Antioch University Comments on “The Hidden Cost of Higher Education”

President of Antioch University Midwest, Dr. Michael Fishbein, joined in the public discussion on the cost factor of Higher Education. In a letter to the editor published in the NY Times on August 25, 2011, Dr. Fishbein responded to an Op-Ed entitled “The Hidden Costs of Higher Ed” written by Noah S. Bernstein, an education program associate at the New World Foundation. Dr. Fishbein wrote that, “The main cost drivers in higher education are not the outsourcing of tuition management or the prepayment of tuition by wealthy families but the fact that its business model has been obsolete for decades. Even with transformative technologies, higher education remains a labor-intensive industry.”

He suggested the following steps to redesign the business model and bring costs down while preserving the culture-creating and civilizing good that flows from it.

1. Create a new academic compact that allows full-time faculty members to direct instruction and adjuncts to deliver it.

2. Stop judging professors as individuals and treat faculty members in departments as true teams.

3. Accept that there is nothing immutable about the 120-credit bachelor’s degree, and dispense with elective course requirements that only inflate the cost of some programs.

4. Work with regional accreditors to focus on output quality, not on measures like numbers of full-time faculty members.

Dr. Fishbein concluded by saying that, “all of this will liberate creativity, improve teaching and learning and bring down costs. It will also reshape the culture and style of the best higher-education system on the planet.”

Click here to view Dr. Fishbein’s response on the NY Times website. 

View the original op-ed here.