Attitudes about controlling higher education costs

An Inside Higher Ed article reports on the results of the work of Carol Twigg and the National Center for Academic Transformations after ten years of working with schools to both improve learning and reduce costs. The point of the article is that Ms. Twigg had two purposes for her important and widely renowned work. That is to not only improve learning but to reduce costs while making the improvements. In a nutshell, learning has been improved but, despite initial cost reductions, there has been a failure to continue to pay attention to cost reductions.

The fact that learning has been improved is wonderful. That alone makes this effort worthwhile. But there is no denying that Ms. Twigg is disappointed. She makes that abundantly clear when she says “you’re dealing with a culture that does not care about reducing costs.”

The article cites several schools that just stopped tracking costs. Twigg is quoted again, “if administrators do not continue to be involved and simply let it devolve to a faculty project, most faculty don’t care about costs.” The problem is stated as one where there are disincentives for saving money because the provost merely takes it away.

This is truly scary. There are faculty quoted as saying they think higher education should receive more funding and therefore they are not invested in trying to reduce costs. But, those outside of higher education are fed up and much of their anger is about the constantly increasing price of attending college. This is no small disconnect. The academic culture appears to be one of supposed entitlement because the work of higher education is assumed to be so important. But there are limits and we are either dangerously close to hitting those limits or may even have surpassed them. Twigg is quoted as saying “people in higher education believe in what we’re doing, as long as they don’t have to do it.”

Any ideas on how to change this culture?

Mike