Probably the most famous sports story ever written began something like,
"Out of the gray October mist, on the plains above the Hudson, the Four
Horsemen rode again. In legend they were famine, pestilence, plague and
death. On Saturday afternoon they were . . ." The story went on to relate
the names of the members of the Notre Dame backfield, how they ran roughshod
over the Army football team, and so the legend of the four horsemen of Notre
Dame was born.
Nearly 70 years later, higher education is again confronted by four
horsemen. Their impact on higher education promises to be every bit as
overwhelming as was the Notre Dame backfield that day of the Army-Notre Dame
face-off. These new four horsemen are quality, cost, access and their
derivative, productivity. Unlike the four horsemen of legend, they offer the
opportunity for renaissance as well as for apocalypse.
Knowledgeable folk already have found the analogy between our health care
"crisis" and the current situation in higher education. Like health care,
our system of higher education is considered the best in the world by many.
Like the situation with Medicare and Medicaid, society is balking at the
"quality at any cost" philosophy that underlies our current teaching
paradigm. Unlike the situation in health care, higher education hasn't done
the studies that would permit an observer to determine just how much more
quality is deliverable at just how much more cost.
Our teacher-centric view of higher education makes the implicit assumptions
that if class sizes are smaller, if teaching loads are lighter, and if
teacher support in the way of classroom, library, and laboratory
accouterments are more extensive, then the teaching will be better-and by
implication, that learning will improve. This leads naturally to the
assumption that lessened instructor input leads to lower quality learning.
All of which goes toward explaining, at least in part, why the assumption is
so pervasive that "distance learning" must somehow be inferior. It also
helps explain the general antipathy for learning from peers in unstructured
environments. These shibboleths regarding learning quality have caused us to
focus on input, rather than output, measures. Quality is, perforce, better
when there are more volumes in the library, higher instructor salaries, more
extensive classroom and laboratory furnishings, and generally when we take
actions that increase costs. As a consequence, we have created a tradeoff
between cost and quality: to increase quality we must increase costs, and
reductions in costs signal declines in quality.
But, higher education costs are too high and those high costs are
manifesting themselves as access problems. To put that in perspective, it
requires 20 percent of the median family income to support a college student
at a public university. It is over 40 percent for a private institution. We
can observe a similar tradeoff between cost and access. As the federal
government struggles with budget deficits and the national debt,
non-entitlement portions of the federal budget are targeted for significant
reductions. Educational programs, federal research programs, and student
loan support fall into this discretionary realm and are slated for deep cuts
in the budget balancing plans under consideration on Capitol Hill.
At the state level we have witnessed five years of struggle with the
inexorable rise in the cost of entitlement programs. A disproportionate
share of state austerity efforts have come at the expense of higher
education. The net of these efforts has been tuition increases approaching
50 percent in some states. This has created a secondary impact on private
colleges as the publics have more aggressively sought private funding. The
immediate impact of these escalating costs has been manifested as a
reduction in access to higher education. An increasingly larger number of
institutions, including some publics, are beyond the financial reach of more
and more families. These moves toward increased costs and reduced access are
sure to be exacerbated by a companion public policy shift from funding
providers to funding consumers. The Charter School movement in K-12 is just
the tip of this iceberg. We can expect increasing support for subsidizing
the consumer rather than the supplier.
If our current paradigm trades off quality against cost, and access against
cost, how are we to resolve the dilemma? The fourth horseman, productivity,
breaks the tradeoff dilemma when we take a learner-centric view of the
instructional mission. The strategy shouldn't be to teach more, but rather
to devise venues for learning that take advantage of the technology
revolution. There are many such strategies that range from shortened
time-to-degree, with smaller and more modular course offerings, to more
extensive use of self-paced, immersion learning software. Reaching out to
learners rather than bringing them to campus is certain to be one of the
strategies to increase productivity.
Robert C. Heterick, Jr., is president of Educom.
� 1995 Educom.