Road to Ruin

Anya Kamenetz answers question about her new book, which she’ll be discussing at Politics & Prose on April 23rd:

Q. What is the biggest thing that college leaders are doing wrong?

A. The biggest mistake is not linking the use of new technology to saving costs. There’s a huge cultural resistance in higher education to talking about costs and even to counting costs. I spoke to the dean of a teaching program, and she had just instituted this really cutting-edge Facebook-like platform for an online master’s degree in teaching, and I asked her how the cost plays out. And she said, “We haven’t done any cost comparison, and we wouldn’t, and I don’t think I would use the word ‘efficiency,’ because if you want a degree from our university, you have to pay our tuition.”

You can have a short run, or you can have a long run, but eventually things are going to get ugly in a business where not only is there no relationship between what services cost and what customers are charged, and not only are the people providing the service ignorant of the cost, but there are active cultural norms discouraging those people from asking questions about cost or even considering concepts like efficiency in the way they work. Eventually someone will fight their way past whatever regulatory barriers you’ve paid for and pull the rug out from under you. There’s no avoiding it forever. The problem in higher education is that a lot of  the decision-makers can make a plausible bet that they won’t be standing on the rug when it happens. But it’s going to happen.