Fried’s Fantasy

While I concur fully with much of Professor Fried’s value-based model of undergraduate education, I am sadly skeptical that it will get the attention and acceptance it deserves from the higher education community, for the following reasons:

1. The professoriate is historically the greatest impediment to change.

2. The model would lead to consolidation of departments and loss of power and status, which would be resisted.

3. The initial cost of phasing out large numbers of faculty to make this work precisely at a time of declining enrollments would require a truly visionary cost-benefit analysis.

4. The “risk” attendant to convincing the body politic as well as the customers that quality education can come in the form of lectures of 100 versus seminars of 25 requires world class leadership, salesmanship, marketing and public relations. These skills are rare in the domain of higher education.

5. The AAUP.

Otherwise, I applaud this proactive model but I can only fantasize that bold, entrepreneurial leadership would arise and show us the way rather than have the painful consolidations soon to be forced upon us by the coming decline in numbers become the driving factor. Now, that will take real vision.

Alan Haas, President at Educational Futures, at 8:00 am EDT on July 8, 2008

Almost there

Professor Fried needs to speak further with the legal community about the real utility of 100 person Socratic method case law classes for training would-be lawyers. Anecdotal evidence from a large number of lawyers indicates that the utility is nil—it prepares you for graduating law school, but not for passing the bar exam or being an attorney. If the idea here is to evaluate value for money, we cannot compare professional school courses (especially ones of dubious value) against undergraduate liberal arts courses.

Midwestern U. Prof, Professor at Midwestern U., at 9:40 am EDT on July 8, 2008

Easier with vouches?

For programs like CELS to work, it would be very helpful if we had a rational system of public financing for higher education. This would facilitate overcoming the current massive market distortions caused by our arcane and opaque system of public funding for higher education.

Huge administrative bureaucracies at are public universities are now free to soak up billions of dollars in wasteful spending. The public has scant idea where their tax dollars for higher education are going, even as each year taxpayers are asked to pay more and more directly to these same schools in the form of tuition and fees.

If States made this funding available directly to students in the form of vouchers instead of funneling it through wasteful administrative bureaucracies, programs like Professor Fried’s CELS model could flourish.

Ken D., at 11:25 am EDT on July 8, 2008

Disagree with two assumptions

Sir,

I am afraid there are two tennets of your model that severly hinder it from providing the “better-than-Ivy” education it wishes to provide. First, I am aware of no English department who shares a significant number of professors with a department of Religion. Also, few English majors need to take a great number of history courses, and vice versa. I think opportunities for consolidation among the liberal arts, sciences, and religion departments are few. Secondly, research is what draws the best professors into the field, especially in sciences and engineering. Most science undergraduates take advantage of research opportunities, working with great professors in the field. Most students entering into pure sciences have aims to be a professional researcher, and working in research as an undergrad is more and more a necessary condition to getting entry into the best graudate schools. Consider also that research programs bring a vast amount of money to colleges, so much so that universities focus obsessively on these departments to help bring offet costs in other departments.

Of course, one might say, “Does the CELS really need the _best_ professors to achieve its goals?” It might not. However, the best students will go to the schools with the best professors, as these students tend to be the ones with ambitions to eventually enter academia themselves. And if those are the students this school plans to attract, I don’t think your model, as presented, will be able to pull them in ahead of the Ivies.

JSH, at 12:25 pm EDT on July 8, 2008

Why not $0 a Year?

Professor Fried has proposed a wonderfully fresh, timely, stimulating experiment. Yes, it seems utopian, but it at least tries to address real and urgent problems that critics have raised, analyzed, and expounded repeatedly. Some version of this vision is probably feasible. You might need the right amount of collective will and some of the essential conditions for an academic version of a perfect “anti-storm.” In fact, why not up the utopian ante: how about aiming for a $0.00 education? Complete financial aid for every student. Such a thing might be done with a large endowment that pays above all for the faculty, the core administrative units, and the classroom- and study-facilities. There would be no investment in dorms, dining halls, parking garages, sports facilities or teams, career counseling and medical units, bookstores, extensive research libraries, museums, etc. These would not necessarily be altogether absent, but they would largely be the provinces of other entrepreneurial agencies. The “college experience” would be centered on the classroom and the curriculum and depth and breadth of learning. The proof would be in the pudding. We need creative thinking and actual experimentation to resolve our current dependence on oil; why not a parallel effort in the domain of higher education?

Peregrinus Utopianus, Associate Professor, Modern and Classical Languages at Saint Louis University, at 12:25 pm EDT on July 8, 2008

Reduced versatility

As Dr. Fried acknowledges in his proposal, such a “value” school would produce liberal arts generalists. The major disadvantage of this is that such a school would be unable to offer adequate preparation to a student who wished to pursue graduate education in the sciences or other technical subjects.

For example, an undergraduate wishing to pursue graduate education in physics would need to take about twelve math courses and fourteen physics courses. That would occupy about two thirds of the typical forty or so one-semester courses that comprise a standard undergraduate degree. A “value” school couldn’t simultaneously achieve the savings that come from a standardized, common curriculum and still offer so many specialized courses.

This isn’t a problem for a student who, upon choosing a college, is sure that he does not want to pursue graduate school. In reality, many students don’t know what they want, or change their minds upon entering college. This is particularly true of students who apply for “generic” liberal arts degree programs.

The truth is that, even at inefficient large universities, a basic liberal arts education is not that expensive to provide. Much of the price of such an education is used to subsidize specialized education in engineering and science, and also (as noted by Dr. Fried) faculty research. Science and engineering education is expensive for several reasons: cost of equipment for lab-based courses, cost of running small, specialized courses (e.g., statistical mechanics), and finally, higher faculty salaries (as opposed to e.g., English professors).

If Dr. Fried’s CELS-type schools were to achieve substantial market share, competition and the resulting loss of cross-subsidy would drive up the price of science and engineering education at schools that still offered such things.

If no other changes were made, this would likely result in decreased production of scientists and engineers, and increased production of liberal arts majors. Would this be a bad thing? I constantly hear about the need for more scientists and engineers, but I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone say we need more liberal arts majors (although perhaps that would change if more liberal arts majors received the kind of high-quality education Dr. Fried hopes to provide).

A big problem is that we, as a society, have not had a national discussion as to the role of universities. Major research universities think their primary role is to do research, with teaching a very distant second (trust me—I’ve sat on a faculty hiring committee, and this is the reality, despite anything such schools might say about their commitment to teaching). Much of the public thinks the primary role of such schools is undergraduate education, hence the intense competition to get in to “top” schools.

Dr. Fried’s CELS seems like an interesting proposal, and I hope it becomes a reality. If it does, it will force a much-needed public discussion on the role of the academy in society.

Travis, at 1:55 pm EDT on July 8, 2008

Consumers?

While I think that it will be difficult to transform an existing institution into a CELS, I think a CELS could certainly be built from scratch. I believe there are enough faculty on the market who could and would join such an enterprise.

The real question is whether students would attend. Will they believe that a new institution is worthy of a value price, instead of a bargain price? The most successful startup in recent years, of course, is Phoenix, which reached a largely untapped market by combining convenience with a bargain price. How hard is it to introduce a new “mid-grade” product in any market without an existing mid-grade tier?

Moreover, will students be willing to buy the Camry at sticker price when they are conditioned to look for Mercedes with deep discounts that sometimes get even lower than $7,376? Many institutions appear to experience a “Wal-Mart effect,” in which their lower pricetag seems to convey to students that their product is inferior, and so the institutions raise tuitions to send signals about value, and shift those tuition dollars into financial aid in a high-tuition-high-aid model.

But I appreciate the model and the effort to find a solution. It’s worth trying, if you can find funding.

sibyl, at 2:25 pm EDT on July 8, 2008

Great goal, wrong approach

I’d aim at lowering cost without reducing quality in these ways:

1. Utilize faculty and student apartments as classrooms. They lie vacant during the day.

2. Hire non-PhDs to teach most undergraduate classes. Often the disparity between the way PhDs and undergraduates is too great. Also, many PhDs’ primary interest is in research, often arcane research, that should’nt be core to undergraduate education. Excellent bachelor’s and master’s degree holders would be both less expensive and better.

3. Forgo fancy administration buildings and country-club-like amenities such as swimming pools and golf courses. Instead, make deals with nearby swimming and golf facilities that enable students to participate at reasonable cost.

For more such ideas, see my articles “Utopia College” and “America’s Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor’s Degree, which appear in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Marty Nemko, at 5:20 am EDT on July 9, 2008

Good Advice

Vance Fried, who teaches at my alma mater, is entirely on point in this article that should be distributed throughout every college. I have been writing about the same thing for more than a year now. (See “How to Fight the High Cost of Curricular GLut at this URL: http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i21/21a03301.htm).

Access to education is an issue on almost every campus. The student loan scandal has funded curricular and technological proliferation, and now that money is tight, so must our budgets. If enrollment falls, as it is bound to do, especially at high-tech (high-priced) private schools, there is no remedy other than administrative cuts and reversions.

A better scenario involves the professoriate putting in place safeguards to avoid curricular expansion (transparent Web technology can ensure that, so that nothing is done in committees without minutes and agendas) as well as technological assessment, weeding out programs and platforms that pick the pockets of students and are in place because of anecdotal sales pitches by vendors.

Meanwhile, kudos to Dr. Fried who applying sound mangerial and organizational principles in this important article.

Michael Bugeja, Iowa State University, at 7:00 am EDT on July 10, 2008

re: The benefits of entrepreneurship to education

Unbiased online service, sounds great. Unfortunately, you are much biased towards applying the business model in education. By all means, go ahead and enfore it on the administration of universities, but it doesn’t work in academia, because it strips the culture. Many of my current problems are because of people who have no idea what a research institution is and what the history of liberal arts means. So I’ll just leave it at this: leave the business model to things that can be consumed, but do not misunderstand, education cannot be consumed.

One concerned student, at 1:45 pm EDT on July 18, 2008