by Jeffrey J. Selingo.
I’ve concluded that I want to post short summaries of the books I’m reading, partly as “content” and partly for my own benefit, and I’m not going to do this in any elegant way, more in the form of notes, so I can recall the content later.
Three sections:
How We Got There
The Disruption
The Future
How We Got There: 1999 to 2009 was the Lost Decade — a boom in high school graduates, which colleges should have been preparing for the future but went on a building spee instead. Growth in new majors, programs, “credential creep,” universities chasing higher rankings in the US News & World Report rankings. 18 new law programs (big moneymaker — tuition subsidizes the rest of the university budget).
The customer is always right: power shift from professors to students, due to rising tuition (students want to get something for their money), increase in adjunct professors, focus on retention in US News metrics, and the Millennial generation’s expectations = focus on making students happy, resulting in more lenient grading, less concern with whether students are learning. Academically Adrift = students aren’t studying and aren’t learning.
Some further explanations for the cost of college: spending on employee benefits, especially healthcare. Rise in numbers of administrative staff. Amenities (a Lazy River?) = $3,400 per student on IM sports, career services, student organizations, counseling. Fundamental supply and demand = when demand outstrips supply, prices increase.
Marketing and advertising costs? Statistics not available.
Discounting: average discount at a private college = 42%; researcher says that “most of the increase in tuition prices at private colleges since the Great Recession has got to pay for discounts.” (p. 29)
The resort campus = amenities arms race; universities rebuilding their dorms as luxury suites, other building projects paid or by bonds. Debt taken on by colleges has doubled since 2000 – > $300 billion now.
Student debt: “Colleges want to hook prospective students on emotion first in hopes they will enroll at any cost.” Anecdotal evidence of parents taking on unaffordable loans to avoid disappointing their children, of students taking on loans with no awareness of the debt load. Colleges don’t help with cryptic financial aid info, not even clearly distinguishing between grants & loans. The amount of PLUS loans have doubled in the last decade (can’t tap home equity any longer).
Some cases of university administrators discouraging students from attending when the financial burden is too great, but they’ve bought into “follow your dream” and aren’t dissuaded.
The Disruption
The 5 disruptive forces that will change higher education forever
1) a sea of red ink — colleges in debt
2) disappearing state subsidies
3) fewer full-paying students — public and private colleges now competing for full-pay students from abroad (China); fewer students from wealthy families, more wealthy parents skeptical of high tuition bills.
4) unbundled alternatives improving — e.g., Khan Academy, earning “Badges”
5) the growing value gap — questioning the value of traditional higher ed
Schools such as Arizona State implementing programs such as Knewton software for math, flipping the classroom. MOOCs!
why do colleges continue to offer traditional lecture-only intro classes? Money — which subsidizes other university expenses.
University of Central Florida — tremendous growth in online learning.
Overall, 31% of overall higher ed enrollment is in online classwork.
The Future
StraighterLine — take intro classes for $99/month + $39 per class, in order to use these as transfer credit elsewhere (if the “elsewhere” accepts it)
Accreditation protects existing colleges from start-ups.
Image of the university is a fresh high school grad packing up and moving into the dorm. But only 2 in 10 undergrads attend a residential 4 year college full-time. A sometimes circuitous path — and even wealthy families send their kids to community college (23% of students from $100,000+ households attend community college in 2011-2012, up from 12% 3 years prior.)
Some movement towards measuring competency, rather than time spent in a chair. Western Governor’s University — 100% online, 4 disciplines (education, business, IT, health professions). begun in 1995, now 25K students, 40% incr per year.
One unresolved problem: the online learning is there, but the credential — the institution that packages the learning into a single identifiable achievement – isn’t there.
[the book continues for a further 50 pages or so with an orientation towards advising future students]
Bottom line:
The author is a lot more optimistic than I am! There are a lot of IFs before the college of the future will arrive: Will online learning be a viable replacement for a traditional university, or at least enable students to earn parts of their degree more affordably? Will traditional universities accept online credits for transfer? Will employers look beyond traditional universities for their entry-level staff? Will traditional universities see their enrollments decline and drop tuition in response?
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