How Do We Know We’re Doing Great?

Can’t beat Inside Higher Education for reporting on issues on the cusp of things that matter. Yesterday’s article by Jack Stripling describes how Carol Twigg’s work in course redesign and reducing undergraduate costs at the Center for Academic Transformation is playing out some ten years later. I’ve said for a long time that institutions and systems don’t understand their own costs, and this article bears that out and gives some reasons why.  Remember, in higher education there’s great attraction to doing just about what we’ve always done even in the midst of a crippling economic downturn whose impact on institutions will only be felt next year when the federal stimulus money goes away.  With catastrophe looming, I’m always eager to learn how innovation can pay its own way.

I’ve been a student of higher education costs–especially instructional cost–for a number of years and even more so lately as part of a team evaluating how states can increase the number of degrees awarded inside their borders.  So, my while bias is always been:  “what types of students change under what conditions”, the next question is, “by the way, what does that cost?”  Of course, if you don’t know what the old way of doing business costs, you’ll never know the value of the new way.  I’ve shaken my head many a time at the disconnect between being innovative and knowing–with actual cost data–that we’re dong great.

So, when colleges and universities implement Carol’s way of saving costs while increasing student learning outcomes some very interesting things appear to happen. Here’s several quotes from the article:

• “[interviewee] says his college no longer tracks the cost per student when conducting a new redesign, because he’s already demonstrated the model saves money. ‘I’m beyond the point of calculating cost anymore. I just know it works,’ he says. ‘I’m beyond the stage where I have to prove it to somebody, so I haven’t run the numbers on that [in more recent redesigns].’ Takeaway: Getting over the first hump and squelching critics is critical. Thereafter inertia to document cost savings blends into the budget landscape.
• “No department head would ever willingly give resources back to the dean, and no dean would ever willingly give resources back to the provost,” [an Interviewee] says. “That’s a core structural feature of American higher education, it truly is. And what Carol’s program does is expose that.” My takeaway: to be truly transformational, all levels of an institution need to discipline themselves to allow those who make the savings keep the savings. I’ve seen many bandit budget schemes and robbing from the innovative to pay the light bill is simply poor management.
• “[An institution] illustrates that course redesign can lead to unexpected innovation, the campus is yet another example,” [interviewee] says, that higher education won’t get serious about reducing cost without “external pressure.” Takeaway: Innovation trumps bookkeeping at the faculty level. This is as it should be…faculty innovate, administrators administrate. Yet, the imperative to make both happen has never been greater in my four decade experience in higher education.

If you’ve been watching all of this unfold in your institution or your state you might agree that: 1) only pockets within institutions (and public systems) understand their own instructional costs; 2) academics are naturally loathe to say that they’ve saved dollars…it gets sucked up (inappropriately, in my opinion) by other parts of the institution; and 3) the best location for productivity and innovation is academic departments and among individual faculty. However, they don’t confuse improvement in student learning with ongoing calculation of cost savings.

So, what would make innovation and cost come together? Could states help institutions bridge this gap? States certainly could play a huge role in policy and policy development, especially in helping pockets of innovation within institutions grow and thrive. But, they either don’t have or haven’t used instructional data to drive a coherent agenda (it’s actually much more of the former than the latter).  Ironically, the data needed to address this issue from the broad perspective of a state–cost savings at the micro or departmental level–remain just beyond reach. Why? Because it’s not the most important thing that academics do.  But, then, nobody thinks to ask.

(Rick Voorhees enjoying a Saturday evening deep in the Rockies while Denver shovels snow!)