I read an editorial from the Pasadena, California Star News entitled “Higher Ed Needs a Redo.”  The article discusses the premises, philosophy, and outcomes of California’s Master Plan issued in 1960 and states that it’s time for a revision to a document that is approaching 50 years old.  The article mentions the 30+ percent tuition increase at the University of California and the tuition increases at the California State University System (CSU) that have reached the point where students pay more in tuition than the state pays.  The writer notes that this is a long way from the original Master Plan which guaranteed a free education to anyone qualified for admission.   The editorial notes that during the recession of the 1990’s, CSU’s enrollment decreased by 50,000 and it took the state years to recover.  Lastly, the California House and Senate have agreed to meet to discuss a revision of the Master Plan on its 50th anniversary.  The timing is fortuitous given the budget crisis.

As I read this article, seemingly the 500th that I’ve read about California’s crisis in higher education funding, it reminded me of the data available through the annual State Higher Education Finance report issued by the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO).  On August 9, 2009, SHEEO issued their sixth report which is for FY 2008.  I highly recommend this report for anyone interested in understanding the funding of public higher education in America.  What’s important to note about this report is that it shows positive progress in higher education (since it’s for the 2007-2008 funding year) but notes that 2009 and 2010 will probably be different given the impact of the recession.  Supplementary tables are maintained by the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) on their website at www.sheeo.org.

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An article with the above title was recently published in the Daily Egyptian, Southern Illinois University’s student newspaper.  Authored by Madeleine Laroux, the article discusses a report provided to SIU’s Board of Trustees at a September meeting.  According to Laroux, Paul Sarvela, Vice President for Academic Affairs, stated that the for-profits are growing at a substantial rate but don’t offer the level of service that the traditional universities offer.  Instead, they’re enrolling the working adult and focusing on marketplace demands.  Chancellor Sam Goldman added, “We are not appropriately compared to a for-profit.  We provide a value-added education and some people want that, many people don’t.  It depends on where you go.”

I think there are two telling comments in the above narrative.  The first is Vice President Sarvela’s comment about for-profits enrolling working adults and focusing on marketplace demands.  I wonder why SIU isn’t interested in that?  Working adults may understand the value of a college education more so than a student just out of high school.  Focusing on marketplace demands sounds important in most businesses.  Imagine if American automakers had focused on the marketplace demands when the Japanese automakers entered the U.S. market.

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Tralee back nine

When I started this blog, I said I would generally write about issues related to higher education, but once in a while I would write about subjects or hobbies that personally interest me like golf.

I’ve been playing golf for almost 30 years, but haven’t found the time to hit the links for more than a couple of rounds  in the past year or so.  I love the game, though.  Through business and some great friends, I have had the good fortune to be able to play many great courses around the United States and overseas:  Pine Valley, Oakmont, Baltusrol, Merion, Oak Hill, Pinehurst #2, Congressional, Baltimore Country Club, Doral, Pebble Beach, Spyglass, Ballybunion, Lahinch, Doonbeg, Old Head, Tralee, Royal County Down, and Portmarnock to name a few.  I have yet to make a hole-in-one, but have made five eagles on par-4’s which is a supposedly harder feat, but there’s no celebratory tradition similar to a hole-in-one.

My wife and I enjoy watching some of the major tournaments in person.  We have attended the U.S. Open (men and women’s), the PGA, the Masters, and the Ryder Cup.  We had a busy schedule this year and have not been able to make any of the tournaments.  However, this weekend, the Sr. PGA Tour Championship will be played in Baltimore at the Baltimore Country Club.  In recent years, the PGA and PGA Tour have provided free admission for tournament events to active duty and retired soldiers, sailors, and airmen.  The PGA recruits sponsors at each of the tournament locations to subsidize some of their charitable activities.  We were asked if APUS would consider sponsoring the hospitality tent for active duty and retired military personnel and we agreed given Baltimore’s proximity to our locations in Charles Town, West Virginia and Manassas, Virginia as well as many military personnel and many of our students stationed within a 75 mile radius of Baltimore.

We’ll have people in the tent and on the course throughout the weekend.  Our location is near the 17th tee, which is ideal for the closing holes of a close tournament.  If you’re in Baltimore and the weather looks nice, stop by and say hello.  If I happen to be in the tent and not on the course, I’ll  be glad to talk about golf or higher education.

Earlier in the month, one of my colleagues sent me a link to an article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, titled “The Ugly Secret Why Tuition Costs a Fortune.”  The article notes that in today’s somewhat unstable economy, the cost of most consumer goods are falling, yet higher education has somehow managed to insulate itself from this fundamental economic trend.  Examining why this has been the case, the article pulls from evidence found in Mark Bauerlein’s paper published by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, “Professors on the Production Line, Students On Their Own.”

Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, offers an eye-opening explanation of a starting trend in academia: the “publish or perish” dilemma facing young professors hoping to be hired or veteran faculty members on the path to tenure.  According to Bauerlein, between 1980 and 2006, William Faulkner garnered some “3,584 books, chapters, dissertations, articles, notes, reviews, and editions.”  In the same time period, Charles Dickens elicited 3,437 studies.  While there can be little question that scholarly critical works on these authors and others are worthwhile for full understanding of their works, one must begin to question how many works on any one author are required before the topic becomes “overdone.”  Bauerlein cites that the demand for a new book in the English literature area rarely exceeds 300 copies.

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I placed a pre-publication order for Curtis Bonk’s latest book, The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education, and was not disappointed when it arrived.  Bonk, Professor of Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University, identifies ten key trends in technology that are impacting education as we know it.  He has coined an acronym, WE-ALL-LEARN, for those trends that are identified as:

• Web Searching in the World of e-Books
• E-Learning and Blended Learning
• Availability of Open Source and Free Software
• Leveraged Resources and OpenCourseWare
• Learning Object Repositories and Portals
• Learner Participation in Open Information Communities
• Electronic Collaboration
• Alternate Reality Learning
• Real-Time Mobility and Portability
• Networks of Personalized Learning

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In the September 14, 2009 issue of Business Week, Stephen Baker and Arik Hesseldahl pen an interesting article about Lifelogs.  The bulk of the article is about Gordon Bell, a 75-year-old computer science legend who works for Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley, California (yes, the Gordon Bell of Digital Equipment Corp and Carnegie Mellon fame, and who as Chair of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Cross Agency Committee probably had a lot more to do with the creation of the internet than former Senator and Vice President Al Gore).  Gordon Bell is also the creator of Bell’s Law, a much more esoteric computer science law dealing with classes of computers than Moore’s Law, but which uses Moore’s Law relating to computational power of computer chips to explain how classes of computers are formed every ten years and how former classes of computers evolve and/or die.

For the past ten years, Gordon Bell has been creating a Lifelog of, what else, his life.  He wears a camera called a SenseCam which takes photos every few minutes or whenever the light changes indicating that the wearer has moved into a new area.  Bell also takes pictures himself and records his phone conversations.  He maps the area where he walks and scans all papers that he encounters that are worth saving.  He has recently co-authored a book with Jim Gemmell about his experiences entitled Total Recall:  How the e-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything.  Bell argues that with the digitization of phone calls (cell phones), pictures (digital cameras, still and video), the internet, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, that a lot of people are digitizing parts of their life, just not in a collective organized fashion.

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