Has Technology Made State Regional Universities Obsolete?
While SRUs do some things well, the current model is not sustainable, with students taking on enormous debt and receiving relatively little income benefit in return. Here's how technology can help change the equation.
America's place as the most successful economy in the world can be traced to our early commitment to universal public education. The engine of that commitment was the Normal School Movement, which trained teachers in the norms of pedagogy and curriculum in those critical decades when our nation was growing up. Normal schools evolved into our state regional universities (SRUs) and we owe them a great deal of thanks for kick-starting our national prosperity.
But many of today's SRUs have fallen dangerously behind the times and do not serve their students well. To see this, one has to push past our national affection for the idea of the local four-year public college, with its pretty, leafy campus and rich history, and fearlessly examine today's SRU degree as a business proposition. I will use my home campus, West Texas A&M University in Amarillo/Canyon, Texas, for my calculations here, because it is a fairly typical SRU.
While a sensible definition of success would be earning a four-year degree in four years, let's allow the more generous six-year time frame, since even our six-year graduation rate is only 42 percent. During that time a student will run up an average bill of $73,500 including in-state tuition and after financial aid, according to the U.S. Department of Education Scorecard website.
How much income benefit do WTAMU graduates get from their degrees? Ten years from original enrollment, or four years into a post-college career, average earnings are only $42,700. By comparison, the government median earnings figure for a full-time employed high school graduate over age 25 is $38,100. So our college grads will earn about $4,600 more per year than high school grads do nationally (though Panhandle high school grads might earn slightly less than the national average). Assuming continuous employment with no layoffs during economic downturns, a WTAMU graduate takes a little more than 16 years to recover their college costs! This does not include interest payments on student loans.
Needless to say, any financial planning firm that offered customers nothing more than a 42 percent chance of recovering their initial investment in 16-plus years would have to shutter its doors in no time. Clearly, seeking an SRU degree is a bad bet for many of our "customers." This is true because, to a large extent, the world around the university has changed a great deal while the university itself has really changed very little in response.
If our SRUs stopped being timid about taking full advantage of technology, they could reconfigure themselves as very different institutions that could offer a great deal more earning potential — and charge a great deal less. To begin to see how this is possible, let's look at the services SRUs perform for their students — and which services would benefit from a more complete reliance on technology.
Course Content
An obvious candidate for technology-based delivery is information distribution. So far, SRUs have mostly taken only the first baby steps in this direction, such as lecture capture. They create video of classroom lectures, perhaps add some crude PowerPoint bullet-point lists and a graphic or two borrowed from Google Images, and then park the product on a campus server for whenever-you-want access by students. It is often done to accommodate students who can't seem to find their way to class at the appointed morning hour.
Since individual professors have neither the skill nor the time to edit the raw footage into a more professional product, the quality of video capture often resembles a poor home movie. Of course, SRUs hire instructional designers who assist with video capture, but they can't help much. Professional-grade course video can easily require 20 or more hours to create one hour of end product, which means a departmental instructional designer could easily be buried in work by a single professor. That does not include updating media-based courses for reuse, which might be needed annually in some fast-moving subjects like technology.