Links for 9/29/10

Martin Hutchinson

the effect of continued ratcheting up of college costs and the modest decline in the college earnings premium has made college dramatically less attractive on a return-on-investment basis. Instead of the healthy 25% and 18% post-tax returns that had been achieved in 1973, and the higher returns in the intervening years, the post-tax return from college investment has fallen to 21% for men and 18% for women…

Dean Dad

Much of the popular discussion of the economics of online education -- both in the press and in the academic blogs -- just gets it wrong. The institutional savings, if any, don’t come from larger class sizes. If you do online education right, it’s labor-intensive. Frankly, if reducing labor costs is your primary motive, you can’t do much better than the traditional overstuffed lecture taught by an adjunct. On a per-student basis, the labor costs of that are miniscule. The institutional savings from online education come mostly from infrastructure. Adding server space is dramatically (and increasingly) cheaper than adding classroom space. You don’t have to add parking, or heating costs, or seats in the library. When your physical campus is running full, this is no small consideration…

Bob Samuels

The University of California is about to decide on a path that will determine its future…

Due to the massive investment losses and the failure to continue contributions, the university now faces the strong possibility of having to contribute over 20% of its budget to the pension for the next twenty years… when the UC lost just 1% of its funding during the last two years, the administration imposed layoffs, furloughs, departmental reductions, and a major reduction of spending on instruction. Imagine what will happen when the UC has to put 20% of its budget into the pension program…

MIKI TANIKAWA

In a country with a shrinking population, the latest trend in Japan’s higher education is something of a mystery: the number of universities and academic programs is rising. The growth is sharpest for professional graduate schools, where the number has soared from practically zero in 2003, when accreditation began, to 130 now, in fields ranging from law and business to clinical counseling and education.

But there is one obvious problem: not enough students are signing up…