Why Does College Cost So Much?

They’re promoting an upcoming book, so the article is merely a summary, but from it arises an interesting premise: education is not an industry that benefits greatly, efficiency-wise, from technology. And that’s an interesting point. If there is a limit to how quickly a student can absorb knowledge, and I think there probably is, then any teaching efficiencies you might gain by adding technology are limited, and certainly won’t scale the way it does in other industries, where you might be able to automate processes and eliminate positions and have the potential to reduce costs.

Technology certainly helps the student; I shudder to think of what writing a thesis would have been like without a word processor program, having had the undergraduate experience of writing papers on an electric typewriter and concocting exams in the navy back when they were much more computer-phobic (cut-and-paste was a literal action, not a mouse-click). But that’s not going to get more information into their collective heads in a fifty-minute lecture, or make them read a book faster. It certainly doesn’t scale according to Moore’s Law.

Computers and peripherals (e.g. processing power, storage, networking) are deflationary. The price of all of the related hardware has been roughly constant over the years — and that doesn’t even reflect inflation: it still costs about a thousand dollars of today’s money to buy a middle-of-the-road computer, a few hundred bucks for a monitor, and another hundred for an external hard drive. But the increase in computing power, sizes of monitor screens and capacity of hard drives has been huge. That helps hold down costs in a lot of places, but if it can’t help the professor teach a class, it’s not going to hold the cost of instruction to the level of inflation. Not until you have robotic teachers, at least.