Skip to main content

Florida Career College to Close

Florida Career College to Close Doug Lederman Fri, 01/26/2024 - 03:00 AM Byline(s) Doug Lederman from Inside Higher Ed https://ift.tt/avZRfLi
Post a Comment

A Pricing Experiment

Blog: 
Confessions of a Community College Dean

A Pricing Experiment

 

What if vocational programs cost students less than traditional academic programs?

 

For the most part,vocational programs cost institutions much more to run.  They have expensive equipment that needs to be maintained, they usually have smaller classes, and it’s often harder to find adjunct faculty.  Some colleges address those higher costs through internal cross-subsidies, allowing the academic areas to make up some of the financial shortfall of the vocational ones.  Others charge extra fees for vocational programs – whether as course fees or program fees – to help offset the extra cost.  Most split the difference, charging more but still not enough to offset the full cost.

 

Apparently, Western Colorado Community College is flipping the script.  It’s actually charging 40 percent less for vocational programs.  

 

I’m intrigued.  Paul Fain’s article mentions that WCCC is relying on a major donation to make up the financial difference, which answers my first question.  But I’ll be interested in seeing whether the move has an effect on enrollments, and if so, among which groups of students.  

 

Although this presumably isn’t the intention, I could see it playing into the narrative that the liberal arts are “elitist,” as opposed to the more workforce-focused programs.  (If certain students are priced out of the liberal arts and others aren’t, we could expect to see liberal arts enrollments skew affluent.)  There’s a deep historical irony in that: classically, the counterpart of the “liberal arts” was the “servile arts.”  But there’s no denying widespread anxiety among students, parents, and politicians about economic payoff.

 

A few years ago on my own campus, we ran a back-of-the-envelope analysis to see which programs were the most profitable and which the least.  Generally speaking, the traditional academic areas subsidize the more vocational ones.  That came as a shock to some people who had assumed, loudly and publicly, that we were wasting money on ‘frivolous’ classes.  In fact, if we did away with the liberal arts areas, we’d need much more operating funding to survive.  WCCC is using a major donation to fill the gap.  The point is that being aggressively workforce-focused requires a lot more money.  

 

In the broader market, there’s nothing weird about sellers using pricing to incentivize sales.  If “we” want more students to take vocational courses, then there’s a consumer-level argument for offering a discount for those courses.  But the parallel to the usual market breaks down quickly when we look at who the “we” is in that sentence.  A polity may decide that it wants more students to go into welding and fewer into history, but if it fails to provide the funding to allow an institution to meet the costs of offering welding at a discount, it won’t work at scale.  That’s because the college doesn’t capture the benefits of a programmatic shift.  Students who go on to make more money – assuming that they do – aren’t obligated to send more of it back to the college.  If the costs are institutional but the benefits are social, then we can predict consistent underinvestment.  If the “we” is a polity, then it should provide far more public funding to allow for student-level discounting.  If the “we” is the college, its survival has to come first.  The two trends of public disinvestment on the one side, and greater public intervention on the other, are increasingly in tension.  He who increasingly cheaps out on the piper still wants to call the tune. Absent a third-party payer, that’s hard to sustain.

 

Still, I have to commend WCCC for having the guts to try something unusual.  If it works, I foresee colleges making some pretty pointed arguments to legislators.

--

Program Note: Due to the holiday and some travel, the blog will be off next week, returning on Monday, June 6.


 

Show on Jobs site: 
Disable left side advertisement?: 
Is this diversity newsletter?: 
Is this Career Advice newsletter?: 
Advice Newsletter publication dates: 
Thursday, May 26, 2022
Diversity Newsletter publication date: 
Thursday, May 26, 2022
Trending: 


from Inside Higher Ed https://ift.tt/mHvf4Tj
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Is Middle School So Hard for So Many People?

Middle school. The very memory of it prompts disgust. Here’s a thing no one’s thinking: Geez, I wish I still looked the way I did when I was 12. Middle school is the worst. Tweenhood, which starts around age 9 , is horrifying for a few reasons. For one, the body morphs in weird and scary ways. Certain parts expand faster than others, sometimes so fast that they cause literal growing pains; hair grows in awkward locations, often accompanied by awkward smells. And many kids face new schools and a new set of rules for how to act, both socially and academically. But middle school doesn’t have to be like this. It could be okay. It could be good , even. After all, middle schoolers are “kind of the best people on Earth,” says Mayra Cruz, the principal of Oyster-Adams Bilingual School, a public middle school in Washington, D.C. The notion that middle school deserves its own educational ecosystem at all dates back to the 1960s , with a campaign to better accommodate the specific learning ne...
20 comments
Read more

Debacle over review reveals racism in academy (opinion)

When medievalist Mary Rambaran-Olm wrote about having her book review “torpedoed” for not being “more generous” to the book’s authors, no one could have expected that this would send shock waves across the academic community in what became an online maelstrom revealing the extent of white academic gatekeeping, ally performativity and blatant racism. For those of us who work on decentering whiteness in premodern fields such as classics, medieval/early modern studies, archaeology and in or on the Global South, this latest attack targeting a scholar of color exposed what many of us have been trying to draw attention to for years—that racism is deep and pernicious in the so-called liberal and woke academy. Rambaran-Olm was commissioned to review The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe ( HarperCollins ) for the Los Angeles Review of Books because of her expertise in early English medieval literature and history, and because she is one of the leading scholars challenging the...
Post a Comment
Read more