No — most provosts who responded to a recent poll said flatly. “Graduate preparation lags woefully behind the needs of the industry,” wrote a chief academic officer of a private university of more than 4,000 students, responding to a recent survey about faculty qualifications and needs.

In our previous post, we talked about the mismatch between the way faculty members are trained (as specialists in a discipline) and what colleges need (generalists who can serve as mentors and draw together disparate information from many sources).

Don’t blame the professors for the way they are trained. The professoriate has long been a calling for people who love research and knowledge for its own sake. To many members of the public, however, professors are cloistered elitists, immune from accountability and real-world learning. Forbes notoriously called being a professor the least stressful occupation in the nation. (it got so much pushback from professors that it took the extraordinary step of adding an addendum to the original story.)

Now, as it has with so many other facets of society, the Internet has shaken the professor’s role fundamentally. Instead of being the expert in a classroom filling empty vessels (students) with knowledge, professors now contend with the reality that any student can gain access to just about any information with a Google search. So professors are adjusting their sights, from being an “oracle” to an “organizer and guide,” as we put it in our report, The College of 2020:Students.

Chief academic officers who responded to the survey (details on response to the survey were included in our previous post) suggested that the professoriate is going through tectonic change. They are responding by looking for different qualities in candidates for professor jobs. The chief academic officers will place less value on research — only 42 percent of respondents said someone who “is a recognized scholar in his or her field” describes well or very well “an excellent professor.” That was the lowest rating in the poll of 21 possible attributes of professors. The highest rated attributes were “treats students with respect,” “is well prepared for class,” and “pushes students to reach their potential.” All were cited by 98 percent of respondents.

Chief academic officers believe more professors are needed with “real-world experience” beyond academe. Some wonder if in a new world the very status of professors will be lessened.

“Certainly we expect that becoming a college professor will change,” wrote a chief academic officer at a regional public university of more than 10,000 students. “Due to less federal money, fewer people will go into the sciences; due to high salaries in the private sector, fewer people will go into professoriate areas of business like finance and accounting; and the liberal arts themselves are at risk as more and more legislative calls decry any field that does not produce ‘job ready’ candidates for graduation.  I think we need to prepare people for essentially very different jobs that are more akin to high school teaching than what we have formerly considered.”

There is more bad news for aspiring professors. By and large, chief academic officers expect professor salaries to stagnate — 85 percent anticipate that salaries, adjusted for inflation, would stay the same or increase less than 25 percent in the decade ending in 2020. Another 4 percent expect professor salaries to decrease.

To train future professors, one provost suggested that graduate schools be changed to include two tracks for aspiring professors: those who wish to teach and those who want to do research. Students in the teaching track would be steeped in curricular design and learning theory.

“If higher education is to thrive, those who are not  specifically headed towards a research based career need to understand learning/pedagogy/and curricular design for a digital age,” said one chief academic officer of a private college of fewer than 1,000 students. “If graduate programs fail to do this, then we will no longer be a viable part of the learning enterprise.”

Others want more scrutiny on the quality of instruction. “Faculty will be expected to do more serious outcomes assessment and be held more accountable for results,” wrote the chief academic officer of a mid-size private university.

However, if instruction is found lacking at colleges and universities, not all the blame can be placed on the faculty. One alarming aspect of the survey is that while provosts are quick to espouse the need for major change, surprisingly few are demanding better.

• Chief academic officers say they need to create more interdisciplinary classes. Now, they report that just 4 percent say at least half of their courses are interdisciplinary; by 2020, they expect that percentage will grow to just 12 percent.

• Chief academic officers say they need to meet students where they live with greater use of technology and social media. Almost two-thirds of them reported that fewer than 30 percent of their faculty use social media to communicate with students. But 40 percent of chief academic officers said it is “not likely” that future faculty contracts would require comfort with social media.

One has to wonder what is taking these chief academic officers so long to make change. Public impatience with the pace of change at colleges is only increasing. Any college that is not making itself more flexible and user-friendly for students is falling further behind.

Part of it can be explained by an inability to change the workforce quickly enough. Once you grant a professor tenure, it is pretty hard to get rid of him or her. That post-tenure career can last 40 years, tying up an important position on campus.

Chief academic officers seem content (or is it resigned?) to letting the process of tenured professors age out of the system.

Almost all of the poll respondents (92 percent) expected to hire adjunct professors in the next year, but only 56 percent expected to hire tenure-track faculty. Of those colleges that plan to hire tenure-track faculty members, 86 percent plan to hire 15 or fewer. Meanwhile, of those who plan to hire adjunct faculty, 48 percent plan to hire more than 15.

Others are looking to be more proactive. “We need to develop and implement more on the job training for faculty members to teach them methodology, learning theory, use of technology for presentations, etc,” wrote the chief academic officer of a community college.

Many other respondents cynically said they don’t see teacher preparation changing significantly before 2020 because higher education simply can’t adjust that fast.

Add it all up and you have a picture of colleges that seem defeated. The intellectual firepower and engagement of their faculty members is their No. 1 product. Yet their bosses complain that many professors don’t know how to teach, don’t want to adapt to new instructional and communication methodologies, and can’t be dislodged quickly enough.

Meanwhile, those in the profession are going through a lot of soul-searching of their own. They are being downgraded from oracles to coaches, with a future prospect that their roles will be more like high-school level positions. Job security, in the form of tenure, is slowly eroding. Salaries are stagnant.

If college instruction is to be revitalized, these issues must be resolved or at least assuaged. Creative ideas welcome.

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For example, at a time when outsiders might expect colleges to be looking for a more flexible workforce, colleges are doing the opposite. While 37 percent of chief academic officers now say that at least 60 percent of their faculty is tenured, 46 percent say at least 60 percent of their faculty will be tenured or on the tenure track in 2020.

Higher education is simply not an industry that is built to embrace and create change quickly.

Some other examples:

– Nearly two-thirds of chief academic officers say that 30 percent or less of faculty members are using social media to communicate with students.

– Only 32 percent believe their faculty is “extremely well prepared” or “very well prepared” to “integrate new technology into the classroom.”

[Before I go on, let me talk about the genesis of this survey. We were hoping to write a report about faculty issues, a sequel to our report The College of 2020: Students. George Dehne, a college marketing and enrollment management expert and our longtime collaborator who did all the polling research for the original report, carried out this survey as well, completing it in May 2012. We received results from 156 provosts or chief academic officers. The majority of respondents were from small colleges — 45 percent were provosts from colleges of fewer than 2,000 students.

For many reasons, however, we concluded that we weren’t going to be able to write a full report. But we want to get out the results of the survey through a series of blog posts. Please contact George Dehne for more details about the survey.]

We have written before about the importance of getting the faculty involved in change on college campuses. Faculty naturally are trying to protect their positions on campus — administrators are so afraid to approach them that oftentimes the faculty is not even consulted during attempts to make change. They have to be at the center of change, and can be a major force in making it happen. As Robert Zemsky, a longtime researcher in higher education, recently said, “If you get faculty thinking, ‘We can do better,’ you’re a third of the way home.”

Our recent survey found another reason why faculty members may be so afraid of change. Many of the chief academic officers polled said their professors have been exposed by a fundamental problem: They don’t know how to teach.

“Many of our faculty members are not prepared to teach, but are experts in their subject matter,” one community college chief academic officer wrote when asked what changes to expect to in preparation of professors before 2020. “We need to develop and implement more on-the-job training for faculty members to teach them methodology, learning theory, use of technology for presentations, etc.”

Provost after provost registered the same complaint.

“Unfortunately, teachers still teach as they were taught, and many professors have not experienced good personal learning experiences for years,” wrote the chief academic officer of a private college with fewer than 1,000 students. “I would heartily recommend that any advanced degree include learning theory, effective pedagogy, and effective evaluation of student performance.”

Another chief academic officer, this one from a private college with 1,000 to 2,000 students, said  faculty members “need to learn more about students’ world view because there is a generational gap that is hindering students. The academy has to find a way out of the little boxes of time and location, even credits, so students can learn with mobile technology, groups, and outside of the semester constraints. We all need to learn how to do that for our learners somehow.”

When you sift through these survey results, you realize the training of professors and the needs of colleges are utterly misaligned.

Everything in the training of professors is predicated on them becoming niche experts in their field of study. The more specialized they are, the better. A graduate student, in order to earn a Ph.D., is expected to write an original book-length document that no one has written before. So instead of becoming a generalist with in-depth knowledge across the spectrum of a discipline, the reward structure is based exclusively on specializing in a narrow alley of that discipline. And without a Ph.D., one has little to no shot of being a college professor.

So here is the result: colleges are looking for generalists but all the graduate schools produce is specialists. Extraordinarily smart and dedicated specialists, no doubt. But that is not what colleges need. And it is certainly not what students need.

Faculty members need to be “moving to a role as coaches and mentors as compared to purveyors of subject matter,” wrote a chief academic officer from a private college with more than 2,000 students. Another provost, this one from a private college of 1,000-2,000 students, said colleges in the future will have “less lecture (and) more use of technology in and outside the classroom as students will expect to learn and interact with faculty anytime and anyplace.”

Other provosts said they believe faculty members will be more involved in recruiting students, and retaining them.

Provosts and chief academic officers believe they must move quickly to a more interdisciplinary approach to instruction that combines technology, onsite and online learning. As one provost — this one from a small private college —  put it, by 2020, “the tradition classroom, as we know it… will truly be flipped and transformed, if not dead or dying.” But are faculty capable of changing that quickly? That will be the subject of our next post.

The post The Mismatch between Academic Training and Student Need: A College of 2020 Poll appeared first on The College of 2020 | Future of Higher Education.

“Is the faculty involved?” was a recurring question.

In most cases, administrators dissembled, and said they were working their way up to bringing in the faculty.

It is no surprise that administrators don’t want to tackle the “faculty issue.” What is their leverage when tenured faculty has more job security than they do? And, when the faculty has an equal role in the shared governance structure that rules most institutions? But it has to happen.

About 62 percent of all spending at public research universities goes to instructional costs, a category that includes faculty salary and benefits and administration of academic departments. Large universities are realizing significant cost savings by such actions as centralizing vendor contracts, using space more efficiently, and eliminating layers of bureaucracy. But even at the largest and most ambitious of universities, the savings might total $50 million. That would be equal to a 2.5 percent cut for a university with a $2 billion budget. In addition, many of the savings can only be realized one time, or the savings in subsequent years are much smaller than in the first year.

Meanwhile, state support for public higher education dropped 7.6 percent in the 2011 fiscal year. State support is a major, albeit dwindling, component of funding for public research universities.

It doesn’t add up. Saying you can balance a university budget without touching instructional costs is like saying you can balance the federal budget without touching national defense, Social Security and Medicare.

It is understandable that academic leaders don’t even want to entertain the discussion about cost savings at their universities. Most faculty members simply want to be left alone so they can pursue their teaching and research. Just by entering into the talks, faculty members are concerned that they will be perceived as giving ground.

But the security and job satisfaction that the professoriate has long enjoyed is lessening. More than half of public college and university classes are now taught by adjuncts. Professors who have retreated to research are finding research budgets cut, and competition for grants steeper than ever. More academics (like this one) are explaining that given the outlook for higher ed, they would rather take their chances in the private sector.

But the stakes couldn’t be higher for everyone involved. Faculty members must understand that if more colleges close their doors, there will be fewer academic jobs to go around. Yes, administrative bloat has been unchecked at many institutions, but that argument between who has been more wasteful — administrators or faculty — has no winner.

Most universities have not created models for paring faculty ranks (other than the occasional early-retirement package). But the conversation must be built on mutual trust and a shared goal: the more money a university saves in overhead, the more it can devote to teaching and research. Creative minds can find creative solutions.

Universities committed to change must involve faculty members at the outset of any discussions. Begin with finding potential allies in the faculty to start the conversation, and spread it from there. This won’t be an easy discussion, but it will get harder the longer it is delayed.

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This very impressive overview by Ann Kirschner in the Chronicle of Higher Education of the many issues besetting higher education and the rash of recent books that has recounted them, made me think more about the battle between faculty members and administrators. This is a zero-sum game. Higher education is changing fundamentally and quickly, and arguing about who is to blame isn’t going to change that.

Kirschner writes:

How long will it take for change to affect higher education in major ways? Just my crystal ball, but I would expect that institutions without significant endowments will be forced to change by 2020. By 2025, the places left untouched will be few and far between.

I agree with her crystal ball. That’s one reason this blog has the name it has! For my money, the growth in the academic badge movement, in particular, is a direct threat to the primacy of higher education and its domination of the market for credentials.

Against that narrative, almost everyone must change their ways, and that is going to mean pain on all sides. If the status quo continues, at most institutions, this ongoing debate will be little more than fighting over crumbs, and the world will pass by the combatants.

It comes to this: higher education is a timeless product, but that doesn’t mean the ways of teaching it and offering it should not change.

If everyone at a given institution can agree to that, then it might have a fighting chance.

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But what about the very core of your college: the campus?

A decade ago, colleges and universities were in a full-on building boom, creating dormitories and recreation centers to satisfy the newest generation of self-involved college student. The Internet boom made a lot of people wealthy, and that led to a golden age in college giving. Much of the money was directed to individual buildings that captured the imagination of the donors. But now, students aren’t influenced the way they once were by fancy new dormitories. Moreover, the students of the future are much more likely to take classes from several different institutions. On average, the students will be older, and may have other complications, like full-time jobs or families, that will make them see a college campus as immaterial to their needs.

In light of that, the majority of colleges and universities need to put a great deal of thinking into how to make their campuses more relevant to students. Some universities, such as the University of Colorado, are following the learning communities model followed most famously by the Ivy Leagues schools. More universities need to think of integrating student living with learning.

The residential institution will not necessarily disappear because the old model of living and learning on campus won’t disappear. Most 18-year-olds need the discipline, encouragement and support of professors or graduate assistants.  Unfortunately, the costs at these institutions will be prohibitive to most students, so this experience will likely fall to the more affluent.

Residential colleges and universities will have a market if they add value to the residential experience.  Residential colleges will need to formally recognize the skills and knowledge gained through the out-of-class experiences.  These skills include leadership, teamwork, public speaking, management and so forth.

We can imagine a “hybrid residential college” where most of the courses are online offerings from the nations’ greatest universities or instructors, but at each college, mentors of advisors work with the students to insure that they have a rich out-of-class experience, and that the learning continues in all kinds of creative ways after the lecture is over.

Along with rethinking student living space, colleges should also reconfigure learning spaces, using modular rooms and furniture to emphasize an openness to interdisciplinary study. Colleges should have meeting rooms of many different sizes, from 2 to 200, acknowledging that learning takes place in all kinds of groups.
Overall, universities need to be much more realistic about the way they view their campuses. Some have more space than they can use, and should consider selling some property or partnering with community groups or other colleges to make sure the space is gainfully used. The campus master plan — at most institutions, a 10-year planning document — should be subject to constant updating and change. Some universities are better at this than others.

Universities should focus on what parts of their campus hold the deepest meaning for their students, their alumni, and other constituencies. Those areas of campus are likely to hold in some way the memory of college that is so precious to many, and what they will carry with them the rest of their lives. Those areas of campus should be considered almost sacred.

But even within the most important parts of campus, colleges need to be aware of the statement they are making with their buildings. They should continue the commitment they have shown in recent years to sustainability, whether it takes the form of green roofs, composting toilets, or recycled building materials. The way that colleges use their buildings is watched closely by their idealistic students, and a commitment to reducing energy costs allows the college to make a visible and lasting commitment to ethics and integrity that will likely make much more of an impression than anything a professor or president ever says. With students spending less time on campuses, those limited chances to make an impression are more important than ever.

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That is the startling scenario that a panel contemplated Thursday night as a forum opened on The Future of Higher Education at The New School University in New York.

Looking 20 to 30 years out, “The wealthiest institutions will continue to provide face to face instruction. Other universities will not be able to afford to deliver instruction face-to-face any longer,” said Neil Grabois, former provost of Williams College and president of Colgate University. He is now dean of the Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy at The New School.

Grabois said he envisions classrooms with holograms of instructors and an increased use of artificial intelligence to assist individual students. The technology for such a classroom is under development.

Other panelists piled on. “Our modes of teaching are really obsolete,” said Jamshed Bharucha, president of Cooper Union. “The way most teaching is done is not aligned with how the brain works. The dirty little secret of learning is that you forget.”

Many college instructors dump knowledge into students as if it will be retained forever, said Bharucha. But students would retain more if teaching was more interactive and interdisciplinary, and more enveloped in technology. “The precious time in a classroom should be used in a more dynamic way than we are using it now.”

The changes are coming to a head because of the unsustainable cost structure of higher education and the growing backlash of students and parents against increasing costs (The session was marked by angry outbursts by students against Matthew Goldstein, president of the City University of New York, which just imposed another series of tuition increases.Goldstein was also on the panel).

“We have brought a lot of this on ourselves,” said Grabois. Somehow, the mission of universities “has changed from the social good to the private good.” Looking through the history of higher education, “at times of large change, those are times when pedagogical changes are almost imposed on us if we don’t do it ourselves.”

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OpenClass is truly a cloud-based service. There is no hardware, licensing or hosting costs for the users. In the same way that free e-mail has become an indispensable part of many peoples lives, Pearson is hoping that a free Learning Management System (LMS) will become an indispensable part of modern higher education. To that end OpenClass is tightly integrated with Google Apps, which many schools (and a large number of students) are already using.  Being a cloud-based service makes OpenClass easy for schools to implement, support, and use. More importantly it has the social and communications characteristics that students have come to expect in many other parts of their lives.

OpenClass will have social features that are common in other online products. Users (students and faculty) will be able to follow each other, regardless of whether or not they are in the same class, building, department, or even university. This is the norm for a site like Facebook, Twitter, tumblr, etc. — they do not create artificial barriers to communications and interaction, and neither should a LMS. By bringing this functionality to the university, OpenClass is a big step towards social learning becoming a useful and scalable asset in higher education.  More importantly these features are already understood and expected by students. Since the technology is already widely available elsewhere, students and faculty could quickly use the social functions of OpenClass to improve the learning environment.

Open content is an important concept for the College of 2020. Students generally expect information to be free and many of the best colleges are making their courses “openly” available. OpenClass claims to be an open environment, meaning that content from other providers besides Pearson can be used. Students are expecting more information at their fingertips. Other areas of the web are providing that information at breakneck speed. If OpenClass is even a little better at making higher education truly open, then it will be a great step forward. Some critical questions remain – like is it really free and what is Blackboard going to do about it?

The distribution model of OpenClass is radically different than current LMS offerings. It’s currently free and scalable – it can grow and expand with the needs of an institution. The College of 2020 will have most of its IT in the cloud and all platforms will be scalable and accessible from anywhere. But right now OpenClass seems almost too good to be true. Even if we don’t know all the details yet, one thing is for certain – Pearson is playing at the forefront of higher ed technology.

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Previously, I wrote about why the cost of higher education keeps spiraling upward beyond the willingness of most colleges to support and the willingness by most to pay for it. Today, I will look at how the response to those costs will change colleges by 2020.

Different institutions will begin to respond to the financial constraints in different ways depending on their particular conditions and missions. One of the most widespread responses, however, is likely to be a stepping back from the increasingly homogenized view of what “quality” means in higher education.

Perversely, “quality” is not currently defined by learning outcomes for students, but by costly surrogates such as quality of student services and amenities, quality of physical plant, or quality of faculty research – in short, the elements of the arms race which is defined by reference to the richest educational institutions.  Lowering overall costs will require in most cases that institutions define their own unique educational niche – stepping back from the rich-institution inspired arms race. This entails sharpening and redefining institutional missions in order to create niches that are both valuable for students and society, and fiscally sustainable.

Different institutions will de-emphasize components of the present arms race in different ways, and will create some new, less expensive value propositions in their stead.  For example, one component of the response of many may be to narrow their curricular focus to a relatively few popular majors, or to focus on pre-professional training.  Happily, many will probably decide that a key component of their new value proposition will be an increased focus on learning appropriate to their new sharpened mission, and on demonstrating that effectiveness.  Thus the colleges of 2020 may well show a much wider aspirational profile than what we see today, and one which is more focused on demonstrated learning rather than surrogates.

Another response that likely will be widespread is to increase utilization of the physical plant. This can be done by admitting more students, possibly moving to year-round operations. Of course, this only is beneficial if savings on the plant are not spent on increased instructional costs. For many institutions, this will mean that faculty will be expected to teach more courses and forgo summers away from campus- and many students will have the opportunity (and obligation) to break out of the traditional fall-spring academic year. Online learning will also likely play a major role in enabling more students to be taught without increasing plant or instructional costs proportionally.

One response that will be almost universal is greatly increased use of technology to improve both productivity and learning outcomes.  In particular, online (and blended) learning likely will be a central component of cost cutting, increased learning, and increased access.

For the institutions with stronger brands, targeted use of online and/or blended learning will lead to increased learning outcomes, greater student satisfaction, and better utilization of faculty. It will also be used extensively for projecting the brand beyond the current geographic boundaries of the institutions. For institutions with weaker brands, the same uses will be found, but with much more aggressive implementation required in order to achieve fiscal sustainability. For example, groups of weaker-brand institutions might jointly share an online curriculum, and differentiate themselves through individual tutoring support and student-life amenities.

Online learning of all types and levels of quality will become readily available as colleges and corporations rush into one of the few areas that holds promise to increase productivity in higher education.  A number of these programs will involve visible, major scholars working with the best experts in pedagogy, and have demonstrated high learning outcomes. The widespread availability of such programs will provide a major challenge for institutions that provide a “generic” education that can be easily and cheaply replaced by a high quality online program. (In fact, many of these low-brand-differentiation institutions already have significant financial problems because they have few competitive advantages.)

These low-brand- differentiation institutions will need to change their mission and approach in order to create a differentiated niche that provides value and competitive advantage.  Many will not be able to  respond creatively in a timely fashion, and will not survive.

Lower-ranked research universities will find it increasingly difficult to afford their current profiles: research universities are by far the most expensive form of higher education yet invented.  In addition, overall research funding is likely to fall significantly over the next decade, thus making many lower-ranked programs even less viable. Options will range from completely leaving research and totally changing the faculty profile, to intermediate scenarios that involve a larger teaching faculty and significantly smaller research faculty.  Overall, the value proposition for this group of institutions likely will shift in the direction of high-quality student learning.

All of this is on the cost side. But some additional changes will work on the side of the price students pay to get a degree.  Numerous institutions probably will emulate Western Governors University and move to competency–based evaluations that enable students to move through the system at their own pace. Such approaches allow students to acquire knowledge from many sources, including work or online programs of their choosing, and get credit from the “home” institution by demonstrating competency.

Bologna-like approaches will also provide educational outcomes measures that will greatly facilitate transferring of credit from one institution to another, thus providing a diversity of different cost pathways to a degree. As a consequence, many four-year institutions may find that their first two years have been “hollowed out” by less expensive two year organizations specializing in quality transferable core courses.  This loss of enrollment in the more profitable core courses will put additional pressure on the budgets of the four-year institutions, thus forcing additional mission change.

So for 2020, this is what I see: increased diversity of institutional missions, greater use of online and blended learning, 12 month academic calendar, fewer research universities, increased transfer opportunities, not all existing institutions will still be around, and student learning will be a key differentiating factor. Now what was it that Bohr said about predictions?

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Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future

Niels Bohr

What will the College of 2020 look like?

It probably will be similar in at least one way to the College of 2011 -there isn’t any one archetypal College of 2011 and there won’t be any one archetypal College of 2020 either. US higher education consists of about 4,500 accredited colleges in 2011 with an incredible diversity of sizes, approaches, missions, and resources.  I would expect the same to be generally true in 2020, with some important caveats:  I think there will be significantly fewer accredited colleges in 2020, and the mix of sizes, approaches, missions, and resources will be quite different from today.

These changes will be driven by two forces that push from different directions, but each leading to increasing fiscal constraints on higher education.  On the one side, local and national governments are finding it increasingly difficult to support higher education at traditional levels. There is a world-wide movement towards decreasing the role of government in providing social goods, and the US reflects that movement. In addition, other governmental costs such as health care, prisons, and retirements are growing rapidly and squeezing out areas such as education.

On the other side, all of higher education utilizes a model whose costs over the last 30 years have steadily grown about 3 percent a year above the increase in the Consumer Price Index. In the tuition-dependent private sector, tuition has grown apace, i.e. roughly CPI plus 3 percent every year for the past three decades.

The costs of higher education are reaching a point where government, parents, and students are beginning to question if the product is worth the price.  The answer is increasingly “no” for private institutions that have lower brand value, but the “no” likely will move upstream in the value ladder over time as costs increase until only a relatively small number of high brand-value private institutions are immune.   On the public side, the answer is increasingly, “no, not given our fiscal constraints” no matter what the brand value of the institution.

Thus what we will likely see over the next decade in higher education is an attempt to create models that provide high educational value (often, perhaps, higher than at present) with less cost per student. So to imagine what the future might look like, we need to understand why costs are so high and increase so rapidly, and how that can be changed.   Oversimplified, a few reasons for the high costs are:

• In a world in which institutional aspirations are increasingly homogenized around a model set by the richest institutions, there is a continuing “arms race” to upgrade and increase teaching, recreational, living and dining facilities; expand student activities and student services; and broaden curricular options – all very costly “improvements”
• Physical plants are generally very expensive for the number of students served
• Increased bureaucracy is needed to manage the growing fruits of the arms race and ever increasing government regulations.
• Arms race expansions of the breadth of course offerings lead to lowering the average number of students/class, thereby decreasing teaching productivity (students educated divided by teaching costs).
• Colleges increasingly  are being asked to remedy the educational failings of secondary education, and this diversion to a non-core mission adds a costly overlay
• Teaching approaches have varied little over the centuries and consequently there currently is little room for increased productivity in this core function.
• Costs tend to increase faster than CPI in any sector where costs are driven by personnel costs, the personnel are highly skilled, and no productivity increases occur.

Another significant driver of educational cost increases has been attempts by many institutions to move up the brand-value chain by increasing emphasis on faculty research.   This results in significant cost shifting from faculty research into undergraduate education e.g.:

• Research faculty command higher salaries than teaching faculty, and those higher costs are spread over fewer students because of reduced teaching loads. Thus teaching productivity gets a double blow.
• Research facilities and instrumentation are very expensive compared to teaching facilities, and research sponsors and donors seldom if ever pay the complete costs of building and maintaining those facilities and purchasing this instrumentation, leaving costs to be covered by  unrestricted funds – which generally are primarily tuition income.
• Government regulations and the bureaucracies needed to respond to them go up exponentially as research comes in, and research funding almost never covers these costs completely, again adding pressure on unrestricted funding.

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