Category: higher education

Publics in distress redux…

I’ve written about the difficult challenges that America’s public research universities are facing before, here and here. Tyler Cowen and I began a conversation over lunch last week that extended to email about what’s really going on with this phenomenon. His viewpoint (and Tyler jump in if I’ve got you wrong on this) is that the growth of income inequality combined with the hollowing out of the middle class has seriously eroded the potential tuition base for these institutions. I agreed, noting that the explosive growth in these flagship publics coincided with the GI Bill and the growth of the middle class following  the Second World War.

What’s odd is that the conventional wisdom on this matter is quite different: that the enormous growth in federal R&D (Vannevar Bush’s legacy) fueled the golden age following the War. This viewpoint holds that the economic engine for the public research institutions was embodied in the growth of the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation as they created first “Individual-PI science” and second big program science (like the polar programs and the big telescopes).

What is certainly true for the flagships is they are being squeezed from both ends–their tuition base is eroding while the Federal R&D bonanza has gone into a slow macro-decline. Add to that, the race to the bottom in state support and the student debt crisis and you have a recipe for bad times ahead.

So what to do?

I think many research publics are looking for their IP portfolios to save them (as in the Wisconsin WARF model), but the recent revisions to US patent law are creating challenges for patent defensive maneuvers. In any case, such strategies present real public relations difficulties for universities.

Others that are land-rich (as UC Irvine was in the 1960’s) may rightly attempt to generate long term new revenue streams from real estate. Stanford’s famous shopping center was an early successful example of this strategy.

Or…the public flagships may simply slowly decline, ceding the cutting-edge research space to the privates like Harvard, Stanford and Caltech, while they lower tuition to $10K/year and use MOOCS to reach out ever more to new pools of students. This may indeed happen (first in Texas). I hope it doesn’t. To me the integral linkage between research and teaching is absolutely central to national competitiveness.

So let’s find some creative ways to save the public research universities and implement them quickly.

Future of Higher Education Conference

I’ve been attending the past few days….it’s here at George Mason. Of course the theme has been systemic change in the way we deliver content to undergraduate learners. In spite of all the talk of MOOCs and learning management systems, I’m struck by two things that aren’t changing: first that in science, the theoretical framework (Professor Jim Trefil mentioned this yesterday) stands apart from the mass of regular course content, waiting to be “discovered” by students enabling them to make sense of so much that must otherwise be memorized (think finally understanding enough quantum mechanics to make sense of organic chemistry). Second, that also in science, today’s factual content is tomorrow’s unreplicated result, religated to the wastebin of history–experiments and the scientific method go on 24/7 and theories (and even the framework!) are on a constantly evolving trajectory.

Technology can help teach science–I use it a lot in my own hybrid cellular neuroscience course for undergraduate majors here at Mason–but it doesn’t solve the problem of getting to the aha! moment when the learner sees a glimpse of the underlying framework that makes sense of all that, otherwise, scattered content.

Not coming back: state support for higher ed

An excellent piece in the Chronicle about a recent NSF report, here. Most interesting to me what not the overall finding, but what the new President at CU Boulder has done in response:

He cited $8-million in savings by opting out of state procurement systems, $4-million in savings by adopting self-insurance, and $2.3-million from an insurance audit. The system also winnowed 209 procedural policies down to 89, making changes such as raising to $500 from $100 the threshold at which an event on a campus requires authorization paperwork.
“I just told everybody when I got here, All right, let’s get through this place, and let’s clean it out, and let’s get rid of the stuff that doesn’t make sense, let’s get lean and mean,” Mr. Benson said.

This is an approach which might usefully be employed elsewhere. Note that, in contrast to the usual austerity imposed on the academic units, at CU administrative processes were systematically streamlined.

UVA’s Teresa Sullivan on Higher Ed…

From today’s Richmond Times Dispatch, here. Money quote:

“It’s fair to say that higher education is under attack nationally, and the attack is not purely financial,” Sullivan said Wednesday in the first lecture of the season for the U.Va. Miller Center.
“Many of the fundamental values of higher learning are being questioned,” she said, including “the essential value of a college education … and even the notion of public education as an instrument of the public good.”
Sounds to me like the Summer Crisis at UVA hasn’t completely subsided….

Summer in the City–time to think about IP

Summer Sunset, Key Bridge

I took the photo on the Virginia side of the Key Bridge after dinner at the Cosmos Club. The principle discussion topic was whether the economy is an unmitigated disaster or just bad. The consensus was that might be the former.

Which brings me to the topic of intellectual property in the context of academic research…

A few institutions account for the vast majority of the patent licensing revenue brought into universities here in the United States. But for those institutions, that revenue can represent a terrific supplementary stream acting as a buffer against the vagaries of the economic climate. Ideally, revenue from patent licenses can fund scholarships, research and other central missions of the university.

The University of Wisconsin at Madison’s alumni research foundation (WARF) is an excellent example of this. WARF has, over its history, returned some $1.25B to the Madison Campus while, at the same time building up an endowment of about $2B. That’s serious money.

The problem is that WARF is an outlier. For most institutions, the pursuit and licensing of intellectual property is a loss-leader. Theoretically, it should make money, but in practice, it seems not to work very well. So at one level, the question then is to learn from what WARF did right at Madison. But at another level, we want to understand what factors are driving growth globally in the IP arena and then position ourselves to optimally advantage our institution with respect to those factors.

One thing that’s certainly true. Without strong laws protecting intellectual property, even WARF would not be successful. Institutions of higher education can only create real licensing revenue streams if they can stop infringement. Strong IP laws protect faculty inventors, but they also protect the robustness of an institution as it navigates the choppy waters of today’s economic news.

I’ll continue thinking about university IP in future posts.

Response to Tyler’s "Sobering Thought" Blogpost

Tyler’s quite interesting short post on American Higher education is here. The money quote:

In other words, I work in what is perhaps the most competitive and successful sector in the most competitive and successful economy of all time.
And yet what I see around me is a total, total mess.  And I believe my school to be considerably above average in terms of how well it is run.

My sense is that he’s on to something here in that higher education is a mirror to the larger society in which it is embedded. Cowen had just blogged previously about David Brooks Two Economies (perhaps the 21st century’s version of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures). Central to Brook’s thesis is that there are two economies these days in the US and they are growing ever more separate. Here is Brooks riffing on Tyler’s own recent work:

His work leaves the impression that there are two interrelated American economies. On the one hand, there is the globalized tradable sector — companies that have to compete with everybody everywhere. These companies, with the sword of foreign competition hanging over them, have become relentlessly dynamic and very (sometimes brutally) efficient.
On the other hand, there is a large sector of the economy that does not face this global competition — health care, education and government. Leaders in this economy try to improve productivity and use new technologies, but they are not compelled by do-or-die pressure, and their pace of change is slower.

One gets the impression that Brooks sees American Higher Ed as being firmly ensconced in Economy 2, while Tyler in his blog post sees it as being in Economy 1.

I think American Higher Education is mirroring the larger American Economy and that there are elements of both Economy 1 and 2 in the Academy. Further, the “mess” that Tyler sees around him is simply an accurate reflection of the tensions that Brook refers to in his column:

A rift is opening up. The first, globalized sector is producing a lot of the productivity gains, but it is not producing a lot of the jobs. The second more protected sector is producing more jobs, but not as many productivity gains. The hypercompetitive globalized economy generates enormous profits, while the second, less tradable economy is where more Americans actually live.
In politics, we are beginning to see conflicts between those who live in Economy I and those who live in Economy II. Republicans often live in and love the efficient globalized sector and believe it should be a model for the entire society. They want to use private health care markets and choice-oriented education reforms to make society as dynamic, creative and efficient as Economy I.

As long as we have STEM fields viewed from an Economy 1 prism and Humanities viewed from Economy 2….well, that’s pretty much a recipe for the perception of a mess, even at a well run place like George Mason. Oops, we’re back to C.P. Snow and Two Cultures….

Giving exams to large numbers of students…

Giving a midterm later today has me thinking about the future of higher education. On the one hand, when remembering my very best classes at Amherst College, I recall a well-delivered lecture as a real gem, to be savored over time, potentially life changing. On the other, the logistics of handling learning assessment metrics (such as exams) for large classes, in the era before the Internet, created very real limitations, even at an elite liberal arts school like Amherst.

My worries about for-profit distance education models principally center around the genericness of the industrial scale lecture. But there may well be new frontiers in learning assessment leveraged by technology that might be usefully appropriated here in the non-profit university world. Ideally (and this is dream-ware I realize), one would want a way to use strong AI (perhaps in the context of natural language processing) to assist human professors in the grading of exams that include essays, equations and other non-multiple-choice instruments–Exams that we might have given comfortably in a seminar class of 15, but that are currently impossible in a class of 100 students.

My favorite examination at Amherst, was in quantum chemistry–it was one week long and open book. All of the questions involved sophisticated mathematics at the very limit of my education. In fact, much of the required mathematics was taught to us by the course professor so that we could understand the chemistry! Our professor was available by phone during that week pretty much 24/7. It was an incredibly exhilarating experience to pass that exam and it was about as far removed from multiple choice as one could possibly get.

My goal would be for technology to drive us towards learning experiences and assessments like the above. If we could do something like that, then we might really revolutionize higher education.