The Cost of Higher Eduction (Part 1)

TW: This article is interesting on several levels, so much so it requires a couple of posts. The article addresses several issues:
1) how universities are evolving to reduce their costs to deliver their product
2) the common question of why university costs are rising inexorably at rates exceeding inflation
3) the never ending struggle to build the university brand- an arms race that is very expensive

We will focus on item #1 in this post. Those of us who attended public universities and many who attended private schools will recall the very unsatisfying and dubious value of the big intro, survey courses presented in auditoriums the size of small concert halls taught by disinterested TAs and profs. That process has apparently not gone away but is evolving perhaps for the better and certainly in a cost effective way for the schools.

From Washington Monthly:
"...The Math Emporium was born out of a financial problem...Virginia Tech has developed a reputation as a first-rate engineering school and has become an increasingly popular destination for students in Virginia and beyond. By the mid-1990s, the growth was causing strain. Engineers need to learn math: more than a thousand students take linear algebra every semester. But even as the number of students wanting to take such courses was going up, internal budget cuts to the math department were reducing the number of professors available to teach them. This kind of fiscal irrationality is typical in higher education, where departmental budgets often have little relationship with costs, revenues, or demand.

For the math department, all the conventional solutions seemed grim. Adding more course sections wasn’t easy; in addition to the professor shortage, the university was running out of space, and some courses were being taught in a basketball arena and an old movie theater. Capping enrollment in required courses would have forced students to stay in school longer, angering parents and state legislators. Increasing faculty workload would have driven more professors out of a department that was already short-staffed.

In designing the Math Emporium, Williams started by rethinking the issue of space. Campus space is inevitably a scarce resource, subject to bloody administrative battles between professors and departments. But all Williams needed was someplace cheap that students could get to easily, with enough room for hundreds of computers and little else. He also wanted space that other academic departments wouldn’t want to steal. So he leased the vacant former home of Rose’s Department Store, a now-bankrupt regional discount chain, for the bargain price of three dollars per square foot.

Then Williams rethought the student learning experience from the ground up. Undergraduate education, particularly at big state universities, is often passive and regimented. Students sit and receive information in the form of lectures that occur at a time and place of someone else’s choosing. The Math Emporium courses that Williams designed—there are currently nine—work in a very different way. Each course is broken up into a series of "modules," available on Emporium computers or the Internet, that students are required to complete within a certain amount of time. Each module outlines a specific set of mathematic principles and concepts. These are translated into specific examples to review and problems to solve..."
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2008/0811.carey.html