By Ronald L. Trowbridge – Special to the Star-Telegram
It may seem exaggerated to accuse the Texas Legislature of neglecting low-income and minority students, but facts show otherwise. The recent decision by regents at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University at College Station to freeze tuition reveals that tuition is just too high. Read More
WASHINGTON— The U.S. economy has been doing poorly for so long now that it’s easy to get dispirited. But there are several reasons to think 2012 might be a good one for American economic performance. Read More
The orientation brought together nationally-acclaimed experts in numerous policy fields to discuss the future of our state and nation along with Texas lawmakers, staff and other interested parties.
The Orientation included many panel sessions, including “Choice or Regulation? Consumer Protection and Markets” which discussed how over the past ten years, the electricity, insurance, and telecommunications industries have to varying degrees moved in the direction of less government regulation. With the Sunset Review in process, there has been discussion on whether the Texas regulation efforts on these industries have been successful, and whether there is a need for more or less regulation.
“Texas has one of the best deregulation models in the country,” said panelist Joseph Bast, President and CEO of the Heartland Institute. “Texas got it right – with more competition and choice than any other state.”
Bast explained how Texas has proven to be one of the best success stories of electric competition, with the evidence that prices have been kept in check by competition. Read More
By Rick Hess
In the past two decades, the cost of a college education has risen steadily. Tuition and fees have increased at twice the rate of inflation, outstripping growth of family incomes or the rate of increase of just about every other good or service on the market. Policymakers and college leaders looking to rein in costs can be flummoxed by the paucity of promising models. Now, Oklahoma State University business school professor Vance Fried has offered up an intriguing take in his new white paper, “Opportunities for Efficiency and Innovation: A Primer on How to Cut College Costs” (full disclosure, the piece was published by my AEI shop).
Fried starts with a simple but provocative thought-experiment: What would it cost to educate undergraduates at a hypothetical college built from scratch, if the college focused on student learning and nothing else? Fried proceeds to identify opportunities for substantial cost savings. He argues that the real levers for increasing efficiency are not the conspicuous, big-ticket items, like football stadiums and plush dorms, but more mundane expenditures that soak up scarce funds. Fried flags five promising cost-cutting strategies: eliminate or separately fund research and public service, optimize class size, eliminate or consolidate low enrollment programs, eliminate administrator bloat, and downsize student life programs.
Offering up alternative practices on each score, Fried is able to sketch a greenfield, high-quality college with a per pupil annual cost of $6,700–compared to $25,900 for a public research institution or $51,500 for a private research institution. When compared to similarly-sized traditional research institutions, the per pupil cost is one-fifth that of privates and just over one-third that of publics. Fried even takes on community colleges, suggesting that they are still 20 percent more expensive per pupil than Fried’s four-year construct. Fried takes on online learning, too, suggesting that the projected savings only materialize when the alternative is small classes, while larger classes in traditional institutions price out similarly to online alternatives.
Fried suggests ways in which policymakers can encourage colleges to embrace cost-effectiveness. He urges states to take advantage of market mechanisms to drive cost-cutting, by creating autonomous pilot colleges to incubate cost-cutting approaches and leveling the playing field for new providers by reducing subsidies for established institutions. Fried also argues that venture philanthropy can support and invest in low-price, high-quality models. Read More
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View the working paper as an Adobe Acrobat PDF
Over the past two decades, the cost of a college education has risen dramatically. Tuition and fees have increased at twice the rate of inflation, rising more quickly than market goods or services and outstripping the growth in family incomes. In his new study, Opportunities for Efficiency and Innovation: A Primer on How to Cut College Costs (published by AEI’s Future of American Education Project), Oklahoma State University professor Vance Fried finds that this dramatic rise in college tuition costs is due to the ways in which traditional colleges and universities organize and allocate resources, and not due to lavish university facilities and extra student services.
“Higher education insiders sometimes point to the increasing cost of auxiliary services like student housing and big-time athletics as a major cause of large tuition increases. This is a red herring,” notes Fried. “Football, good food, and hot tubs are not the reason for runaway college spending. Rather, the root cause is the high cost of performing the instructional, research, and public-service missions of the undergraduate university.”
To identify areas ripe for cost savings, Fried creates a provocative experiment: what would it cost to educate undergraduates at a hypothetical college built from scratch? Fried concludes that undergraduate colleges should consider five major cost-cutting strategies: Read More
When North Carolina’s Mooresville Graded School District launched a 1-to-1 laptop initiative three years ago, Superintendent Mark Edwards prepared himself for an”innovation dip,” a small drop in student performance as educators and students adjusted to the new approach.
He says he anticipated it would take time for students and teachers to master the use of laptop computers, digital curricula, and more personalized ways of teaching and learning. Though he believed that in the long run the approach would benefit students and be borne out in test scores, Edwards says he and the school board were mentally and philosophically prepared for a drop in scores over the first couple of years as the 5,600-student district worked out the kinks.
But just the opposite happened.
In three years, the district went from ranking 30th in the state in school performance measurements to fourth, and Edwards says he is gunning for first place this year. District officials saw boosts in other areas, too. Suspensions dropped at the high school level by 65 percent and districtwide by 50 percent, Edwards says.
“Students like using relevant tools and materials,” he says. “The kids are more engaged and excited about school. They’re doing things in class and saying, ‘I will do this in my future.’ “
Balancing digital innovation and academic accountability is a tricky task for schools—one that is fraught with worries about what will work and what won’t. Schools want to utilize new tools and embrace different ways of teaching, but not at the expense of their performance on state achievement tests. Experts say finding that balance through trial and error is one of the keys to improving schools. Read More
By Rich Lowry
Amid all the uplifting cliches at their commencement ceremonies, graduating college students won’t hear a line applicable to some of them — you got ripped off.
Student debt just surpassed the country’s credit-card debt for the first time. It is projected to top $1 trillion this year, according to The New York Times, when it was less than $200 billion in 2000. For the class of 2011, the mean student debt burden is nearly $23,000, up 8 percent from a year ago.
There’s no doubt that graduating from college brings a significant economic advantage, but that doesn’t excuse the waste and self-satisfied lassitude of American higher education. Colleges appropriate tuition dollars from America’s students with an ever-accelerating voracity, yet don’t deliver any additional educational benefits — indeed, they do the opposite. Higher education is one of the sectors of American life that most desperately needs a thorough re-conception. Read More
By Tom Pauken
Meanwhile, a story in the May 6 edition of The Wall Street Journal reports that manufacturing businesses across the country are struggling to find employees with the math and science skills and training necessary to “operate and repair sophisticated computer-controlled factory equipment.” These jobs pay well – some as high as $80,000 – yet high school students are consistently pressured not to pursue them by an educational system that believes earning a college degree is the only path to success. Read More
