考研阅读精选：如何让大学学费更公道

『居高不下的大学学费已经成为学生的负担，如何降低大学费用已经成为社会探讨的焦点。』

　　How to make college cheaper

　　如何让大学学费更公道

　　July 7th 2011 | from The Economist

　　DEREK BOK, a former president of Harvard, once observed that “universities share one characteristic with compulsive gamblers: there is never enough money to satisfy their desires.” America’s universities have raised their fees five times as fast as inflation over the past 30 years. Student debt in America exceeds credit-card debt.

　　It is truly irritating now that middle-class incomes are stagnant and students are struggling to find good jobs. Hence a flurry of new thinking about higher education. Are universities inevitably expensive? Vance Fried, of Oklahoma State University, recently conducted a fascinating thought experiment, backed up by detailed calculations. Is it possible to provide a first-class undergraduate education for $6,700 a year rather than the $25,900 charged by public research universities or the $51,500 charged by their private peers? He concluded that it is.

　　Mr Fried shunned easy solutions. He insisted that students should live in residential colleges, just as they do at Harvard and Yale. His cost-cutting strategies were as follows. First, separate the funding of teaching and research. There is no reason why undergraduates should pay for it. Second, increase the student-teacher ratio. Business and law schools achieve good results with big classes. Why not other colleges? Third, eliminate or consolidate programmes that attract few students. Fourth, puncture administrative bloat. The cost of administration per student soared by 61% in real terms between 1993 and 2007. Private research universities spend $7,000 a year per student on “administrative support”. That is more than the entire cost of educating a student under Mr Fried’s scheme.

　　Veteran university-watchers may dismiss Mr Fried’s ideas as pie in the sky. Yet some universities are beginning to squeeze costs. The University of Minnesota’s new campus in Rochester has defined teaching as “job one”. The Harrisburg University of Science and Technology has abolished tenure and merged academic departments.

　　Mr Fried fails to mention an obvious source of savings. Americans could complete their undergraduate degrees in three years, instead of four. In practice, most American students take even longer than four years, not least because so many work to pay their tuition.

　　Shai Reshef, an educational entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist, is pioneering an even more radical idea. His University of the People offers free higher education, pitching itself to poor people in America and the rest of the world. The university does this by exploiting three resources: the goodwill of academic volunteers who want to help the poor, the availability of free “courseware” on the internet and the power of social networking. Some 2,000 academic volunteers have designed the courses and given the university some credibility. Tutors direct the students to the online courses. They also help to organise them into study groups, and then supervise from afar, dropping in on discussions and marking tests.

　　There are plenty of questions about Mr Reshef’s project. Can you really build a university on volunteerism and goodwill? Can students really be relied upon to do most of the teaching themselves?

　　Mr Reshef’s university has yet to win accreditation, which could take years. But he can take comfort from Clayton Christensen’s classic book “The Innovator’s Dilemma”. Mr Christensen points out innovators often start by offering products that are cheaper, but markedly inferior. Quickly, however, they learn how to improve their offerings. Even if Mr Reshef fails, there are plenty of other disruptive innovators around. In America, one tertiary student in ten already studies exclusively online. One in four does so at least some of the time, and a growing number of bodies, including elite universities and international organisations, are putting first-rate material online.（584 words）