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THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
How to Save American Colleges
The Purdue president on freezing tuition, how to reduce student debt, and busting the accreditation cartel.
Purdue University President Mitch Daniels, the former Governor of Indiana & White House Budget Director, is a college administrator who has set out with a single-minded focus on cutting costs, taming the tuition monster, and increasing the quality and value of college degrees.
I heard University of Arizona is going to have a completely online first year course. Cost was targeted around 6,000 bucks and anyone can take it from anywhere.
THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
How to Save American Colleges
The Purdue president on freezing tuition, how to reduce student debt, and busting the accreditation cartel.
Purdue University President Mitch Daniels, the former Governor of Indiana & White House Budget Director, is a college administrator who has set out with a single-minded focus on cutting costs, taming the tuition monster, and increasing the quality and value of college degrees.
Many WSJ articles are available without a subscription, especially weekend essays - I assumed this one was available to all. My bad. Here are some of the key excerpts:
Quote:
Purdue's Mr. Daniels' first order of business: freeze tuition.
“I had a sense, first of all, it seemed like the right thing to do. Not to skip over that. But secondly that we probably could do it without great difficulty,” he says...
“I thought this whole process—it’s sort of like a bubble, and people are using that term—just couldn’t go on much further, and so why not get off the escalator before it broke,” he says.
Not many colleges have followed, and Mr. Daniels has a few theories about why. “Corporate boards 15 years ago or so were roundly and rightly criticized for being too compliant with the desires of management. If this was true of corporate boards, I think it’s really been true of a lot of college boards and trustees,” he says. “They have such an affection for dear old alma mater, love those 50-yard-line seats, ‘Whatever you want to do, Mr. President.’ And so it’s been observed a long time that colleges will spend everything they can get their hands on, in the absence of either market pressure or stewardship by a strong-minded board.”
...According to data released last year, half of high-school seniors accepted by their first-choice college attended a different school, and most cited cost as the reason...
Mr. Daniels notes: “The top 10 endowments have something like a third of all the money, and the top 40 have two thirds or close to it. If you’re outside that group, and you’re charging these tuitions, I hope you’ve got a Plan B.”
Mr. Daniels lists what he has discovered are the top concerns of Purdue students—the cost of tuition, the price of room and board and textbooks—and seems to be working his way down that list, including nitty-gritty projects like reducing the cost of the meal plan by 5%. The college has deputized 18 loan counselors to warn students about borrowing too much; in the past two years, total debt has dropped $40 million. Amazon approached Mr. Daniels—ostensibly because the company sees him as an innovator—and worked out a deal to supply students with discount textbooks.
... More than 35% of college students at a range of four-year institutions showed no growth between freshman year and commencement in areas like critical thinking and writing, according to research by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in their 2011 book “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” ... Similar findings emerged from a 2005 Education Department report that found more than half of four-year college graduates could not compare viewpoints in newspaper editorials.
... Mr. Daniels also has some advice for Congress as the Higher Education Act of 1965 comes up for reauthorization. “Clearly an opportunity in deregulation,” he says. The act’s provision for Free Application for Federal Student Aid, a form that students use to figure out federal aid eligibility, has 108 questions, many of them useless.
... In his drive to free students of debt, Mr. Daniels is considering innovations such as an unconventional financing option known as the income-share arrangement. Instead of taking out a loan, students promise an investor a certain percentage of their income for a fixed number of years. Graduates who earn more pay more, and those who earn little pay little. The concept, Mr. Daniels points out, isn’t new. “Like a lot of my ideas, Milton Friedman thought of it decades before,” he says with a grin.
... As a college administrator, Mr. Daniels has also taken notice of the bureaucratic accreditation process that is a prerequisite for receiving federal funds. Six regional groups blessed by the Education Department, as well as a coterie of program-specific organizations, sign off on an institution’s programs. The ostensible goal when Congress coupled federal funding with accreditation in the 1952 G.I. Bill was to protect students from colleges hawking worthless degrees.
That hasn’t happened. Instead, universities devote considerable resources to a useless process. Almost no institution misses the mark, and since accreditation is done geographically, an upper-tier school like Purdue is accredited by the same agency that has given accreditation to Indiana University East, where the six-year graduation rate is about 18%.
Purdue pays $150,000 annually in direct accreditation fees, working with any combination of 17 agencies—but that doesn’t include time. Stanford University Provost John Etchemendy said in a 2011 letter that the school spent $849,000 in one year of a multiyear accreditation. “One suspects you have some basic inertia and some folks would rather spend their time being busy with this than doing something more productive,” Mr. Daniels says with a faint smile. “I refer of course to the people on other campuses.”
‘All this time and money and in the end some really lousy schools get accredited, so I’m not sure what the student—the consumer—learns. An awful lot of make work involved, or so it seems,” he says.
... Mr. Daniels has made a habit of searching out what “ought to be looked at” in his two years running Purdue, getting his school in shape for when the higher-education bubble implodes. It’s all part of trying to provide the accountability that students and parents are starting to demand. “Higher education has to get past the ‘take our word for it’ era,” he says. “Increasingly, people aren’t.”
Last edited by SportyandMisty; 04-28-2015 at 10:02 AM..
The Wall Street Journal has excellent journalism, unlike, say, the national fishwrap-of-record, the NYT.
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