Free College Education for Iowans?

January 16, 2015, 7:00 a.m.

Will Germany’s Economic Formula Work for Iowa?

Nicholas Johnson

Iowa City Press-Citizen, January 16, 2015, p. A7
The Iowa Legislature and Board of Regents emphasize college education for Iowans — at least those whose parents can afford the tuition, or graduates accepting debt with their diploma. Others debate pros and cons of extending 12 years of free public education to 14 ("Too Good to Be True? Time will tell on tuition plan," Jan. 14).

Meanwhile, Germany is only the latest country to realize that free higher education for all world citizens promotes economic growth in each of its states ("Länder"). Other countries with similar programs include Brazil, Finland, France, Norway, Slovenia and Sweden. [Photo credit: unknown. The picture is of students taking break from classes at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. Humboldt is one of the most prestigious universities in Europe, and has educated 29 Nobel Prize winners. Many of these "international universities" offer their free courses in English as well as the native language -- although improving one's foreign language is one of the benefits of study abroad.]

Tennessee is leading the trend in the U.S. with free community college education. Chicago is among the first big cities. President Obama is urging all states to follow.

As an educator, I'd like to believe this movement reflects a simultaneous epiphany among the world's public officials regarding the many values of a liberal arts education. Have they at last come to see that quality education, like universal single-payer healthcare, is a basic human right (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Arts. 25 and 26)?

Alas, that's not the case. Providing free college education to all, like the free food samples at Costco, is just good business.

Germany is part of a global economy. The more world citizens with German ties, the more the Länders' economies grow. It's true whether students from abroad stay, or return home with networks of German contacts. It's equally true of German students otherwise without access to higher education. The German economy benefits when they stay; it benefits when they study abroad, stay, and do business from there.

Iowa, unlike Germany, does not grasp this simple truth. Our leaders believe if Washington can pay for a war with tax cuts, Iowa can create prosperity with tax cuts. Both Washington and Des Moines are in desperate need of remedial math.

Iowa Workforce Development has warned of our challenge "to overcome a skills gap." We don't have a shortage of jobs, we have a shortage of middle and higher skilled workers. Our state universities don't have too many students from abroad and out of state, we have too few. Too few Iowans who have studied abroad and stayed there to help develop markets for Iowa products. Too few from abroad who have studied here and stayed here — or gone back home with ties to Iowa businesses. [Photo credit: UI College of Education. The picture is of Iowa students taking a break from classes on the University of Iowa's Pentacrest.]

This is not rocket science. There's data. There's history. America and Iowa enjoyed an economic boom during the 1950s. Major contributors were the 2.2 million returning veterans of World War II who received a free college education under the GI Bill. California's growth from a destination for Dust Bowl immigrants in the 1930s to one of the world's 10 largest economic powers in the 1960s is directly linked to its deliberate economic policy of free higher education. New York is, in part, a similar story.

Iowa can't gamble its way to prosperity. It can't build a growing economy on tax cuts. It can't sustain economic growth by bribing fickle out-of-state businesses to locate here.

What it can do is look to the history of the World War II GI Bill, and the growth of California. What it can do is try to understand the rationale behind Germany's policy of free education for all. What it can do is, like President Obama, follow a progressive state like Tennessee and city like Chicago.

Will it work for us? Let's think it through.

It would require the uncommon political courage of deferred gratification: putting Iowa's long-term economic growth above Iowans' short-term economic greed. And, yes, it requires a willingness to raise and invest taxes. But that educational investment could prove to be much more profitable than using taxpayers' money to bribe out-of-state corporations or as paybacks to major campaign contributors.
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Nicholas Johnson of Iowa City, a former FCC commissioner, maintains http://www.nicholasjohnson.org and FromDC2Iowa.blogspot.com.

Comments
Note: This column/blog entry produced a number of comments elsewhere -- sometimes including my own. They are reproduced below.

Email
From a former Iowa City City Council member, via email and with permission:

Hello Nick: About your opinion piece in today's Press-Citizen.....I could hardly agree more. As far back as the 1950s when I was in school, the informed philosophy was that a college education was of benefit to far more than just the individual earning the degree.

Shannon Janes, a long time friend and former colleague of mine at ACT, is one of the brightest people I know. In the 1970s he was promoting higher education being a logical extension of public education. Thus, the present increasing conversions and proposed conversions in higher education/postsecondary education isn't something new to me.

I hadn't previously thought of your illustration that the post-World War II vets' access to the GI Bill does reflect well on the nearly global benefits of postsecondary education.

Do you know if any citizen efforts are developing for expressing strong support for extending K-12 to at least K-14?

Again, thanks for the interesting and most informative opinion piece.

Bob Elliott

Iowa City Press-Citizen Online Version Comments
Ed Flaherty · Iowa City, Iowa
As usual from Nick, excellent. We must change our investment policies. If we value private accumulation of wealth more than the health of our planet and of future generations, we lose our humanity and moral compass. January 15 at 9:10am

Rudolf Schmidt · Top Commenter · University of Iowa
The trouble with "free college for all" is the same problem that we have with "easy credit for college" in that we matriculate a lot of people who don't finish, and those who do finish end up with a generally worthless degree and tens of thousands of dollars in debt because of poor advice and poor planning.

Not everybody needs to or should go to college or university, but the main view is that everybody should go. Why is that? Why can't we talk about dropout rates and how young people who can't legally buy a beer are suddenly entrusted to sign away the next 20 or 30 years of their life to the government for loan payment on questionable majors? January 15 at 2:36pm

Nicholas Johnson · Top Commenter
Rudolf Schmidt:

Thank you for reading the column and posting your comment.

We mostly agree; but I'd like to draw some distinctions.

Whether free or high tuition, I agree that "not everyone needs to go to college." I suspect there are those who don't need to go to community college either -- though I'd guess a much larger percentage would benefit from the additional two years.

I also agree about the downsides of students graduating with very substantial debt -- that is but one of the reasons I'm advocating free college.

And, whether free or tuition-funded, I also agree that we could probably do a better job with admission standards that produce lower dropout rates. (However, I suspect that there will always be some students who wouldn't meet the standards who would do well if given a chance -- for, say, a limited six-week, or one semester, opportunity to show what they can do before being denied the opportunity.)

-- Nick January 16 at 7:55am

Holly Hart · Top Commenter · Works at Iowa Shares
Skills shortage? Then why is it impossible to get the training for what the state claims is needed? And why do they call :skills" things like working with Microsoft office? We have a job shortage, period. January 16 at 1:58pm

Sam Osborne · Top Commenter
A good education is not worthless to one that gets one. And, our institutions of higher education should be something other than machine shops the mill subtends into interchangeable parts to fit into the profit making efforts of others.

The supposed dropout out problem of a student leaving school prior to graduation can be done away with by simply referencing the student leaving as are other such changes---as a worker finding new opportunity, a former golfer having taken up fishing, a CEO stepping down and into retirement, a professional athlete wrapping up his career and any of us exiting into well earned retirements.

Free education is as good of an investment as is all of the money spent propping up moneychanger capitalism that is leaving this and soon coming generations of young people the red ink of debt that should have been a warning check mark against the elders who were not smart enough to avoid their own failing. January 17 at 10:07am

Rick Whitten · Top Commenter · Information Technology Specialist at State of Iowa
Nicholas: Long term thinking?? That sounds almost, um, conservative!

Facebook Comments
Note: The column/blog entry produced a lengthy exchange on Facebook. It is too long to format and reproduce here -- at least this morning. My response toward the beginning of the exchange provides a sense of what it was about.

Nicholas Johnson

Chuck Schmidt and Steve Hanken: I very much welcome your spirited exchange. That was my goal with the op ed column in this morning's [Jan. 16] Press-Citizen.

Germany and other countries are not offering free college education to every potential entering student in the world because it's a nice thing to do. They, like California years ago (prior to becoming the 7th largest economic entity in the world), are doing it because they find it promotes their economic growth faster and farther than other investments. Tennessee is doing it for the same reason with its community colleges, and the President thinks other states should follow their example.

I'm just suggesting we, and our elected representatives in Des Moines, ought to at least think about it, and the rationale of Germany, and others, for doing it. We should either do it, too, or come up with some very darn good reasons why it only works for other countries and states but not for Iowa.

It seems to me from your exchange that much of your difference derives from an unarticulated distinction between "expense" and "investment." Which is the "cheaper," or the "better buy," for an Iowa farmer: A $95,000 Tesla automobile, or a $150,000 John Deere tractor? Both are a "cost." But they are not both an "expense" (as I'm drawing the distinction). The Tesla is an expense. The tractor is an investment. Eisenhower's Interstate Highway system was an investment, not an "expense." The U.S. universal free K-12 public education systems in 15,000 school districts represent investments. So will be free 14 years of education instead of 12 (community college). And so, Germany believes, is its states' investment in free higher education.

-- Nick
January 16 at 10:42am

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Paying for College

May 30, 2011, 8:00 a.m.


Allocating Costs; Setting the Price
The Sunday Des Moines Register of May 22, 2011, had a major, page one spread about the rising costs of a college education. Except it wasn't about the cost of education. It was about the rising price of that education, comparing the increase in the share of those costs allocated to tuition with the rising price of peanut butter, milk and eggs. More on the Register's piece on down the blog.

First, here is my 300-word-limit response in the next week's Sunday Register, May 29:


Legislature shifted the cost of education
Nicholas Johnson
Des Moines Register
May 29, 2011, p. P20

"The Challenge for Students, Parents and Schools: Runaway Tuition" (May 22), helped focus attention on the rising price of a college education.

Unfortunately, it conflated the "price" (to the student and parents) with the "cost" (to the universities) of that education.

Can universities do more to reduce the costs of education? Can they increase the quality and utility of that education? Absolutely.

However, it's both unfair and inaccurate to suggest that the sole cause of rising tuition is the increase in costs resulting from poor management by the Iowa Board of Regents and administrators.

A major reason for the increase in tuition is not the cost of education, but the allocation of those costs between taxpayers (who receive a public benefit from a well educated workforce) and the private beneficiaries (the students who go on to better jobs and lives).

When California universities charged no tuition, that didn't mean they had no costs. It meant taxpayers paid those costs.

The most appropriate allocation? That's a debate worth having.

But for now, let's recognize that it is the Iowa Legislature that has chosen to allocate an ever-increasing share of the costs to students' tuition; not
the Iowa Board of Regents, universities' administrators or faculty members.

Here are some early excerpts from the Register story the week before, followed by some comments.

Iowa's two largest universities expect to pocket millions of dollars in extra tuition revenue next fiscal year, with the vast majority going to pay for
additional faculty, programs aimed at lowering dropout rates and other student services, officials said.

That decision comes as the cost of earning a four-year degree in Iowa at a public university continues a steep march upward and pushes students to take on more debt, which, at $26,066 per graduating student, is the fourth-highest average in the country.

In the past 30 years, the average cost of tuition and fees at an Iowa public university has jumped 707 percent, more than four times the rate of inflation. College costs have increased each of the past 30 years for students and their families.

Meanwhile, a new survey shows families and students saddled with rising tuition and debt, stagnant wages and an uncertain job market are questioning whether a traditional college education is their ticket to the American dream.

Some universities are trying to respond to the converging forces with innovative classroom approaches and three-year degree programs. . . .

Americans are reassessing what they get for their tuition dollars.

Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed by the Pew Research Center say the higher education system does not provide a good value for the money they spend, and 75 percent say college is too expensive for most Americans to afford, according to findings released last week.

Jens Manuel Krogstad, "Runaway tuition: A challenge for students, parents and schools," Des Moines Register, May 22, 2011, p. A1.

I acknowledge in the response to the Register's report, "Can universities do more to reduce the costs of education? . . . Absolutely." Frankly, I don't know enough to support that "absolutely" judgment. It's based simply on the intuition and experience that virtually every individual, business, government agency, and institution that is willing to address in detail its systems and processes, goals and operations, can probably come up with ways to reduce costs, at least a little -- often while improving quality and outputs.

It may well be that the salaries of universities' personnel, and the other costs of education (as distinguished from the price of education, tuition), have increased significantly further and faster than inflation in the costs of producing other goods and services. If so, that's a matter well worth investigating. If the increases represent necessary costs, held to the minimum, wise investments, and other consequences of skilled, creative and attentive management, that's one thing. If not, if alternative decisions could have produced greater quantity and quality of service at lower cost, that's another.

The point, for purposes of critiquing this Register story, is that it only addresses the increases in the price of education, not the costs of providing that education.

Beyond that, there was another opinion piece in the Sunday paper [May 29] of even greater relevance to America's future than my 300 words.

Robert Reich, the former U.S. secretary of labor, is now an author, columnist, blogger, and professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkley, testifies before Congress from time to time. The Register published as an essay an excerpt from his May 12 testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. It's vey much worth reading in its entirety; indeed it could be characterized as must reading for every American and public official.

To give you an idea of his subject, and thesis, here is is lead paragraph:

How did we go from the Great Depression to 30 years of Great Prosperity? And from there, to 30 years of stagnant incomes and widening inequality, culminating in the Great Recession? And from the Great Recession into such an anemic recovery?

Robert Reich, "How Our Prosperity Became Stagnation," Des Moines Register, May 29, 2011, p. OP1.

In the course of answering those questions, here's what he had to say about the role of higher education:

Government also widened access to higher education. The GI Bill paid college costs for those who returned from war. The expansion of public universities made higher education affordable to the American middle class. . . .

Starting more than three decades ago, trade and technology began driving a wedge between the earnings of people at the top and everyone else. The pay of well-connected graduates of prestigious colleges and MBA programs has soared. But the pay and benefits of most other workers has either flattened or dropped. And the ensuing division has also made most middle-class American families less economically secure.

Government could have enforced the basic bargain. But it did the opposite. It slashed public goods and investments -- whacking school budgets, increasing the cost of public higher education, reducing job training, cutting public transportation and allowing bridges, ports and highways to corrode. . . .

Coping mechanism No. 3: Draw down savings and borrow to the hilt. After exhausting the first two coping mechanisms, the only way Americans could keep consuming as before was to save less and go deeper into debt. During the Great Prosperity the American middle class saved about 9 percent of their after-tax incomes each year. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, that portion had been whittled down to about 7 percent. The savings rate then dropped to 6 percent in 1994, and on down to 3 percent in 1999. By 2008, Americans saved nothing. Meanwhile, household debt exploded. By 2007, the typical American owed 138 percent of their after-tax income.

He concludes:

The fundamental economic challenge ahead is to restore the vast American middle class. That requires resurrecting the basic bargain linking wages to overall gains, and providing the middle class a share of economic gains sufficient to allow them to purchase more of what the economy can produce. As we should have learned from the Great Prosperity -- the 30 years after World War II when America grew because most Americans shared in the nation's prosperity -- we cannot have a growing and vibrant economy without a growing and vibrant middle class.

"To restore the vast American middle class" is going to require, among many other things discussed by Reich, a restoration of affordable post-high school college education -- as well as a reduction in the price of community college education, and skills training in the trades.

Had we been hell-bent on deliberately evolving into a third world country's population, with a statistically insignificant percentage of super-wealthy at one extreme, and 90 percent or more struggling just to get by, we would have adopted almost precisely the policies we have. That's not to say that it was deliberate. Others can explore the conspiracy theories. But that is the result.


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From SUI to ACT: Higher Ed's Crumbling Monopoly

January 31, 2010, 9:20 a.m.

Universities Yesterday and Tomorrow
For universities today, and more, see the bottom of this blog entry
(brought to you by FromDC2Iowa.blogspot.com*)
There are probably thousands of reports on the challenges confronting higher education, their missions, their five-year plans. From my perspective each challenge has a solution.

But few academics address the worst case scenario: the disappearance of universities as we know them. That challenge also has a solution. Unfortunately, it also has powerful analogies.

• Try 40, not 5-year plans. Over 40 years ago, in an environment of libraries’ card catalogs, paper newspapers, and three TV networks, I predicted “Communications in the Year 2000” (ultimately a chapter in How to Talk Back to Your Television Set) would include “instantaneous, ubiquitous, no-cost access to all information.” Today it's here. We call it the Internet.

• The 99.99%-off sale. We’re used to January's 10% to 50%-off sales. But 99.9% off? The computational capacity you could buy for $1 million 40 years ago -- but would have been far too heavy to lift -- today's students now have delivered by UPS, carry in backpacks, and costs them $1000 (or less). The 99.9%-off sale. So what, you ask?

• Broadside blows. So companies, even entire industries, have disappeared or struggle against formerly unpredictable competition. All the rules have changed – and at an accelerating rate of change. That’s “so what.”

Ten years ago Facebook (300 million members), YouTube (20 hours of video uploaded each minute), Wikipedia (3 million articles; 161 language editions), and iPhone (3 billion downloaded applications) didn’t exist.

With 4.5 billion cell phones in over 200 countries, and smart phones’ Internet capabilities, cell phone networks are rapidly becoming the platform, the pathway to the new Internet. The cable TV and landline phone companies, and the Wi-Fi systems they feed, may feel the same kind of broadside blow out of nowhere from which the newspaper industry is now trying to recover.

Musicians and their fans no longer need “record companies,” film makers don’t need “studios,” journalists “newspapers,” or authors “publishers.” All can go directly to the Internet. Craig’s List is the new “classifieds.” Amazon the new Sears. Downloaded movies closed video rental stores.

Why do we think our near-$300 billion industry called higher education is immune to such telecommunications tsunamis?

Just as the online content of the New York Times is available for free, so is the online content of an undergraduate education. Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Princeton make courses available online for free. The near-250 million additional Web sites provide the rest of what students need.

Is the "college education" a student can get off the Internet "the same" or "as good as" what can be obtained by sitting in a college classroom or lecture hall for 1800 hours (120 credits times 15 weeks each)? Probably not. Though I would say, "it depends."

Faculty can inspire, excite, encourage and direct students who want to learn. And that makes a difference, often a big difference in an occasional student's life. But no one can "teach" someone else, particularly someone who is not all that enthusiastic about learning in the first place. "You can lead a horse to water . . .."

With "public" universities' tuition closing the gap with that of Ivy League colleges, it is not that unusual for the total cost of an undergraduate and graduate education to cost on the order of $200,000 or more (tuition is only a part of that total), whether the parents saved for it, pay for it, or the student borrows for it. (Of course, the cost is even greater if the opportunity cost -- what could have been earned in the marketplace during those four-to-eight years, but wasn't -- is factored in.)

Thus, even if the gains from sitting in that classroom (offset by the losses from binge drinking and other temptations and time wasters) exceeds the value of obtaining that education on one's own, is the incremental value worth the $200,000 or more?

And if the answer to that question is not immediately obvious, it leads us to the next question: Why, then, would anyone lay out that kind of money just to learn stuff?

The answer, of course, is that they would not. Not when you can learn stuff for free. So why are they paying; what are they getting for that money?

They are paying the money to obtain the certification that they are a "college graduate," as they go into an economy that rewards that certification with higher pay.

If that's the primary goal, why don't they go elsewhere to get the certification? Because accredited colleges and universities are the only institutions licensed to print those certificates. (Paying $200, a much lesser amount (another 99.9%-off sale?), for the printing of the fake driver's license necessary for the illegal consumption of alcohol near campus is one thing. But lying about one's "college graduate" certification, or obtaining and framing a counterfeit degree, tend to be viewed as a much more serious offense in the workplace.)

Higher education's hold on parents' and students' wallets comes from the monopoly those institutions hold on the granting of degrees, and the resulting "medallion value" those diplomas possess.

Do you see how fragile that monopoly can be in our digitized, globalized world that Tom Friedman tells us is now flat?

If newspapers and book companies are discovering that writers can go directly to the global market that is the Internet without passing through their editors, if "record companies" find that musicians can do the same (with either samples or whole tracks for free or for sale), if video rental stores are boarded up while their customers download movies, why do we think higher education will forever hold a monopoly on "college" certification?

And what if we didn't?

• In 1971 73% of college students said it was “essential or very important” to have a “meaningful philosophy of life.” Today 78% identify “wealth” as their goal, and “business” is the most popular major.

• Parents understandably wonder about the value of a college degree that may cost $200K or more.

• Firms that seek self-starting, creative knowledge workers recognize the value of the equivalent of a liberal arts education. They also know a diploma doesn’t even guarantee the basic math and language skills the firm needs in its employees -– and that those skills don’t require a diploma.

Business doesn’t want “majors;” it wants employees with those basic skills. Southwest Airlines says, “we hire for attitude and train for skills.” But as the executive of a local Fortune 500 told me, “We can’t even train employees for skills if they haven’t mastered the basics.”

Passing the GED exam is treated as a high school equivalency. Passing the GRE exam qualifies a student for graduate school.

What if those who could pass a standardized exam were recognized as even better than college graduates (because of the rigorous language and math components)? A local business person told me he’d hire them for “college graduate” positions in a New York minute. He wants to know what they can do, their willingness to work and sense of responsibility, and what time management and social skills they have -- not what grades they got or how many initials they're legally entitled to put after their names.

Educators are slow to change. Professors started lecturing 1000 years ago because there were no books. Now, notwithstanding books, we’re still lecturing to warm (if often inattentive) bodies in lecture halls.

We don’t have 1000 years this time. If the UI ever loses its monopoly on certification Marc Moen will be replacing four Pentacrest buildings with high-rise condos.

The certification process may remain in Iowa City, but be based on results of exams announced by ACT and Pearson, institutions with neither faculty nor students, certifying those qualified for employment as knowledge workers in a global economy.

If we ever transform what was once SUI into ACT, the certificate ACT awards to a University of Phoenix graduate will be the full equivalent of the diploma we give a UI graduate -- or the certificate a dedicated student obtains without assistance from either institution.

It couldn’t happen? I remember when no one else imagined a $1 million computer could ever sell for $1000 and become part of a global network.

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More . . .

Today's blog entry is deliberately kept short enough to make it an easy read.

But because there were a lot of other thoughts running through my mind while writing it, I thought I'd simply append some of them here, rather than embedding them above.

Jim Stroud. As a young kid, there are some of your parents' friends you connect with and really like. Jim Stroud -- faculty member, neighbor, and family friend -- was one of those for me. I thought he looked like Mark Twain. He may have actually been from Missouri, I don't know. He had the moustache, smoked a pipe, wore tweed coats, had a bit of a twang and a great sense of humor. He and Dad claimed to be Swedish cousins, though I don't think they ever really documented that. They both worked at writing amusing "laws." As a sample, one of Dad's was, "What else is there to scratch but the surface?" One of Jim's was, "I'd rather walk down one dry road than ten muddy roads." Maybe you had to be there. (Actually, he lived at the top of the hill that is now "Greenwood," and was then sometimes a muddy road.) Since they had geese up there, I assume they must have been the donors of my sister, Kate's, goose "Blimp."

I am literally a child of the University of Iowa: born it its then-new hospital on the west side of the River, part of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Clinic's two-, three-, and four-year-old groups (then at 9 East Market Street), and a student at (and ultimately graduate of) the College of Education's "University Elementary and High School" (Class of 1952), now simply "North Hall."

As such, we were the guinea pigs for a great variety of educational testing and doctoral dissertations. And one of those experiments was Jim Stroud's, and the world's, very early efforts at "speed reading."

As he traveled around the State of Iowa, trying to sell school districts on the idea of trying it, he was often confronted with the argument, "But if they read that fast they won't learn and remember the material." (Truth is, you often learn and remember it better.) Jim's response was, "Well, I figure if it takes 'em two hours to read their homework assignment now, and they don't understand it, and I can show 'em how they can read it in 45 minutes, and they still don't understand it, well, shucks, I've done 'em a favor."

That's kind of my reaction to the opposition to kids studying on their own from an organized curriculum available off the Internet at no cost to themselves. "Well, I figure if it takes 'em five years in college to get a four-year degree for $200,000 now, and they don't learn all that much in the process, and I can show 'em how they can get the equivalent "college" certificate by studying on the Internet, for free, and they still don't learn all that much, well, shucks, I've done 'em a $200,000 favor."

Certificates. There's an enormous amont of online education, training and certification going on now -- and that's before taking into account the increasing number of students (both on and off campuses) who are picking up academic credit for online courses from their own institution or others. The military has online courses and training, including college credits. Microsoft offers a number of certification programs online, qualifying those who "pass" with levels of expertise in various computer science specialties. Human subjects researchers are now required by the NIH to take an online training program regarding human subjects research ethics before receiving grants.

In fact, even teachers get "certification" as well as, or without the need for, formal "college" credits:

"West High journalism teacher Sara Whittaker has achieved Certified Journalism Educator status from the Journalism Education Association. To earn the certification, a teacher must earn college credit in news reporting and writing, communications law and publications advising, or pass an examination that demonstrates their proficiency in those areas." "Teacher Earns Certification," Iowa City Press-Citizen, February 1, 2010.

How can educators possibly argue that they can demonstrate proof of skills and professional advancement through certification without formal classes, but it is somehow inappropriate for students to do so?

Indeed, the University of Iowa is already offering online courses, instruction, training and certification, e.g., "UI Learning and Development/E-Learning." That's not really an answer to the potential "broadside blow" if higher education loses its certification monopoly, but it is an illustration of the fact that -- like the newspapers that gave away their content online and then came to regret it -- universities are certainly capable of offering education without buildings.

A couple days ago I met a woman, married with four kids, probably in her late thirties, who never finished college, but still has dreams of someday attending law school. Given the childhood she endured, no one could have predicted the success she has achieved in her chosen line of work. She has over the years put herself through every relevant certification program that relates to her job, and now has more initials after her name than your average Nobel Prize winner. I have absolutely no doubt that if a free, online route to certificate of "college equivalency" and "law degree" were available to her she would pursue them. And I suspect that, as extraordinary as she is, there are probably more like her out there, and that we are all poorer as a nation for not making that path possible for them.

The legal profession's "certification" approach. Ironically, the ability to practice law -- the study of which in universities is a graduate program on top of an earned undergraduate degree -- is controlled with a certification process in many ways unrelated to academic institutions: the "bar examination."

Admittedly, most lawyers attend, and graduate from, law schools before taking a bar exam. But there are still states and circumstances where that is not required. (I have not independently researched this, but this Web page cites as its source "Comprehensive Guide to Bar Admission Requirements 2004," published by the National Conference of Bar Examiners and American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar.)

And, like most professions, there is a kind of ongoing certification process called "continuing legal education" that requires practicing lawyers to earn a minimum number of "CLE credits" each year to maintain their "active" status and continue to practice law. Increasingly, these programs are offered online. (Although my bar membership can be maintained as "inactive status" because I'm not actually practicing law and taking clients, I "sat in" -- meaning, "in" front of my computer screen -- this past week, for an hour-long, online exploration of the use of trademarks on the Internet that would have provided me CLE credits had I needed them. It was a "class" offered, not incidentally, by a law firm not a law school.)

If we can select those who will be our nation's lawyers with online training, and a certification process unrelated to the academy as such, it's unclear why it would be impossible to do the equivalent for a basic college "certificate."

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* Why do I put this blog ID at the top of the entry, when you know full well what blog you're reading? Because there are a number of Internet sites that, for whatever reason, simply take the blog entries of others and reproduce them as their own without crediting the source. I don't mind the flattering attention, but would appreciate acknowledgment as the source, even if I have to embed it myself. -- Nicholas Johnson
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