In this blog the focus is on the education, even though the learning is at the heart of education. The question of what is hurting the learning is more at a seeker level and the question of what is hurting the education is more at the provider level. Most often than not, the providers are constrained by not one, but many factors.
Education when viewed from the perspective of constraints limiting its full potential, it more or less draws me to these: LOLs, Policies and Presumptions. LOL in my lingo (not the texting lingo) means Law Of the Land. I never experienced the pain of higher education in the 20th century like the way 21st century is now experiencing. I welcome the pain of changing times, but is this the pain that we can manage or we just simply need to go through? Why is this pain felt by many and why not by few? These are the questions that are at the heart of this blog, and, to find some sensible answers.
Let me give an example of students doing the post-grad. Those students could be studying on a F1 student visa or local. Students who have done the under-grad locally, it is safe to assume that they would have already spent close to $100k to complete a four-year under-grad. They already have a huge financial burden to take care of even before thinking of entering post-grad studies. Is this the same scenario for those who are on F1?
Let us take examine those students who are on F1. They could come from anywhere in the world and most likely could be from those countries where they would have done their under-grad studies at a fraction of the cost compared to those who have done their under-grad locally. Financially, this could lead us to believe that those on F1 do not carry that much of a burden when compared with the local students to enter post-grad studies.
I think this is where it hurts badly. When the country is in a recession and more traditional jobs are going overseas or have already gone, without a plan to replace those jobs locally with a newer ones, number of unemployed will keep growing. Economies of scale does make matter worse, and the driving force for the downturn will be those unregulated private industries whose drive to maximize profit and minimize operating costs causing constant erosion of the job opportunities for the local. However, if you decide not to compete with those jobs, the other jobs that are left behind need education, but education is becoming expensive to keep pursuing those jobs.
If that is so, don’t we need to rework the LOLs to maximize the potential for the local students to get absorbed either by the universities or by the private or public sector in ways better than absorbing students on F1? Don’t we need the private/public sectors and the universities to be cognizant of this fact to make it easier for those who have done their under-grads locally to succeed either in higher education or succeed in securing a job that can help them to pay off their fee burden by creating a conducive environment?
Is it not possible for universities who are offering under-grad programs to have another look at the curriculum and do away with the subjects that act as fillers towards the completion of the credits required? How about replacing these fillers with what COL advocates – subjects that help to discover, connect and benchmark the learning? I could cite plenty more drivers acting towards the spiraling costs of education which are potential candidates for replacement. Why not work towards giving a maximum bang for the buck? When you see this as the motto of employers with a mentality of doing more with less for their customers, then why can’t that be true for students who are the customers of the Universities?
This can happen when some of the presumptions governing these bodies change. As an example, why go for a text-book with a new edition that costs hundreds of dollars while the previous edition costs lot less and the differences are not that many and do not warrant students to buy the new edition? This little common sense approach will work towards driving the costs of education down and within a short time, we can start seeing the results. When the entire industries cry out loud for re-use to maximize the profits, why not students cry for educators to do the same?
Students will not stand a chance, unless the policies and presumptions of this kind change. LOLs must collaborate to help those changes to occur.