Wednesday, September 29, 2010

What's Wrong With Higher Education?

When I first asked that question, it was in the mid 1970s. My company was spending tens of millions of dollars each year on tuition refunds while at the same time we were pouring millions more into training programs for our managers. I was a very young and somewhat naive young manager charged with administering our management development programs and assumed my vice president would just keep the money flowing. When I submitted my annual budget I was surprised when he called me into his office and demanded to know what the business payback was for all those millions we were spending. I had no answer. For many months after that, I researched the problem and finally provided an answer. We weren't getting very much. From that point on, I went a crusade to try to improve the return on our business investment by challenging presidents of major universities to improve their curriculums and prove to us too why people should invest so much in them. That is a long saga, which I will not reiterate here. I only use the story to explain my interest and early involvement in the problem of rising tuition and the value of education.

Many assume that you cannot place a dollar amount on education, citing all kinds of esoteric and intangible reasons that education is for education sakes. There are arguments for that, but it is untrue that you can't measure it and place a financial number to it. You can determine how much of a return you are getting for the investment. It is just expensive to measure behavior modification and that is what most education is about. With college tuitions exploding, it is unlikely that the majority of people send their kids to college purely for the sake of education itself. There are few liberal arts degrees awarded these days.

When I've directly asked university board members and administrators to show the value of the investment that they are asking millions of parents and students, few if any are able to answer the question. Many can't even give a coherent answer to the question about what their mission is. That is especially true among board members of state owned universities. State Universities do not have the same mission as private schools, yet their boards often believe they do. They think they are competing for the same students. They are not. In universities that are owned by the states, that is the taxpayers; their obligation is first and foremost to the residents of that state, not outsiders. While it is good to have a diverse cultural experience in college, that is not their primary mission. Normally these publically owned schools are charged with providing a high quality education at as low a cost as possible to the citizens of the state. There are lots of other things you might want to include in that mission, but that is usually the very first and most important reason for their existence and continued public support. It is also the one that is most often forgotten by board members in their decisions to raise tuition costs while continuing to build new brick and mortar facilities, buy new uniforms for the football teams, and pay exorbitant salaries to professors who contribute less, not more each year. These same people justify why it is more important to accept out of state students to utilize these facilities yet they cannot show you where that is in their mission. Some board members claim to agonize over raising costs, but never suggest cutting costs. It is as though everyone is entitled to a raise. They claim to agonize, but I sincerely doubt that they agonize anywhere near as much as those who must pay back these monstrous student loans. If everyone would go back to asking the schools to justify the investment payback and to demand to know what they are doing to meet the first objective of their mission, then tuition might actually go down. No business operates the way universities do and whether the schools believe it or not, they are in business to educate the students and prove they have value. The citizens of the states must take back ownership of their schools and demand that they be run as they would their own businesses and start to see a return on their investment.

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