Market Driven Futures

MacCollege, Inc.

The community college is most suited to survival in this new educational world. Most already have outreach centers in the community, large numbers of part-time and temporary faculty, and thriving distance education programs.

Initially, the community colleges try to handle decreased government support by widening the catchment area for their programs through more aggressive distance education recruiting. But this strategy does not succeed in recruiting enough students and is too expensive to maintain.

A group of community college presidents holds a secret summit meeting and divides the country into regions. Within those regions, they allocate franchises in the MacCollege system. This eliminates duplicate programs, as well as some specific degree programs, to ensure efficiency of delivery.

Some community colleges attempt to continue offering on-campus programs until local funds dry up; then, they, too, join the franchise system. As the system becomes more efficient, MacCollege Inc. closes freestanding campuses and leases space in local malls.

The final efficiency comes with a breakthrough labor concept. Modeled after the direct marketing industry and various communication company techniques, MacCollege Inc. develops an educational debit card, entitling the bearer to a certain number of hours of online education. The mall centers are staffed by salespeople who sell a specific body of content knowledge, available over MacCollege's computer system, and educational enhancements, such as do-it-yourself fetal pig dissection kits.

The student swipes the debit card in the computer and is connected with a program monitored by online "faculty." The faculty is situated in the low-wage Maquiladora area of Mexico.

MacCollege continually offers education specials for credit, including such sports as "Mall-walking" and "The Sociology of Video-Arcades." In 2011 MacCollege stock is issued as an IPO and snapped up immediately by public sector pension plans.

Wired U.

At Wired University, the transition to the "new" education of 2011 is more gradual. Long priding itself on the personal contact between faculty and student, the institution remained committed to what it considered good teaching. In view of financial stringency, however, it is forced to make some compromises. It chooses to dramatically expand its presence in distance education, but contrasted its approach to that of MacCollege by touting the excellence of its production values and the actual presence of faculty in the development and implementation of its courses. Wired U. takes the star system already existing in some public institutions and refines the concept. Faculty who are the most at ease in front of cameras and the most photogenic became the on-line stars, the purveyors of the knowledge developed by others. Scornfully referred to as the "Blow dries" of the profession, the performers responded by hiring Screen Actors Guild agents to handle their appearances and negotiate their residuals.

Other faculty members coalesce as research teams, developing the materials offered by the headliners. Gradually, the traditional distinctions between scholarly disciplines changed, and the research and production teams reformed from such groupings as English Lit., Biology, and Nursing to scholarly groupings more in line with the Hollywood genres - historical spectacle, drama, situation comedy. The university successfully fights off an attempt to require each program to show ratings for the level of mature content. Institutions also find that they no longer need most of the campus buildings. In those states where "three strikes and you're in" legislation has been passed, an elegantly simple solution is to turn the spare buildings into minimum-security prisons. Sports facilities are leased to various professional sports franchises for use by farm teams.

This institution decides to maintain the campus experience for students. However, since education is labor-intensive, the trustees of this institution are determined to handle those costs and run their institution in line with the most progressive business models they can find. Following the 20th century trend of increasing corporate influence in higher education, Outsourced Tech invites a team of business visionaries and leaders to redesign the educational system to create the most cost-efficient operation. In keeping with a privatization trend started in the early 1990s, this advisory group designed a system that completely privatized the institution. While a subcontractor had run the dining halls for several years, the concept was expanded to the residence halls. There was stiff competition in bidding with a surprise entry by a conglomerate of national fraternity organizations, which insisted that it had a track record in operating full service facilities on campus and this made it eminently competitive. In rapid order, building and grounds, bookstore, and the accounting operations were privatized, and employees are laid off and rehired as hourly, part-time workers. Automation of the library was a bit more difficult, but eventually accomplished by the installation of a full on-line cataloguing and ordering system, subcontracted to Amazon.com. Work-study students replaced librarians.

The faculty proved a bit more difficult to handle, but the seeds had already been sown in the late 20th century by institutional subcontracting to private companies for remedial and ESL services. The institution had quietly been eliminating tenure for some time by simply not replacing tenure lines as they opened up. Outsourced Tech offered an attractive buy-out package, and tenure was gone. From then on, private companies handled all instruction. There was some jockeying by the various business representatives on the advisory committee to get contracts. By that time, many businesses were operating their own "universities" by subcontracting with higher education institutions to provide education and training. The companies simply reversed the process, making the instructors their employees and contracting their services to Outsourced Tech. The final privatization step came when the council of business advisors ousted the board of trustees and delegated decision-making responsibilities to an advanced version of IBM's Big Blue.

By the end of the 20th century, the seeds of Warehouse A&M had already germinated in the giant state institutions of the mid-West. It was a short step from campuses with 40,000 students to campuses with 100,000. With the increasing use of technology and the decreasing number of jobs available to mid-level white collar workers being replaced by that technology, the government feared the influx of the millions of young workers from the boomlet echo. Society embarked on a concerted effort to extend the adolescence of these students to prevent the disruption that would be caused by their massive entry into the labor market. Reversing a trend toward limiting the length of time a student could stay in college without financial penalty, students were encouraged to remain in college as long as possible, to change majors frequently, to partake fully in the on-campus experience. With the massive numbers of students arriving and staying on campus, the institution was forced to make educational adjustments. Lecture halls were built to accommodate more than 3000 students per class. Monitors around the halls provided the students with a view of the professor and the material being presented. Examinations became all multiple choice with electronic scoring. Any contact the students had with faculty was purely accidental. Freshman or 100-level classes were handled primarily by computerized instruction, 200 and 300 level by adjuncts and graduate assistants. By the time a student actually reached the equivalent of a senior year, he might have a class with a faculty member.

With that concentration of directionless post-adolescents, institutions beefed up the social opportunities on campus to keep them amused and occupied. College football became more and more professional with the agreement of NCAA to allow eight years eligibility and to lift any restrictions on alumni "gifts" to players. Touring campus concerts were produced with Hollywood production values. It was from the messages spread at these concerts that the separatist movement began. It came to the attention of some students that, at some point, they would actually have to graduate. On the evening of the 48th world tour concert of the Stones, students around the nation declared that the Warehouses were independent political regions and self-governing. In the national constitutional convention that followed, the most hotly debated topic was the "30 and out" clause, limiting residence in the Warehouse to those under the age of 30.

Education Maintenance Organization

In this approach, government, industry and campus administrations get together to fix higher education's inefficiencies. There are several things they note that need their attention. Business leaders say that the products of faculty research take too long to reach the market, primarily because faculty insists on extensive testing. These leaders are also disturbed because faculty members want to keep the rights to their own discoveries. Campus administrations agree with business since they cannot realize their share of the profits until the product hits the market and until ownership issues are decided. Congress solves the problem by abolishing the concept of individual ownership of intellectual property and by vesting all rights with the employer.

Once institutions can put a faculty member's materials onto the web site or into the marketplace without bothering with pesky permission protocols, there is less need for an extensive (or expensive) permanent workforce on campus. Publishing companies, sensing the profits to be made from virtual education, immediately contract with universities to produce the classes and course materials developed by faculty, then work with the institutions to market them to students.

Gradually, a new model for higher education emerges, based on the HMO structure of the 1990s. Higher education institutions begin to administer education through contracts with various industries and states. In the interest of efficiency and lower costs, the states begin to reimburse the institutions on a capitation basis; that is, they reward the institutions for keeping classes short and contact at a minimum. Departments schedule faculty into 15- minute teaching time slots, based on adult attention span research.

Institutions supplement their income by allowing publishing companies to pilot commercial, distance education materials using students and faculty as subjects. The publishing companies drastically cut their development costs and the institutions get free materials while charging students the same fees.

At first, because of faculty layoffs and efficiencies in the system, tuition drops and more students enter college. But eventually there are no more efficiencies. Students begin to question the quality of education they're receiving.

As the faculty spend less and less time on original research and instructional development, companies begin to complain about the declining quality of the instructional materials they get from the institution and threaten to go elsewhere. As tuition rises with inflation and loss of outside funding, students turn to academies run by consortia of faculty who have left the public institutions and formed their own.