We have been traveling a fair amount during the past couple of weeks – once to Chicago to visit my son and then to Charlotte and Greensboro, NC where my wife is participating in a conference. I have been meeting up with a good friend in Charlotte and playing golf. I drove two hours each way twice to play. Yup, it is crazy. Yesterday, after getting up at 5 AM and driving down for a 7:30 AM tee time, I almost began doubting weather.com. As you can see in the picture on the left, at 7:30 AM, this is how the golf course looked and we could hear a distant thunder or two and see lightening. However, as predicted, the storm passed quickly and we ended up playing in 50 deg weather on a soggy course.

After my friend introduced me to his other friends and they ask me what I do, the discussion predictably turned to why Higher Ed costs so much. A few of them, like us, have one or more children in College and it is hard on everyone who has to pay what we all have to pay. Since I know a thing or two about the financials of the institutions I have worked in, I tried to explain how, as a non-profit organization, the Higher Ed institutions have worked extremely hard to reduce the budgets and it is very hard to look for where to cut more. Of course, they don’t buy it. I also pointed to the fact that we all have choices when it comes to where we want to send our children to school based on costs, but we all value education so much that this is one area where we are probably not going to make hard choices or take chances.

This topic of increasing cost of higher education is a hot topic and technology is predicted to be a savior! There are all sorts of futuristic arguments on how technology can help reduce the costs and increase productivity, but specifics are lacking. Frankly, if technology could actually help curb the cost of Higher Ed, with the advances we have seen in the recent past, why has this not happened?

Technology in Higher Ed has a long history. Very first computers were installed in large research universities – MARK 1 in 1944 at Harvard and ENIAC in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania – and were used for scientific research. Then in the ’60s the concept of time sharing revolutionized the way computing was done. By the ’70s, many institutions had access to computers for use with their business processing in addition to scientific research. The real explosion took place in the 80s with the arrival of mini and personal computers and the exponential growth since then has radically transformed the technology landscape in Higher Ed. For a good review of the early history of computers in Higher Ed, please read this 1997 article by Andrew Moinar.

While these advances were happening, College administrations realized that the “old” way of dealing with computer software where the programmers on staff wrote critical business and utility applications either by themselves or through collaborations were not reliable enough. They helped support the adoption of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software from industries to Higher Ed. Banner is our ERP software. All of this began happening in the late ’80s. Higher Ed Administrations also realized around this time that taking advantage of emerging technologies was no longer a choice because the students and many faculty were demanding them and that unless they commit to adopting new technologies, they may be left behind. This required enormous financial commitments – both in capital and human resources. Early to mid ’90s saw the creation of larger IT departments with significant budget allocations.

In many institutions, the ’90s and early 2000s were financially favorable times for a variety of reasons – overall financial environment was positive, considerable increase in College bound youngsters resulting in increased demand etc. This resulted in investments in technologies that now we realize may not have been wise. For eg., during those times, individual departments in institutions were empowered to make their own technology decisions without a coherent strategy. This resulted in a mish-mash of products (calendar software for events management, niche financial analysis software, alumni relations system, customer relationship management, one card access, student judicial system, credit card processing etc. etc.) Over a period of time, one realizes that no product can ever satisfy the complete needs of an organization. Changes needed central IT resources which were already spoken for, therefore consultants were hired to do the work, resulting in significant additional cost. Frankly it was and continues to be a huge mess in many institutions.

The most recent financial crisis resulted in trimming of IT resources and budgets and we are trying to sort out how to continue to provide the best possible services with reduced resources. What I have just described point to the fact that all through the greatest ever revolution in technologies, technology has been a contributor to the increase in cost of Higher Education and not help reduce the cost! So, when one proposes that technologies will help reduce the cost of Higher Ed, they are mostly referring to the emergence of online courses and the scale that it offers. They are really not talking about drastically reducing the technology budgets (and somehow that translating to reduced tuition) in the brick and mortar part of the institutions.

There are many ways in which we can think about reducing the technology budgets – going to open source where possible, reducing the number of paid software that are currently in use and using the free software to accomplish tasks in more efficient and better ways, managing the hardware budgets more wisely by moving to the cloud where appropriate, etc. etc. In many cases, the funds that are saved from these steps simply are used to fill other gaps. In our case, we are using the savings to manage several unfunded or underfunded initiatives. One could argue that this results in net savings to the institution because we are not asking for additional funding for certain critical operational tasks, but, you see, we are still unable to return significant money back. Why is that?

In many cases, it requires significant changes and no one likes the C word (Change). Change is precisely what will help us drastically change the way we do business. For eg. we continue to purchase hardware at levels that are higher than needed in this day and age where most of the work happens on the web and the need for the beefed up hardware configuration is not necessary. Trying to affect this change through the selective deployment of thin clients can potentially halve the hardware cost over a period of  time. In a few cases this will be a change that will be highly disruptive and painful. There will be a brief period when the user may experience slow performance (which we will of course address and correct). Similarly, as I wrote before, we can go all wireless and save money in not replacing the switches required for hardwired connections. Even if we could convince the whole community to adopt to these changes, the savings, in comparison to the tuition, will be minuscule! Besides, the future students are going to be arriving expecting whatever the latest and greatest technologies that they are used to.

What has happened over the last several years is that the technologies have helped the administrative departments do their work in much more efficient ways that ever before. They have also helped tremendously with the way we communicate, the faculty teach (with learning management systems, classroom technologies etc.) & student learn. Technology is core to the operation of a higher ed institution and there is an implicit assumption that the central technology organizations will continue to help the institutions adopt new technologies with existing resources.

A polite way to capture the current situation is that we are in an “Expanding Universe”.  We seem to be in a constant state of expanded service delivery with existing resources, which, in the best case, can keep the costs down and in the worst case continue to increase the cost (because new services mean new investments). By the way, this applies not just to technologies, but to many other services we provide as an institution. Reduction in Higher Ed cost can only come from drastic reduction in services to everyone involved and that is a hard thing to do. Note: Expanding Universe analogy is more appropriate for the best case because in an expanding universe, energy is not conserved, instead there is a net loss of energy.

I strongly believe that technology’s role in an academic institution will continue to remain highly relevant and extremely important. Whether it will help reduce the cost depends on a lot of external factors – local culture being the most important one. Where many institutions are shifting their focus is therefore how best to leverage technologies to increase revenues. This is where the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course) and other forms of online education is being looked at seriously by many institutions as a new revenue opportunity.

The institutions that adopt this new form of teaching and learning and do it well will succeed in attracting large number of students. After a few years, these will mature to a point where accreditation agencies are likely to evaluate and put their seal of approval on a subset of them. Students needing official credentials from these classes will be asked to pay a much smaller fee than a residential student who is admitted to an institution through normal admissions process. Hopefully, this will inspire the employers to begin accepting these credentials for the evaluation of  job candidates. Over a period of time, revenues from online registrants will help offset the costs to the institution and may result in reduced tuition to other students. At least, this is the line of thought that has been proposed.

It is obvious that technology is important for all of this to work well and making sure that it works perfectly will require creative thinking on the part of the technologists.

Exciting times ahead for all of us working in higher ed!