William G. Bowen - Higher Education in the Digital Age

Higher Education in the Digital Age

Higher Education in the Digital Age

WILLIAM G. BOWEN

in collaboration with Kelly A. Lack

with a new foreword by Kevin M. Guthrie

ITHAKA

New York, Princeton, Ann Arbor

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright 2013 by Princeton University Press

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

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All Rights Reserved

Third printing and first paperback printing,
with a new foreword by Kevin Guthrie and a new appendix by the author, 2014

Cloth ISBN 978-0-691-15930-0
Paper ISBN 978-0-691-16559-2

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows

Bowen, William G.
Higher eduction in a digital age / William G. Bowen.
p..cm.
Includes index.
1. Education, HigherComputer network resources. 2. Education, HigherEffect of technological innovations on. 3. Internet in higher education. I. Title.
LB2395.7.B67 2013
378.17344678dc23
2013001913

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4

To Ezra,

my learned friend of many days,

and to the Black Horse

WHEN PRESIDENT JOHN HENNESSY invited me to give the 2012 Tanner Lectures at Stanford University, I accepted readily, in part because I had already been thinking for quite some time about the twin subjects I would discuss: the cost disease in higher education and the potential of technology (finally!) to ameliorate the disorder. I spent much of the summer of 2012 pulling my thoughts together and working on drafts of the lectures, which were given in October of that year. Stanford arranged to have the lectures complemented by formal commentaries from President Hennessy himself (who participated actively in both the post-lecture discussions, as well as in the two formal commentary sessions), Howard Gardner of Harvard University, Andrew Delbanco of Columbia University, and Daphne Koller of Coursera.

Peter J. Dougherty, director of Princeton University Press, the long-time publisher of my books, expressed a strong interest in publishing a revised version of the lectures along with the commentaries. We have now, in this book, the results of this expression of interest.

The original lectures have been available on the ITHAKA website since they were delivered, and printed copies have been I regard her as a full partner in this enterprise even though I cannot pass off on her, or on anyone else, my full responsibility for the final content.

In thinking about the revisions that I would like to make, I first decided that I would keep the informal, conversational character of the lectures. Next, I decided against introducing new topics. That would have delayed publication and worked against my desire to maintain a certain tone and tempo. There are, to be sure, important follow-on research projects, which I reference in the text of this book, but they will have to be addressed in due course and stand on their own. I also decided that I would do my best to incorporate new developments that appeared after the lectures and that were related to the existing lecture content. This has been a daunting task for Kelly and for me, but a stimulating one. We have learned new things. We did have to set an end date, however, and we decided that we would try to limit our inclusion of developments that occurred after Thanksgiving 2012. And we recognize that we have, inevitably, missed some materials published before our end date. This is such an incredibly active field that there is no way two mortals could claim to control all of it on a real time basis.

One other stylistic matter. In the main, I have keptand added tothe copious endnotes, now exceeding 150 in total, that were an integral part of the text that appeared on the ITHAKA website right after the lectures. These endnotes report the sources of opinions and other materials cited in the text; they also provide additional commentary that would have overwhelmed the text had I put it there. Some readers may find the endnotes more useful than the text, and in a few cases (but only a very few) I have moved original endnote material to the text.

Readers who either heard the lectures or read online versions of them may want to know the main changes in this revised text. The structure remains the same. The book is in two parts, which track quite closely the objectives of the two lectures. , which contains the revised version of the second Tanner Lecture (henceforth referred to as Tanner II), explores the multiple challenges we confront in trying to use technology, and variants of online learning in particular, to provide at least something of a fix for the cost disease. Below I summarize the revisions I have made to each lecture.

Tanner I. In addition to updating references, I have included:

comments by President Hennessy on recent trends in the published tuition rate and student aid at Stanford, which has had the ability (and will) to increase student aid faster than tuitiona pattern that stands in stark contrast to what has happened at many (less wealthy) institutions, both private and public;

a more nuanced discussion of the components of the productivity ratio that emphasizes the importance of both reducing institutional costs (the denominator of the ratio) and improving student-learning outcomes such as completion rates and time-to-degree (in the numerator); it also recognizes that there is a consumption component on the output side of college education;

a suggestion that publications stop making unsupported blanket condemnations of higher education as inefficient;

a list of additional factors pushing up college costs (such as the increased expenses associated with benefits, including the effects of higher Medicaid charges in some states);

a softening of the assertion in the original version of Tanner I that improving the match between student qualifications and the standards of the institutions they attend would improve overall completion rates;

an even stronger emphasis on the need for new research into the revealed preferences of students as they make enrollment decisions in response to escalating tuition charges in the public sector;

a brief reference to the November 2012 vote in California to permit higher taxes in lieu of further sharp reductions in state support for education; these taxes have been seen by some as resuscitating hopes for more generous state support (though I do not agree with this optimistic assessment); and

an even stronger warning that if colleges and universities themselves do not address the cost and affordability issues that beset public higher education, elected state officials may seek to impose strong incentives for educational institutions to meet what could be overly narrow, short-term state objectives.

Tanner II. The quite extraordinaryand seemingly unremittingsurge in discussions of online learning, and especially of massive open online courses (MOOCs), has encouraged us to make a number of revisions to the discussion of the potential of technology to address the issues highlighted in the first lecture. Here are the additions: