Topic: Higher education costs
Blog Post
January 4, 2016
Moving Innovation Off Campus
When Paul LeBlanc arrived at Southern New Hampshire University in 2003, he realized that the small, private, tuition-dependent college on the banks of the Merrimack River was destined to decline right along with the downward projections for high school graduates in the state. “I studied the cards we were dealt and looked for the best ones,” he said. In one corner of campus, he found his ace in the hole: a small online operation. Over the next several years, by…
Blog Post
December 3, 2015
Idaho’s Bold Initiative
Will It Help?
Earlier this week, Inside Higher Ed reported on the recent announcement by the state of Idaho that, beginning with the class of 2016, the state’s high school graduates would be guaranteed admission into at least some, and possibly all, of Idaho’s eight public colleges and universities. For more than 20,000 public high school graduates, admission into five of the state’s postsecondary schools would be guaranteed while the remaining three – Boise State University, Idaho State University, and University of…
Blog Post
November 16, 2015
Having the “Online Learning Discussion” with Faculty
Ithaka S+R has been working with the Council of Independent Colleges for nearly two years in creating a consortium for online learning in the humanities. We have written extensively about the project, in a previous blog post, a report on the findings after the first year of the program, and a case study in which we featured a few faculty from the project and their experiences with the program. Last week, the Council of Independent Colleges held…
Blog Post
October 29, 2015
Valencia College’s Collaborative Re-design
“Culture” is often treated as a mystery ingredient in the recipe for promoting student success. A good culture catalyzes well-designed interventions and produces positives results. A bad culture impedes the take-up or spread of practices that should otherwise work, leading to disappointment. But like airborne yeast in a sourdough, an institution either has good culture or it doesn’t. But what if culture weren’t a background condition? What if, instead, it can be designed, intentionally? And if so, how? Valencia College,…
Case Study
October 29, 2015
Collaborating for Student Success at Valencia College
In recent years, a promising conversation about change at community colleges has emerged. Employing the language of redesign and reinvention, this conversation emphasizes comprehensive, broad-sweeping reform, and calls for a reorientation of community college missions around student learning and student success. Though it is hard to disagree that improving student outcomes is desirable, the traditional enrollment and funding models for community colleges make a true institutional “reset” difficult. Understanding how institutions have successfully gone about redesigning their operations and culture…
Blog Post
October 20, 2015
Can Online Courses Make Humanities Courses More Accessible in Small, Independent Colleges?
The Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, established a Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction in 2014. Twenty-one colleges that constituted the consortium agreed to develop online or hybrid courses that could be shared by all participants in the consortium and had three major goals for this project: To provide an opportunity for CIC member institutions to build their capacity for online humanities instruction and share their successes with other liberal arts colleges. To…
Blog Post
October 20, 2015
Online Learning Markets: Inter-Institutional Challenges
In my last blog post, I described some of the challenges that must be addressed in the institutional context if online learning technologies are going to have maximum impact on the way registered students at existing institutions learn and on the costs associated with that instruction. The barriers described in that post are intra-institutional in nature: faculty concerns, addressing teaching specialization, governance, and cost management. In this post, I want to address important inter-institutional challenges to a robust “business-to-business”…
Blog Post
September 21, 2015
Double Trouble
Sweet Briar College and Cooper Union
Lawrence S. Bacow, president emeritus of Tufts University and leader in residence at the Harvard Kennedy School, and William G. Bowen, president emeritus of Princeton University and founding chairman of ITHAKA, have commented recently on the ill-fated interventions by state attorneys general into the operations of American colleges as they attempt to make strategic shifts to address imposing financial challenges. Today in our latest issue brief, Double Trouble: Sweet Briar College and Cooper Union, Bacow and Bowen share…
Issue Brief
September 21, 2015
Double Trouble
Sweet Briar College and Cooper Union
Sometimes, large lessons can be learned from the travails of small institutions. This is, we believe, true of the dramatic sagas of two very different private educational institutions: Sweet Briar College in Virginia and The Cooper Union in New York. The near-demise of Sweet Briar (now attempting to renew itself, but with uncertain prospects) and the struggles of Cooper Union (with big issues of both policy and governance) have much to teach us about the challenges facing both many small…
Blog Post
September 15, 2015
Online Learning Markets: Institutional Challenges
In late July I posted on the different markets that exist for technology enhanced teaching and learning in higher education. To summarize the assertion from that post: there are substantial differences between the activities and impact of courses delivered by online learning platforms directly to individuals and those delivered through institutions to students. The latter represents a “business-to-business” case that must overcome different obstacles for success than “direct-to-consumer” offerings like MOOCs. I promised in that post to highlight a…
Blog Post
August 26, 2015
Improving Instruction at Scale
In 2008, John Immerwahr described an “iron triangle” constraining colleges and universities, in which cost, quality, and access exist in an “unbreakable reciprocal relationship, such that any change in one will inevitably impact the others.” According to this logic, making a college or university more accessible or trying to increase the quality of instruction would necessarily drive up institutional costs. Conversely, reducing expenditures would inevitably make an institution less accessible and undermine the quality of the education that a…
Case Study
August 26, 2015
Breaking the Iron Triangle at The University of Central Florida
Scanning the social needs and economic realities faced by institutions of higher education in 2008, John Immerwahr described an “iron triangle” constraining colleges and universities. Immerwahr suggested that the three points of this triangle—cost, quality, and access—exist in an “unbreakable reciprocal relationship, such that any change in one will inevitably impact the others.” According to this logic, making a college or university more accessible or trying to increase the quality of instruction would necessarily drive up institutional costs. Conversely, reducing…
Blog Post
August 10, 2015
Productivity and Student Success
There is an unstated subtext to the growing calls for colleges and universities to lower their costs. When colleges and universities are asked to lower their costs, what they are really being asked to do is lower their costs without decreasing quality. There is no other way to square cost concerns with the other major demand on higher education: to increase completion rates. When we talk about costs, what we’re actually talking about is productivity—increasing output for the same or…
Blog Post
July 27, 2015
The Importance of Social Factors in Student-College Match
In a new NBER working paper released this month, economists from the University of Texas and Texas A&M scrutinize some of the factors motivating racial and ethnic differences in college application choices, using data from the entire population of high school graduates in Texas over the past two years. In disaggregating rather than lumping together minorities (as some other studies do), the authors find that Hispanic students are in particular less likely to apply to any college, even after…
Blog Post
June 17, 2015
Earning College Credit Before College
A Worthwhile Investment
As college costs rise and student success rates stagnate, states and institutions of higher education have grappled with creative ways to improve student outcomes – particularly for those who are traditionally underserved. Recently, policymakers have increasingly turned to programs that target students even before they enroll full time in college, by implementing and expanding dual enrollment options that allow students to earn college credit while in high school. In theory, dual enrollment programs (along with programs like Advanced Placement…
Blog Post
May 12, 2015
Unbundling Higher Education
To What End?
Recently, Arizona State University announced that it would partner with edX, the online platform for MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) founded by MIT and Harvard, to offer an online freshman year of college that students could take for free without admissions and apply for credit after the fact. The announcement is just another example of efforts in recent years to rethink the bachelor’s degree from a bundle of services offered by one college over four years (usually in a…
Blog Post
May 5, 2015
Cause and Effect in Virginia Higher Education
In a recent report, we described changes in student-level net costs at Virginia’s public colleges and universities and their effects on student outcomes, particularly for the poorest individuals. In our most robust analysis, for example, we found that a $400 decrease in net cost for Pell-eligible students caused a 5.9-percentage-point increase in the rate at which those students stayed for a second year of college. I use the word “caused” carefully – in the social sciences, to say that…
Blog Post
March 18, 2015
Higher Education’s Free Agent Future
What happens when Professor Everybody teaches at the University of Everywhere? I’ve been grappling with this question for the last week after I heard talks at SXSWedu in Austin and then in Washington, DC about the coming free-agent, unbundled era of higher education. At SXSWedu—the education offshoot of the popular music and film festival—Jeff Young, a senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education, explained how the so-called “sharing economy” might disrupt the higher education teaching model in…
Blog Post
March 4, 2015
When State Funding for Higher Education Dries Up, the Poorest Students Suffer the Most
That’s the key finding of Ithaka S+R’s new report, “The Effects of Rising Student Costs in Higher Education: Evidence from Public Institutions in Virginia.” Taking advantage of a uniquely comprehensive and detailed dataset managed by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), authors Christine Mulhern, Richard R. Spies, Matthew P. Staiger, and D. Derek Wu analyze trends in state aid, what students pay to attend, and student outcomes. Their work has yielded some of the strongest statistical…
Research Report
March 4, 2015
The Effects of Rising Student Costs in Higher Education
Evidence from Public Institutions in Virginia
In Virginia and elsewhere, higher education faces an unstable future. Demographic, economic and technological changes are driving transformation in all that we do. Higher education – access to it, knowledge created and disseminated through it, and outcomes produced by it – will be the key to innovation and prosperity. At the same time, public higher education faces an unprecedentedly challenging landscape as it seeks to fulfill its public purposes and responsibilities. Its transformative potential for our nation is at risk. The risk…