Here in the deep winter doldrums, I struggle with brain cramps brought on by limited sunshine and cognitive vapour lock. Not a pretty picture on so many fronts...
You may have seen my Twitter plea for a blog topic (http://twitter.com/#!/SunnyatDal). My good colleague Rick Nason responded right away with a provocative question (it's pretty much the only kind of question he asks).
Would education be valued more if it were free but only one tenth of current students could attend?
The first thing that springs to mind is what we might mean by "education" - university, community college, private trade school, for profit university? I have taken the liberty of restricting the question to graduate studies given that this blog belongs to the three Deans in the Faculty of Graduate Studies. Even in that narrower context, this is a complicated and interesting question. It invites a whole lot of clarifying questions.
- Do you mean valued by students who get in? The students who didn't get in? Parents? The community? Employers?
- Does the word "free" include tuition, books, transportation, residence, food? Does "free" mean with no strings attached, or would it require service to the community on graduation?
- What are we going to do with the other 90% of the students who could attend? Create a different form of schooling, such as technical training?
- What would we teach this small elect group, and how would we choose them?
As Rick very well knows, "value" is one of those attributes that depends heavily on perception rather than objective measures. Usually our perception of value is shaped by cost. It's certainly the way most people buy luxury goods such as jewelry and wine . When a man buys an engagement rings, the colour of the box is an important semiotic to "value" (i.e., the blue box from Birks or the light blue box from Tiffany's). The colour, cut, clarity, and carat weight of the stone is something most of us are unable to judge. When it comes to wine, the empirical evidence is that it is easy to change perceptions (cf. http://tinyurl.com/48bpwua), and in my experience the simplest way is through the price signal. We know this wine is good, because it is expensive.
On the other hand, restricting access to graduate education to a small elite (using that word in its most positive sense) would change the perception. Certainly universities generally and graduate school specifically are serving a much different community that they used to 30 years ago.
There is a middle ground. Folks in my office have described in which the barrier to entry in first year and the cost of the program is very low. Thousands taking first year medicine, say. But the number of seats available for second year is very limited, and everyone knows teh rules before signing on That's an interesting model too.
It turns out there is exactly such an institution here in Canada, one which is "free". It's the Royal Military College. It is free in the sense that tuition, books, residence, meals, summer employment / training, uniforms are all paid for. But there is an obligation to serve. So the counter-example is not exactly what Rick is thinking about. Is the education there valued more than many students at civilian universities?
I suspect so. But speaking from personal experience, the other costs are much higher.
Maybe the real lesson in today's reflection is that we should think more carefully about the expectations and demands we make of students. Maybe we are not asking enough.
Sunny