Page 183 - Crisis in Higher Education

154 • Crisis in Higher Education

embrace all aspects of being student centered, including student-centered
learning. Faculty members are key players in this change, so they must buy
into and lead these efforts. Although this entails upfront investment, uni-
versity leader who understand the value and potential costs savings will
choose to move forward. Public universities, under pressure from govern-
ment, students, and students’ support groups, should work hard to improve
student services and lower administrative costs. This creates better value
for students, which leads to lower tuition costs and higher enrollment.
University administrators and tenured faculty must work together to
change how faculty are evaluated so instructional faculty feel less pressure
to reduce course content and decrease learning standards.
Two parts of the solution require government to take the lead. Universities
are likely to resist any attempt to make student fees optional. They may
go along with the ideas that student fees can only be spent for nonaca-
demic purposes and that funds cannot be comingled, but even these ideas
are likely to meet resistance. Second, state governments provide funds to
expand infrastructure and should press public universities to thoroughly
examine their plans for new buildings to prevent overinvestment. As a
last resort, states can decide to provide capital funds only for maintaining
existing buildings.

7.6 IMPACT OF BECOMING STUDENT-CENTERED
ON HIGHER EDUCATION OUTCOMES
Universities have been working to become student-centered for many
years, and they have improved in some areas such as treating students
with more respect and providing better services. But they have not
reached the top of the mountain, which is finding ways to customize
their pedagogies to cope with different learning styles and focusing on
what may be the single biggest problem with higher education: rapidly
rising costs. The following list examines how this element of the solution
impacts the root causes, which are discussed in Chapter 4.

1. Lack of understanding—Who is the customer? (root cause 1): The
essence of being student centered is to understand the needs of stu-
dents, but it goes further to recognize that students are best served