Posts from — July 2010

Our mantra is free education for all.

So we are extremely partial to the resources that readers can access without shelling out their hard-earned cash. For that reason, we have watched closely, and with subsequent disappointment, the folks at the New York Times who appear destined to begin keeping some of their highly-valued content behind a paywall.

It seems that the Times might want to rethink that decision based on the recent data coming out of Europe and a similar step being taken by media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

The publishing titan and mastermind of the immensely popular Fox News recently began placing the London Times behind such a paywall and the results appear to be extremely negative. According to the Times arch-rival, the Guardian, Murdoch’s paper has “lost almost 90% of its online readership” since February. The site made registrations mandatory in June.

The Murdoch process works this way: if you are not a registered user of the Times sites, you are “bounced” to a membership page where the reader must register to be able to view the content. According to published reports, just one in four readers bounced to the membership page proceed to sign up. The remainder take their curiosity and their interests and head for other media sources.

Overall, visits to the Times site have apparently fallen to 4.16% of UK “quality press online traffic.” Prior to the mandatory registration, the site saw a 15% visitation rate but sources indicate a “93% fall” in visits when compared with May.

Perhaps most importantly, 15,000 registrants have agreed to actually pay money. Contrast that number with the published stats of 1.2 million online unique visitors a day.

In simplest terms, experts predicted that readership would fall off by about 90% when the site moved to a paid-access model instead of free access. And the results appear to back that up.

Furthermore, there are approximately 150,000 Times print subscribers who receive an online registration free. That would mean a total subscription level of about 165,000 in total, again a far cry from the 1.2 million claimed.

With advertising sold on the basis of x number of viewers, it will be interesting to see the overall impact of the paywall experiment. Will the new revenues generated offset the loss in potential advertising rates based on only 165,000 potential unique visitors a day?

And what of the future? As some writers immediately postulated, the first wave of registrations “are likely to be the biggest burst that the paper gets.” In other words, it is likely all downhill on those numbers as the days progress.

In addition to the negative impact on ad rates, we have also noted that such firewalls will have a disastrous effect on blogging references. If we bloggers are unable to cite an article that our readers can further access, then we will simply will not be linking to it. And given that links represent the fuel that feeds any internet site, the paywall experiment could prove to be a dismal failure.

Yes we are biased – but it is with a sense of satisfaction that we note that charging for online news appears to be a thing of the past.

For a number of years there has been a growing consensus that we need to find ways to assess educational progress. That demand for accountability began initially in American public schools, but in recent years, there has been a much-needed push to shine a lens on higher education.

Unfortunately, whereas we once viewed American colleges and universities as exemplars for the entire world, in recent years the sheen has begun to erode. First came those reports of a system that was accepting only the best and brightest students yet was only graduating those students at rates that we will not accept from our high schools.

In recent times, there has been a shift towards an examination of the extraordinary costs associated with earning a degree and the mountains of debt students have taken on in their effort to earn that coveted diploma.

New Online Tool

In regards to the latter issue, those interested in examining the cost-effectiveness of higher education now have access to a new cost-comparison tool. Thanks to the Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs, Productivity, and Accountability, it is possible for analysts to examine how thousands of the nation’s colleges and universities are spending their resources.

The Delta report – Trends in College Spending 1998-2008: Where Does the Money Come From? Where Does It Go? What Does It Buy? – focuses on the period from 1998 to 2008. Using that accumulated data, the folks at Delta have created TCS Online, a web-based application, that allows individuals easy access to individual institution details.

As for the soaring rates in tuition over the past decade, the Delta Project reveals some very important insights. Sadly, the results reflect poorly on our priorities as a nation and the priorities in place at our colleges and universities.

Those Ever-Rising Costs

One significant factor in the overall increase in costs centers upon the chase for students. According to the report, “sharp increases in spending between 1998 and 2003 by a handful of colleges and universities” created “competitive pressures on spending everywhere.”

But in most cases, college tuition is “not increasing because spending is going up. They are going up because of cost-shifting—meaning that instead of cutting spending in the face of revenue declines, institutions consistently shift to higher tuitions.”

To get at some hard numbers, “at public research universities, nearly all of the revenues from student tuition increases from 2002 to 2006 (92 percent) were used to offset revenue losses from other sources, primarily state appropriations.” Over that same period “the share of educational costs represented by student tuition rose from just over one-third to nearly one-half at public four-year institutions.”

It is important to realize that while our politicians, from President Obama on down the line to our local state representatives, pronounce their support for higher education, their actions speak differently. The findings of the Delta Project reveal a “shift away from public funding of institutions” meaning that new money to pay for increased costs must come from “tuition and fees, private gifts, and grants and contracts.”

Private universities are said to be doing better because they have actually decreased the percentage outlay for students. While still a positive step, students are paying between 75 and 85 percent of the full cost of their education at these more expensive institutions.

Wrong Priorities?

Sadly, while costs to students continue to escalate, “the share of educational spending dedicated to classroom instruction declined at all types of institutions from 2002 to 2006. The share of spending going to pay for instruction has consistently declined when revenues decline, relative to growth in spending in academic and student support and administration.”

Even more disappointingly, “this erosion persists even when revenues rebound, meaning that over time there has been a gradual shift of resources away from instruction and towards general administrative and academic infrastructure” including general academic support, student services, and maintenance.

As for those extra dollars helping more students, there seems to be one positive. Over the past ten years “spending per completion (certificates or degrees) has remained fairly steady at public colleges.”

Still, it is alarming to note that the student services category includes such items as intramural athletics and student centers. Here again, the dollars are instead chasing the students in the hopes of increased enrollments.

“This is the country-clubization of the American university,” Richard K. Vedder, a professor at Ohio University who studies the economics of higher education, told the New York Times. “A lot of it is for great athletic centers and spectacular student union buildings. In the zeal to get students, they are going after them on the basis of recreational amenities.”

Better Education?

There is little doubt that the United States has the world’s wealthiest postsecondary education system. According to the research of Delta, American institutions spend on average about $19,000 per student. That is more than double the $8,400 average cost of other developed countries.

Furthermore, community college costs average about $10,000 per student while private institutions average $35,000. Such numbers make it easy to see that our current system of higher ed is also perpetuating the stratification of our society.

The Delta report does not get at the heart of the quality of the educational product. But it does clarify that we have real problems embedded within our current system, especially if our goal is to help provide students from all walks of life a chance at a college degree.

Our politicians need to match their actions with their rhetoric and ensure adequate funding for our public colleges. But at the same time, those institutions of higher education need to find ways to cut costs that ultimately do not directly affect classroom academics.