I recently met Professor Vance Fried, who has made a compelling argument for creating a more affordable college experience while maintaining quality. Below are a few excerpts from his work – I wonder what your thoughts are?

“I didn’t cut any corners in designing CELS [note: College of Entrepreneurial Leadership & Society – a hypothetical college for purposes of demonstrating his ideas]. A laptop is included in tuition, there is a residential college system like Harvard and Yale, faculty are high quality, and the football stadium has a Jumbotron. However, I also didn’t waste any money. I followed a simple design premise: maximize value to the student. Determine what package of benefits (primarily learning) and price is attractive to them. If an activity has a high cost but provides a substantial benefit, then do it; but do it as efficiently as possible. If an activity adds significant cost but only minor benefits, don‟t do it. In sum, my guiding design principle for CELS was never spend money unless the resulting additional student benefit is clearly greater than the additional cost.

[later]
“Producing research is a costly undertaking. From society’s viewpoint, the costs of university research may be justified because it provides a public good, generating new innovation and knowledge in fields like medicine, engineering, and the hard sciences. However, these costs do not do much for educating most students. There may be benefits to the relatively few students in academic, research-oriented graduate programs, but most undergraduates or professional school students fail to ever benefit from these substantial research investments.

“For these reasons, research should be largely eliminated at public regional colleges and most private bachelor’s colleges, whose core business is to educate undergraduates. In these colleges, faculty research activity should range from nonexistent to modest. On the other hand, public and private research universities do have a major research mission. Here, care must be taken to insure that research does not reduce the quality of undergraduate education and that it is not financially subsidized by money meant to be going to education. Research is a legitimate, major E&G cost, but this cost should not be passed on to students in the form of higher tuition.”

Read for yourself: “Opportunities for Efficiency and Innovation: A Primer on How to Cut College Costs,” by Vance Fried.  A pdf is available at http://www.aei.org/papers/education/opportunities-for-efficiency-and-innovation-a-primer-on-how-to-cut-college-costs/

 

There are plenty of studies, editorials, and news stories bemoaning the rising cost of higher education, but rising costs are only alarming when the quality of the product is remaining constant – who wants to pay more today for the same product you bought yesterday? When a new version of the iPhone or iPad is launched, people happily stand in line to pay more because of the product has significantly improved features, innovation, and benefits. The same is true when we shop for a car or a home – we instinctively associate higher price with higher quality.

So what’s happened with university education? Simply stated, the product has not improved enough to offset the increasing costs. If a parent or high school student was convinced that a particular university experience would absolutely revolutionize one’s life, open doors of opportunity and enrichment, and light a fire of passionate purpose to fulfill his/her potential, they would eagerly search for a way to pay for it, and they would be less likely to complain about the cost.

Universities are quite good at explaining the theoretical underpinnings of behavior, societies, politics, economics, physics, etc. – the “why” – but have not given nearly the same attention at teaching the “how” – i.e., making the knowledge useful or actionable in the real world. As a result, we have graduates with degrees but no deliverables. The education and psychology literature (e.g., Dewey; Kolb) has clearly demonstrated the cognitive benefits from experiential learning, but something deeper happens within students when they convert their interests and passions into projects that benefit others. They begin to get a sense for their place in the world – the very thing they came to college for in the first place.

If universities can teach both the “why” and the “how” of every discipline, they will be closer to offering that transformative experience to students that is truly priceless.

The traditional university – you know, the one using the same teaching format used in ancient Greece, the one that rewards professors for staying longer (and often doing less), the one that has become some type of “stamp” of educate-ability – must change. I’m not talking about adding sections that accomodate online learning, or putting better computers and projectors into their classrooms, or developing more “race to the bottom” majors that are high on fluff and light on rigor, I’m talking about an overhaul, about innovating and re-energizing in the most thorough sense. Of course, something as inherently institutional as universities must change gradually, but change they must. The university, like every other organization, is part of a market system and must continue to provide significant value, or go the way of the buffalo.

In a recent article in the Feb 12, 2012 issue of  The Chronicle of Higher Education (linked below), a national-award-winning professor who had advocated the technological highway as the path to university improvement has had to rethink his approach and message. The reason, in my opinion, is that the fundamental learning process was not challenged or changed. The ancient Greek model of lecture-theater was only streamlined and made more accessible via a computer interface.

Ask a student what they want from college, from a class, from those amazingly potent 4 years of their lives. What you’ll find is that fundamentally, what students want and need most is engagement. Deep engagement, conversation, and debate with the instructor, with each other, with knowledge, within themselves, and – importantly –  the chance to apply their knowledge through engagement with the community.

At the University of Tulsa, we’re piloting a new approach to higher education, and we hope you’ll make contact with us and join us in the process!

http://chronicle.com/article/A-Tech-Happy-Professor-Reboots/130741/