Last year I wrote a blog post about the
absurd costs of higher education(The Cost of higher Education,
February 3, 2012, to be exact). That blog post was triggered by a
begging letter from my medical school Alma Mater, the University of
Utah. Guess what? That's right. I got another begging letter the end
of May. In this letter they say that resident tuition for the fall of
2013 will be a cool $32, 934, up from the $29, 663 in 2012. That's a
jump of about 11%. Non-resident tuition is going up from $55, 318 to
$61,500; that's about a 10% increase. Oh, by the way, wouldn't I like
to contribute?
Not to be outdone, beginning this fall
undergraduate tuition at the University of Arizona is going up from
about $9200 per year to $10, 905.70. That's only an 18% increase.
Student loan debt is now somewhere
between 900 billion and one(1) trillion dollars, depending on who you
read. That's right—a TRILLION dollars. It seems the universities
will continue to jack up tuition, etc as long as the lending
community, including the feds, is willing to foot the bill. Meanwhile
the student takes it in the shorts. It seems to me that this can't go
on forever.
Universities originally grew up around
libraries because libraries held the accumulated information
necessary for scholarship and learning. Professors gravitated to
those places and voila! Universities were born. Universities have
grown now to where some of them are virtual cities or even
city-states. Witness Arizona State University, with something over
60,000 students, housing, food services, transportation and police
force. Is this really necessary in this day and age?
The advent of the computer, the
internet, Skype and related communications technology brings into
question of the necessity of universities as a geographic location
for learning. The cost of information has dropped drastically, even
as the cost of higher education has escalated. In the mid 80's I
remember the state health department purchased a 400 megabyte disc
pack for a Honeywell minicomputer for about $40,000. Today I have a 2
terabyte hard drive in my personal computer. Might have cost $200, I
don't remember for sure. Google has or has had, I'm not sure where
they are with it, a project to digitize all the world's books. How's
that for information? The ease of acquiring information today is
amazing. The other day I thought a piece of art work resembled the
style of the English painter, Constable. I pulled that out of some
recess in my brain lodged there more years ago than I care to
remember probably in a Humanities course. So, I jumped on the
internet, looked up Constable and looked at virtually everything he
ever painted. Also the why's and wherefores of his style, his
interest in meteorology, etc. All from home. Took me 15 minutes or
less. In the past I would have first looked in whatever art books we
have around the house, then gone to the public library and searched
their card catalog and books. Total time: several hours. I also might
not have found what I was looking for.
Twenty years ago if I wanted to do some
research in the medical literature I had to travel to the County
Medical Society Library, downtown Phoenix, and get them to order on
inter library loan anything they didn't have. Or go to a large
hospital and do the same thing in their med library. Or travel 100+
miles to the U of A med library in Tucson. Many hours of effort not
to mention expense. For the last journal article I wrote I did all
the literature review at home, in my office, on the internet.
It is difficult to see how this will
shake out. What's more important, the acquisition of degrees from a
university by actually being present on campus or the acquisition of
knowledge, no matter it's derivation? I suspect that for the
immediate future the initials after the name will be the most
important. But does it really matter if the initials were acquired by
sitting in some class room for 4 or more years or by doing internet
education? Or is the “college experience” worth the exceeding
great expense?
Like so many things, these are societal
issues and need to be solved by society as a whole.
I strongly recommend an op ed piece
written by Bret Swanson in Forbes. It can be found at
www.forbes.com/sites/bretswanson/2012/01/20/apple-and-the-education-information-chasm/
Thanks, Andrew, for recommending it.
