The coming revolution in higher education

Instapundit points to a great column by Ward Connerly on The Spiraling Cost Of Higher Education. Though as one of the comments says Ward is really talking about the rising costs of lower education. The quality of education at the college level has declined over the decades. It would be interesting to compare today's average college graduate with the high school graduate of fifty years ago.

Ward's column opens with:

"California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed legislation (SB 190), authored by State Senator Leland Yee, which would require the governing boards of California's two university systems - the University of California and the California State University - to determine future pay increases of university executives in meetings that would be open to the public. 'This bill is simply intended to let a little sunshine into the process,' Yee has been quoted as saying."

To help put this in perspective Ward explains the "University of California (UC) has increased the cost of undergraduate fees by nearly 10 percent for the 2007-08 academic year."

Ward goes on to make the point that fixing the skyrocketing cost of college and university education is going to take more than a little sunshine. I remember reading awhile back that the cost of "higher" education has climbed twice the rate of inflation for the last forty years.

Thomas Sowell writes in Inside American Education that colleges will raise tuition and demand more government subsidies because they can get away with it. They are not providing a better education. They spend more money on extras like bigger sports teams, foreign exchange student programs, and more research projects for teachers. They spend very little money on improving the education of the students.

Ward covers some of the ways that university administrators get away to raising the costs. He points out that "there is a growing awareness that the cost of higher education is like a runaway freight train."


I predict that the American Higher Education system is a freight train heading for a cliff. Clayton Christensen writes in The Innovator's Dilemma that few companies transition to new technology. For example most steam shovel manufactures did not successfully move to diesel. We see this all the time in high technology, some times in just a couple years. Clayton focuses on the disk drive companies. Initially disk drives use to be 14 inches. As the technology moved down to 8 inch, then 5 inch, and 3.5 inch drives, most companies producing the old drives died as new companies start producing the smaller drives.

I believe that the internet is fundamentally changing the education landscape. Students can now get much of a college education free, or at little cost, online. They don't get the certificate saying that they have a "college degree." Once someone works out a way to certify that a person has the equivalent of a college education, millions of parents will save billions of dollars by having their children spend a couple years at home. Hundreds of colleges will have to change, or close their doors.

There will be a revolution in higher education.


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