I  wrote a comment  on the report and the ongoing debate about cost/value in higher education on our other site, Liberal Ed Crisis.  The post is here.

The  real issue at stake is  not necessarily the cost of higher  education.   If we want to maintain the residential model  of higher education, costs will rise as maintaining the physical plant and keeping the student-faculty ratio as low as possible remain expensive.

What is especially troubling is that apologists for the cost of the American model of higher education equate liberal education with a model  of teaching that is expensive. They rebel against  the notion that liberal education can be conveyed  effectively through MOOCs, blended  learning or other  online educational models.  So, as costs increase, critics suggest that the well-to-do will get a “brick-based” education while the 99% will get more of a “click-based” education.

If we continue to resist technological advancement, we then doom the 99% to what  seems to be an inferior educational model that will not convey the benefits of liberal learning because it does not entail classrooms, residential campuses, etc.  The traditional, increasingly expensive model of education remains an ideal.  But, it is clear that if educators do believe that liberal education does convey a package of learning skills and democratic, civic values that are vital to the health of a society, then they have a responsibility to find a way to convey those values through more advanced technological means.  If they do not, they undermine the symbiotic connection between liberal education and liberal democracy that organizations such as the AACU celebrate.

If we look beyond the confines of American higher education, we see that technology is driving the democratization of access to  education.  This TED Talk by Daphne Koller is an especially powerful statement to this effect.  It would indeed be paradoxical if, in the name  of preserving the means of conveying liberal democratic values, liberal educators made those  values less democratically accessible.

The  challenge for our educators today is to find a way to  put liberal  learning  to work embrace technology so  that we can ensure that access to education,  knowledge liberal learning and democratic values is democratized.