Challenging conventional wisdom about what college should cost

Jane Wellman and Dennis Jones offer some important challenges to conventional wisdom about college costs in this Inside Higher Ed article. They see a developing national agenda for higher education driven by the goal put forward by President Obama to return the U.S. to world leadership in degree attainment levels by 2020. Achieving that goal will require extraordinary measures and management of costs.

What is fun and important about their piece is how they dismiss eight beliefs that are so widespread that they are recognized as conventional wisdom. They do a great job of talking about each of the eight “wisdoms”:

• spending increases are inevitable because quality would be harmed if productivity is increased
• more money means more quality, and quality means higher performance (quality is more important than productivity)
• public policy goals should take a backseat at public colleges since the states have reduced funding and are minority “shareholders”
• public colleges cannot be expected to invest in change to pursue state priorities unless they get more money (and if funds were taken away, they must be replaced before added funds are considered to be “new” funding)
• instructional costs rise by the level of student taught, so doctoral students are the most expensive, and lower division undergraduates are the least
• lost public support can, or should, be replaced with increased research revenue
• the more expansive the undergraduate curriculum, the higher the quality and attractiveness to students
• productivity will be improved if more students are sent to community colleges.

Simply listing these points does not do justice to what Wellman and Jones have written, so I encourage you to read the full article. And, I want to note that several of these beliefs deal only with publicly supported colleges and universities. But, I agree with Wellman and Jones that there is a developing national agenda for higher education and it is a very important agenda. Those of us at private institutions, whether for-profit or not, share a responsibility to contribute to the national agenda. We need to consider how some of these beliefs hinder the performance our institutions, and how we can overcome the conventional wisdom in order to contribute to increased degree attainment levels. We share a responsibility to reconsider our own assumptions about spending increases, defining and delivering quality, and achieving efficiency as well as effectiveness in our curricula.

Thanks to Wellman and Jones for sharing their criticisms, so effectively challenging the assumptions, and asking all of us in higher education to reconsider some fundamental beliefs, and to join together in the pursuit of a shared goal.

Please feel free to leave a comment.

Mike