"I am the first to agree that students fortunate enough to go to an Ivy League school, Stanford, Duke, Williams, Amherst, Grinnell, or the flagship state universities are part of what any gathering of one or more educational leaders calls “the best higher education system in the world.” I am one of those graduates. What, though, does that greatness do for those the millions shut out or struggling as part-time students? All the undergraduate spots in all those fine institutions amount to a tiny fraction of the 20 million students now in college.
I’m left to wonder what I’m missing. Perhaps the next unasked question is about this product we call college, the four-year bachelor’s degree. In defending the high cost of education, college and university presidents and business officers have taken everything into account except the fundamental cost of delivery. In MBA speak, the central cost driver of a college education is not health insurance, salaries, rising oil costs, or even costly academic journals. It is the four-year, 36-course structure that determines the cost of a college degree. This model, leading to annual tuitions and fees of $25,000 at public colleges and $50,000 at many private ones, crushes families with $100,000 to $200,000 in cost and debt.
Impossible to imagine the end of the bachelor’s degree packaged into four years? Most of us — households or other enterprises — from time to time take a look at the fundamentals of our budgets and ask, “Is there another way?” As an example, consider the bloodless iPod and MP3 revolution. What happened? A demographic cohort, people roughly 16 to 25 years old who wanted access to one song at a time in a form that could easily be shared among friends, revolted and created a new market when the music industry refused any modifications or price breaks.
How can I present this outlandish question, and some solutions, with any hope of a hearing? I put my “greatest education in the world” to use and pulled out Thomas Paine (1737-1809), a man with a mind and a pen who did get we, the people, thinking. Using Paine’s structure to think these issues through, I wrote a pamphlet.