The National Review: Federal largesse can’t prop up doomed business model forever
This week The National Review asked me to comment on the educational proposals President Obama is trying to push through. Here’s the gist of the article:
“Race to the Top” federal handouts, increasing Pell Grants, and executive-branch decrees won’t lower college tuition or improve the quality of university degrees … [O]ver the next decade, many universities may bankrupt themselves by clinging to an educational approach that confuses lecturing with learning and protects highly paid, tenured faculties and administrators from a tsunami of technological change that soon will deliver transformational learning at a fraction of today’s costs.
Check out the article, where I go on to elaborate on some of the most fundamental problems in education:
- A public that increasingly questions the value of a college degree.
- High and rising fixed costs from tenured faculty, bloated administrative staffs, and expensive new buildings at a time when tenured-faculty teaching productivity is falling.
- A tsunami of technologically enabled educational change promises to deliver transformational learning at a fraction of today’s costs
