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?

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