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标题: [卡利]大学应该从报纸的衰落中学习什么 [打印本页]

作者: apple    时间: 2009-4-21 00:07     标题: [卡利]大学应该从报纸的衰落中学习什么

THINK TANK
What Colleges Should Learn From Newspapers' Decline

By KEVIN CAREY

Newspapers are dying. Are universities next? The parallels between them are closer than they appear. Both industries are in the business of creating and communicating information. Paradoxically, both are threatened by the way technology has made that easier than ever before.

The signs of sickness appeared earlier in the newspaper business, which is now in rapid decline. The Tribune Company, owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, is bankrupt, as is the owner of the The Philadelphia Inquirer. The Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are gone, and there's a good chance that the San Francisco Chronicle won't last the year. Even the mighty New York Times is in danger — its debt has been downgraded to junk status and the owners have sold off their stake in the lavish Renzo Piano-designed headquarters that the paper built for itself just a few years ago.

All of this is happening despite the fact that the Internet has radically expanded the audience for news. Millions of people read The New York Times online, dwarfing its print circulation of slightly over one million. The problem is that the Times is not, and never has been, in the business of selling news. It's in the print advertising business. For decades, newspapers enjoyed a geographically defined monopoly over the lucrative ad market, the profits from which were used to support money-losing enterprises like investigative reporting and foreign bureaus. Now that money is gone, lost to cheaper online competitors like Craigslist. Proud institutions that served their communities for decades are vanishing, one by one.

Much of what's happening was predicted in the mid-1990s, when the World Wide Web burst onto the public consciousness. But people were also saying a lot of retrospectively ludicrous Internet-related things — e.g., that the business cycle had been abolished, and that vast profits could be made selling pet food online. Newspapers emerged from the dot-com bubble relatively unscathed and probably felt pretty good about their future. Now it turns out that the Internet bomb was real — it just had a 15-year fuse.

Universities were also subject to a lot of fevered speculation back then. In 1997 the legendary management consultant Peter Drucker said, "Thirty years from now, the big university campuses will be relics. ... Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable." Twelve years later, universities are bursting with customers, bigger, and (until recently) richer than ever before.

But universities have their own weak point, their own vulnerable cash cow: lower-division undergraduate education. The math is pretty simple: Multiply an institution's average net tuition (plus any state subsidies) by the number of students (say, 200) in a freshman lecture course. Subtract whatever the beleaguered adjunct lecturer teaching the course is being paid. I don't care what kind of confiscatory indirect-cost multiplier you care to add to that equation, the institution is making a lot of money — which is then used to pay for faculty scholarship, graduate education, administrative salaries, the football coach, and other expensive things that cost more than they bring in.

As of today, there's no Craigslist busily destroying the financial foundations of the modern university. Teaching is a lot more complicated than advertising, and universities have the advantage of sitting behind government-backed barriers to competition, in the form of accreditation. Anyone can use the Internet to sell classified ads or publish opinion columns or analyze the local news. Not anyone can sell credit-bearing courses or widely recognized degrees.

But the number of organizations that can — and are doing it online — is getting bigger every year. According to the Sloan Consortium, nearly 20 percent of college students — some 3.9 million people — took an online course in 2007, and their numbers are growing by hundreds of thousands each year. The University of Phoenix enrolls over 200,000 students per year. In one case, the dying newspaper industry itself is grabbing for a share of the higher-education market. The for-profit Kaplan University is owned by the Washington Post Company.

And it would be a grave mistake to assume that the regulatory walls of accreditation will protect traditional universities forever. Elite institutions like Stanford University and Yale University (which are, luckily for them, in the eternally lucrative sorting and prestige business) are giving away extremely good lectures on the Internet, free. Web sites like Academic Earth are organizing those and thousands more like them into "playlists," which is really just iPodspeak for "curricula." Every year the high schools graduate another three million students who have never known a world that worked any other way.

Some people will argue that the best traditional college courses are superior to any online offering, and they're often right. There is no substitute for a live teacher and student, meeting minds. But remember, that's far from the experience of the lower-division undergraduate sitting in the back row of a lecture hall. All she's getting is a live version of what iTunes University offers free, minus the ability to pause, rewind, and fast forward at a time and place of her choosing.

She's also increasingly paying through the nose for the privilege. Few things are more certain in this uncertain world than tuition increasing faster than inflation, personal income, or any other measure one could name. People will pay more for better service, but only so much more. And with the economy in a free fall, more families have less money to pay. The number of low-cost online institutions and no-cost alternatives on the other side of the accreditation wall is growing. The longer the relentless drumbeat of higher tuition goes on, the greater their appeal.

Institutions that specialize in their mission and customer base are still well positioned in this new environment, much as The Chronicle is doing a lot better than the Rocky Mountain News (RIP). Tony liberal-arts colleges and other selective private institutions will do fine, as will public universities that garner a lot of external research support and offer the classic residential experience to the children of the upper middle class.

Less-selective private colleges and regional public universities, by contrast — the higher-education equivalents of the city newspaper — are in real danger. Some are more forward-looking than others. Lamar University, a public institution in Beaumont, Tex., recently began offering graduate courses in education administration — another traditional cash cow — through a for-profit online provider, with the two organizations splitting the profits. It's an innovative move and probably a sign of things to come. But the public university still looks like something of a middleman here — and in the long run, the Internet doesn't treat middlemen kindly. To survive and prosper, universities need to integrate technology and teaching in a way that improves the learning experience while simultaneously passing the savings on to students in the form of lower prices.

Newspapers had a decade to transform themselves before being overtaken by the digital future. They had a lot of advantages: brand names, highly skilled staff members, money in the bank. They were the best in the world at what they did — and yet, it wasn't enough. The difficulties of change and the temptations to hang on and hope for the best were too strong.

That's a problem for more than just newspaper shareholders. A strong society needs investigative journalism and foreign bureaus. It needs knowledgeable local reporters who can ferret out corruption and hold public officials to account, just like it needs faculty scholarship and graduate programs and even an administrator or two. Undergraduate education could be the string that, if pulled, unravels the carefully woven financial system on which the modern university depends.

Perhaps the higher-education fuse is 25 years long, perhaps 40. But it ends someday, in our lifetimes. There's still time for higher-education institutions to use technology to their advantage, to move to a more-sustainable cost structure, and to win customers with a combination of superior service and reasonable price.

If they don't, then someday, sooner than we think, we're going to be reading about the demise of once-great universities — not in the newspaper, but in whatever comes next.

Kevin Carey is policy director of Education Sector, an independent think tank in Washington.


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http://chronicle.com
Section: Commentary
Volume 55, Issue 30, Page A21
作者: apple    时间: 2009-4-21 00:08

[光明译丛]

大学应该从报纸的衰落中学习什么

凯文·卡利 著 吴万伟 译

吴万伟 

 光明网-光明观察 刊发时间:2009-04-14 14:33:59

  报纸正在走向死亡。接下来轮到大学了吗?它们之间的平行关系比表面看来更密切。两个行业都在从事创造和交流信息的事业。矛盾的是,两者都受到让这个过程变得比从前更加容易的技术的威胁。

  报纸业的患病迹象出现
得更早一些,现在正加速衰落。拥有《洛杉矶时报》和《芝加哥论坛报》的美国论坛公司已经破产,《费城问讯者报》的所有者也已经破产。《洛基山新闻》和《西雅图邮讯报》已经消失,《旧金山记事报》很可能熬不过今年。甚至强大的《纽约时报》也陷入危险中。它的债务状况已经恶化到了成为垃圾股的水平,股东们就开始廉价出售几年前该报建造的由伦佐·皮亚诺(Renzo Piano)设计的奢华总部的股份。

  所有这些都发生在网络迅速扩张新闻受众规模的事实情况下。千百万人阅读网络版《纽约时报》,印刷版100万多一点的发行量相形见绌。问题是《时报》从来也不是在做出售新闻的生意,它是在做印刷广告的生意。几十年来,报纸享受了地理上的、确定的、对利润丰厚的广告市场的垄断权,其中的利润被用来支持调查性新闻报道和海外机构等赔钱的行当。如今没有了金钱,败给了更便宜的网络竞争者如分类信息网(Craigslist)。几十年来为当地读者服务的高傲机构一个一个地消失了。

  现在发生的事情有很多在1990年代中期就被人预测到了,当时因特网刚刚进入公众的意识。但是人们也在说了基于回忆的荒唐可笑的与网络有关的事情——比如,经济周期被取消、通过在网络上出售宠物食品发大财。报纸从网络域名泡沫冲击下出来相对来说没有受到多大的伤害,很可能对自己的未来还充满信心呢。但是现在看来,网络炸弹是真的,报纸不过还有15年的寿命而已。

  当时大学也成为很多热烈的预测的对象。在1997年,具有传奇色彩的管理顾问彼得·杜拉克(Peter Drucker)说“再过30年,庞大的大学校园将成为遗址。这样完全不受控制的开支,没有任何看得见的不管是内容还是教育质量上的改善,意味着这种体制肯定是难以维持的。”12年后,大学里面还是顾客盈门,而且比从前更大,更有钱了(最近以前)。

  但是大学有自己的弱点,它们自己脆弱的现金牛:本科教育的低层次。算术非常简单:把大学的平均净学费(加上国家补贴)乘以新生课程的学生人数(比如200人),再减去讲授课程的可怜的兼职老师的工资。我不在乎你想在这个等式上再加上什么样的充公的间接成本乘数,大学赚了很多钱,然后被用来支付教师的学术研究,研究生教育、管理者工资、足球教练、以及其他收入不抵支出的昂贵东西。

  今天,没有分类信息网忙于摧毁现代大学的财政基础。教书比广告复杂多了,大学以颁发证书的形式有优势坐在政府支持的竞争壁垒后面。任何人都可以使用因特网出售分类广告或者发表评论专栏文章或者分析地方新闻。但不是每个人都可以出售授予学分的课程或者得到广泛认可的学位证书。

  但是能够这样做的机构已经在网络上这样做,而且变得越来越大。按照斯隆财团的数据,在2007年,大学生中的接近20%,也就是390万人左右参加网络课程学习,它们的数量每年以数万人的速度增长。凤凰大学每年招收学生超过20万人。在一个案例,正走向死亡的报纸业也在抓住高等教育市场的一定份额。为了赢利的卡普兰大学(Kaplan)就是属于《华盛顿邮报》公司所有的。

  假定学分制的管理高墙将永久保护传统大学将是一个巨大的错误。像斯坦福和耶鲁等名牌大学(对它们来说幸运的是,在外部的利润丰厚的大学排名产业里)正在把它们非常优秀的课程讲稿免费发送到网络上。诸如学术世界(Academic Earth)之类的网站组织这些和千百门这样的课程成为演出节目表,成为名副其实的iPodspeak课程表。每年,高中毕业另外三百万学生,他们从来不知道这样方式运作的世界。

  有人可能争论说最好的传统大学课程比任何网络课程都好,是的,他们说的不错。什么也代替不了老师学生的现场思想交流。但是,别忘了,那和低层次的本科生在大教室后排坐的经验完全不同。她所能得到的不过是iTunes大学免费提供的东西的现场版而已,而且还不能在自己挑选的时间和地点里随便暂停,倒过去再听,或者快进等功能。

  她也是越来越多地付出远远高于其价值的钱得到特权。在这个不确定的世界里没有多少东西比学费增长超过通货膨胀速度、或个人收入或者任何人们能够想到的其他评价标准更确定无疑的事情了。人们多花钱是要得到更好的服务,但是只有这么多了,在经济处于自由落体状态的情况下,更多的家庭可支付的钱更少了。低成本的网络大学数量和学分制高墙外面的不用花钱的替代方案在迅速增加。高等教育学费无休止地增长得时间越长,这些地方的吸引力就越大。

  那些有自己特长领域和以客户为中心的大学在这个新环境中依然处于有利地位。正如《高等教育记事》比《洛基山新闻》(RIP)做得更好一样。Tony文科学院和其他选拔性私立大学做得很好,同样的,能够获得大量外来研究资助的公立大学,能够为中产阶级孩子提供经典的住校经验的公立大学也做得很好。

  相反,选拔性弱的私立大学和区域性公立大学——相当于高等教育界的城市报纸——就处于真正的危险中了。其中有些大学比其他大学更有前瞻性眼光。得克萨斯州博蒙特市(eaumont)拉玛尔大学(Lamar)最近开始提供教育管理研究生课程,另外一种传统的现金牛,通过以赢利为目的的网络服务供应商,利润由两家分享。这是一个创新性的动作,很可能是未来新发展的迹象。但是公立大学仍然看着像中间人——从长远看,网络不会对中间人友好的。为了生存和发展,大学需要把技术和教学结合起来,以这样的方式,既提高学习的经验,又同时以更低的价格的形式把节省下来的开支转移到学生身上。

  报纸经过了十年的转型期,然后被数字未来超越。他们有很多优势:响亮的品牌、技术熟练的专业人员队伍和银行存款。他们是在世界上做他们专业事务最好的人,但是这还不够。变化的困难和保持原状的诱惑和渴望最好局面的希望实在太强烈了。

  这个问题不仅对于报纸股东有关。一个强大的社会需要调查性的新闻报道和外国机构,它需要有知识的地方记者,能够揭露腐败和监督公共官员的行为,就像它需要教授的学术研究和研究生项目,甚至一两个管理者。本科生教育可能是根绳子,如果拉一下,就可以揭开现代大学所需要的精心编制起来的金融体系,使它一下子零散开来。

  大学的寿命或许还有25年或40年,但是我们活着的某一天肯定能看到它的死亡。大学现在还有时间利用技术为自己带来好处,走向更加可持续的成本结构,用更加优良的服务和更合理的价格的结合吸引客户。

  如果它们不这样做,那么,有一天,或许比我们预料的还要快,我们就可以读到曾经伟大的大学死亡的消息,不是在报纸上,而是在即将到来的任何其他媒介上。

  作者简介:凯文·卡利(Kevin Carey)位于华盛顿的独立思想库教育领域(Education Sector)的政策研究中心主任。

  译自:What Colleges Should Learn From Newspapers' Decline

  http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i30/30a02101.htm




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