Skip to footer

Making college affordable: five ways that states, schools are trying to help

Student debt and skyrocketing tuition make headlines. But this week, both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have sought to highlight the silver lining – examples of how states and institutions have been trying to reduce the cost of higher education.

Here are some ideas presented in a hearing Wednesday held by the House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training, and another Thursday morning before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

4. Make courses cheaper, and better, with technology

Working with teams of faculty, colleges are starting to change how big-lecture courses are delivered – taking advantage of instructional technology and freeing up educators for more quality interactions with students.

More than 150 large-scale course redesigns have occurred with help from the National Center for Academic Transformation, reducing costs by an average of 37 percent, said the center’s president and CEO, Carol Twigg, on Thursday. At the same time, student and faculty satisfaction has gone up, and student learning outcomes have improved in 72 percent of the courses (while remaining flat in the rest), she said.

In some cases faculty – the biggest expense on campus – can oversee twice as many students without working any harder, because sophisticated software can present much of the basic material and even grade tests when appropriate, Ms. Twigg said.

Such uses of technology aren’t widespread enough yet to transform college pricing, says Terry Hartle, a senior vice president at the American Council on Education. Ideas like free online courses also “have potential, but you can’t place a bet on them yet,” he says.

4 of 5
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.