|
|
|
Saba's Corner --Connecting the Dots: Cost of Higher Education, Reduced Resources and Distance Education Source: Distance-Educator.com
San Diego, CA - January 2002. In the next few weeks governors throughout
the country will review the state of the affairs for their constituencies
(State
of the States from the National Governors Association). Preliminary
indications point to most governors announcing reduced budget allocations
for higher education, or at least asking for fiscal belt-tightening. A story by Louie Meizlish (January18, 2002) published in The Michigan
Daily, the student newspaper of the University of Michigan typifies the
situation across the country. It stated: "With the state facing an
estimated deficit of $900 million, funding for Michigan public universities
for the next academic year is expected to remain low and could even be
cut." These measures are in response to the current recession, which has reduced
tax revenues of most states. History will tell if the current recession
will be as wide and deep as the one we experienced in the early 1990's.
However, as far as higher education is concerned, this recession looks
very similar to the one almost a decade ago. At the time, states were
also faced with reduced tax revenues, which in turn compelled them to
make drastic reductions in budgets allocated to institutions of higher
education. Back then, corporate America was also experiencing the realities of a
recession. Their response was to adopt new information technologies which
were emerging at the time. This was to reduce costs, and increase productivity.
These measures were very effective and led to the prosperity of the second half of the 90's. Higher education institutions also decided to adopt such technologies
to reduce their costs, and curb the effects of the massive budget cuts
on their operations. Implementing technological solutions in higher education,
in part, resulted in an unprecedented growth of distance education. In
the past five years, many institutions have established new courses online,
or expanded their previous offerings. Well over 90% of institutions of
higher education, at this time, have some form of distance or distributed
technology-based education. In contrast to business and industry; however, higher education has not
been able to reduce its cost. Despite massive infusion of computer power,
and telecommunication solutions into higher education costs to students
have been steadily increasing at a rate of 5 to 15% in various institutions.
Again, the story of the University of Michigan is typical. "Last
summer, Engler and the Legislature approved a 1.5 percent increase in
funding for the University of Michigan, but with that funding, the Board
of Regents approved a tuition increase of 6.5 percent for most students."
(Meizlish 2002). Higher education is one of the rare institutions in which adoption of
technology has not reduced the cost per people served. There is a good
reason for business and industry reaping the benefits of information technology,
and for higher education not to be so blessed by it. This has to do with
the organizational changes that corporate America went through in the
early 1990's. The buzz word in corridors and hall-ways of corporations
back then was re-engineering. Many corporations took a hard look at their
organizational structures, and the roles people played in them. They reviewed
the tasks of top executives, to mid-level managers, and the front line
workers. In many cases, front-line workers were brought into the decision
making process by appropriate use of information technology, further reducing
delays, and improving productivity and quality. Simply put, This did not happen in higher education. The basic organizational structure
of the university remained the same. Adoption of information technology
in this case, actuallyincreased the cost of higher education. Simply put,
the organizational structure of most of the institutions of higher education
is prohibiting them to benefit from information technology. Nowhere this
lack of organizational change is more apparent than the workload of the
university faculty. By adopting technology for teaching they, in most
cases, have added to their burden. In technology-based organizations division
of labor allows the entire institution to benefit from what technology
has to offer. In the case of faculty, such division of labor is usually
not available. Faculty who would like to teach at a distance have to perform
tasks that ought to be carried out by a team of specialists. This would
include instructional designers, programmers, graphic artists, videographers,
and others. This organizational underdevelopment in distance education at the course
level results in increased cost of instruction per student. Without adequate
staffing the instructor is only capable of teaching a few students per
course. Usually courses taught at a distance have the same number of students
as their on-campus sections. Since distance education involves computer,
telecommunication, video and other technologies it is much more expensive
than the comparable on-campus course. To use a crude analogy, this is
similar to installing a bullet train between Philadelphia and New York
but mandating that it should only carry as many passengers as a sedan
could accommodate. Furthermore, it should not move beyond 65 miles per
hour! Inevitably, this is setting the stage for failure of teaching students
at a distance. To a new organizational structure is badly needed. Staffing a course with
only one faculty (and if s/he is lucky with a teacher assistant), is not
adequate to increase the number of participants in courses in order to
reduce the cost of instruction per student. More importantly, it denies
students the benefits of personalized learning that new technologies could
offer if they are used in organizational structures that adequately support
information technology. Farhad Saba, Send your comments about this article to saba@distance-educator.com How to reference this article:
| ||||||||
