Death of a Cash Cow, Part II

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WASHINGTON — President Obama’s budget proposal on education would for the first time index student-aid Pell Grant to inflation, guaranteeing low-income college students a stable grant amount, and pay for that expensive shift by eliminating $4 billion in annual subsidies to private banks who make student loans.

“The president has proposed the biggest change in the federal programs that help students finance a college education since the main higher education law was written in 1965,” said Terry Hartle, a vice president at the American Council on Education, which represents hundreds of colleges and universities.

Student Loans, SAM DILLON, February 26, 2009

The Reagan Era made stupid ideas seem ordinary and t encouraged us to not think too carefully. There are so many dumb ideas circulating that it’s impossible to know where to start the critique. Why, for example, were loans the primary form of student aide? And why were private banks involved?

A loan doesn’t make an education affordable, it puts off the costs of the education until after graduation. It’s a classic conservative short-term thinking confidence game. Don’t worry about the loans, the argument goes, you’ll be making more than enough money (thanks to your degree) to afford it.

Meanwhile, conservatives argue for increases in tuition and make enormous profits on textbooks while trying everything possible to drive down wages and salaries. And if that were not enough, they make the loans impossibly expensive (and profitable) by adding the costs of profit and administration.

It would make much more sense to cut if not eliminate tuition and fees. Schools, including universities, should be a ubiquitous and expected as fire departments and highways. In any case, taking private banks out of the equation can help free up a lot of money and potentially reduce the abusive of students via these loans.

Posted in: Economics, Professional

Evolve and Dissolve: The Death of a Cash Cow

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Evolve or dissolve. That advice, from a recent report on virtual universities, played out in two news stories this past week. The University of Texas’ online division is staring down a deep budget hole as it loses a longtime subsidy. And in Utah, budget cuts have killed a 10-campus online consortium.

Those and other predicaments reflect the growing pains of public online education. As programs mature, their business models have come under more scrutiny. The Texas and Utah cases speak to difficult questions facing states: What role should those programs play? How should states pay for them? Or should they?

Technology growth in the 1990s prompted a surge of online-learning collaborations. The groups prodded member colleges to put classes online, pooled courses into collaborative degrees, and supported online programs with promotions. Some became little more than state- or systemwide online catalogs.

News Analysis: Online Education Grows, but Painfully, By MARC PARRY

This story caught my eye because just this week the corporate entity that I work for celebrated enrolling 25,000 students for the first time. So while proprietary online education continues to grow, at least in some of its manifestations, public online schools continue their prolonged retrenchment.

I think the reasons are very obvious. The public schools thought they could leverage their reputations and already existing student bodies into a cash cow that would require little investment. They believed their own hype and invested very little of their own resources– financial and social– into developing a viable model.

Not surprisingly this model failed– or, rather, it has gone through a decade long rolling failure as one insitution after the other abandons projects that, as they sheepishly admit, turn out to not be very profitable after all. (The “Open Course” model, on the other hand, continues to thrive; that’s a separate story.)

I don’t mean to imply that the proprietary schools are doing a better job, or that they are in some sense less focused on the bottom line. That’s far from true. I think the proprietary online model is going to fail in the long run too, if that model continues to be conceived as a replacement for traditional education.

In the long run, I think, distance education is not going to be hugely profitable or broadly applicable. It’s a niche market. Once the public schools realize that and begin to search out and target their niches, the programs will run on the same model as traditional education: not a cash cow, but not a drain either.

Posted in: Economics, Professional

An MLA Agenda: Too Little Too Late

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In many places, laudable efforts to professionalize institutional policies and practices for faculty members off the tenure track have established an intermediate tier consisting of full-time contingent faculty members who hold renewable multiyear contracts. While these faculty members have more job security than part-time or short-term instructors, they are still far more vulnerable to cutbacks than colleagues on the tenure track, typically have heavier teaching loads than their tenure-track counterparts, and usually play limited roles in student advising and curriculum planning. Compared with the opportunities for professional development and institutional advancement of tenure-track faculty members, theirs are scant; their lot is to live with the frustration and resentment inherent in second-class academic citizenship.

MLA Newsletter, Summer 2009, “An Agenda for These Times,” Catherine Porter

I have to say my profession, especially my professional organizations, drive me a little batty. Everything seems laced with a bit of irritating class bias. I love the people who love technology and who incorporate it into their classrooms, but they are also too often uncritically consumerist. I enjoy the conventions (well, mostly) but they seem utterly disconnected from economic reality. Everything is priced for the tenured-expense-account-professors.

Notwithstanding the fantasies of the hard-right, academia is shockingly conservative, loath to accept even the most minor change. Porter calls tenured faculty “a discomfited elite, caught up in awkward relationships with their less-privileged colleagues.” That’s great to hear but it would have been even better to hear it a decade ago, when graduate students (yours truly among them) first began to sound the alarm.

A cynic might see the establishment of the Academic Workforce Advocacy Kit as a kind of sudden realization on the part of this elite that they may well have killed the goose that laid the golden egg of their discomfited privileges. Honestly, I am not sure how to judge it, although there must surely be some goose killing paranoia in the mix somewhere. Maybe, though, we might see this as the long-slumbering beast slowly awakening.

Posted in: Online Places, Professional, Writing

What We Talk About (When We Don’t Want to Talk About Class)

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For years, parents, students, and taxpayers have lamented the spiraling cost of higher education — with too little effect. Between 1982 and 2007, college tuition and fees increased 439 percent, adjusted for inflation, while the median family income only rose 147 percent. Pleas by ACTA and others to cut costs fell on mostly deaf ears.

The recession is now compelling at least some universities to cut back on all the pricy extras that drive up cost and shift the focus back to the fundamental purpose of their institutions: education. In January, ACTA praised the Pennsylvania State Board of Education for approving a proposal to create a “low cost, no frills” bachelor degree. Now comes news of a similar degree at Southern New Hampshire University — a “low-cost airline equivalent,” according to its president — and plans to create a new affordable state university in Arizona with no football team or research programs.

ACTA’s Must Reads, Posted by David Azerrad on May 07, 2009

The ACTA is reliably reactionary, much more interested in the academic trains running on time than in education generally or employment issues. Antonio Gramsci himself would rise up out of his grave if they mentioned the exploitation of graduate students or the commercialization of education.

Yet their concerns are, as the theorists used to say, symptomatic of the anxieties and concerns of our nominal rulers. I am not sure if they represent a cadre of the technical elite or of the financial elite or both but they are ideally positioned to judge the temperature of our ongoing cold (class) war.

So it’s fascinating that they are concerned with the increasing scarcity of the cultural capital represented by traditional liberal arts colleges. I don ‘t think you can attribute this to bourgeois sentimentality. The more bloated these increasingly boutique universities become, the better the chance of some sort of backlash.

The rhetoric of education in the U.S. is democratic; everyone can work hard and get the education of their choice. In fact, only 1/3 of us have college degrees; the percentage who have gone to these elite colleges is much smaller. Yet these schools play a disproportionately important role in our educational self-image.

If these schools become even more inaccessible, and the mass market schools follow by continuing to raise tuition and fees, the U.S. might seem too obviously undemocratic and class ridden. We can’t talk about that, though, can we? So we talk about ‘budget schools’ that might siphon off a bit of that class tension.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Professional, Writing