Saba’s Corner –Connecting the Dots: Cost of Higher Education, Reduced Resources and Distance Education
San Diego, CA – January 2002. In the next few weeks governors throughout the country will review the state of the affairs for their constituencies 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.
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, CEO, Distance Educaotr.com, Inc. Send your comments about this article to saba@distance-educator.com How to reference this article:
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