Global Strategies: Musings on Higher Ed

Since the summer of 2006 I’ve been writing the members of Oregon’s Board of Higher Education and the presidents of the three major public universities to increase the number of students studying Mandarin at their institutions and to send more to study abroad in China. I’ve spoken to most of them individually, usually briefly and at Board meetings. In 2007, the Oregon House Education Committee held a hearing on Higher Ed’s involvement in China. Each of Oregon’s three major public universities submitted data on the number of students studying Mandarin at their institution. Each had about 1.5% of their undergraduates doing so. In my opinion, 10% would be a more adequate figure for a generation that will probably sees China’s economy grow to be more than twice the size of the US economy. The Board and the Presidents have done nothing to increase the number of students studying Mandarin. Absolutely nothing. I know how resistant to change Higher Ed in Oregon is.

Patrick Emerson on his blog “The Oregon Economics Blog” argued that investments in education contribute to economic growth, and that “a state like Oregon should view education as a part of its economic (as opposed to social) strategy.” (here). In a comment there, I agreed generally, but cautioned not to think that the current model and organization of education was the most efficient. Then I quoted John Robb.

John Robb (wiki here) is blogger, writer and theorist of modern warfare and conflict. He is author of the influential book “Brave New War” (here). He has a dark view of mankind’s future:

Because we are unable to decapitate, outsmart, or defend ourselves against global guerrillas, naturally occurring events, and residual nationalism from causing cascades of failure throughout the global system, we need to learn to live with the threat they present. As we have already seen, this doesn’t mean an activist foreign policy that seeks to rework the world in our image, police state measures to ensure state security or spending all of our resources on protecting everything. It does mean the adoption of a philosophy of resilience that ensures that when these events to occur (and they will), we can more easily survive their impact.

Resilience means building local self-sufficiency. But it is not his views on the future of warfare that make him relevant here. It is his post on “Industrial Education?” (here) in which he writes:

Education, in its current form is an admixture of industrial and artisan processes. While the quantities of product (graduates) produced and the facilities resemble industrial processes, the actual production is most closely akin to artisanship (with guilds, no less!). Regardless, this process has become an albatross of cost and stagnating quality. For example, costs for collegiate education have increased 4.39 times faster than inflation over the past three decades and has now eclipsed affordability for most households (median incomes have stagnated during this same period) with no appreciable improvement in the quality of graduates. Worse, there is reason to believe that costs of higher education (direct costs and lost income) are now nearly equal (in net present value) to the additional lifetime income derived from having a degree. Since nearly all of the value of an education has been extracted by the producer, to the detriment of the customer, this situation has all the earmarks of a bubble. A bubble that will soon burst as median incomes are adjusted downwards to global norms over the next decade.*

Fortunately, with the implosion of this bubble, the opportunity to introduce improvements will emerge. The most interesting of these improvements is the ability of collaborative online education to replace much, if not most of in person teaching.

Which lead to the NY Times article “Israeli Entrepreneur Plans a Free Global University” by Tamar Lewin (1/25/09, here):

An Israeli entrepreneur with decades of experience in international education plans to start the first global, tuition-free Internet university, a nonprofit venture he has named the University of the People.

“The idea is to take social networking and apply it to academia,” said the entrepreneur, Shai Reshef, founder of several Internet-based educational businesses.

“The open-source courseware is there, from universities that have put their courses online, available to the public, free,” Mr. Reshef said. “We know that online peer-to-peer teaching works. Putting it all together, we can make a free university for students all over the world, anyone who speaks English and has an Internet connection.” …

… For-profit universities like the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University have extensive online offerings. And increasingly, both public and private universities offer at least some classes online.

Outside the United States, too, online learning is booming. Open University in Britain, for example, enrolls about 160,000 undergraduates in distance-learning courses.

The University of the People, like other Internet-based universities, would have online study communities, weekly discussion topics, homework assignments and exams. But in lieu of tuition, students would pay only nominal fees for enrollment ($15 to $50) and exams ($10 to $100), with students from poorer countries paying the lower fees and those from richer countries paying the higher ones.

To get a further flavor of this trends watch this ad for Kaplan:

Why should Oregonian invest in the Oregon University System when we could have many of our students studying for less?

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Posted by: Custom Essays | February 12, 2009 at 02:20 AM