduate because of insufficient
resources and further weigh down the school's finances. And some students do
not go to the right school for them, aiming either too high or too low.
Meanwhile, state schools ? such as the University of
California, the subject of one of the questions from the obviously concerned
audience Wednesday night ? are being crippled by diminished state budgets
resulting in higher tuition, which further burdens citizens and ends up hurting
the institution. At the same time, the upward cost curve is coinciding with
steadily declining family income.
A question of will
Does all this add up to a serious problem, a crisis even?
Yes, Bowen said, but it does not spell the end of higher education, neither for
private schools nor for state universities. The question is how to do more with
less. That, he said, is a question of will, not just resources.
With a night to think about the rather grim picture Bowen
painted Wednesday evening, a crowd of professors and students gathered Thursday
morning to continue the conversation. The respondents were two individuals well
versed in the world of educational transformation: Stanford President John
Hennessy and Howard Gardner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of
Education.
Gardner's remarks focused on the importance of the
residential education model. If we just let students live in dorms and got rid
of the classes, he asked, would it be Plato's Academy or Lord of the Flies?
Admittedly, he said, universities everywhere have "fallen far from the
ideals" of residential higher education, but we must figure out ways of
preserving its virtues while reducing its cost. "Cut the frills," he
said. "We're not competing with Marriott." Hire teachers who want to
teach, embrace distance learning, cut support staff and maintain communities
with society's most admirable values.
Chief among those values is the opportunity to know
people from different racial and social backgrounds, and in that regard both
Gardner on Thursday and Hennessy on Wednesday night, when introducing Bowen,
mentioned the affirmative action case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Hennessy talked numbers when it came his turn to respond
to Bowen on Thursday, and the numbers say that the list price of a university
education is swiftly rising. It's rising more slowly than lawyers' rates, he
acknowledged, but that's not saying much.
"We should all accept the premise that residential
and liberal arts institutions are the gold standard," he said. "The
challenge is how to preserve the gold standard," even accepting that there
are various classes of gold. Maintaining and nurturing a diverse student body
entails community centers and theme dorms and even mental health facilities,
which are all desirable but expensive.
A few schools ? very few ? have huge endowments to offset
the costs, but that's not a long-term solution, and it's no solution at all for
public schools being devoured by publicly mandated expenditures, Hennessy said.
Too many research institutions
A central part of the problem ? and Hennessy confessed he
is "a pessimist that this problem is going to get fixed" ? is
research, a point with which Bowen and Gardner agreed.
"We are trying to support too many institutions
doing research," Hennessy said flatly. "We have to accept that we may
not be able to afford that many research institutions." (That, Bowen
remarked a few minutes later in an understatement, "is a very tough political
problem.")
Engaging Bowen's question of the previous evening ? do we
have a cost crisis? ? Hennessy said no, we have a cost problem. Where there's a
crisis, he said, is in college completion, which hovers just over 50 percent in
public schools. It's a bit higher for private schools, and plunges to 25
percent in the for-profit sector. And students who don't complete their
education are often those carrying the greatest debt. They owe money and have
nothing to show for it.
The public university model clearly is untenable,
Hennessy said bluntly. "You just have to blow up the system."
As with the previous evening, the audience appeared
captivated and worried, trying to get a handle on the tough choices ahead.
Bowen's nonprofit organization for transformative educational technology is
called Ithaka; he knows well that the journey will be long and winding.
"What will the university look like 10 years from
now" once all the changes shake down, asked Daphne Koller, one of the
commentators for a discussion session today, which will be devoted to online
education. Koller, a cofounder of the online education hosting company
Coursera, is on leave from her position as a professor of computer science at
Stanford. (This morning's discussion session will take place from 10 a.m. until
noon in the Lucas Conference Room in the SIEPR-Landau Economics Building.)
"Ten years is not enough," Bowen replied.
"Things will be all over the map. No single paradigm will emerge from all
this."
The Tanner Lectures at Stanford are hosted by the Bowen
H. McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society and the President's Office.
Stanford University. All Rights Reserved. Stanford, CA
94305. (650) 723-2300.
No comments:
Post a Comment