Article found on LinkedIn posted by John Maeda
Why Higher Ed is Slow to Become Longer Ed
February 14, 2014
With the jury coming in on some of the first high-profile MOOC experiments – some successful, some not – the debate continues about whether MOOCs are good for society. This debate is often conflated with the debate about the cost of higher education. In fact, it’s difficult to have a conversation these days about higher ed without talking about cost. As I make my departure after seventeen years spent in higher ed, the last six as a college president, it’s clear to me that college costs will keep climbing higher and higher, for at least another decade. A child born in 2014 can expect a 4-year degree at a top private college to exceed half a million dollars.
People often ask me why college costs so much, and I tell them it didn't happen overnight. It took many decades for us to become so expensive. Seventy years ago, returning soldiers were deservedly rewarded with a full ride to college under the GI Bill, and a strong middle and upper middle class was built. Thirty years ago, immigrant parents like Yoji and Elinor Maeda could send their sons and daughters to college, lifting their children out of a family tofu business, and propelled by an unusually intense work ethic, into a life of bigger American dreams.
That America is disappearing. And though as president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) I was able to make some dents – like leading into an era when RISD is now thesecond most expensive art school in the country, instead of the first, starting by freezing my own salary – these can seem like small details, lost in the larger questions about the sustainability of the current model.
As I wrote about earlier, we are living decades longer than we did when a four-year college education -- a gorging on knowledge in your 20s -- was established as a model. In this day and age, I believe we need less higher-ed, and more longer-ed: a distribution of many modes of education across our lifetimes. Yet the current system is slow to adopt this kind of radical reinvention. Why?
1/ Tight competition. Competitive pressures to attract students are increasingly fierce, and the well-practiced way to draw students in is by spending money on lavish facilities and amenities, for example.
2/ Increased regulation. Increased scrutiny on costs has resulted in a whole host of new reporting requirements and compliance standards. Ironically, these provisions themselves have increased the cost of doing business in higher ed.
3/ Culture as product. A successful learning community is predicated on a culture that takes pride in its identity. To be capable of inspiring students at scale, colleges must treat the fabric of this culture like the precious commodity it is. At a conventional workplace, the work comes first and the employee culture comes second. In a higher-ed environment, the culture itself is "the product" that is being transmitted to the students. So despite being known as progressive environments, college campuses tend to safeguard against changes that would threaten their communities.
4/ Resource-intensive delivery model. The brightest minds in the professoriate do not have excess time or capacity to reinvent higher education, because they are engaged in the act of making education happen all the time. I think of my former colleague at MIT, Professor Hiroshi Ishii, who spends 24/7 teaching, mentoring, and enabling his students. Only a few universities like Harvard, MIT or Stanford have enough financial latitude to buy out faculty time to work on the problem of reinventing higher education in earnest, and even then, funding for new initiatives compete with decaying buildings, expectations for wage increases, and badly needed infrastructure upgrades.
Ironically, higher-ed has amazing capacity to reinvent itself because of the brilliant minds of its faculty, but it is unlikely to do so quickly due to the factors above. For those who can afford traditional higher-ed, the new MOOCs provide longer-ed for free with the price of tuition, and a good first order approximation of sitting in a top university lecture auditorium at the age of 20, 30, 50, and 70. The question remains how to build a sustainable, quality model for those who can’t afford college in the first place – and won’t be able to any time soon.
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John Maeda