College

August 24, 2016 By B. Baylis Leave a Comment

The Business Model of All of Higher Education Is Broken–Part V Increasing Enrollments Is Not Enough

For some in American higher education, the headline College enrollments to double in next decade that appeared in the July 12, 2016, edition of Education DIVE, a daily online newsletter of news from all aspects of education, may have seemed like the message from on high that they desperately wanted to see and hear. However, if American Institutions of Higher Education (IHEs) are counting on this touted coming influx of students for the future health of their institutions, they are going to be sadly mistaken.

This installment is the fifth part in a series on the economic conditions in American higher education. The preceding installment, The Business Model of All of Higher Education is Broken: Part IV — Tuition and Fees, dealt with the general trend of increasing the share that tuition must cover of an institution’s Education and Related Costs (E & R Costs). However, in The Business Model of All of Higher Education is Broken: Part III — Tuition and Fees, we saw that students and their families are resisting any and all suggestions that increasing individual students’ tuition and fees should provide a possible solution to higher education’s financial difficulties. Students and families are saying, “Enough is enough! We’ve paid our fair share!” This thought is only reinforced by politicians saying that four years of public college education should be free for every one or at least the overwhelming majority of the American public. This means that to realistically get more money out of the Tuition & Fees Bucket, institutions must increase the number of students paying the current or possibly even lower tuition charges. If institutions are counting on many new students saving them from financial disaster, there are several significant holes in this strategy.

In spite of the bold headline, the first hole in this strategy is what I believe is the mistaken belief of many leaders in the American higher education megaplex that there is a seemingly unending and ever expanding supply of students who will pay any price to be part of the American higher education scene. The preceding post in this series presented some of the arguments against raising tuition. Two recent articles in education press circles clearly show the strategy of counting on continuously growing enrollments may soon blow up in the face of traditional IHEs. While the Education DIVE headline appears to bolster the claim that there is a growing supply of fresh bodies for American IHEs, it conveniently omitted the fact that the article was referring to “the number of students in colleges and universities across the globe will double by 2025.” As you read the article, it does admit that enrollments at U.S. colleges are falling. Are they trying to rain on the parade of educational expansionists?

In the Nineteenth Century, the history of college enrollments in the United States had been one of relatively consistent, but slow growth. The rate of growth increased slightly for the first half of the Twentieth-Century, before taking off like a rocket ship in the latter half of the Twentieth-Century. In the early years of the Twenty-First Century, the growth has sputtered and even dropped for several years. This is the context for the statement in the Education DIVE concerning falling enrollments. The article references the CNN report College enrollment is dropping. Bad sign? This article begins by pointing out that college enrollment in the United States “peaked in 2010 at just over 21 million students. Attendance has dropped every year since. By the fall of 2014 — the most recent year that government data is available from the Digest of Educational Statistics published by the National Center for Educational Statistics–there were 812,069 fewer students walking around college campuses.” Is this the first sign of trouble on the horizon? I think that it is a clear warning sign and should be taken very seriously by American IHEs.

However, the CNN article tries to assuage fears of impending doom by suggesting that this decline is primarily due to improvement in the economy. “More people are going back to work instead of signing up for additional degrees. ‘Historically, as the economy improves and Americans get back to work, college enrollment declines,’ says U.S. Under Secretary of Education Ted Mitchell.” The unemployment rates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics lend some credence to this explanation, since the unemployment rate in 2010 was almost twice the unemployment in 2014. However, current federal and state administrations predict continued low unemployment rates, while predicting and pushing more students into higher education. Are IHEs and the federal and local governments trying to “have their cake and eat it too?”

Chart 1 below presents Total U.S. College Enrollments and Projections from 1870 to 2025. The data has been extracted from several sources including the report, 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait, published by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), and the 2016 Digest of Educational Statistics also published by NCES. This graph gives the reader the sense of the enormity of the growth of American higher education in the last century compared to its early days.

Chart I Total U.S. College Enrollments from 1870 to 2025

However, because of the scale of the graph, it is difficult to get a perspective on some of the early growth of American higher education. Thus in Chart 2, I emphasize the growth of enrollment in the years 1870 to 1920.

Chart 2: U.S. College Enrollments from 1870 to 1920

Is the headline claim of enrollment doubling totally unreasonable? In the history of U.S. higher education, doubling of enrollment within one decade has never happened. The closest occurred from 1870, when the first doubling of enrollment took just over a decade. The next doubling of enrollments took approximately two decades. Looking at both Charts 1 and 2, we see that the next six doublings of enrollment took approximately 15 years each. Then in 1980, the brakes on enrollment growth began to slow down growth considerably. If there were to be another doubling of enrollment the NCES projections predict that it would take approximately five decades.

Evan Schofer and John W. Meyer in their paper The World-Wide Expansion of Higher Education in the Twentieth-Century present some very startling results. They show that even though the higher education enrollments in the United States were expanding at what seemed to be break-neck speed in the last half of the Twentieth-Century, the United States’ share of the world’s higher education market fell from 50% to a meager 20%. With no apparent let-up in world-wide higher education enrollments, at least in the analysis of UNESCO and the independent scholars, Schofer and Meyer, it is a very small leap of faith to postulate that they could easily top 250 million by 2025. This would mean that the U.S. share of the world market falls to approximately 10%. The United States is no longer the top dog. The two countries of China and India have surpassed the U.S. share of the world market, with Europe, Africa and Latin America nipping at its heels.

I don’t believe that the future is much brighter for U.S. higher Education. This is especially true if U.S. colleges stick to their well-ingrained bias of focusing their offerings in a full-time, face-to-face format to late adolescents. This population has peaked in the United States and will be in decline over the next 20 years as the following chart from the U.S. Census Bureau indicates.

Enrollment peaked in 2011. In July of 2011, there were about 18.1 million people in the prime college years of 18-21. In June of 2014, that number was down to 17.4 million – nearly 700,000 fewer young people. U.S. colleges enrolling 300,000 fewer students last year suddenly makes a lot of sense. Not only are other options opening up for high school grads, but there are also just fewer warm bodies to go around.If we think about the graduating high school seniors who might be entering college, there would have been close to 4.6 million 18 year-olds in 2009. Five years later, there were only 4.2 million – And the 17 year-olds preparing for college are the smallest age cohort younger than 35 – at 4,176,000. The next set of them (current 16 year-olds) will be even smaller. In fact, we should expect a slowly declining pool of college-aged students for the foreseeable future, as illustrated by the graph below.

Data is extracted from the US Census and presented in an understandable format by Demographic Research Group at UVA

This has not been a very upbeat posting. My next post will attempt to analyze the problems and difficulties facing the U.S. higher education system. I will then propose some possible solutions. I can’t guarantee that the proposed solutions will work. In fact, the only thing that I can guarantee is that some of my readers will find these proposed solutions completely untenable.

August 3, 2016 By B. Baylis Leave a Comment

The Business Model of All of Higher Education is Broken — Part IV Tuition and Fees

This is the fourth part in a series on the economic conditions in higher education. The preceding post, The Business Model of All of Higher Education is Broken: Part III — Tuition and Fees, dealt with the history of the revenue stream generated by tuition and fees over the past 40 years. American higher education is divided into two main segments: public education and private education. Much of the American population has a giant misconception about how American higher education is funded. Most students and their families know full well the real financial burden that an education puts on their own budgets. However, it seems that many Americans believe that between government subsidies and the revenues generated by tuition and fees, both public and private colleges cover all of the educationally related expenditures of these colleges. Most surveys suggest that the American population does not believe that American higher education is experiencing a real financial squeeze. On the other hand, surveys such as Inside Higher Ed’s Annual Survey of Chief Business Officers, tell a very different story. More college officials are starting to worry about the future of American higher education. While this debate rages, some current politicians are espousing the idea that the public institutions should be tuition free. Many independent analyses of this idea suggest that there are untold, hidden dangers in this bold plan. It looks like I just suggested the addition of at least two more posts to this series on The Business Model of All of Higher Education.

However, as promised this post will concentrate on the question of how much of college budgets are actually covered by students’ tuition and fees. The most recent compendium of cost data is from the January 2016 Delta Cost Project, at the American Institutes for Research (AIR), Trends in College Spending: 2003 – 2013. This report is the most recent in a series of reports sponsored by the American Institutes for Research (AIR). These reports focused on two questions: 1) Revenues: Where Does the Money Come From? and 2) Expenditures: Where Does It Go? What Does It Buy? In addition to the Delta Cost Project, expenditure data can be extracted from the Integrated Postsecondary Educational Data System (IPEDS) data base. Unfortunately, the Delta and IPEDS data do not segment their data in the same manner. In addition, the Delta study has not consistently used the same segmentation.

Data exacted from Delta Costs Studies and IPEDS data base; supplemented by author’s calculations

The Delta Study prior to 2013 used only six segments of institutions. There were three for public institutions: Research Universities, Master’s Universities, and Community Colleges. The three private categories were: Research Universities, Master’s Universities, and Bachelor’s Colleges. In 2013, the Delta Study added a seventh segment: Public Bachelor’s Colleges. In attempting to extract the data from the IPEDS data base, one must be careful because some college and university systems submitted data for individual institutions, while others submitted system-wide data. In using the IPEDS data for this post, I tried to break down data into seven segments. I can’t guarantee the absolute accuracy of all of my calculations. However, since the data seemed to fall in line with the Delta data, I am comfortable in using my data for general inferences.

There are at least four mysteries or questions that we can derive from the data in the chart above. The first is that the private institutions use more of tuition dollars to pay for Education and Related Costs (E&R Costs). This is not totally unexpected since public institutions by definition get more support from governmental sources. There is another question lurking in the weeds. The graph of E&R Costs for private institutions are much closer to flat lines than the more sharply increasing lines for public institutions. What are the causes of these sharp increases? Is this a subject for another post?

In terms of funding for Public Institutions of Higher Education (IHEs), federal and state politicians have been passing the football back and forth like a hot potato for the past quarter of a century. After many years of stability or growth, the percentage of total spending at state universities provided by state tax revenue has been sinking since 1990. In attempting to explain drastic increases in tuition and fees for Michigan residents, Jim Duderstadt, President of the University of Michigan from 1988 to 1996, told students, state legislators and the general public, “We used to be state-supported, then state-assisted, and now we are state-located.” In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the State System of Higher Education is comprised of 14 “state owned” universities. The state contributes $3,900 annually per student while in-state students pay $10,052 annually in tuition and fees. For the state-supported, flagship institution Penn State University, in-state students pay $17,514 in tuition and fess while the state contributes $3,000. Michigan and Pennsylvania are not the only two states that have “privatizing public higher education.” Thomas G. Mortenson began a Winter 2012 post, State Funding: A Race to the Bottom, on the American Council on Education (ACE) website on the Leadership and Advocacy page with the following statements:

State appropriations for public higher education have just faced another tough year. And yet, public institutions have faced many such years over the past three decades. Despite steadily growing student demand for higher education since the mid-1970s, state fiscal investment in higher education has been in retreat in the states since about 1980.

In fact, it is headed for zero.

Based on the trends since 1980, average state fiscal support for higher education will reach zero by 2059, although it could happen much sooner in some states and later in others.

I have one question for all the zealous politicians calling for tuition-free, or even debt-free public education: “Flying in the face of these current trends, where are you going to get the money to make up these differences?” These conundrums sound like the material for additional posts.

The second question raised by the chart, Tuition’s Share of Education & Related Costs, relates to the percentage of student tuition dollars that Private Master’s institutions devote to E&R Costs. These data help bring to light one of the most poorly kept secrets in higher education. Master’s programs can be cash cows for institutions. Traditionally, many master’s degree programs, such as MBA’s, MED’s, and MA’s in humanities, have not given out large amounts of financial aid to students. Master’s degree students in these areas come to the institutions without any expectation of financial aid from the institution, nor from current employers, if they have current employers. Thus, they tend to pay full tuition out of their own pockets, using loans to make up any differences they can’t fund out of their own savings and earnings. This frees up more money from the subsidy sources for institutions to use in other ways. Do these points provide us topics for additional posts?

The third question relates to three obvious declines in the percentage of student tuition dollars used to fund E&R Costs in the above data. The first two occurred in 2003 in the Private Research and Private Master’s universities. There are also drops in the Private Bachelor’s colleges and Public Master’s universities. These occurred in 2004 and 2006 respectively. This question has two parts. The first part is “Why did institutions decrease their dependence on student tuition dollars?” The second part is “Why did these declines occur at different times?”

The fourth mystery relates to the relative slope of the graphs of the public institutions. The Public Community Colleges have the slowest growth rate of all public institutions. Why have they been able to keep from dipping into the student tuition dollars to fund more of the E&R Costs? Do they know something or are they doing something different from the public four-year institutions? Is this a topic for another post?

I believe that I have come to a good transition point in this discussion of Tuition and Fees providing additional funds for American colleges. If we can’t raise what each student pays, the next logical choice would be to get more students paying the base tuition and fees. The next post will deal with the problems of increasing the number of paying students going to college.

July 4, 2016 By B. Baylis Leave a Comment

CHANGES AHEAD

There are some exciting happenings just around the bend for HEBB. I am reopening some of the previously closed operations of HEBB and rolling out some totally brand new ventures. Please stay tuned to the HEBB website, and my blog By’s Musings. for future updates on these events. You can subscribe to automatically receive those blog updates by giving us your email address in the box on the right side of this page. You have my word that your address will only be used for that purpose. We guarantee your privacy and will never sell or loan your address to someone else. Announcements of the updates will also be posted on Google+ (Bayard “By” Baylis), Twitter (@ByBaylis), and LinkedIn (Bayard Baylis),

If you can’t wait, I will give you some hints; but please don’t keep them to yourselves! Go and tell others. I really want everyone to know about these undertakings. HEBB will soon open its doors to accepting individual and family clients offering Biblical Life Planning counseling, along with individualized help on how to do college: step-by-step guide on how to prepare for college; evaluate colleges; select the right college for you; complete college admissions and financial aid applications; successfully navigate the first-year of college; and make the most of your total college experience. I have also started writing books again, and am open to accepting certain speaking engagements, either in person or via electronic broadcasting.

I have recently started working on another project that I’m tentatively calling The Watershed Collaborative (TWC). It is intended to bring under one umbrella a diverse team of eminently qualified, highly-principled professionals with extensive experience from numerous fields of expertise, and from all segments of the public and private sectors, working collaboratively to help individuals and organizations identify and answer watershed questions. The mission of this proposed consulting alliance is to offer quality, values-based, comprehensive consulting and coaching services to educational institutions, ministries, non-profit organizations, and for-profit enterprises at reasonable prices. The membership of this alliance will consist of only partners who affirm the common goal of providing the highest quality information, advice and other services that are built on the foundation of solid theoretical research, and practical solutions which have been extensively tested in the work arena, uniquely fitted to the clients’ needs.

These are exciting times for me and HEBB. I was never really sure that I would regain any semblance of the capabilities that I used to have. I wasn’t completely confident that I would be able to work again. This has long been a matter of prayer. Over the past three months, it has been wonderful to see God removing many obstacles. However, not by a stretch of anyone’s imagination am I ready to resume a full work schedule. However, much of my thought capabilities have returned, although I am still thinking visually and have to translate the pictures into words to communicate. My endurance is still a question mark. Most afternoons, I find myself in need of a nap to restore my energy. After a short nap, I am ready to go again and can almost jump for joy.

June 5, 2016 By B. Baylis Leave a Comment

Higher Education and Toilet Paper, Part II

This is the first of several follow-up posts to the posts What does higher education have in common with the watch industry, the chocolate industry and toilet paper manufacturers? and Comparison of American Higher Education with the American Automotive Industry that I published six years ago. I have been thinking about reprising the idea after seeing the YouTube video, HoboTraveler.com The AskAndy Show, about toilet paper with no center core. Although Kimberly-Clarke introduced the “Natural Roll” under the Scott Brand name about 8 years ago with much fanfare as to how it was going to reduce landfill, incinerator and recycling waste in the United States, it seems to be a colossal flop here, but it has caught on in Europe and Asia. Witness the following U.K. news article from 2014, Roll with the times: U.S. company takes the cardboard OUT of toilet paper for first time in a century in move to cut down on waste.

In the initial roll-out of the tubeless toilet paper, Kimberley-Clarke indicated that approximately 17 billion rolls are used world-wide, each year. That would be enough to fill the Empire State Building twice. Placed end-to-end, this many rolls would stretch around the Earth at the equator 40 times. They also represent 160 million pounds of waste, roughly equal to the weight of 250 Boeing 747s. In an effort to encourage the use of the core-less toilet paper rolls, ScottBrand has published the following website for consumers to estimate how many rolls their families would typically use: How many tubes do you use?

Why would the core-less roll find a burgeoning market in Europe and Asia, but not in the U.S.? There is probably no one answer. Most likely, it is a combination of a number of factors. Most US consumers give lip service to going “green.” However, if it costs more or is a little less convenient, the US consumer seems to stick to the old way of doing things. Consider recent pushes for light bulb, battery and electronic equipment recycling. In Asia and Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, consumer products are far more controled by central government decisions.

What’s all this have to do with higher education? Let’s go back to the 1890s when toilet paper rolls were introduced. Toilet paper rolls were a new convenient way to provide a sanitary way for people to clean themselves after the elimination of bodily waste. They didn’t catch on right away. Their use skyrocketed with the almost universal introduction of indoor plumbing, community sewer systems, and private septic systems that were built on the premise of the disposal of only biodegradable products.

www.madblog.org/2011/09/an-unexpected-catalyst-the-gi-bill/

Prior to the return of soldiers from World War II and the introduction of the educational benefits contained in the G.I. Bill (or Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944), American colleges could be divided into three models. The first model was the small, quintessential residential liberal arts college. The second model was the land grant college that grew out of the 1862 and 1890 Morrill Acts. These IHEs tended to be larger schools that emphasized agricultural education and research, and community service outreach programming. The third model was born out of the European research-based educational institutions that began in the US, around the turn of the 20th century, with the flourishing of the Ivy League institutions and the birth and growth of the University of Chicago and Stanford University. With millions of servicemen and women looking for educational opportunities in the latter half of the 1940s and the first half of the 1950s, the existing IHEs didn’t have the capacity to handle such a load.

One very surprising solution to this overcrowding was the unexpected growth of for-profit institutions in the late 1940’s. Many of these institutions were labeled “fly-by-night” schools at the time. Sound familiar? There was a two pronged approach to tackling the problems created by these schools. The first was to increase restrictions by the federal government and accrediting agencies. Sound familiar, again? The second was the unprecedented expansion in the latter half of the 20th century of existing traditional colleges and universities in terms of enrollments, programs and facilities. These expansions created a secondary market demand for an increased number of faculty, which further drove the expansion of graduate programs. Since the early 1990s, the job prospects, in and out of academia, of recent doctoral graduates in almost all disciplines have tanked. In many disciplines we now have a surplus of PhDs. What are we going to do with all of them?

As all of this has been happening, there has been call after call for more education. Politician after politician has pushed for more college graduates to meet the unmet demand for qualified job applicants. To meet these demands, American society has turned to three sources. The first has been for-profit institutions, that many accuse of operating unethically. Sound familiar? The second source is an explosion of non-traditional programs emanating from the traditional IHEs. If you can’t beat them, you might as well join them. The number of traditional IHEs with “adult educational programming,” online programs and even MOOCs has exploded. The third has been pressure from multiple sources on the traditional IHEs to be “more efficient” in their traditional programming. Everyone has THE SOLUTION.

However, when we try to partially implement these solutions, the situation seems to get worse. Enrollment in higher education has reached an all-time high. However, so has the number of attriters who enrolled in programs but don’t complete them. The level of borrowing for education has reached all-time highs, as has the number of defaults. As more under-prepared students have enrolled, accusations of dumbing down the curriculum have escalated.

What lesson can we learn from the toilet paper industry? Once American society has become accustomed to a particular approach to a particular problem, it is very difficult to move it to try something new. It makes no difference that the new product or service may be less expensive in the long run, and a better use of natural resources. It takes overwhelming pressure to introduce a new behavior and have it take hold a significant segment of society.

For those of us who are old enough to remember the early days of cable television, we can’t forget the overwhelming pressure from the ubiquitous MTV ads that shattered our ear drums with the droll, repetitive chant “I Want My MTV!!!” MTV hooked the adolescent crowd with a constant barrage of their ads and free introductory offers of music videos . For those of us who were somewhat beyond the adolescent years, we had athletically inclined ESPN, the first 24-hour sports and entertainment network. Fortunately, there was more sports than entertainment. Who can forget camel races, ostrich races and Australian rules football? Once the American public was hooked, ESPN is now a staple on all cable and satellite systems, usually with multiple channels. What’s the secret? Start early and small with a product that people want, then keep feeding them the candy to get them addicted.

Is it too harsh to suggest that we need to get people addicted to education? We need to start hooking them on education early. Trying to get the late adolescent or an adult to see that they need education is too late. Talking to an early adolescent about the need to read can be like talking to a brick wall. We need to introduce children to books before they start schools. Kindergarten may be too late. This was the conclusion of the report STEM and Early Childhood — When Skills Take Root, commissioned by Mission: Readiness, a nonpartisan national security organization of more than 600 retired generals and admirals calling for smart investments in the upcoming generation of American children, and ReadyNation, an organization of more than 1400 business leaders who work together to strengthen American business through effective policies for children and youth. If we were to follow the recommendations of “When Skills Take Root” it would mean that parents would be responsible for introducing books and learning to their children at pre-K ages. That’s a tall order in this society, when many adults have not read a book in years.

Trying to get the late adolescent or an adult interested in educational programming that forgot them years ago is nonsensical. Attempting to lure a late adolescent or adult into academic programming that uses approaches that they rejected years ago is a nonstarter. We need to go where they live and think like they think. We must bring the reticent adolescents and adults slowly into the light. We need to speak their language and use their media and methods as a starting place. I know this goes against grand educational traditions, It is NOT how we learned. That doesn’t matter. We are in a war for peoples’ minds and we need to use the most effective weapons. If we don’t have those weapons in our arsenal, we need to add them. I know that this doesn’t solve our immediate problems. However, I can almost guarantee that it will eventually bare fruit, both for the general public and for IHEs.

Pair of boots, service rifle, and helmet stand in tribute to fallen soldier; courtesy of largeart.com

This next two paragraphs are probably the strongest statement that I have ever made about the future of higher education. We are engaged in a war. As in any war, there will be casualties. Some of the casualties will be civilians, while others will be educators. We will not educate every adolescent or adult in society. However, we have a responsibility to try to save and educate as many civilians as we can. Some we will lose because they refuse to help themselves. If individuals refuse to be educated, we can’t force it on them. Some we will lose because we don’t have the forces to reach them or we have deployed our assets incorrectly. We need to carefully study our battle plans to reach as many as we possibly can. We will lose some educators in the battle, because we haven’t trained, equipped, deployed or supported them properly. These loses are the most unfortunate because they could have been prevented.

We will also lose some IHEs along the way. We lost four within the past month with the announcements that St. Catharine College (KY), Dowling College (NY), Wright Career College (KS) and Burlington College (VT) will close their doors this summer and not offer classes this fall. Some IHEs will find themselves in untenable financial positions from which they can’t recover. The most unfortunate cases are probably those that we lose to friendly fire. If you are uncomfortable talking about the future of higher education in these terms, then I suggest that you might look for another profession. This war is only going to get messier. I am not a prophet of doom. Higher education will survive this onslaught and will regain some high ground. Will it recover all of its loses? It is possible, but not likely. However, the new emerging higher education will be different from the higher education of the late 20th century.

I began this post referring to a post in which I compared higher education to the watch, chocolate and toilet paper industries. In future posts, I will deal with the watch and chocolate industries. In the meantime, I would not recommend TPing anyone’s house or car.

May 18, 2016 By B. Baylis Leave a Comment

American Higher Education is a Sandy Beach

Who pays what in this new paradigm?” This is one of the provocative questions that I raised in my recent post The Paradigm of Surviving and Thriving. However, since American Higher Education is a complex system, there are many questions that need to be considered before we should even draw the conclusion that the current system even needs changing. If it is in need of changing, we must then determine the appropriate changes and who is responsible for implementing those changes.

Some of you are already asking why in the world would I, as someone who has spent more than 50 years intimately engaged in higher education, suggest that we need a new paradigm for American Higher Education? What’s wrong with the current design? Before I get to the topic of changing American Higher Education (AHE), I should start by describing the current state of AHE. I begin with a picture. AHE is very much like a sandy beach.

Shifting sands at Tentsmuir; image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and geograph.or.uk

Sunset at Crystal Cove Beach; image courtesy of wikipedia commons

Eroded beach castle on unidentified beach; image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

What were your thoughts as you looked at these pictures? My thoughts were that a sandy beach is an excellent metaphor for higher education. A beach can be a safe and secure place. It is often a desired destination for sailors at sea looking for a place of rest and safety, and a place to replenish their supplies. I find a sandy beach an inviting place to sit, relax, stare across the water and reflect on many things, including my own existence. One thing about a sandy beach, which is also very similar to higher education, is that it is never the same from one day to the next. The winds that naturally blow off the waters toward land and the waves breaking on the shore from the action of tides and storms move billions of grains of sand each day. Those sand castles that are painstakingly built in the wet sand left as the high tide slowly ebbs into low tide, are quickly eroded away into a mound that bears little resemblance to the original. The participants in AHE can build their little castles and silos, but the shifting winds of academic disciplines, all levels of government, public sentiment and the general economy can gnaw away at those once beautiful edifices. Sometimes the changes come gradually, when they are caused by gentle breezes and the endless cycle high and low tides. Sometimes the changes come quickly, especially when they are caused by storms. Not all storms are the same, and not all storms have the same intensity. Gentle rain with almost imperceptible wind will produce small changes that can build up over time. A severe storm can wreck havoc in a very short time., leaving behind irreparable harm. We are reminded of this by Jesus as he taught the multitude:

Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it. (Matthew 7:24-28, KJV)

Storm damage from Hurricane Ivan at Pensecola,FL; image courtesy of Jocelyn Augustino, FEMA, and Wikimedia Commons

When you live in a storm zone, you make plans for many different eventualities. When a storm is imminent, you don’t have time to make plans. You may only have time to react. In the case of a catastrophic storm, you take the precautions necessary to save people first. We are reminded of this by David in the Psalms: “I would hasten my escape from the windy storm and tempest.” (Psalm 55:8, KJV) Property is secondary. Property can be replaced. You can rebuild in the previous location, or a new location. There have been a number of storms to hit AHE. I can’t say that we have always had good contingency plans. We have not always reacted in a timely manner to hazardous conditions. We have not always built our castles wisely in terms of location or design.

This is just some introductory thoughts that will lead to a series on the American Higher Education system, where it is currently, where it should go, how we’re going to get there, how many much it is going to cost, and who should pay for it. In the meantime, find a nice, deserted beach. On a clear morning, go down to water’s edge and take in the beauty of the sunrise. As you meditate there on the beach, you should also pray like David in the Psalms, “Hearken unto the voice of my cry, my King, and my God: for unto thee will I pray. My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O Lord; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up.” (Psalm 5:3 KJV). Spend that time getting right with God, and being transported to another place. Then you can sit down, reflect on things like AHE, and enjoy the moment, with the only noise coming from the waves on the shore line or the mews, keows, ha-ha-ha-ha’s and huoh-huoh-huoh’s of sea gulls communicating with each other. Don’t be surprised if the keows of the gulls start sounding like the noise from that last committee meeting.

Sunrise at Virginia Beach, VA; image courtesy of Rae K. Hauk and Wikimedia Commons

May 14, 2016 By B. Baylis Leave a Comment

The Paradigm of Surviving and Thriving

Rebekah Basinger’s Generous Matters blog post Surviving, Thriving and Six Degrees of Separation has started an avalanche of thoughts in my mind. My initial thought was that Rebekah is working with a Surviving/Thriving Paradigm. This paradigm can outline a common pattern of organizational behavior. Undeniably, from reading Rebekah’s post, I know that it is specifically being applied to ministries and organizations. As I continued to delve into the steps of separation, I came to see a natural and obvious spill over of applications of this paradigm to for-profit businesses. However, during those periods of semi-consciousness when I was trying to go to sleep and trying to wake up, my thoughts settled in on a number of very wild, but related ideas. This concept could also have traction for individuals. In addition, if we can apply the ideas generated in these thought games to individuals, ministries and businesses, would it not make sense to try to scale them up the organizational ladders? Can we apply the Surviving/Thriving Paradigm to whole industries and even countries? We may just be following in the footsteps of Paul Kennedy with his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, or Karen Blumenthal with her biography, Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought DIfferent.

It’s not the first time that I have had similar thoughts. One thought in particular has been the cause of nightmares on occasion: “Does the Higher Education Enterprise go through periods of thriving and just surviving?” You will notice that in deference to some of my sisters and brothers in higher education, I didn’t use the term “industry.’ In June 2010, I published the post What does higher education have in common with the watch industry the chocolate industry and toilet paper manufacturers? I am convinced my watch/chocolate/toiletpaper post is directly related to the surviving/thriving topic. In my post, I first looked at how the watch industry was completely revolutionized by the introduction of a new technology and a new idea. Watches didn’t have to run on jewels and finely manufactured gears. Time be could kept by crystals excited by electrical current. Watches didn’t need dials to tell you the time. They could do it with lighted numerals. Watches didn’t need to be expensive works of art to be useful. Not everyone wanted an expensive piece of jewelry that told time. This revolutionized the watch industry right out from under the noses of the staid, historic brand names, some of which disappeared. They were replaced by upstart technology firms that had little concern about beauty, with the exception of Steve Jobs and Apple, who had a new definition of beauty. In comparing higher education with the chocolate industry, I focused on two extremes within the chocolate industry which were able to bifurcate the industry and not only survive, but thrive. Not everyone wanted the expensive Dove, Ghirardelli, Godiva or Cadbury chocolates, but these chocolates were still able to maintain a sizable market share and thrive as businesses. At the same time Hershey thrives with a completely distinct market, pricing structure and marketing plan. The third example in my post, toilet paper, is a product that has been used universally for many years. Over five centuries the distribution plan in this industry has radically changed. The old methods have been completely replaced by a new model. Is this a warning for higher education? Are we unnecessarily flushing money down the drain?

I published a second post in June 2010 entitled: Comparison of American Higher Education with the American Automotive Industry. In this post I obviously attempted to compare American higher education with the American automotive industry. This was not a great time for the American automotive industry. In my post, I outlined some of the problems that brought into question the survival of the upper midWest, rust belt automotive industry. A November, 2005 WSJ piece A Tale of Two Industries posed doubts about the health of the American automotive industry that had ruled the roost since the middle of the twentieth century. This article began with a story that hit home to a number of people who had been our neighbors when we lived in Indiana. Grant County, Indiana, had been reliant on heavy manufacturing since WWII. General Motors was the county’s largest employers. Buried in the WSJ article was an announcement that GM was closing its Marion plant and eliminating 2,000 jobs. This hit the small county seat very hard. The county’s unemployment rate was already hovering around 10%.

In my post, I noted the similarities between the decline of the once dominant model in the American automotive industry of manufacturing plants in the upper midWest with the rise of a “second American auto industry” in the South. This new competitive model was providing lower cost cars while still paying employees well for what they had been receiving in the new region. By 2005 it had captured 26% of the market for all new cars made in America. The WSJ article suggested that this switch came about because the old model of producing premium cars at premium prices no longer was bought unquestioningly by the American consumer. They were staging a price strike.

Meanwhile headline after headline each week, in educational news outlets, as well as the general public press, announced the closing or merging of colleges and universities. Many pundits were predicting the demise of higher education as we knew it. Why all of the gloom and doom? However, in my research of college closures, I found that the first decade of the 21st century was the decade with the fewest closures or mergers since 1850 when people started keeping track of these things. In my post I postulated that this reading of conditions by the higher education community was what I suggested was the Crab Pot Syndrome. Higher education had just experienced enrollment and building booms in the last two decades of the 20th century which had only been surpassed by the boom created by the return of WWII soldiers and the GI Bill. In addition, many proprietary institutions were prospering, as well as the online educational operations of public flagship universities and many residential liberal arts colleges. Why? They were providing a product at a reasonable price in a fairly convenient format for a public which did not believe that the premium that the residential liberal arts colleges and flagship universities were charging was worth the difference in price. On the whole American higher education seemed quite comfortable. It could be compared to a crab in a pot of water sitting on a stove, before the heat is turned on. The crab just sits there lounging in a pot. As the heat increases, it actually begins to enjoy the warmer water. It isn’t until the water almost reaches the boiling point, does the crab realize that it is in trouble. It begins to try to claw it’s way out of the pot. However, by this time it is too late, and this crab will soon be eaten for dinner.

At the conclusion of my aforementioned post I stated that: “I think we should be taking seriously the question raised by Joseph Marr Cronin and Howard E. Horton in their May 22, 2009 Commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled, Will Higher Education Be the Next Bubble to Burst?“ In the six intervening years since I wrote that post, a number of events have dramatically changed the landscape of higher education. Do those events alter my conclusions? My first conclusion now is that the bubble has already burst. As a fallout to that explosion, I would now say that we MUST reevaluate the whole enterprise of American higher education. This reassessment must answer all of the following questions concerning a new American higher education paradigm:

What are the appropriate differences between the public and private education sectors?
What roles should the federal and state governments play in public education?
Do the federal and state governments have any role in private education?
Who pays what in this new paradigm?
What role do student loans pay in this new paradigm?
What role does accreditation play in this new paradigm?
What role should proprietary institutions and corporate universities play in this new paradigm?
What role should career and technical training play in the new paradigm?
What role should online education, eLearning and MOOCs play in the new paradigm?
What role should non-traditional learning modalities play in the new paradigm?
What role should badges and credentials play in the new paradigm

I don’t want to be Chicken Little running around yelling “The sky Is falling! The sky is falling!” However, if we are not careful, it is quite conceivable that the tornado that is bearing down on us will level our enterprise and scatter the debris of what’s left all over creation.