Slightly O/T: Interesting Read on Socioeconomic Inequity in Aussie Higher Ed

Granted, teaching a class by DL may take a lesser time committment on the part of the professor than teaching the same class B&M. But, because the professor will still have a finite amount of time, he/she will still only be able to teach only a certain number of students and thus the number od students who can be accepted will be limited, thus driving up tuition as demand increases. Your next fallacy is that the lower costs involved in DL should translate into lower tuition for DL. Not necessarily so. If the DL degree is perceived in the marketplace as the equal of a B&M degree from the same school, there's no obvious reason why the school should price DL tuition lower than B&M tuition.

 

Ted, you're da legend, I'm really enjoying this discussion.

Ok, B&M degree and DL degree in the very same field and specialization, from the very same university. Are they the same?

How about yes and no?

The degree is not the only thing that is being sold (unless we're talking about degree mills) but the product consists of

- education
- assessment
- exposure to research & technology
- interaction with other people interested in the same field
- establishing contacts
- "experience" of going to university
- final degree awarded

We might benefit from devoting time to a more detailed specification of all the elements a typical degree/university education consists of, but for the sake of what I'll try to suggest, let's say the list above sums it up (you're free to suggest any changes).

While the "core" of the degree, education (acquisition of knowledge, critical thinking, research and analysis skills, methodology etc), could be considered roughly equivalent, other components of the degree need not be (except the final degree awarded).

Let's make a parallel with the car-industry. I have a need for transportation (education), so I want to get myself a car (enroll for a degree). I also live in a city so I'll buy a car that is suited for it (I'll get a degree in a specific field) But I also want quality and am mindful of my status in the society so I would like to get it from a well-regarded place, say from Mercedes (Harvard).

What kind of Mercedes?

Now admittedly I don't know much about cars, even less about a Mercedes, but I have a friend who owns a Škoda (Fabia I think) and he likes discussing why he bought the one he bought. If I remember correctly, even within the very same model (Fabia) there are slightly different engines, and even within that, you get to decide which other goodies that will cost you extra you want your car to have. It's all about finding an optimum solution for your needs and your budget, and in the end it's still a Škoda Fabia, or some other Škoda, Mercedes, whatever.

Isn't it the same, or rather shouldn't it be the same for choosing either B&M or DL mode for a specific degree from a specific university? A company could then expand its market share in a specific segment, in this case DL, by playing on the economies of scale in production and offering prices that are more affordable than the competiton, that still earn it profit. Of course, if the company knew that my employer would give or lend me a certain amount of money, as your government is doing for your university studies in the forms of student loans, aid and subsidies, than it wouldn't have a good reason to lower prices.

If there were no such policies in place, or very limited, shouldn't it be expected that the prices, being formed in the free market, should reflect the production costs specific for the market segment we're looking at, be it B&M or DL?

At the end of this little diatribe of mine , let's look at another example beside DBS where this seems to be the case.

Henley Business School, UK, triple business accreditation (AACSB, AMBA, EQUIS)

Tuition costs?


The price of the Full-Time MBA is £33,000.
The price of the Henley Executive MBA is £39,950.
The Henley MBA and Postgraduate Diploma in Management - by Distance Learning £16,795


So they got their product set up for different market segments and for each version are charging what that market segment is willing to pay. In the case of DL, tuition is about half the tuition of the full-time program.

Now, of course, if they had a guarantee that someone else would cover the costs of the students, say, their governments, or the UN, or the Asgard from Stargate SG-1, I guess they'd also be charging roughly the same for DL as for full-time. It seems they don't have that privilege though, lucky for those of us who like the DL mode.

 

So Monash is in and Macquarie is out. That seems kind of arbitrary. The eight you name might arguably be the strongest Australian research universities (in the sciences at least) judging from the Shanghai list. I'm less sure that they offer the country's best undergraduate education. Research strength doesn't always equate to better bachelors programs. Here in the US, the best undergraduate education is arguably found at the stronger liberal arts colleges. Do the Go8 have significantly higher undergraduate admissions requirements?

There's zero Australian marketing visible here in California, so the phrase is new to us. (Australian marketing seems focused almost exclusively at Asia.)

That sounds like the pre-1990 situation, before a whole collection of colleges of advanced education or whatever you called them were upgraded to new university status.

I think that there may be some faint merit in the suggestion. Many countries, like the UK for instance, probably do have too many doctoral universities. Resources are spread too thin. But restricting Australian research universities to eight would be a tremendous error in the opposite direction.

The non-Go8 universities on the Shanghai list are:

Macquarie 201-300
LaTrobe U. 301-400
U. Newcastle 301-400
Flinders U. 401-500
James Cook U. 401-500
Murdoch U. 401-500
U. New England 401-500
U. Tasmania 401-500

This second eight might not be as research intensive as the first eight, but they're still significant research universities in their own right.

Schools elsewhere in the world with comparable Shanghai rankings include:

Brandeis 201-300
Georgetown 201-300
Notre Dame 201-300
Ecole Polytechnique 201-300
Trinity College Dublin 201-300
Tulane 301-400
Auburn 301-400
U. Oklahoma 301-400
Simon Fraser 301-400
U. Witwatersrand 301-400
C. of William and Mary 401-500
U. Wyoming 401-500
U. Mississippi 401-500
Cairo U. 401-500
U. Chile 401-500
U. Kwazulu-Natal 401-500

Any university in that kind of company is doing something right and needs to be encouraged, not suppressed.

My idea would be for Australia to designate perhaps 20 (not 8) universities as doctoral research universities. They would be the Shanghai 16 plus the best of the rest. Then focus the remaining schools on being something like American "masters universities", offering bachelors and masters degrees, but deemphasizing research and doctoral degrees. Exceptions might be occasional doctoral programs in specialty subjects where schools have unusual strengths.

That's a less draconian adaptation of the California model. We only maintain 10 state-funded research universities. So each one of them has a tremendous amount of money (or did, until the recent economic unpleasantness) and most have risen to the top of the rankings. I'm thinking 20 for Australia, since AU doesn't have a private university sector comparable to California's.

We have lots of government money going to universities. Not only do state universities get funding from state legislatures, there are major federal funding bodies like the National Institutes of Health that spray research money at universities with a fire-hose. Some universities receive hundreds of millions of dollars a year in research grants, from the NIH alone.

According to the 'Economist', US governemnts (state and federal) fund higher education at about the same level that Europe does, as percentage of GDP. The difference is that there's roughly the same amount of money again flowing into higher education from private sources. That's why American universities do so well in the rankings. I counted 152 American universities in the world's top 500 in the Shanghai ranking, more than 30% of the total.

Interestingly, Australia's 16 is actually a better showing on a per-capita basis, adjusted for our countries' different populations. (Australia 20 million, US 300 million.) My instinct is to tell Australia that if it ain't broke, then don't fix it. You aren't doing badly right now, so just do more of it, don't start tearing it all down.

I think that academic selection is an important factor in creating top programs and universities. Stanford, Harvard and their peers admit a small percentage of their applicants. Students are a very smart, very creative bunch.

But I agree with you that selection shouldn't be a matter of ability to pay high tuition. I favor admissions that seek out the most promising candidates (with as little political/celebrity favoritism as possible). Then put in an ability-to-pay sliding scale for undergraduates. Stanford is a very expensive private university, but it's trying to be tuition-free for children from middle-class backgrounds. The better American universities support most of their doctoral students with free tuition, housing allowances and up to $30K/year in expense stipends. (That's for full-time study though, and it rarely extends to DL, which many schools (public and private) treat as a money-maker.) Students are usually expected to work for their departments as research and/or teaching assistants, activities that are considered integral parts of their doctoral training.

 

I am busy at the moment negotiating a research package with a university in my work environment. I had a lengthy conversation with the party from the university about the future of university education in Australia. He was telling me that the "baby boomer" academics were having trouble in creating online lectures due to the so called lack of students present when the video is made. I guess a little like stage actors and television, no feedback. I don't understand why this is an issue as surely you could record a lecture as it is being given to a class, but that was the claim apparently.

They researched the lecture auditorium and found that many classes with 150 registered students only had ten people attending the lecture. Most of the younger generation students were accessing material from online sources and just doing exams/assignments. One would attend the lecture and relay the material to the rest. The students had built their own model of distance and online education.

Ipod lectures seems to be the next generation material coming through and sought by younger students. It would appear that the students have moved to online options here, regardless what the universities think. Mind you Australia has a long history with distance education and there is no stigma. There is no educational cultural barrier here so that may be an important factor.

I suggested that the biggest threat to the universities here was the council libraries which are increasingly into new technologies. My generation (Baby boomer) will demand access to lecture material and libraries will download from the net lecture materials for their auditoriums or computer networks. Simply put, a university in the US can produce material for the local client base, go into profit there, then "dump" the material online for a vastly reduced cost for secondary markets. This is what happens to US television shows now in this country. It is very difficult for locally produced content to get produced because of the cost variance.

Libraries here are likely to pick this up, initially this may be particularized to the humanities and arts area. The question as to the degree may be open, but the lecture material will be able to downloaded from the local library to the ipod or viewed online at the library. Bricks and Mortar universities with difficult parking and high barriers to entry are going to be increasingly difficult to maintain.

Research facilities will remain, but undergraduate degrees in non technical areas will be under threat. Education may be more accessible than ever in this country and elitism under a different threat than the one they perceived. In any case, he agreed that online learning was challenging traditional models of educational practice in the non laboratory setting. It may be that new technologies have already rearranged the educational landscape.

It may be a case that the troops have marched and the generals need to catch up.

 

OK - This whole thing started with an article whose author believes that we have a major social problem if not enough poor people are spending large amounts of money on the priciest and most prestigious universities. I attempted to explain to you how prestige tends to increase demand, therefore increasing price, which maintains the perception of prestige. Next, the discussion turned to a discussion about how distance learning would facilitate professors teaching more students (true to an extent, but even a B&M professor spends far more time preparing lectures and grading papers and exams than he spends playing talking head at the front of the room). Then, there was the further suggestion of limiting prep time by having pre-prepared "canned" lectures and having a large stable of underpaid adjuncts teach the DL classes. I guess it seems to me that there is some "disconnect" in the idea of a prestigious university offering canned courses taught by underpaid adjuncts. But the other point that people seem to be missing is that the very essence of prestige is that something can be prestigious only so long as it is something only a few people can have.

 

Not only to you. There is a whole article on the DL use of adjunct faculty in (a bit dated, though) "Encyclopedia of distributed learning" (By Anna DiStefano, Kjell Erik Rudestam, Robert Jay Silverman) raising that very same concern regarding quality.

You can read it on Google Books, page 11.

However, this Harvard Extension course, while not exactly canned, does seem to feature a lecturer teaching and a TA grading assignments, at least when taken for undergraduate credit (watch the first hour). Note that although in this case there is actual teaching, they are leveraging their in-class lectures to enroll additional DL students.

 

This then takes us right back to the question of whether the DL degree and the B&M degree from the same university are the same degree. We have seen thread after thread where the members of this august board have circle jerked and beaten to death the issue of Harvard Extension not carrying the same prestige as "the real" Harvard.

 

The Harvard Extension model whereby there is a separate extension division offering its own set of degrees and courses which are only a subset of courses offered at "real Harvard" is just one of the models. I wonder if those two business schools mentioned above, Durham and Henley, make this distinction on the degree. I am mentioning them specifically because they could be considered somewhat "elite" with the triple accreditation etc. so would fit a profile of a prestigious place.

One thing that the encyclopedia article mentions is the "unbundling" of the duties of the professor and assigning some of them to TAs. Now, so far we have identified interaction, feedback etc as some possible activities TAs and adjuncts can take over, but I think it would be interesting to read an actual analysis of typical discrete activities a professor performs and the percentage of time commitment they take.

This interview gives us one rough estimate:

And I believe this breaks the teaching further down:

So

Model 1 - teaching Bachelor's
100% teaching
- 30% actual lectures
- 40% preparation
- 30% gradfing

Model 2 - teaching Master's

40% teaching
- 12% actual lectures
- 16% preparation
- 12% grading
40% research
20% service

Model 3 - teaching PhD

20% teaching
- 6% actual lectures
- 8% preparation
- 6% grading
60% reaearch
20% service

 

It seems to me that at a university which is not research-heavy, and at the Bachelor's level at research-heavy universities, the percentage of the professor's time that can be saved by the labor-to-capital and labor-to-labor models suggested by the encyclopedia article on Adjunct faculty (using technology instead of actual lectures and using TAs for grading etc. respectively) is significant.

At research-heavy universities at Master's and PhD level however these two techniques seem to save a much lower percentage of the professor's time.