Commentary | WJHU FM 88.1
By William R. Brody
President, The Johns Hopkins University Productivity and Tuition As a university president whose son is a college freshman, I've had lots of opportunity lately to think about tuition bills, both from the perspective of the sender and the recipient. Like any parent and every college president I know it concerns me that tuitions everywhere have been rising steadily, year after year. It worries me what this means. It's not as if colleges and universities aren't trying to hold costs down. Every institution I know is looking for ways to better manage its facilities, outsource services and improve administrative efficiency. However, we're going to have to change not just the way we administrate, but also the way we educate. If you walked into a bank, or a steel mill, or a hospital in 1900 and then again today, you wouldn't recognize them as the same institutions. The ways in which we provide services and manufacture goods and care for sick people have been radically transformed by discovery and technology. As a result, in these areas we've made huge productivity gains. But education hasn't recorded comparable productivity gains in the past century. It hasn't become that much more productive in even the past two centuries. It's this failure to increase productivity that has caused our costs and prices inevitably to have risen more quickly than those in other sectors of the economy. So far, the debate on productivity in higher education has centered almost exclusively on whether we should force faculty to teach more courses. That's not what I'm proposing here. My own institution is a research university, where both teaching and research are greatly valued. Every additional hour a faculty member spends in the classroom is an hour taken away from discovery. It would make no sense if, by fiat, we simply ordered our faculty to teach more hours. In effect, we'd be saying, 'do less research.' What I am suggesting is that we make a concerted effort to develop more efficient and more effective ways to educate. Yet, for some reason we are content spending trivial amounts of money on research in education, both in K through 12 schools and at post-secondary institutions. The federal government puts few dollars into research in educational innovation. It is innovation and improvement in quality, not cost-cutting, that lead to the greatest productivity gains. Around the country, faculty are working hard to bring new technology into the college classroom. At Johns Hopkins, an engineer has created a "virtual laboratory," allowing introductory engineering students to do experiments on a computer that would be impossible or prohibitively expensive in a conventional lab. A French professor says her World Wide Web-based course allowed her to get through two semesters' worth of content in a single term. We think such innovations will improve learning and thus, make the teaching more productive. We know we must work much harder to develop these and other technologies in the coming century. That's why well-funded research into more efficient and effective methods of education is essential. If we don't do that research and develop those methods, education costs and tuition will continue to rise faster than inflation. We will be in grave danger of creating a society increasingly segregated by each individual's ability to pay for education, something of which we need to be mindful. Many of us know first hand how expensive a good education can be. Let's not discover the cost of allowing it to become unaffordable.
September 1998 | 
