Monitor on Psychology - September 2011 - (Page 32)

Questionnaire In emerging nations like China and India, that problem is huge. It’s relatively easy to start a university, but you need to hire qualified people. It’s a dramatic challenge in a country like India where you’ve got a billion people and half the population is under 25. How do you provide more colleges and universities fast enough to provide them with educational opportunities? In the United States, there’s a college for every kid who wants to go to college. The challenge here is the price. There’s been no real growth in U.S. median household income for 20 years, yet tuition has gone up by about 3 percent a year. If you project that out for the children of college students who graduated this year, it’ll be well over $1 million for them to go to college. While today’s tuition for top-tier colleges is around $50,000 including room and board — more than the median household income — when tuition hits a $1 million, it’s going to be several times the median household income. If you’re talking about professional education and medical education where students sometime have debt loads of $300,000 today, in the future the debt loads will be 18 or 20 times the median household income. The country cannot sustain that. Why do education costs seem to be rising so dramatically compared with the inflation rate? When we say “inflation,” we’re typically referring to the consumer price index, which is a fairly arbitrary basket of consumer goods and services. For many of those goods, prices come down over time due to changes in technology. A generation ago, if you wanted to buy a color TV, it might have cost $300 or 32 $400, even at a time when that was a lot more money. Today you can buy a much more advanced TV for half that. The same thing is true for cars and other kinds of manufacturing; costs can be reduced by replacing labor with technology. In high-end professional services like education and health care, they can’t. Or at least you can’t yet. Obviously, there are attempts to do that with distance learning, and technology will play a huge role, but right now we aren’t able to drive down costs with technology. Also, institutions are getting more complex. There are more compliance regulations. Library costs have doubledigit inflation. Even our administrative and institutional technology costs have inflations rates that are much, much higher than the general national inflation rate. We’ve tried to provide better, fancier dorms and fancier student centers, fancier athletic facilities and so on, and these things keep pushing up the budget. That can’t be sustained. Can American, indian and Chinese institutions partner to help solve each other’s problems? Yes. What’s needed are innovations in which American colleges and universities partner with education centers in Asia where there are win-win opportunities that increase the education value while controlling the costs. At Tufts University, we’ve started a public health program at the master’s level with a medical school in Vellore, India. Some of our students and faculty will be going there for various periods of time. The reason it’s win-win, first of all, is that for students in the United States in a place like Boston, getting some experience in a place like India or Africa is going to be much more powerful than anything they can get in Boston. Working on the ground and experiencing actual public health conditions in many other parts of the world will greatly enrich their education. They get to see diseases, public health problems, infrastructure or the lack thereof and modes of treatment they would never see in Boston. At the same time, for the time that they’re there, the cost is a fraction of what it is in Boston. The costs of putting up infrastructure there, whether it’s classrooms or offices or clinics out in the field, are a fraction as well. They’re getting a more powerful learning experience for a reduced cost. What do the overseas institutions get out of it? They get the science, technology, faculty training, expertise and curriculum of the American universities. You can have partnerships in which some Indian students are involved in joint teaching and research opportunities. All of that enables a transfer of knowledge. That’s one example of win-win. But there are broader models, too. For example, an American university could have a small satellite facility in a place like a secondary city in India. If students spend a semester or a year abroad at one of these satellite facilities, the costs are greatly reduced and universities can pass along those savings to students in the form of lower tuition or financial aid. Did your psychological training help prepare you for this new role? Absolutely. Never forget that organizations are about people, and people are very complicated. In an Monitor on psychology • septeMber 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Monitor on Psychology - September 2011

Monitor on Psychology - September 2011
Letters
President’s Column
Contents
From the CEO
Supreme Court hears psychologists on prison and video game cases
Antipsychotics are overprescribed in nursing homes
New MCAT likely to recognize the mind-body connection
A $2 million boost for military and families
In Brief
GOVERNMENT RELATIONS UPDATE
On Your Behalf
Judicial Notebook
Random Sample
TIME CAPSULE
QUESTIONNAIRE
Speaking of Education
SCIENCE WATCH
An uncertain future for American workers
Advocating for psychotherapy
PRACTICE PROFILE
ETHICALLY SPEAKING
Seared in our memories
Helping kids cope in an uncertain world
APA and Nickelodeon team up
Muslims in America, post 9/11
Bin Laden’s death
‘They expect us to be there’
Answering the call of public policy
Candidates answer final questions
APA News
Division Spotlight
New leaders
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATION
Disaster relief training
Honoring teaching excellence
Personalities

Monitor on Psychology - September 2011