Rising Cost of Tuition

The Internet has broken the chains of information, and is redefining what is valuable.  Could this be a cause for the rising cost of tuition, is knowledge no longer the commodity?

Photo courtesy of the University of Cincinnati.

Flipping through the channels to find some sort of white noise to fill in the silence while studying for my PSY320 class, I came across a discussion on CNN about the rising cost of tuition.  It was suggested that there was some direct correlation between the fall of students and the rise of tuition, that the following number of applicants was because of the rising tuition.  My first gut reaction was "duh", but as I got to thinking a little more about it, I found myself feeling that their direct correlation was actually kind of a shortsighted.  As the saying goes, we have a tendency of being unable to see the forest through the trees.  Many times we want to make singular conclusions, and have a hard time believing that multiple external factors can lead to such outcomes.

The Barrier of Knowledge

For many centuries only a lucky few were privileged enough to be given the gift of education and writing, and subsequently were allowed access to the handful of large institutions that not only housed these wonderful writings - like the library of Alexandria - but also the minds of the elite thinkers.  This way of life gave rise to an elitist mindset that only a few were superior enough to handle and had the capacity to achieve a higher level of knowledge.  For example, Plato believed that Socrates in his writing of The Republic felt that women should be educated equally with men but were unable to utilize this knowledge to the extent men could.  We see an attempt in the 15th century to try to break this barrier to knowledge by miniaturizing these large libraries into small transportable books that can be more easily shared.  With more books came more places to find them; public libraries, state colleges, even religious institutions, but no matter how hard even developed societies tried, the "best" and latest continued to be locked away behind the wall of monetary prestige. Social changes towards civil entitlements and the role of education within civil rights and liberties have tried for several decades now to establish some sort of balance within the US, allowing access to knowledge to those less privileged, and hopefully giving us the intellectual "step up" early on in life.

Information is Freed

Then comes this thing called the "Internet" that will set us free from geographical and monetary barriers by granting access to the collective knowledge of the entire world.  While it has been an icon of almost salvific proportions, it has also upset some of the most established markets.  Our question now is how much is the Internet affecting the educational system, as it pertains to the proliferation of information, not only for colleges and universities, but for K-12.

For so long now we have been used to the idea that going to college or university was the way to securing our future or having access to those higher forms of information, by telling us all about those careers we wanted to do since we were children.  Recent economic recessions have not only cut back the government funding towards college and K-12 programs, reducing the number of students able to apply, but also increased the level of unemployment, cutting again the number of students able to go to school.  What's more, schools raise tuition and other fees, again reducing even further position availability.  From here it seems like we're already stuck in an endless loop of rising tides and sinking ships.  Fear of a classist system began permeating once again the thoughts of political arts major's alike.  In hopes to curb this "threat", State universities like Stanford and Harvard (among others) have begun participating in joint ventures to make lectures and curriculum free to the public, known as Open Educational Resources (OER).  However, does this solve the initial problem?  Schools must be more than just places to be fed a bunch of facts, right?

Internet Adding to the Cost?

This question seems to be in the minds of those ages 15 - 29 right now, of those buried under years of debt only to find themselves unemployed, and those youngsters outside looking in observing what is happening to the generation ahead of them.  "Why go to school when all the facts I need to know are freely available online?"  It would seem then that institutions participating in OER are shooting themselves in the foot by making source material and lectures available without the need of even stepping foot in a classroom.

I am all too familiar with a career that does not necessarily require any sort of formal college education to be successful.  There are hundreds of websites that tell you all you need to know about the different languages used to program, how to program with them, ways of being more productive, etc. to the point of becoming overwhelming.  The Internet has become a great place to find what you need to know, but not what to do with it.  It does not put it in order for you, and it does not verify reliability.  Information is no longer the commodity of value, educational institutions are going to need to begin making the expertise and experience of their professors the object worth the cost.  Professors didn't spend 8 to 12 years and rack up $100,000 in debt just to be fed a bunch of facts about a certain field they were interested in, only to regurgitate all the information to the next generation of students, though that is what we are beginning to see quite frequently in the K-12 schools.

Time for Change

The Internet has broken the chains of information, and is redefining what is valuable.  As the playing field begins to change, institutions and teachers are going to need to find what the new market finds as a commodity and what is not,  if they want to be able to continue affecting future generations.