November 2009

The Price of the Ticket

Submitted by Bill Lyne on 11/23/2009

The function of tuition at state universities is straightforward.  As state appropriations decline, the burden of the cost of education is shifted to students and tuition goes up. As tuition goes up, people with less money have a harder time going to college, which is antithetical to the mission of a public university.

 

ImageDespite this simplicity, Washington’s Higher Education Coordinating Board has done fifteen tuition studies since 1990, and right now they are finishing a sixteenth. That’s almost a study a year.  Between the consultants, the staff time, and the hearings, the money the state has spent studying tuition could have paid the tuition of dozens of students.

 

That the state has been almost continuously engaged in the study of the relatively simple issue of tuition is probably a result of the fact that tuition is politically very sensitive.  Tuition studies are more about political cover for raising tuition than they are about discovering anything new.  That is certainly the case with the latest study.

 

In 2007, still basking in the glow of Washington Learns and aspiring to enter the pantheon of Global Challenge States, the state legislature passed a law limiting tuition increases at Washington’s institutions of higher education to no more than 7% per year.  This got the Democratic caucus some short-term love from students (a pretty unreliable voting block when Barack Obama is not on the ballot), but from a strictly political point of view, this was probably a dumb move.  Because when the bottom fell out in 2009 and the state used 4-year universities as its rainy day fund, the legislature had to renege on its promise and allow universities to raise their tuition by 14% in order to keep from crumbling under 25-30% cuts to state appropriations.  Republicans running in 2010 will certainly chastise Democrats for making a law in one session and then immediately breaking it in the next.  And of course they will season that charge with lots of pious talk about students and how our children are our most valuable resource.

 

That’s what made raising the tuition ceiling in 2009 such a “tough vote” for legislators.  The night they did it was one of the most emotional of a pretty emotional session.  And many legislators haven’t forgotten it, feeling that the universities haven’t shown enough gratitude for the courageous choice they made to let us bill our students for the draconian cuts they made to our budgets.

 

So of course, as part of the political cover for forcing the universities to balance their budgets on the backs of their students, the legislature ordered the HEC Board to do yet another tuition study.  The draft of this latest study is now available on the HEC Board website.  It is yet another earnest and well-documented attempt to outflank stubborn facts and try to imagine a world in which state appropriations to universities can continue to decline and college can remain affordable.

 

The fundamental contradiction in the study is that it insists that the state return to funding at least 55% of university education while assuming that nothing will change about state appropriations or the state’s goofy and wildly regressive boom-and-bust revenue system.  This is a tribute to the HEC Board staff’s ability to imagine other worlds, but in this world, the only way that could happen is if the universities dramatically reduced tuition, which would, of course turn the campuses into ghost towns. 

 

At last Thursday’s HEC Board meeting, representatives of the universities lined up to express their concerns with the study and its possible consequences once it reaches the legislature.  In many ways, the discussion was a preview of what could happen in the legislative session.  On one side, we had the universities, whose state appropriations have been cut beyond recognition.  They have no faith that the state will support public universities and thus want to control their own tuition in order to keep excellent universities from crashing into mediocrity.  On the other side, members of the HEC Board feel that their duty is to make sure that continuously rising tuition does not put a university education out of reach for middle class families.  Both sides are right.  And as long as we continue to talk about tuition isolated from everything else that affects it (as the latest tuition study often does), the two positions will remain irreconcilable. 

 

Listening to the discussion on Thursday, it was easy to get the feeling that this was the warm-up, the undercard for the main event in Olympia, where the number one contender, UW President Mark Emmert, will square off with the undisputed champion, HEC Board Executive Director Ann Daley for fifteen rounds over whether or not the universities will be granted tuition-setting authority.  The corridors of the capitol will surely be livelier for that struggle, but it will not serve the students, the universities, or the state.  If the HEC Board and the universities go to Olympia fighting over the nuances of who gets to set tuition, then legislators will do what they do best.  They will turn away from the in-fighting higher education people and toward groups who have learned the value of speaking with one voice. 

 

When the Thursday conversation started to put tuition into a larger context, most of the differences and tensions between the HEC Board and the universities disappeared.  Everyone agreed that there should be more state support for our universities.   As soon as you acknowledge the hydraulic relationship between tuition and state appropriations, it’s easy enough to get everyone to admit that the best way to keep tuition low is to increase state appropriations.

 

And that’s what the tuition study that goes to the legislature should lead with.  The argument is simple and it goes something like this:

 

1.    Washington’s universities are about the best bang for the buck in the country, producing high quality degrees at well below average costs.

2.    Tuition and state support are hydraulically related—as state support goes down, tuition goes up.

3.    As tuition goes up, people with less money have a harder time going to college, which is antithetical to the mission of a public university.

4.    Thus, the best and only way to keep universities affordable for Washington’s citizens is to dramatically increase state support.  Everything else is just nibbling around the edges.

 

Policy purists will argue that this goes beyond the bounds of a tuition study and runs the risk of politicizing the work of the HEC Board.  We here at the blog would respectfully suggest that tuition was politicized a long time ago and that the HEC Board should not be in the business of producing reports that can be used as faux populist manifestos for further decimating our universities.

 

The argument for more state appropriations should be page one of the Tuition Study (and the System Design Study and the various Technology studies . . .) and everything else currently in the report should be relegated to footnotes.  That way, everybody—the HEC Board, the students, the faculty unions, the university administrations—could all enter the upcoming legislative session with a united front. 

 

In these times, anything less than that is suicidal.

Improving the Market Value of Degrees

Submitted by Johann Neem on 11/17/2009

Washington state does not produce enough bachelor degrees to meet its economic—much less its civic and social—needs. For individuals, there is a clear correlation between education and future earnings. For the state, there is a clear correlation between investing in education and future economic growth.

ImageAt the moment, much of the state’s focus seems to be on community colleges and on vocational programs that train people for specific economic tasks. To an extent, this makes sense, especially as hard times force many experienced workers to return to school, retool, and find new opportunities. Yet, as earlier posts have suggested, there is a fundamental difference between training and educating. This difference is not only philosophical and ethical, but also economic.
 
Four-year degrees carry more market value than two-year degrees. The most valued degrees come from schools that emphasize the liberal arts and sciences. This may be surprising. We often think that vocational degrees—“practical” degrees that prepare people for a job—make economic sense. And, for many, it does. But one need only look around at the most prestigious universities and colleges to realize that the most highly-prized degrees in the market are not vocational. In short, supporting four-year colleges’ liberal arts and sciences programs makes good economic sense.
 
Why is this? It appears paradoxical. We all hear stories of the liberal arts major who now serves coffee. But in reality, the liberal arts and sciences majors offer exactly what Washington’s economy needs: highly capable creative thinkers with portable skills for an ever-changing market. The more narrow, the more useful, a major sounds, the less it prepares students for long-term success, and Washington’s economy for long-term growth. The bachelor degree’s market value stems from the simple fact that business leaders know that students educated in the liberal arts and sciences can think, write, and analyze; have had exposure to other cultures; understand how to use data; and have developed creative and imaginative perspectives on the world. All of this has cash value. The liberal arts and sciences are practical; they always have been.
 
Students in baccalaureate institutions are not trained to be specialists but to have depth. To the extent that our economy depends on innovation, training specialists is not enough. We need economic leaders who are imaginative and who can use their knowledge to create new, exciting things. To the extent that our society depends on creative answers to public problems, many unknown today, we do not need specialists but citizens able to think critically about the past, present, and future. Otherwise, we might as well have a planned economy.
 
Ultimately, the value of a liberal arts and sciences education extends beyond the workplace. America’s Founding Fathers supported liberal education because they understood that educated citizens and leaders were vital for a successful democracy. (The word “liberal” in liberal education shares the same root as “liberty.”) Moreover, a liberal arts and sciences education enriches those graduates who gain a vantage point from which to understand the human condition—our relationship to the social and natural worlds.
 
The nice thing, however, is that the civic and personal benefits of liberal education are not in tension with its economic benefits. In business, this is called synergy. By promoting the liberal arts and sciences in baccalaureate institutions, we can improve the health of Washington’s democracy, enrich our citizens’ lives, while also producing the most valued degrees in the market

Fortunate Sons and Daughters

Submitted by Bill Lyne on 11/12/2009

Poor people have always fought rich people’s wars.  And the rich folks have always said thanks in one way or another.  Yesterday our airwaves were jammed with Veterans Day ceremonies, speeches, and heartfelt thirty-second thank yous to veterans from multimillionaire quarterbacks.  Applebee’s let veterans eat free for a day.

This gratitude used to take a more material form.  Military service bonuses began in 1776, and until about 1860, Continental army veterans received military service bonuses of both land (100 acres for a private, 1100 acres for a Major General) and cash.  As the number of wars increased and available land decreased, these payments were scaled back to the point where veterans of the Spanish-American War did not receive a bonus, and the millions of U.S. soldiers who participated in the carnage of the Great War received only $60 for their efforts.  In 1924, in response to political pressure led by the newly created American Legion, congress issued certificates of service to veterans that would mature in 20 years.

 

ImageIn 1932, at the crest of the Great Depression and finding themselves unable to wait to until 1945 to collect their benefits, 43,000 veterans and families of veterans, led by former army sergeant Walter W. Waters and calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, marched on Washington.  For about a month they camped on the Anacostia Flats, until President Hoover, utilizing a loophole in the Posse Comitatus Act, ordered the U.S. military to remove them.

On July 28, 1932 the United States Army, with fixed bayonets and Adamsite gas, and led by General Douglas MacArthur and Major George S. Patton, attacked its own veterans.  After the initial thrust drove the Bonus Army across the Anacostia River, President Hoover ordered the attack to halt.  But General MacArthur, beginning to hone his disdain for presidential authority, continued the assault and hundreds of veterans were injured and several were killed.

ImageAs is the case with most revolutionaries, the Bonus Army’s defeat turned into a victory for those who came after them.  In 1944, at the end of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt, fearful of another Bonus Army march on Washington, signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, more commonly known as the GI Bill.  This act provided veterans with unemployment relief and low-interest home loans, but its most important and far-reaching impact was on education.  Millions of veterans got a college education on the GI Bill. 

The GI Bill, along with the Women’s movement and the Civil Rights Movement, transformed public higher education.  But the GI Bill was only half the story.  State funding for flagship, land grant, and comprehensive universities grew dramatically after World War II.  At the same time that the federal government was investing in veterans, state governments were investing in public universities.  In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, public universities became the drivers of state economies and social mobility that they were created to be in the early part of the twentieth century.

But as genuine public responsibility for America’s wars declined, so did state support for public universities.  With the end of the draft in 1973, large portions of the U.S. middle and upper classes no longer have had to put their own blood on the line when our leaders take us to war.  Now more than ever, poor people fight rich people’s wars.    And since the 1980s, states have been steadily disinvesting in public universities and replacing state appropriations with increased tuition.  So as the military has become more and more the place where the dispossessed go for some economic stability, state universities have become more and more the playgrounds of the privileged. 

ImageRecently, the education portion of GI benefits made a comeback. The Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2008, originally introduced by veteran and Virginia senator Jim Webb, provides 4 years of state college tuition to veterans who served after September 11, 2001.  But, as with the original GI Bill, that can only be half the story.  Right now, veterans trying to take advantage of the 9/11 GI Bill are waiting by their mailboxes for checks that have been delayed due to cuts to institutional financial aid offices, and looking for classes that aren’t there any more due to budget cuts.

If Washington continues to cut funding to our state universities, our veterans won’t have access to the institutions where they can spend the tuition money they earned on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Revolution Will Not Take Place On Line

Submitted by Bill Lyne on 11/05/2009

Times are tough everywhere. 

People are losing their jobs and losing their homes.  And now comes the news that Disney will be refunding millions of dollars to everyone who bought all those educational Baby Einstein videos because it turns out they weren’t, well, educational.

And Disney is not the only mega-corporation that has fallen on hard times.  The advertising budget at Hewlett Packard seems to have been especially hard hit.  So it was good to see government doing its part to help out last Thursday as representatives of HP were given time to peddle their wares in a hearing of the Washington House of Representatives Higher Education Committee and on TVW.  For a good half hour committee members and audience were treated to a demonstration of the ways in which HP can make the world your classroom for the low, low price of $146 per license.

Leaving aside for a moment all the advertising on the public dime questions, the HP presentation gives us the opportunity to reflect on all the technology-and-education hubbub that’s in the air these days.  Baby Einstein was just the beginning—now our techno-corporate friends, undaunted, want to sit us down in front of a screen to get college degrees on line.

To be sure, the emergence of the virtual world and other technological advances have been as revolutionary for education as they have been for everything else. In fact, universities and their faculty embraced these advances long before they became so popular with various education reform movements.  Technology has greatly enhanced the classroom experience and it holds tremendous possibilities for bringing opportunities to places and populations that have often been excluded from higher education. 

But in these days of shrinking education budgets, many people have been tempted to see technology as a fiscal wonder drug that will allow us to produce degrees more cheaply, just as we might use technology to produce automobiles or fireplace implements more cheaply.Image  This fantasy depends on some dubious historical arguments and a very dim view of teachers.

Consider, for example, this slide from a recent report from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation called “Disruptive Technology and Delivery Models in Higher Ed”...    

Were I a more technologically sophisticated blogger, you would see this slide in the suspense-building way that the Gates Foundation folks prepared it, with the telegraph-to-iphone strip leading off, followed by the miracle migration from the steam engine to the space station, and then topped off with the punch line of repetitive classroom photographs, where education has only recently managed to emerge from black and white and into a drab, 1960s-era Kodachrome color. 

You don’t have to be a Microsoft billionaire to get the point here: the hip, new techno-twenty-first century has made obsolete the traditional educational model of a bunch of white people sitting around talking.  Power Point doesn't auto-check for historical accuracy or find and replace ideas that are less than an inch deep, but it’s great for simple one-liners and the clear message here is that Professors Are the Problem.

ImageThis visual demonization of faculty is built on a widespread and false assumption that has become axiomatic in the techno-zealot education reform community: that professors, despite their constant contact with students, have no idea how those students learn.  This assumption underwrites this next slide from the Gates Foundation presentation...

Listen to any advocate for on-line learning, elearning, ilearning, or hybrid learning and within two minutes you will inevitably hear something about how the world has changed and, no matter how hard it may be for those tweedy professors, we now have to embrace student-centered and “learner-centric” models.  Only now, as Hewlett Packard and Microsoft and Apple have entered the education market, have we discovered that different people learn in different ways, and the days when a professor could just stand up and bray at his or her students are gone.

This crap is not a solution to our education problems, it is in fact a big contributor to the problem.  All of the exciting stuff in those communication and transportation slides would never have been invented if it weren’t for college faculty and their students.  The good people at the Gates foundation wouldn’t even know how to say “learner-centric” if it weren’t for college professors.

At least since Socrates, teachers have understood that you take your students where you find them and that your job is to shape instruction in a way that allows students to best engage and learn the material.  In the second half of the twentieth century, as the GI Bill, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Women’s Movement made college available to people who had traditionally been excluded on the basis of class, race and gender, lots of research began to uncover the different learning patterns and styles of people from different social, economic, and cultural backgrounds.  This genuine inquiry has been co-opted by the elearning crowd and translated into a simple but stupid story that pits an imaginary new generation of students who learn differently because they have iPods against an imaginary professoriate that stubbornly refuses to leave their nineteenth-century classrooms.

ImageThis story is wrong, but it is easy to see why it has been pushed so hard. The real reason why the corporate techno-edcuators feel such a need to trash professors is revealed in the payoff slide near the end of the Gates Foundation presentation...

By stacking “pure online” college against real college, this chart insinuates that there is something about the online-ness of online education that makes it cheaper.  A moment or two of actual thinking reveals this as nonsense.  Technology in and of itself doesn’t make anything cheaper, in fact it adds hardware, software, and technical support costs.  What makes Rio Salado and Western Governors University cheaper than Maricopa and Cal State is the fact that the online “universities” have dramatically reduced their faculty labor costs by hiring moonlighting real professors to prepare course materials (syllabi and reading lists that most of us make available on our websites for free) that are then “facilitated” by underqualified, low-wage, no-benefit “instructors” who are available “anytime, anywhere,” kind of like those people at the other end of phone sex lines.  This may very well be stuff that people can learn something from, but it’s not a genuine university education.  And the way that we know that for sure lies in the fact that neither the children of the corporate execs selling this stuff nor the children of the policy makers and legislators buying it will be getting their college degrees from the University of the People or iTunes U. 

All of which brings us back to our favorite topic here at the UFWS blog: the dwindling access to genuinely public, genuinely high-quality university education in the state of Washington.  Technological advances have indeed done a lot to help bring more and better education to more people, but they will not replace real education or make it cheaper.  And if we direct more resources toward the sorts of things being advocated by the Gates Foundation, we will further separate Washington’s citizens from the highest levels of educational attainment.  The promise of genuine world-class education available to anyone who works hard enough for it will continue to disappear.  Real college and all the benefits and economic rewards that come with it will be private and the public will only have access to the online “degrees” that make them narrowly qualified to do low to mid-level jobs. 

The time we spent in the people’s house watching an HP sales pitch might have been better spent trying to find ways to reinvest in Washington’s universities.

Legislative Hearings, Bill Lyne's Testimony...

Submitted by Bill Lyne on 11/02/2009

House of Representatives, State of Washington (video embedded)
October 29, 2009 9:00am

Work Session: Tuition, Student Indebtedness, and System Expansion (discussion with HECB, SBCTC, WTECB, and other stakeholder groups regarding tuition policy, use of info technology, and system design work). For full video, please visit...TVW.