Generado por Gregory Elacqua.
Vance Fried, académico de Oklahoma State University propone cuatro
soluciones para bajar los costos de educación superior. (1) Separar
financiamiento de docencia e investigación. Mantiene que estudiantes de
pregrado no debería financiar la investigación. ¿Quien lo debe
financiar? ¿El Estado? ¿El sector privado? ¿Como afectaría los
incentivos de los académicos? ¿Y los temas que investigan? (2) Aumentar
el número de alumnos por cursos. También más online learning. ¿Cómo
afectaría la calidad? (3) Eliminar o consolidar programas que atraen
pocos estudiantes. ¿Que hacer con los programas como astronomía? (4)
Reducir los costos administrativos. Menos burocracia en las Ues privadas
y públicas. ¿Como afectaría la calidad del servicio que reciben los
estudiantes? La burocracia que existe en las Ues (a lo menos las
privadas) generalmente responde a la demanda de los estudiantes por un
mejor servicio. Nada facíl.
Un quinto factor que no menciona, que es muy importante en Chile y otros
países de la región sería reducir el número de años que duran los
programas (carreras) de pregrado. En Chile duran entre 5 y 8 años en
pregrado. En la mayoría de los países en Europa duran 3 años y en EEUU
duran 4.
Gregory
------------------------------
http://www.economist.com/node/
*The Economist*
*Schumpeter*
How to make college cheaper
*Better management would allow American universities to do more with less**
*
Jul 7th 2011 | from the print edition
DEREK BOK, a former president of Harvard, once observed that “universities
share one characteristic with compulsive gamblers and exiled royalty: there
is never enough money to satisfy their desires.” This is a bit hard on
compulsive gamblers and exiled royals. America’s universities have raised
their fees five times as fast as inflation over the past 30 years. Student
debt in America exceeds credit-card debt. Yet still the universities keep
sending begging letters to alumni and philanthropists.
This insatiable appetite for money was bad enough during the boom years. It
is truly irritating now that middle-class incomes are stagnant and students
are struggling to find good jobs. Hence a flurry of new thinking about
higher education. Are universities inevitably expensive? Vance Fried, of
Oklahoma State University, recently conducted a fascinating thought
experiment, backed up by detailed calculations. Is it possible to provide a
first-class undergraduate education for $6,700 a year rather than the
$25,900 charged by public research universities or the $51,500 charged by
their private peers? He concluded that it is.
Mr Fried shunned easy solutions. He insisted that students should live in
residential colleges, just as they do at Harvard and Yale. He did not
suggest getting rid of football stadiums (which usually pay for themselves)
or scrimping on bed-and-board.
His cost-cutting strategies were as follows. First, separate the funding of
teaching and research. Research is a public good, he reasoned, but there is
no reason why undergraduates should pay for it. Second, increase the
student-teacher ratio. Business and law schools achieve good results with
big classes. Why not other colleges? Mr Fried thinks that universities will
be able to mix some small classes with big ones even if they have fewer
teachers. Third, eliminate or consolidate programmes that attract few
students. Fourth, puncture administrative bloat. The cost of administration
per student soared by 61% in real terms between 1993 and 2007. Private
research universities spend $7,000 a year per student on “administrative
support”: not only deans and department heads but also psychologists,
counsellors, human-resources implementation managers and so on. That is more
than the entire cost of educating a student under Mr Fried’s scheme.
Veteran university-watchers may dismiss Mr Fried’s ideas as pie in the sky.
(“The only part of college not mired in tradition is the price,” grumbles
Ben Wildavsky, a co-editor of “Reinventing Higher Education”.) Yet some
universities are beginning to squeeze costs. The University of Minnesota’s
new campus in Rochester has defined teaching as “job one”. The Harrisburg
University of Science and Technology has abolished tenure and merged
academic departments. Regents at the University of Texas are talking about a
$10,000 undergraduate degree.
Mr Fried fails to mention an obvious source of savings. Americans could
complete their undergraduate degrees in three years (as is normal
elsewhere), instead of four. In practice, most American students take even
longer than four years, not least because so many work to pay their tuition.
Surprisingly, America’s future chainsaw-wielding corporate titans take a
leisurely two years to complete their MBAs; most Europeans need only one.
Shai Reshef, an educational entrepreneur-turned-
pioneering an even more radical idea. His University of the People offers
free higher education (not counting the few hundred dollars it costs to
process applications and mark exams), pitching itself to poor people in
America and the rest of the world. The university does this by exploiting
three resources: the goodwill of academic volunteers who want to help the
poor, the availability of free “courseware” on the internet and the power of
social networking. Some 2,000 academic volunteers have designed the courses
and given the university some credibility. Tutors direct the students, who
so far number 1,000 or so and hail from around the world, to the online
courses. They also help to organise them into study groups, and then
supervise from afar, dropping in on discussions and marking tests. Mr Reshef
pays for incidental expenses with $2m of his own money and donations.
There are plenty of questions about Mr Reshef’s project. Can you really
build a university on volunteerism and goodwill? Can students really be
relied upon to do most of the teaching themselves? Will free courseware
remain free? (Newspapers that used to give away content online are now
putting up pay barriers.)
Mr Reshef’s university has yet to win accreditation, which could take years.
But he can take comfort from Clayton Christensen’s classic book “The
Innovator’s Dilemma”. Mr Christensen points out that innovators often start
by offering products that are cheaper, but markedly inferior. Quickly,
however, they learn how to improve their offerings. Even if Mr Reshef fails,
there are plenty of other disruptive innovators around. In America, one
tertiary student in ten already studies exclusively online. One in four does
so at least some of the time, and a growing number of bodies, including
elite universities, think-tanks, governments and international
organisations, are putting first-rate material online.
*The coming campus rumpus*
Sometimes when academics grouse that there is “never enough money”, they are
justified—big science costs big bucks. But higher education is nevertheless
marred by inefficiencies and skewed incentives. Students pay to be taught,
but their professors are rewarded almost entirely for research. Mr Fried’s
calculations suggest that one can slash costs without sacrificing much that
students value. Mr Reshef’s experiment may fail, but there is no doubt that
universities need more experimenters. The cost of tuition cannot forever
rise faster than students’ ability to pay. Industries that cease to offer
value for money sooner or later get shaken up. American universities are
ripe for shaking.
-------------------
Gregory Elacqua
--
Director
Instituto de Políticas Publicas
Facultad de Economía y Empresa
Universidad Diego Portales
Ejército 260
Santiago, Chile
Vance Fried, académico de Oklahoma State University propone cuatro
soluciones para bajar los costos de educación superior. (1) Separar
financiamiento de docencia e investigación. Mantiene que estudiantes de
pregrado no debería financiar la investigación. ¿Quien lo debe
financiar? ¿El Estado? ¿El sector privado? ¿Como afectaría los
incentivos de los académicos? ¿Y los temas que investigan? (2) Aumentar
el número de alumnos por cursos. También más online learning. ¿Cómo
afectaría la calidad? (3) Eliminar o consolidar programas que atraen
pocos estudiantes. ¿Que hacer con los programas como astronomía? (4)
Reducir los costos administrativos. Menos burocracia en las Ues privadas
y públicas. ¿Como afectaría la calidad del servicio que reciben los
estudiantes? La burocracia que existe en las Ues (a lo menos las
privadas) generalmente responde a la demanda de los estudiantes por un
mejor servicio. Nada facíl.
Un quinto factor que no menciona, que es muy importante en Chile y otros
países de la región sería reducir el número de años que duran los
programas (carreras) de pregrado. En Chile duran entre 5 y 8 años en
pregrado. En la mayoría de los países en Europa duran 3 años y en EEUU
duran 4.
Gregory
------------------------------
http://www.economist.com/node/
*The Economist*
*Schumpeter*
How to make college cheaper
*Better management would allow American universities to do more with less**
*
Jul 7th 2011 | from the print edition
DEREK BOK, a former president of Harvard, once observed that “universities
share one characteristic with compulsive gamblers and exiled royalty: there
is never enough money to satisfy their desires.” This is a bit hard on
compulsive gamblers and exiled royals. America’s universities have raised
their fees five times as fast as inflation over the past 30 years. Student
debt in America exceeds credit-card debt. Yet still the universities keep
sending begging letters to alumni and philanthropists.
This insatiable appetite for money was bad enough during the boom years. It
is truly irritating now that middle-class incomes are stagnant and students
are struggling to find good jobs. Hence a flurry of new thinking about
higher education. Are universities inevitably expensive? Vance Fried, of
Oklahoma State University, recently conducted a fascinating thought
experiment, backed up by detailed calculations. Is it possible to provide a
first-class undergraduate education for $6,700 a year rather than the
$25,900 charged by public research universities or the $51,500 charged by
their private peers? He concluded that it is.
Mr Fried shunned easy solutions. He insisted that students should live in
residential colleges, just as they do at Harvard and Yale. He did not
suggest getting rid of football stadiums (which usually pay for themselves)
or scrimping on bed-and-board.
His cost-cutting strategies were as follows. First, separate the funding of
teaching and research. Research is a public good, he reasoned, but there is
no reason why undergraduates should pay for it. Second, increase the
student-teacher ratio. Business and law schools achieve good results with
big classes. Why not other colleges? Mr Fried thinks that universities will
be able to mix some small classes with big ones even if they have fewer
teachers. Third, eliminate or consolidate programmes that attract few
students. Fourth, puncture administrative bloat. The cost of administration
per student soared by 61% in real terms between 1993 and 2007. Private
research universities spend $7,000 a year per student on “administrative
support”: not only deans and department heads but also psychologists,
counsellors, human-resources implementation managers and so on. That is more
than the entire cost of educating a student under Mr Fried’s scheme.
Veteran university-watchers may dismiss Mr Fried’s ideas as pie in the sky.
(“The only part of college not mired in tradition is the price,” grumbles
Ben Wildavsky, a co-editor of “Reinventing Higher Education”.) Yet some
universities are beginning to squeeze costs. The University of Minnesota’s
new campus in Rochester has defined teaching as “job one”. The Harrisburg
University of Science and Technology has abolished tenure and merged
academic departments. Regents at the University of Texas are talking about a
$10,000 undergraduate degree.
Mr Fried fails to mention an obvious source of savings. Americans could
complete their undergraduate degrees in three years (as is normal
elsewhere), instead of four. In practice, most American students take even
longer than four years, not least because so many work to pay their tuition.
Surprisingly, America’s future chainsaw-wielding corporate titans take a
leisurely two years to complete their MBAs; most Europeans need only one.
Shai Reshef, an educational entrepreneur-turned-
pioneering an even more radical idea. His University of the People offers
free higher education (not counting the few hundred dollars it costs to
process applications and mark exams), pitching itself to poor people in
America and the rest of the world. The university does this by exploiting
three resources: the goodwill of academic volunteers who want to help the
poor, the availability of free “courseware” on the internet and the power of
social networking. Some 2,000 academic volunteers have designed the courses
and given the university some credibility. Tutors direct the students, who
so far number 1,000 or so and hail from around the world, to the online
courses. They also help to organise them into study groups, and then
supervise from afar, dropping in on discussions and marking tests. Mr Reshef
pays for incidental expenses with $2m of his own money and donations.
There are plenty of questions about Mr Reshef’s project. Can you really
build a university on volunteerism and goodwill? Can students really be
relied upon to do most of the teaching themselves? Will free courseware
remain free? (Newspapers that used to give away content online are now
putting up pay barriers.)
Mr Reshef’s university has yet to win accreditation, which could take years.
But he can take comfort from Clayton Christensen’s classic book “The
Innovator’s Dilemma”. Mr Christensen points out that innovators often start
by offering products that are cheaper, but markedly inferior. Quickly,
however, they learn how to improve their offerings. Even if Mr Reshef fails,
there are plenty of other disruptive innovators around. In America, one
tertiary student in ten already studies exclusively online. One in four does
so at least some of the time, and a growing number of bodies, including
elite universities, think-tanks, governments and international
organisations, are putting first-rate material online.
*The coming campus rumpus*
Sometimes when academics grouse that there is “never enough money”, they are
justified—big science costs big bucks. But higher education is nevertheless
marred by inefficiencies and skewed incentives. Students pay to be taught,
but their professors are rewarded almost entirely for research. Mr Fried’s
calculations suggest that one can slash costs without sacrificing much that
students value. Mr Reshef’s experiment may fail, but there is no doubt that
universities need more experimenters. The cost of tuition cannot forever
rise faster than students’ ability to pay. Industries that cease to offer
value for money sooner or later get shaken up. American universities are
ripe for shaking.
-------------------
Gregory Elacqua
--
Director
Instituto de Políticas Publicas
Facultad de Economía y Empresa
Universidad Diego Portales
Ejército 260
Santiago, Chile
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