This week in my Dyspepsiana column I lament that, for all his talk about structural
reforms in Illnoius’ system of public higher education, Bruce Rauner has no
idea what needs to be to really change it for the better.
Which is why I was intrigued by the recent
conversation between Ben Sasse, the junior senator from Nebraska, the
Republican Ben Sasse is also a former college president. He talked recently
with George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen and said several
interesting things.
I don’t think
we have nearly enough forms of higher education in the US. We pretend that we
have one model of higher ed — we actually have a handful of models — but we
need dozens and scores of different types of institutions.First of all, we should recognize
that the teaching mission of a liberal arts college and the research mission of
a large university are really, really different things and we should admit
that. Different faculty have really different strengths and weaknesses, and we
should admit that. One of the things that I learned, and this is not directly
on your point of administrative costs, but there’s an adjacency here.The college that I took over had accounting as its fourth-largest major. And we
used to brag at this liberal arts college that happened to have a pretty strong
set of business programs, and accounting in particular was large. We used to
brag, “Look how great we are. We have a 40:1 student ratio in our accounting
programs, and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln,” the flagship big state
university campus down the road, “they have a 330:1 ratio. We’re 40:1; they’re
330:1.”We bragged about that a lot. Turns out, there’s some data on this, and
the student experience at 40:1 and 330:1 is just not different at all because
40:1 is well beyond the seminar feel. There are five nerds that talk all the
time in a 40:1 class or in a 330:1 class. And in both cases, the feedback loop
of the professor, so that she or he understands what students are learning or
not, is not well represented by the five kids who talk all the time.So we started looking at, what if you had all online delivery of
accounting classes, all in person, or hybrid. Now let’s measure them based on
both cost effectiveness and educational efficacy or effectiveness. As you’d
expect, that all online is the cheapest, hybrid is middle, and all in-person is
the most expensive.But counterintuitively, at least to me, hybrid was the most
educationally effective, then all in-person, then all online. Why is that?
Turns out what the hybrid gets you, is it gets you high-frequency, low-stakes
quizzing where individual students are disaggregated and professors figure out
what students are bottlenecked on what things. You still have an interpersonal
relationship, you have a place to go to have the tutorial which will free you
from your bottleneck, but it turned out the IT added lots and lots of value.I don’t think you’re going to get to that kind of differentiation by
program type through the traditional model of just more and more administration
and all faculty being treated the same way, whether you’re really primarily a
teacher or whether you’re primarily a researcher. So I want a real
pluralization of these forms.
Sasse is an engaging guy with lots to say, and I might excerpt more ot in later posts.
This article appears in Jun 29 – Jul 5, 2017.
