Government Budget Cuts and Financial Implications on Education
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In the United States, Education K-12 as well as Higher Ed is suffering huge budget cuts from the government. K-12 programs are losing licensed teachers, arts/music/sports programs are being cut, special education for children with additional needs are at risk, teaching assistants are losing positions, administration positions like vice principals are being reduced or eliminated in some schools (one example of many: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-jim-taylor/the-travesty-of-education_b_...).
Higher Ed is having to adjust professor salaries, cut scholarships and grants, implement department and college-level cutbacks. These funding/spending changes will drastically alter the ability of schools to make “bonus” additions of technology implementations on all different levels. "When California college students return to campus this fall, they'll find crowded classrooms, less access to faculty and counselors, fewer campus services and more difficulty getting classes they need to graduate - all while paying higher fees... ...The schools have responded by boosting fees, turning away record numbers of students, expanding class sizes, eliminating programs, laying off staff, and furloughing professors and other employees" (http://www.kpbs.org/news/2009/aug/05/budget-cuts-devastate-california-hi...).
It is likely that we will continue to see the cascading effects from budget cuts across the board.
Original dialog expanded from my comments on Dave's Blog: http://davecormier.com/edblog/2010/04/06/day-2-futures-education-course-...
I am completely astonished to see a large scale education budget cut in the US. I think that this is totally different from what Barack Obama was promising during presidential campaign.
Mark, do you think that this was predictable? and how educators could have better prepare for this situation?
Thank you
Mark, what worries me about these budget cuts is that I have heard a few people up in the hierarchy (administration hierarchy of a university) claim that they "can do it all cheaper if we add more online courses."
While I don't think this can be considered a trend yet (at least I don't have the data to back it up) I worry that online education may be increasingly viewed by governments and administrators as the equivalent to industrialized farms: do it quicker, cheaper, faster.
I wonder if this may become more widespread, and if so, how detrimental it can be to the development of online education.
In my city in AZ we have a public university that is encouraging departments to adopt online education as a way for the department to make money. Enroll over a certain amount and the dept. keeps the money. Since the university will not be renewing many adjunct faculty contracts (budget cuts) they are now asking grad students to teach online, with no training, hence these grad students are posting lectures and quizzes because that's all they know how to do. Many courses do not even have discussion forums. The incentives for quality online education do not exist. It's all about the money.
Excellent example. This is the kind of activity that threatens to destroy everything we've worked to build over the last decade in online education. It doesn't take many courses like this to completely ruin the reputation of online education. What the administrators don't realize is that it could also severely damage the reputation of their institution, which might have taken decades to establish. Look at Toyota. A reputation is something that is built over many years but can be destroyed in a heartbeat.
Najmeh, you said "I wonder if this may become more widespread, and if so, how detrimental it can be to the development of online education."
Could you please elaborate, I am not sure I read your question out of context, but I would need clarification to directly respond.
George Siemens and Peter Tittenberger put out a Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning which I found here. There is a great passage on "Transforming the University" which states:
- Higher education’s response to change pressures must be holistic, attending to the varying needs of stakeholders. E-learning does not function in isolation. Multiple stakeholders are involved in the credibility and success of elearning: learners, employers, instructors, higher education institution, accreditation bodies, and so on ^20. The growth and value of elearning is directly related to the ability of institutions to attend to the needs of each stakeholder member. (pg. 5)
Online education can succeed when the stakeholders are invested in the quality. If budget cuts do indeed lead to more online education, we will have to hope that those burdening the new responsibility will have take both the approach and attitude to deliver positive opportunities.
Cheers,
-Mark
Mark, thanks for the link to the handbook. I hadn't come across it before.
I just meant that if budget cuts at higher ed institutions do become a sort of "excuse" to rely more and more on providing distance education courses to students ... how will this affect the quality of these courses and distance ed in general?
Exactly because "Multiple stakeholders are involved in the credibility and success of elearning:" - it does require investment and infrastructure of varying sorts - financial investment, intellectual, scholarly, institutional, etc. I fear that some administrators look at distance ed as a way "out" of investment, not the other way around.
Najmeh, you have valid concerns about diminished quality. However, Universities do deliver a product. If the product is of poor quality and those paying will voice their concerns. If programs do develop a history of poor quality, they will lose students and consequently more funding. Quality is a bit of a "catch-22" in that it is an investment, monetary/time/otherwise, but with out it, they will also lose money/time/otherwise trying to fix what is lacking.
Thanks for sharing,
-Mark
Hi,
Our university has certainly been experiencing budget woes. We now think its a good year when the budget does not shrink (ignoring the effects of inflation)
As a public institution we've watched the support from our state government dwindle. One can wonder if this is caused by lack of public confidence in our work (broadly speaking). We are watching proposal to adapt No Child Left Behind to universities.
What are the future trends that come from these observations? One that interests me is related to credentialing and assessment.
I've made a post here and invite you to pop over and join our conversation about the wider issue. http://edfutures.com/forumpost/institutions-and-learning-dichotomy#comme...
I teach in British Columbia Canada.
Here we are seeing big cuts happening. The Vancouver Sun - Report Card blog does a good job of covering them.
http://communities.canada.com/vancouversun/blogs/reportcard/default.aspx
It is a trend, but I see it more as a cycle. It has happened before, not quit the same. The farther I look back the more of the cycle can be seen with the future being medium term downward trend in financing for K12 education.
The reduction in budgets forces change. The results seem to be one of loping off rather more than creative restructuring and reduction of service.
I think the figures you shared strongly reiterate the burden and resulting stress that is being put on public institutions in Higher Ed. Even private institutions are raising tuition and losing Financial Aid opportunities in the form of grants and scholarships to both students and faculty.
Do you happen to have a link to that article? I'd like to catalog it.
Thanks Norm,
-Mark
Here's the link to the article I was referencing:
http://www.jg-tc.com/articles/2010/04/19/news/doc4bcd0a5f55c68161377775.txt
Thanks Norm.
-Mark
In our local newspaper yesterday was a fact that illustrates the decreasing support given to public universities in the U.S.. In 1974, my institution, a state university, received 84% of its operating funds from the state. Today, we receive only 45% from the state (and are lucky if they actually forward us the money!). The result is that tuition must rise, as it is one of the few methods of making up for the lost public funding. Our university has always tried to keep tuition low in an effort to make an education here affordable to all state residents. That is no longer possible. It is the marginalized in the society that will suffer as tuition continues to rise well above the rate of inflation at most universities, putting higher education out of reach for many, even at (supposedly) public institutions.
Just sharing a little bit of what I know...
In Belgium most universities have a very good level of education, and most are public. Funding by the state is very high and tuition fees are about one middle-class salary for a whole year of study (and based on parents earnings).
This has the defect of being taken from income taxes, and Belgium has one of the highest income tax rates in the world (I think we're third) with a little bit more than 53% if you're single and employed.
I remember universities in the UK being around 10 middle-class monthly salaries per year of study.
In a kind of huge contrast with Belgium, universities in Peru are mostly private, and it is a *very* good business, when you know that every student pays about one monthly salary of a teacher *per month* (for 30 students-strong classrooms) and when you see the number of new buildings every private university is building every year.
However, the level of education, in my experience, is very low (statistics in a recent report seemed to confirm that, with Peru appearing as number 130 and more in a list of countries ranked by education level) and regulations are not adopted, which means pretty much anyone can get an engineer title, depending on which university he chooses to put his money in. Very few students abandon (about 10% per year), mostly because they choose other activities (not because they fail), and it is not uncommon to see a graduate software engineer not being able to understand 50 lines of code (I'm taking an example I know and have verified myself).
Public universities are most probably funded by taxes on mineral resources (they have a lot of it) and taxes on businesses. Taxes on income are about 20% and I would evaluate only about 25% of the population (higher and middle class) has to pay any.
The way to enter any university is through qualifying exams (quite difficult to pass, I'm told), and then the tuition is based on parents income.
So basically what I want to say here is that financing varies a lot from one country to the other, and I guess universities should always try to balance their income.
Giving education to lower income households always comes with a backside of having to ask more to people who own the money (generally the ones who benefited from education first). The state is generally the entity that regulates the process, avoiding an increased gap. In much the same way, richer countries generally help poorer countries to develop their education (with funding or exchange programs). That's just because it makes sense (morally and economically) to do so, but that's not easy to weight because governments don't generally last much more than one complete university cycle.
If the future education can be, somehow, provided without the enormous costs of running a university, or simply reducing these enormous costs by implementing methods that allow basic knowledge to be more accessible, in a cheaper (not lower quality) way, then we might simply reach a point where government funding will be easily covering all the education sector needs and learning becomes free for all...
Yannick
Hi Yannick,
Great post.
Proposal: the rising costs of higher education creates change pressures that can also result in the devaluation of higher education.
Case in point (from http://opensource.com/education/10/5/defaulting-open-open-access-duke-pa...):
Recently, Duke announced that it would join MIT, Harvard and Stanford in adopting an open access policy, in which the scholarly articles written by faculty members are made freely available to the public for non-commercial use, by default. What was the rationale for Duke's decision?
Duke's strategic plan says that one of our key goals is to apply knowledge in the service of society. Currently, much of the knowledge produced by Duke faculty is published in venues with limited distribution and often very high subscription rates that preclude access by many who would benefit from reading it. Making the research freely available to anyone with Internet access helps to increase the potential number of readers, and opens up possibilities for more people to make use of and build on the research being done here.
Case in point 2: The 'course' we're currently participating in -- which to a large extent removes financial barriers to entry and access to knowledge and expertise.
How does this experience compare to a for-fee university course -- in terms of applicable knowledge and experience gained?
An interesting (to me) connection between these two models is the 'accreditation' thread that opened up here -- which essentially seeks to leverage economic value out of a non-economically-based formation process as a bridge between these two worlds.
Conclusion: Is it possible that hiring in the future working world will be based less on traditional official certification and more on individual professional portfolios of work?
Yannick, thanks for sharing your thoughts. You make some interesting points about the cost of education in relation to "# of middle class monthly salaries." There is quite a bit of variance country-by-country and it helps to hear global perspectives to broaden my view.
I agree with your sentiment that "reducing these enormous costs by implementing methods that allow basic knowledge to be more accessible, in a cheaper (not lower quality) way, then we might simply reach a point where government funding will be easily covering all the education sector needs and learning becomes free for all..."
When I was a kid, Encyclopedias had a cost. The data in them was published, so if you needed current information, you needed the most recent copy. They were cost intensive, and until the advent of the CD-Rom, they were not a common household item, and even CD-Roms had a reoccurring cost. Now, with Wikipedia, anyone can instantly do free laborless keyword searches to information that may have even been revised the same day.
Information distribution has certainly changed and it would stand to reason that similar advancements may be around the corner in other areas of Education. Khan Academy might be one example, and I both expect and hope to see more similar resources become available: http://www.khanacademy.org/
Thanks for sharing,
-Mark
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I thought only we suffered from those sad situations, but I can see it is happening everywhere. Here we have the same problems. Budgets are assigned to specific faculties or universities and it is not applied or used in the proper way, and it disappears...nobody knows where it goes.
On the other hand, there are government organizations who finance research projects and are assigned a certain amount of money to do so. Some projects are actually supported but most of the bugdet is kept by them (and where is it? we don´t know).
Laura Herrera Corona
Educational Technology Department
Christopher Columbus University
Veracruz, Mexico
Tel. +52 22 99 23 29 50 to 54 ext. 1109