Possible Answer to the “College Affordability Crisis”
·
The costs have gone up dramatically,
making college unaffordable for many.
·
Students who have needed college loans to
enable them to go to college are saddled by an incredible amount of debt.
The following statistics bear these statements out. It
truly was easier financially to get my Bachelor’s Degree from Michigan State
University from 1967-1970, getting my degree in three years and a summer term,
working my way through, and leaving with no debt and a new car.
“Average Cost of College Statistics and Key Findings
·
Average Total Cost
of Public Colleges: $25,290 (in-state) $40,940 (out-of-state)
·
Average Total Cost
of Private Colleges: $50,900
·
More than 19.9
million students are projected to attend American colleges and
universities in fall 2018, with around 6.7 million going to two-year
institutions and 13.3 million going to four-year institutions.
·
The majority of
students pay between $6,000 and $15,000 in
tuition for both public and
“According
to The College Board®, the average 2014-2015 tuition increase was 3.7 percent
at private colleges, and 2.9 percent at public universities. However, looking
back at the last decade, the 10-year historical rate of increase is
approximately 5 percent.
These
figures are substantially higher than the general inflation rate, and also
higher than the average increase in personal incomes.”
Projecting ahead those
rates of inflation make things look problematic, at best.
The impacts of these higher costs are
shown in the rising student debt held by former students.
“U.S. student loan borrowers owed a collective $1.6 trillion
in federal and private student loan debt as of March 2019, according to the
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
. . . .
Sixty-five percent of the
class of 2018 graduated with student debt, according to the most recent data
available from The Institute for College Access & Success, a nonprofit
organization that works to improve higher education access and affordability.
Among these graduates, the average student loan debt was $29,200.
The average U.S. household with student debt owes $47,671, according to NerdWallet’s 2018 household debt study.” 2019
Student Loan Debt Statistics
So, What Do We Do About It?
First, I am not persuaded by demands that student debt
should be forgiven, except in certain circumstances. The rate of return for the
money invested in a college education is still generally positive. People
invest money, including for college, because they anticipate a positive rate of
return. The fact that they incur debt to get the education should not give
reason to let them off the hook. Of course, some people are very adversely
affected. For example, many enrolled in rip off private colleges but then never
received a degree or other expertise that was of any value. Others incurred
debt, then dropped out of their program, with little to show for it. Others made
very bad choices in their selected field of study which upon graduation may
have little demand for or very low wages for that specialty. In general, I am
very supportive of the notion that people need to be held accountable for their
actions. If these indebted former students were let off the hook, presumably
someone else would need to pick up the check. Many of those expected to do so
would be others who have not had the same opportunities for the education that
the debtors have, and in fact, may be making lower wages than the indebted. Is
it fair to transfer the burden to them? I think not.
If there are loan forgiveness programs for debtors who
fill hard to fill public service jobs (such as teaching positions in selected
rural locations or poverty stricken inner city schools) or doctors who take
positions in rural areas that have great difficulty in attracting doctors, I
would have less of an objection. Or, as I have seen proposals for allowing
future social security benefits to be tapped to pay off or pay down student debt,
I may be ok with that.
But I think the focus should be on doing what we can to
control college costs and reduce the incidence of these problems arising in the
future.
How to Control Costs
Great advances have been made in online education. I have
“taken” perhaps 50-70 excellent courses from the Teaching College in their Great Courses.
I have also taken numerous courses from Coursera.
There is an abundance of excellent learning opportunities online free (or a
small fee for a certificate of completion).
I envision a program as follows:
·
An accrediting body
be set up to evaluate and approve worthy online courses for credit to an American
Virtual University. Some current courses, such as in the Great Courses
series, would likely qualify due to their selecting some of the best English-speaking
instructors in the world to teach their courses. Their courses would need to be
modified to add the embedded quizzes and tests, but can serve as models of the
quality expected. Also, many of the Coursera courses are of the length and
quality already with the testing components. And, there are many other top-notch
universities with online courses that would surely qualify, such as listed on Udemy.com,
oeru.org, edx.org, Udacity, Masterclass, Pluralsight, Lynda.com, Skillshare, and
more.
·
The courses would be
granted credit in proportion to the extent of the course content. A typical
university course granted 3 credits would have 3 class hours per week for 15
weeks, for a total of 45 hours. A rule of thumb is that students should spend
an additional 2 hours studying per hour of class, for a grand total of 135
hours. A typical Great Course is 24 lectures 30 minutes each, for a total of 12
hours, but would take longer with the quizzes and tests added. This might be
granted a ¼ credit, for example.
·
The courses could
have quizzes or tests embedded in the instruction, n to ensure the enrolled
student actually did the course, just as Coursera does now. To prevent others
from doing the work for them, a camera on the computer could required that
biometrically ensure that the student is the one who he/she says it is. For
those opposed to the use of biometric monitoring, they could simply choose not
to participate in the program.
·
Upon the completion
of 90 credits, the student would receive an Associates Degree, which should be
easily achievable in two years, even if full time employed. There may be a need
for specification of the kind of class mix that would be needed for the degree,
i.e., a curriculum developed with different specializations.
·
The credits earned
would be transferable to public four-year universities.
Now this approach would not be ideal for some subjects,
for which frequent student-teacher interaction is needed. I first thought this
would apply to algebra or calculus, for example, but with the low-cost access
to online tutoring in these subjects, even that does not seem to be an insurmountable
hurdle. But, this is undoubtedly true for some subject matter, such as which
require labs or other hands-on learning.
We can also expect pushback on the basis that the
student-teacher interaction is needed in almost every subject matter to enhance
critical thinking, etc. in addition to rote learning. However, if you have been
in many major universities and witnessed how lower level courses are taught,
you would see huge lecture halls and even televised lectures delivered simultaneously
in multiple location on campus – virtually no different than online courses are
delivered.
There can be expected to be huge pushback from
educational professionals who would be displaced by this initiative. But, that is
the nature of “creative destruction”, similar to the adverse effect the auto
industry had on the buggy whip makers. The drop in demand for teachers of some
subjects would free up money for more of the hands-on technical trades training
that is desperately needed.
If this were done on a national scale, it could be done
very cost-effectively, which once set up, could virtually run with little human
input (other than continuing to approve additional courses as they were
developed, or discontinuing others that don’t prove out) and monitoring the compliance
by the students (which mostly would be done through artificial intelligence).
This could be so inexpensive that it could be offered
free. The cost saved by reducing the
costs of current methods would easily be more than the cost of the American
Virtual University.
For conservatives concerned about the “free” nature, this
could be offset by requiring people getting welfare or Food Stamps (now SNAP)
to be enrolled in the American Virtual University at least at some minimal level.
The worst that would happen is that they would become better informed with
better vocabulary and language skills.
For people, particularly those for whom English is a
second language, there could be course content for them as well.
. . . .
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