So the 2010 Washington State legislative session is a week old and already the writing is on the wall for our state universities.  Governor Gregoire summed it up in her state of the state address:

“Our higher education system is a major economic engine for our recovery.



We need to keep the doors to higher education open to students of all income levels by restoring funding for the State Need Grant Program. 

We owe it to all those, like Janel, who couldn’t attend college without our help.



I’m asking you to provide funding to our community and technical colleges to retrain 2,500 of our workers for the jobs of tomorrow.


And I’m requesting you provide our four-year institutions with competitive tuition flexibility so we can continue to be ranked among the best in the nation in producing the most innovative workers and employers.”


To translate and sum up, the governor wants to restore the cuts to financial aid that she made in her “Book 1” budget, she wants to further shift the balance of higher education funding to the community and technical colleges, and she wants to give tuition setting authority (“flexibility” isn’t fooling anyone) to the universities and call it good.  You’ll notice that there’s money there for everything except the state universities.  

The restoration of the State Need Grant was a no-brainer.  That $146 million gives those below the middle of the middle class some access to higher education and is the foundation of programs like Husky Promise and other university-based financial aid.  There was talk that the governor’s choice to cut the Need Grant in her Book 1 budget was a shock and awe tactic designed to drum up support for new revenues.  That talk was loud enough that Governor Gregoire felt compelled to vigorously refute it in her various public comments this week, saying that she was simply meeting her obligation to present an all-cuts budget and not trying to scare people into new taxes.  

Certainly there is a lot of evidence to suggest that she was absolutely sincere in saying that.  The guv’s Book 2 budget calls for almost $800 million in new revenue, but it’s very coy about where that money will come from.  In her remarks in various legislative hearings, Governor Gregoire spoke confidently about conversations with her new pal Vice President Biden and the promise of up to a billion dollars in new federal stimulus money.  It’s hard to imagine that a careful politician like Governor Gregoire would raise our hopes like that if she wasn’t pretty damn sure she could deliver.   

And that’s good news and bad news.  

These days any money is good money, even the kind with the treasury printing press ink still drying. But, as our Republican friends are fond of pointing out, getting hooked on fed cash in 2010 can make the withdrawal that much harder in 2012.  

So the bad news is that the VP’s stimulus promises have led our Eymann/Rossi haunted governor to back way off from the taxes she was talking about just a few weeks ago.  And in an election year when Democrats are poised to take a backlash beating, no one’s stepping up to take her place.  So right now it looks like the best we’re going to do is a couple of closed loopholes and maybe a bite on gum.

And that’s too bad, because at a time when everyone’s running around talking about the opportunities in this crisis and the need for fundamental reform, it seems like the least we could do is overhaul the most antiquated and regressive tax structure in the country.  Even if it didn’t net the state one more dime of new revenue, it’s way past time for the legislature to change a system that taxes poor people at a rate of about 17% and rich people at a rate of about 3%.

But we digress . . .

Back at the state o’ the state, right after restoring financial aid, the governor called for more money for worker retraining in community and technical colleges.  This is not a change from the Book 1 budget.  On its face, worker retraining is a laudable goal, but let’s be clear—the governor’s proposal does not add money to the community and technical colleges, it just makes the cut to the universities deeper in order to mitigate the cut to the CTCs.  Keep your eye on the shell with the pea under it: Federal rules for the first stimulus check limit the higher education budget cut to $78 million.  But if you “add” $11.5 million to the CTCs, you can then cut higher ed by $89.5 million.  Divide that evenly between the CTCs and the universities and you can give the false impression that the two sectors were cut equally.  If you wanted to avoid all the unnecessary arithmetic, you could get to the same place by simply cutting the universities $46 million and the CTCs $32 million.  Of course, then you wouldn’t be able to claim that the cuts are equal.  

Funding community colleges is, of course not a bad thing.  But here at the blog, we feel compelled to continue to look at higher ed funding decisions and ask whether anyone in this state gives a shit about having a legitimate 4-year university system.  As always, the numbers make it hard to answer that question with anything but a resounding No:

--Washington ranks 5th in Community College participation and 48th in 4-year college participation

--Washington ranks second in the country in percentage of the higher education budget devoted to community colleges

--Washington is in the bottom five in the country in total per student and total per degree funding for 4-year colleges

--In the last 10 years, state funding for higher education overall has grown by 17%, state funding for community and technical colleges has grown by 28%, and state funding for public 4-year colleges has declined by 7.3%.

--Last year, state funding for public four-year universities was cut by 23%, while state funding for community and technical colleges was cut by 5%.

Public four-year higher education has fallen so far down the budget ladder that the governor and legislators can make tuition-setting authority the big prize for universities and act like they’re really doing something.  Tuition authority will give the universities a little bit better ability to plan and manage, but at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter who sets tuition.  The university boards of regents and trustees aren’t going to raise tuition any higher or more rapidly than the legislature has over the last 20 years.  Tuition authority coupled with more cuts to state appropriations will only continue the current downward spiral.  

From the day she released her Book 1 budget, the governor made it clear that she had no intention of using any new revenues to buy back the cuts to university state appropriations.  Politically, she’s on pretty safe ground, as no one other than representatives of the universities has really complained.  A pretty safe bet right now is that at the end of this legislative session, our state universities will be cut another $46 million (on top of the over $400 million we were cut last year) and their boards of regents and trustees will have tuition setting authority.  

This result will only keep Washington’s universities on the road to becoming smaller and more private.

There is good reason to focus money and energy on workforce development and training in Washington’s community colleges. After all, as the recession worsens, many Washingtonians need access to local institutions and the opportunity to retrain themselves. In the short run, this is all good and necessary.

But in the long run, we need to learn from China what China has learned from us. The secret to economic growth lies in the intellectual and creative capacities of a nation’s citizens. The key, they discovered, is to ensure that college education does not just train but that it educates students to think up new ideas. In short, many in China are urging Chinese colleges to follow America’s example of providing a broad, general liberal arts education.          

China has recently opened a new liberal arts institution and its leaders are encouraging a broader, general education than China’s universities have traditionally offered, according to a January 3, 2010 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  To encourage student creativity, China is pushing for smaller student-centered classrooms rather than large, impersonal lectures. To encourage innovation, Chinese leaders are urging students to explore learning in interdisciplinary environments rather than pursue pure vocational training. Increasingly, Chinese are embracing residential colleges that encourage student sociability and intellectual exchange.

What’s going on? What is authoritarian one-party China doing?

The Chinese seem to know that if they want to be on the leading edge of technological innovation they will have to reimagine their education system. They will need to offer students and professors the opportunity to think deeply and freely about complicated ideas. They cannot expect students to be creative if the curriculum is not. Nor can they expect to remain economic leaders if their education is narrowly practical, preparing students for what exists today without thinking about how they might be the ones who lead tomorrow. In short, the Chinese are realizing that they must do what America’s colleges four-year colleges do best: liberal arts education.

It’s ironic that as the Chinese become more American, Washington is becoming more like China. Vocational training is not enough to be a world leader. Our economy, and our society, depends on generating new ideas. This means teaching students to be broad thinkers. Oddly, the practical thing may be to offer less practical education!  

China knows that the creators of tomorrow’s economy will be educated in liberal arts institutions. Educators in other countries are coming to similar conclusions as they seek to move beyond serving Western economies to becoming leaders in their own right. If Washington wants to compete, it needs to invest in four-year liberal arts education so that our graduates are capable of doing more than finding work today. We want them to create jobs for tomorrow.

“It’s easy to wish we had invested that $3 billion more directly into our workforce development, adult basic education, English as a second language, community and technical colleges and our universities.”

- Representative Reuven Carlyle, on the concessions given to Boeing before they split for a low-wage state.

Here at the blog, we often find ourselves keeping company with other people who are concerned about the abysmal funding for our state’s public universities.  When casting about for ideas as to how to better convince legislators that more support for Washington’s universities is crucial for the future of the state, some of these folks inevitably hit on the idea that we need to get business leaders to be advocates for us.  Those people have clout, we say, and surely they understand the value of a college education.  Most of them went to college and they hire lots of people from all over the country with college degrees. 

All we need to do is get the leaders of Boeing (the ones that aren’t packing for Carolina), Microsoft, Intalco, and Nintendo to call up their legislative buddies and explain to them that, if Washington’s residents are going to continue to have any kind of access to a university education, we’re gonna need more money.

Certainly it is not unusual to find individual business leaders who do more than their share to support our universities.  They make individual gifts, they sit on our boards, and they often put the bite on their rich friends to help us raise private money.  The Gates Foundation has lots of dubious ideas, but you can’t say that they haven’t put their money where their mouth is when it comes to education.  

But we should be careful not to confuse the support of individual business people with the support of business.  Those foundations and executives and CEOs write us checks on their own time.  In their day jobs, their primary responsibility is to their shareholders and the bottom line. 

And that’s why business will never be genuine, meaningful advocates for our state universities.  

Washington’s fanciest businesses employ lots of people with fancy degrees.  Our slice of the brain-power economy has helped make us the state with the third highest percentage of people with 4-year college degrees in the country.  With that kind of demand for four year degrees, you would think that business would have a strong interest in a robust system of four-year universities.  But if you thought that you would be wrong.  

Any business executive knows that outsourcing is one of the most important tools for improving the bottom line.  If it’s cheaper to buy widget part A from a subcontractor than it is to make it in-house and the quality of your widgets doesn’t decrease (and sometimes even if it does), you do it in a heartbeat.  If you can fire all your janitors and contract with an exploitative sweatshop for the same service at half the price, you jump on that, and patch up what’s left of your conscience by writing a letter to said sweatshop reminding them of your company’s high standards for employee welfare.

The beautiful things about outsourcing the education for your best jobs are that you don’t even have to pay the subcontractor and the guilt factor is pretty low.  When you go looking for people to fill those jobs that require a four-year degree, there is absolutely no need to get squeamish about crossing the state line (or even mighty oceans).  Those jobs usually come with moving packages and Washington is a beautiful and desirable place to live, so why not let the taxpayers in Michigan, Ohio, and Texas pay to educate the employees who will be more than happy to move here after graduation.

(And while we’ve said this here at the blog before, it bears repeating: this dynamic is surely a lot of the reason for the huge disparity between Washington’s 2-year college participation rate—5th in the nation—and 4-year college participation rate, which vacillates between 48th and 49th.  The labor pool for those jobs that require AA degrees is not nearly as mobile as the bachelor’s pool, so you need a healthier home farm team.) 

So no matter how warm and fuzzy the feelings of individual executives may be toward universities, when they’re talking turkey with legislators and policy-makers, their message will always be clear: Our state universities are great, but don’t even think about raising our B&O taxes or rerouting our tax breaks and subsidies in order to increase state appropriations for universities.  That’s what they say and that’s what we here at the blog would say too if we worked in the executive suite.

It’s just business.

Boeing will bring more jobs and goose the economy in South Carolina, but their arrival will not lead to more South Carolinians having access to better funded state universities.  

So if we’re waiting for business to take the lead in advocating for more state funding for state universities, we’re going to keep getting what we’ve been getting, which is steadily declining state funding which leads to steadily increasing tuition which keeps more and more of the middle class out of college.

If the legislature is going to be convinced to reverse the longstanding trend of declining state funding for state universities, the pressure will have to come from regular people. The children of the people who sit on our boards are all going to college, usually not at our universities.  It’s the children of teachers, firefighters, small business owners, information technology workers, and state employees who are getting less and less access to the education they need to compete for Washington’s best jobs.  If they don’t start letting their representatives know that college education is a voting issue for them, our universities will soon be dramatically smaller and more private.

Let’s start with an observation that should by now be axiomatic: All bosses are overpaid. And most of them are insulated from and clueless about the way their attitude and privilege come off to the rest of the world.  If we could all just agree to this truth that is even older than rapacious capitalism, we could get past the reddest herring in the debate about higher education in Washington State.  

In a recent editorial in the Seattle Times, Nicole Brodeur lent her indignant voice to the chorus of moaning about UW President Mark Emmert’s millions and Provost Phyllis Wise’s new gig moonlighting for Nike.  After President Emmert dropped by the Times to talk about the latest round of cuts to Washington’s universities, Ms. Brodeur was compelled to write:

“I sat there and listened to Emmert lament the cuts that would come, the students who would suffer. The diversity that would die. The futures dashed.

“But all I could think about was Emmert's $905,000 annual compensation; the second highest among public university presidents nationally.” 

That’s a bit like listening to the weatherman tell you about the hurricane that’s coming and refusing to evacuate because he’s wearing a nice suit.  

The message isn’t wrong just because the messenger is arrogant or tone deaf. Whatever else Mark Emmert may or may not be, he’s dead right about the impact of draconian cuts to university budgets on opportunity and economic vitality in this state.  Unless something dramatic happens to turn things around, Washington’s universities will become increasingly smaller and more private and Washington’s citizens will be put at more and more of a disadvantage in the competition for Washington’s best jobs.  

Brodeur and all the others who want to scapegoat the UW president always make the childish connection between Emmert’s swag and the rising costs of going to college, suggesting that if top administrators were just paid less then university budget problems would go away and everyone could afford to go to college.  

Well, do the math:  There are six university presidents in this state.  None of the rest of them make Emmert’s money, but they’re all living very well and they all get houses and country club memberships.  If you sacked all of them tomorrow you would save the state about $3 million dollars.  (You would, of course, be left with a bunch of universities without presidents, but let’s not quibble.)  Throw in the housing allowances and the cars and the golf and maybe you’re up to $4 million.  

Last year the legislature cut state support to Washington’s universities by $400 million. The governor’s recently released budget is proposing to cut them by another $46 million this year.   Presidential salaries are just a drop in an oil drum.  If Emmert had responded to the many calls to give back some of his salary, it would have been a purely symbolic gesture.  (And as long as we’re looking for pointless conversations, we could debate which presidential gesture was more hubristic, Emmert’s coy assertion that “everything” was on the table when he had no intention of cutting his salary, or Washington State University President Elson Floyd’s pious give-back of a hundred grand at the same time that he was making sure that WSU students will no longer be able to study Theatre or German.) 

The cost of public universities has not gone up because of outlandish executive salaries, and it has not gone up because of the salaries of university faculty and staff, which have struggled to keep pace with inflation.  It has gone up almost solely because the state has been relentlessly redefining public university education as a private good.  State support for state universities has been steadily declining over the past 15 years and precipitously declining in the last two years.  

Ironically, it is exactly this declining state support that has led to the need for CEO-type presidents.  In the early to mid-twentieth century, when public universities were still for the public and still about education and research, the college president was still an academic who didn’t get that much more than everyone else on the faculty.  He (and in those days it was always he) had to clean up O.K. and know which fork to use, but mostly the job was running the university.  As universities have become more and more entwined with corporations and less and less supported by the state, the job of president shifted more and more toward the external.  As universities are forced to become more and more like businesses, regents and trustees are forced to go looking for corporate rainmakers to run them.  The best way to keep executive compensation under control would be to restore the public funding that would allow public universities to operate more like universities and less like corporations.  

Public universities in Washington are on the brink of not being public any more.  The universities were cut disproportionately last year and the governor’s proposed higher education cuts for this year again slice deeper into the universities than the community colleges.  The decisions made in this legislative session about taxes, funding, tuition, and financial aid will have a profound impact on students for generations to come.  We have serious problems and we need serious people trying to solve them.  What we don’t need is a lot of distracting bluster about Mark Emmert’s tax bracket.  Let’s hope that our legislative and media friends don’t waste a lot of time grandstanding about the banal fact that all bosses are overpaid. 

In the spirit of moving on, we’ll resist the temptation to point a finger back toward what Representative Brendan Williams calls the “Bill for Political Cowardice” about revenue and the “immoral all-cuts budget last session.”  What’s done is done.

So yesterday Governor Gregoire released her required “Book One” all-cuts supplemental budget and then immediately began denouncing it.  This time, with state services on the verge of completely disappearing, taxes are on the table.   

The governor’s budget proposes using $900 million from the “rainy day” fund (the real rainy day fund this time, not the universities as rainy day fund) and cutting about $1.7 billion from state services to cover the current $2.6 billion deficit.  In the press conference following the budget release, the governor said she would like to buy back some of those cuts with about $700 million in new taxes.  That still leaves about a billion dollars in cuts.  So if you’re a Washington citizen looking for human services or an education, you’re not out of the woods yet. 

The proposed new cuts to higher education come in two forms: a dramatic reduction to the State Need Grant and substantial cuts to university and college operating budgets.  The $146.4 million slice off the Need Grant would kick about 12,300 students out of the program and reduce the payment to those left by about 50%.  In her press conference, the governor specifically mentioned this program as one she wanted to buy back with new revenues. 

She did not, however, say anything about trying to reduce the cuts to the institutions where students might use those need grants.  So we’re looking at $89.5 million in cuts to our universities and community and technical colleges. 

At first glance, the cuts seem to be divided more or less equally between the two sectors: $45.9 million to the universities and $43.6 million to the community and technical colleges.  But it’s important to remember that this split is being imposed on a base that was wildly skewed in last year’s budget (O.K., maybe we’ll take just one quick look back at last year’s legislative session).  The cuts to four-year higher ed state appropriations were as deep as almost any state agency, while the cuts to community and technical colleges were about a quarter of the cuts to the universities:

It is also important to note that the maintenance-of-effort rules required for last year’s stimulus funding would have limited Governor Gregoire’s cut to higher education to $78 million, which, in a 50-50 split, would have been $39 million to the universities.  But adding $11.5 million in new Worker Retraining spending to the CTCs, the Governor’s budget proposal can then make the cut to higher ed that much higher.  So, while the proposal looks like pain shared between the CTCs and the universities, the alchemy of stimulus rules plus “new spending” plus cuts equals a shift of about $7 million in cuts from the CTCs to the universities.  Here’s hoping that there will actually be jobs for all those retrained workers when they leave those programs.

 As always here at the blog, the point of all this is not to disrespect or denigrate our dedicated and hard-working sisters and brothers at the community and technical colleges.  Like every other state worker at every other state agency, they are struggling to keep this recession from destroying the state. 

The point is that Governor Gregoire’s proposed budget, in keeping with a long tradition in Washington State, has once again chosen training over education.  Washington’s six public universities will be made more private and Washington’s citizens will continue to bump up against an even more impenetrable education system and economic ceiling.

On Thursday morning, fifteen legislators and a member of Governor Gregoire’s staff got up early and scraped the ice off their windshields to join us for bagels and coffee.  They were met by an unprecedented coalition.  No fewer than eleven, count ‘em, eleven presidents were part of the welcoming party:

Washington state does not produce enough bachelor degrees to meet its economic—much less its civic and social—needs. For individuals, there is a clear correlation between education and future earnings. For the state, there is a clear correlation between investing in education and future economic growth.

At the moment, much of the state’s focus seems to be on community colleges and on vocational programs that train people for specific economic tasks. To an extent, this makes sense, especially as hard times force many experienced workers to return to school, retool, and find new opportunities. Yet, as earlier posts have suggested, there is a fundamental difference between training and educating. This difference is not only philosophical and ethical, but also economic.
 
Four-year degrees carry more market value than two-year degrees. The most valued degrees come from schools that emphasize the liberal arts and sciences. This may be surprising. We often think that vocational degrees—“practical” degrees that prepare people for a job—make economic sense. And, for many, it does. But one need only look around at the most prestigious universities and colleges to realize that the most highly-prized degrees in the market are not vocational. In short, supporting four-year colleges’ liberal arts and sciences programs makes good economic sense.
 
Why is this? It appears paradoxical. We all hear stories of the liberal arts major who now serves coffee. But in reality, the liberal arts and sciences majors offer exactly what Washington’s economy needs: highly capable creative thinkers with portable skills for an ever-changing market. The more narrow, the more useful, a major sounds, the less it prepares students for long-term success, and Washington’s economy for long-term growth. The bachelor degree’s market value stems from the simple fact that business leaders know that students educated in the liberal arts and sciences can think, write, and analyze; have had exposure to other cultures; understand how to use data; and have developed creative and imaginative perspectives on the world. All of this has cash value. The liberal arts and sciences are practical; they always have been.
 
Students in baccalaureate institutions are not trained to be specialists but to have depth. To the extent that our economy depends on innovation, training specialists is not enough. We need economic leaders who are imaginative and who can use their knowledge to create new, exciting things. To the extent that our society depends on creative answers to public problems, many unknown today, we do not need specialists but citizens able to think critically about the past, present, and future. Otherwise, we might as well have a planned economy.
 
Ultimately, the value of a liberal arts and sciences education extends beyond the workplace. America’s Founding Fathers supported liberal education because they understood that educated citizens and leaders were vital for a successful democracy. (The word “liberal” in liberal education shares the same root as “liberty.”) Moreover, a liberal arts and sciences education enriches those graduates who gain a vantage point from which to understand the human condition—our relationship to the social and natural worlds.
 
The nice thing, however, is that the civic and personal benefits of liberal education are not in tension with its economic benefits. In business, this is called synergy. By promoting the liberal arts and sciences in baccalaureate institutions, we can improve the health of Washington’s democracy, enrich our citizens’ lives, while also producing the most valued degrees in the market

Poor people have always fought rich people’s wars.  And the rich folks have always said thanks in one way or another.  Yesterday our airwaves were jammed with Veterans Day ceremonies, speeches, and heartfelt thirty-second thank yous to veterans from multimillionaire quarterbacks.  Applebee’s let veterans eat free for a day.

This gratitude used to take a more material form.  Military service bonuses began in 1776, and until about 1860, Continental army veterans received military service bonuses of both land (100 acres for a private, 1100 acres for a Major General) and cash.  As the number of wars increased and available land decreased, these payments were scaled back to the point where veterans of the Spanish-American War did not receive a bonus, and the millions of U.S. soldiers who participated in the carnage of the Great War received only $60 for their efforts.  In 1924, in response to political pressure led by the newly created American Legion, congress issued certificates of service to veterans that would mature in 20 years.

In 1932, at the crest of the Great Depression and finding themselves unable to wait to until 1945 to collect their benefits, 43,000 veterans and families of veterans, led by former army sergeant Walter W. Waters and calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, marched on Washington.  For about a month they camped on the Anacostia Flats, until President Hoover, utilizing a loophole in the Posse Comitatus Act, ordered the U.S. military to remove them.

On July 28, 1932 the United States Army, with fixed bayonets and Adamsite gas, and led by General Douglas MacArthur and Major George S. Patton, attacked its own veterans.  After the initial thrust drove the Bonus Army across the Anacostia River, President Hoover ordered the attack to halt.  But General MacArthur, beginning to hone his disdain for presidential authority, continued the assault and hundreds of veterans were injured and several were killed.

As is the case with most revolutionaries, the Bonus Army’s defeat turned into a victory for those who came after them.  In 1944, at the end of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt, fearful of another Bonus Army march on Washington, signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, more commonly known as the GI Bill.  This act provided veterans with unemployment relief and low-interest home loans, but its most important and far-reaching impact was on education.  Millions of veterans got a college education on the GI Bill. 

The GI Bill, along with the Women’s movement and the Civil Rights Movement, transformed public higher education.  But the GI Bill was only half the story.  State funding for flagship, land grant, and comprehensive universities grew dramatically after World War II.  At the same time that the federal government was investing in veterans, state governments were investing in public universities.  In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, public universities became the drivers of state economies and social mobility that they were created to be in the early part of the twentieth century.

But as genuine public responsibility for America’s wars declined, so did state support for public universities.  With the end of the draft in 1973, large portions of the U.S. middle and upper classes no longer have had to put their own blood on the line when our leaders take us to war.  Now more than ever, poor people fight rich people’s wars.    And since the 1980s, states have been steadily disinvesting in public universities and replacing state appropriations with increased tuition.  So as the military has become more and more the place where the dispossessed go for some economic stability, state universities have become more and more the playgrounds of the privileged. 

Recently, the education portion of GI benefits made a comeback. The Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2008, originally introduced by veteran and Virginia senator Jim Webb, provides 4 years of state college tuition to veterans who served after September 11, 2001.  But, as with the original GI Bill, that can only be half the story.  Right now, veterans trying to take advantage of the 9/11 GI Bill are waiting by their mailboxes for checks that have been delayed due to cuts to institutional financial aid offices, and looking for classes that aren’t there any more due to budget cuts.

If Washington continues to cut funding to our state universities, our veterans won’t have access to the institutions where they can spend the tuition money they earned on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Times are tough everywhere. 

People are losing their jobs and losing their homes.  And now comes the news that Disney will be refunding millions of dollars to everyone who bought all those educational Baby Einstein videos because it turns out they weren’t, well, educational.

And Disney is not the only mega-corporation that has fallen on hard times.  The advertising budget at Hewlett Packard seems to have been especially hard hit.  So it was good to see government doing its part to help out last Thursday as representatives of HP were given time to peddle their wares in a hearing of the Washington House of Representatives Higher Education Committee and on TVW.  For a good half hour committee members and audience were treated to a demonstration of the ways in which HP can make the world your classroom for the low, low price of $146 per license.

Leaving aside for a moment all the advertising on the public dime questions, the HP presentation gives us the opportunity to reflect on all the technology-and-education hubbub that’s in the air these days.  Baby Einstein was just the beginning—now our techno-corporate friends, undaunted, want to sit us down in front of a screen to get college degrees on line.

To be sure, the emergence of the virtual world and other technological advances have been as revolutionary for education as they have been for everything else. In fact, universities and their faculty embraced these advances long before they became so popular with various education reform movements.  Technology has greatly enhanced the classroom experience and it holds tremendous possibilities for bringing opportunities to places and populations that have often been excluded from higher education. 

But in these days of shrinking education budgets, many people have been tempted to see technology as a fiscal wonder drug that will allow us to produce degrees more cheaply, just as we might use technology to produce automobiles or fireplace implements more cheaply.  This fantasy depends on some dubious historical arguments and a very dim view of teachers.

Consider, for example, this slide from a recent report from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation called “Disruptive Technology and Delivery Models in Higher Ed”...    

Were I a more technologically sophisticated blogger, you would see this slide in the suspense-building way that the Gates Foundation folks prepared it, with the telegraph-to-iphone strip leading off, followed by the miracle migration from the steam engine to the space station, and then topped off with the punch line of repetitive classroom photographs, where education has only recently managed to emerge from black and white and into a drab, 1960s-era Kodachrome color. 

You don’t have to be a Microsoft billionaire to get the point here: the hip, new techno-twenty-first century has made obsolete the traditional educational model of a bunch of white people sitting around talking.  Power Point doesn't auto-check for historical accuracy or find and replace ideas that are less than an inch deep, but it’s great for simple one-liners and the clear message here is that Professors Are the Problem.

This visual demonization of faculty is built on a widespread and false assumption that has become axiomatic in the techno-zealot education reform community: that professors, despite their constant contact with students, have no idea how those students learn.  This assumption underwrites this next slide from the Gates Foundation presentation...

Listen to any advocate for on-line learning, elearning, ilearning, or hybrid learning and within two minutes you will inevitably hear something about how the world has changed and, no matter how hard it may be for those tweedy professors, we now have to embrace student-centered and “learner-centric” models.  Only now, as Hewlett Packard and Microsoft and Apple have entered the education market, have we discovered that different people learn in different ways, and the days when a professor could just stand up and bray at his or her students are gone.

This crap is not a solution to our education problems, it is in fact a big contributor to the problem.  All of the exciting stuff in those communication and transportation slides would never have been invented if it weren’t for college faculty and their students.  The good people at the Gates foundation wouldn’t even know how to say “learner-centric” if it weren’t for college professors.

At least since Socrates, teachers have understood that you take your students where you find them and that your job is to shape instruction in a way that allows students to best engage and learn the material.  In the second half of the twentieth century, as the GI Bill, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Women’s Movement made college available to people who had traditionally been excluded on the basis of class, race and gender, lots of research began to uncover the different learning patterns and styles of people from different social, economic, and cultural backgrounds.  This genuine inquiry has been co-opted by the elearning crowd and translated into a simple but stupid story that pits an imaginary new generation of students who learn differently because they have iPods against an imaginary professoriate that stubbornly refuses to leave their nineteenth-century classrooms.

This story is wrong, but it is easy to see why it has been pushed so hard. The real reason why the corporate techno-edcuators feel such a need to trash professors is revealed in the payoff slide near the end of the Gates Foundation presentation...

By stacking “pure online” college against real college, this chart insinuates that there is something about the online-ness of online education that makes it cheaper.  A moment or two of actual thinking reveals this as nonsense.  Technology in and of itself doesn’t make anything cheaper, in fact it adds hardware, software, and technical support costs.  What makes Rio Salado and Western Governors University cheaper than Maricopa and Cal State is the fact that the online “universities” have dramatically reduced their faculty labor costs by hiring moonlighting real professors to prepare course materials (syllabi and reading lists that most of us make available on our websites for free) that are then “facilitated” by underqualified, low-wage, no-benefit “instructors” who are available “anytime, anywhere,” kind of like those people at the other end of phone sex lines.  This may very well be stuff that people can learn something from, but it’s not a genuine university education.  And the way that we know that for sure lies in the fact that neither the children of the corporate execs selling this stuff nor the children of the policy makers and legislators buying it will be getting their college degrees from the University of the People or iTunes U. 

All of which brings us back to our favorite topic here at the UFWS blog: the dwindling access to genuinely public, genuinely high-quality university education in the state of Washington.  Technological advances have indeed done a lot to help bring more and better education to more people, but they will not replace real education or make it cheaper.  And if we direct more resources toward the sorts of things being advocated by the Gates Foundation, we will further separate Washington’s citizens from the highest levels of educational attainment.  The promise of genuine world-class education available to anyone who works hard enough for it will continue to disappear.  Real college and all the benefits and economic rewards that come with it will be private and the public will only have access to the online “degrees” that make them narrowly qualified to do low to mid-level jobs. 

The time we spent in the people’s house watching an HP sales pitch might have been better spent trying to find ways to reinvest in Washington’s universities.