This summer I sat down with Purdue University President Mitch Daniels to talk about his tuition freeze initative there for my City Journal article on the subject. Here’s the podcast of that conversation. If the embed doesn’t display for you, click over to listen on Soundcloud.
Here are some excerpted highlights. Daniels on what’s driving costs up:
Government has imposed a whole lot of this administrative cost on the colleges. Not all of it, but a lot of it. You know, administrative costs have soared in banks, too. And so there’s some validity in the response that many of the tasks being done on campuses now are simply trying to keep up with the avalanche of regulations and compliance that goes with it.
But when you shear all that away, it was just too easy for universities and colleges generally to decide what they wanted to do and what they wanted to spend – all the additional enthusiasms they might have had at a given time – and there was no elasticity in tuition payments, especially not when so much of it was being borrowed from third parties. And so they raised it. Purdue was hardly the worst offender. It’s more or less in the pack of what happened here, in fact, better than most. But when you roll it all together, it finally reached the place where I think the machine is going “Tilt,” and it should.
On whether the tuition freeze will be permanent:
We’re not promising to do it indefinitely, but I have said it wasn’t a one-time or even a three-time gesture. We do want to make a statement that Purdue cares about this subject. We’re a land grant school, remember. We were placed here in large part to open the doors of higher education beyond the elites, who were almost the only ones with access back when. And that’s still important. But this is not just a gesture. This will be a permanent policy, that is to say, affordability will be a permanent policy, and we’ll see how far we can press it.
On the potential impact of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs):
My sense is that there will be some sort of shake-out, you’re already seeing it. I think you’ll see some institutions that just can’t justify what they’re doing and what they’re charging. I think there will be others who adapt to it. And we are certainly using online education blended often with classroom instruction more and more aggressively here. We think we are ahead of every other university in the number of Purdue courses that have already been changed, such that, typically, the lecture is not in a hall with 300 other people. It’s on your handheld or it’s on your laptop. You watch it on your time, in your space. You watch it as many times as you need to to absorb it. When you go to class, you’re going to be either working on a project to see if you did learn it. In the best of cases, there will have been some interactivity, and the professor will know what Aaron got that Mitch didn’t, and vice versa. This is probably the right direction. So long answer, I’m sorry, but it is such a central question. But thank goodness for disruptive technologies. And whether they utterly rewrite the terms of trade in this sector, or simply force big changes, either way is positive. I’m betting it’s the latter.