Sixteen long years ago, I wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education that "consumers need a 'no-frills university' to turn the higher-education marketplace upside down." I lamented, "It costs $20,000 to attend some of the nation's more illustrious colleges this year, prices having risen an average of 9 percent over last year. That means the $80,000 bachelor's degree is upon us, and the $100,000 edition cannot be far away."
Today, you can double those numbers. We're headed toward the quarter-million dollar baccalaureate. Someone once quipped that sending your child to college was like buying a new car every year. Today, that vehicle is a fully loaded luxury SUV. The total cost of four (or five or six) years exceeds that of homes in much of America.
In 1987, I was touring small private colleges with my kids, and was also affiliated with a respectable university. I found myself shaken by two realities: first, the absence of any sort of productivity gains in higher education, amid an economy whose principal engine of growth was (and remains) improved output per unit of worker input. Indeed, the campus mind-set denied that one should even EXPECT greater efficiency from higher education. Second, the tendency of U.S. colleges to compete for desirable students by adding upscale amenities, what a Mount Holyoke dean once termed the "Chivas Regal strategy." (During our campus tour, one of my children remarked that it was like comparing resort hotels.)
Fortunately, my daughter and son are finished with all that and, in the end, the colleges (and grad schools) they chose served them well. No regrets, aside from the big hole in our bank account. But my 1988 suggestion - creating some "stripped down, no-frills" college models offering "the educational equivalent of reliable basic transportation" - seems even more apt today.
What would such places look like? I sketched eight key features:
- A lean administration, little non-teaching staff, and most campus jobs performed by students or outsourced to private vendors.
- Amenities (entertainment, food courts, fancy gyms, etc.) left to entrepreneurs - and paid for by those who use them - rather than provided by the college and billed to everyone.
- A fee-for-service basis for college-delivered services that not all students avail themselves of: placement offices, art studios, psychological counseling, health care, etc.
- A year-round, four-quarter calendar with facilities in constant use, steady work for employees and the opportunity for energetic students to finish in three years.
- Faculty paid well but worked hard: a full teaching load, no tenure, and the expectation that their job is to teach. (Those wanting to engage in research raise grant dollars and "buy out" some of their teaching time.)
- A trimmed-down curriculum with a solid core and strong majors in a dozen fields. Those wanting to study social work, broadcasting, expressive dance, or contemporary Somali politics would see that No-Frills U is not the school for them. It makes no pretense of teaching everything.
- Rigorous exit standards with diplomas equivalent to an intellectual "warranty."
- Students pay for themselves, with outside grants and loans and suchlike for those who are eligible but no "Robin Hood" behavior within the college's own budget.
That still strikes me as a plausible formula for containing the cost and price of higher education without onerous government controls, and for eking some productivity gains from this enterprise. What's happened since 1988, however, seems noteworthy on four fronts.
First, the troubling trends of mainstream higher education continue in the same familiar pattern, only more so. Students take longer to complete their degrees. The academic week and year grow ever shorter as amenities grow yet more lavish. (Indoor climbing walls? Elaborate electronics in dorm rooms?)
Second, whereas the sticker shock fifteen years ago was felt primarily by those at private campuses, today the public-university price tag is soaring, too. States are strapped for cash while investing more in primary-secondary schooling (and Medicaid, law enforcement, and other costly items). It may also be that society is less inclined to keep generously subsidizing institutions that are seen as wasteful, ungovernable, politically problematic, and philosophically contrarian. Though we still want to help needy students gain access, we're grumpier about underwriting the school itself. (Even the British parliament, after wrenching debate, agreed this week with Tony Blair that students should bear more of the cost of this pricey service from which they benefit hugely.)
Third, higher education has developed a fast-growing sector that (no thanks to me) follows the no-frills formula: the proprietary sector, characterized by the University of Phoenix and kindred vendors of efficient and relatively inexpensive postsecondary schooling. Entrepreneurs have figured out a formula for delivering an acceptable level of instruction and training at reasonable cost to people who are willing to pay for it. More remarkably, while traditional suppliers weep over their deficits and deferred maintenance, the proprietors of these new institutions are making money!
Fourth, technology is making it possible for students to avail themselves of higher education without ever even showing up "on campus." The for-profit sector makes expert use of this delivery system but traditional universities are working at it, too. Because distance learning makes it possible not only to slash campus expenses but also to extend the "reach" of a given professor to far more students than one could ever teach face-to-face, it serves willy-nilly to boost academic productivity. The fact that more students now assemble their college credits from multiple providers - the academic equivalent of "grazing" - puts considerably more leverage into the consumer's hands and correspondingly less in those of producers.
As Congress and state legislatures seek to contain the price of college and devise student-aid formulas that assist the needy without spurring yet more tuition inflation, they would do well to focus on costs as well as prices. They may want to encourage more no-frills institutions and to nudge more students toward the efficient providers. The starting point is to cease treating traditional college economics as immutable and instead to recognize that society has an obligation to reward efficiency and productivity here just as it does almost everywhere else.
