For those who remember Gordon Gee's tenure as University of Colorado president, his recent comments to The New York Times on the student-debt crisis should come as no surprise. "I readily admit it," he declared. "I didn't think a lot about costs. I do not think we have given significant thought to the impact of college costs on families."
Well, of course. Gee, who left CU in 1990 and has since been at the helm of Brown, Vanderbilt and Ohio State, secretly authorized valuable deferred-compensation packages for top associates at CU without bothering to clue in the regents, and even enriched a man he fired with a golden parachute.
But if Gee's extravagance and indifference to costs is both legendary and self-acknowledged, is it really so much worse than the attitude of many counterparts at universities across the country? As the lengthy Times article makes clear, too many schools — if by no means all — are avid facilitators of growing student debt. And while the worst offenders may be for-profit institutions and pricey private colleges with small endowments, the culprits are scattered across the entire landscape.
The context, of course, is rising tuition. As Newsweek recently reported, "In the past 25 years, while health-care costs have risen 250 percent, higher-education's costs have skyrocketed 450 percent, according to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education." Blame this phenomenon on whatever you like — the failure of state support to keep up with student growth, for example (although this doesn't explain private tuition inflation), or on complacent management — but at the end of the day, it won't particularly matter. A reckoning awaits.
Oddly, however, the Times never mentions the most likely disruptive agent of the higher-ed status quo: online learning.
Online education has been around for quite some time, but only in the past few years has it begun to gain traction as a mainstream alternative to high-quality, on-campus schooling. That's in part because companies such as 2tor have been partnering with institutions such as the University of North Carolina, Georgetown and the University of Southern California to offer top-notch graduate and other programs. While many tend to be priced in the same range as traditional offerings, it remains to be seen if that will hold.
Consider two developments: First, MIT announced in December that it "will offer a portfolio of MIT courses for free to a virtual community of learners around the world," with "students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects [able] to earn certificates awarded by MITx." A certificate is not the same as a degree, but what if employers find certificate-holders just as competent as traditional degree-holders from second- and third-tier schools?
Second development: Two Stanford computer science professors have attracted venture capital to start Coursera, which (quoting Newsweek) "will make courses from top-tier universities available online, at no charge, to anyone." In an online experiment last fall, more than 100,000 students enrolled in just one of the professors' courses.
Giving away courses isn't necessarily a winning business model, either, but the Coursera venture is just underway. Give it and other such experiments time.
And don't forget existing challenges to the status quo such as Western Governors University. This accredited online school allows students to proceed at their own pace in subjects such as business and information technology and to secure a degree for what it boasts is "typically half the cost" of what other "regionally accredited online universities charge."
The on-campus experience isn't about to disappear, of course, particularly at the best schools, but online competition will cut costs and broaden access while undermining the liberal arts degree (hey, I've got one, too) along with the traditional tenure track. The Gordon Gees of the world may not have thought much about the impact of costs, but their smugness has only goaded others to lead the way.