Creating a new public college would be a hard sell in almost any state these days, with officials under pressure to cut taxes and restrain spending. Yet, when George P. Connick asks the University of Maine System next month to establish a new public institution, he expects a hearty Yes.
But then, the “institution” he’s proposing won’t require millions of dollars for classrooms, laboratories, or its own faculty payroll. Mr. Connick will ask that the state make its telecommunications network a separate institution and expand its scope. That shouldn’t faze the university system, which for five years has been using the network to offer college courses and seven full degree programs.
“It’s an electronic institution, as opposed to a campus,” says Mr. Connick, who is on leave from the presidency of the University of Maine at Augusta to develop the plan to turn the Education Network of Maine into the system’s eighth institution.
Mr. Connick’s goal is to use the network of voice, video, and computer links to serve more Maine students without the costs of building a new campus, an idea that has more than a little appeal in statehouses throughout the country.
No other state is on the verge of labeling a network as a separate institution. But in virtually every state, governments and communications companies are expending money and effort to connect public schools, colleges, libraries, and state-government offices on networks.
Public-college leaders in many of those states say the efforts are more than just attempts to keep up with the high-tech age. They are beginning to feel pressures to use these new “information highways” to address such long-vexing issues as keeping down tuition and state expenses while serving growing numbers of students.
“It’s crystallizing,” says Gordon K. Davies, executive director of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. “You’re finding people now all over the country who are alive to these possibilities.”
In Virginia and Utah, officials bracing for huge increases in enrollment have been urged by their governors and legislators to use technology, not new campuses, to accommodate many of the new students.
In Minnesota, business and labor leaders have been pushing colleges and universities to do more to help train and retrain workers. State officials say they want every public college to develop plans for serving those new students, and to use the state’s developing telecommunications network, which will eventually connect all 66 public campuses, in those efforts.
In Florida, where there is no statewide network yet, the state Board of Regents, under orders from the Legislature, is developing a plan for using a future network to improve education at all levels.
Florida’s plan will go far beyond “the ‘hairy-arm approach’ to distance learning,” where the instruction is just “a guy’s arm on a TV screen,” promises Robert A. Bryan, a former provost at the University of Florida. He is heading up a study on bringing the Internet and a range of other electronic and video options to schools, colleges, and, eventually, people’s homes.
Higher-education systems in each of those states have received multimillion-dollar appropriations in recent years to help develop their plans and install or lease equipment.
“Right now, technology seems to be the only thing states are willing to invest in,” says James R. Mingle, executive director of the State Higher Education Executive Officers group.
Legislators and governing boards view higher education as too labor-intensive and are looking to technology to help lessen that and improve productivity, Mr. Mingle says.
“Boards fully expect this to save them lots of money,” says Mr. Mingle. “From the state perspective, there is a tremendous amount of hope and expectation that it will solve our problems.”
Whether it is in fact the answer to policy makers’ prayers, however, is far from clear.
A lot will depend, many in higher education say, on whether states invest in technology that institutions can use efficiently and whether institutional rivalries interfere with state efforts to promote technologically delivered courses. States will also have to find ways to provide students with the important, non-instructional aspects of education, such as library access, counseling, and a means to collaborate on line, if they hope to make electronic higher education an adequate substitute for the traditional campus experience.
The cost of hooking up to networks has already become an issue in Iowa and North Carolina, particularly for community colleges with tight budgets. In Minnesota, legislators’ attempts last year to provide $18-million to build a network and to train faculty members to teach on it was resisted by the universities themselves.
“There’s huge competition for every dollar,” says Joe Graba, interim executive director of the Higher Education Coordinating Board in Minnesota. He says public-college leaders were anxious about diverting funds from their institutions. Ultimately, legislators cut the appropriation to $4.8-million, which the campuses are using to install the technology gradually.
Higher-education policy makers also will have to resolve concerns of anxious faculty members, who, in contract negotiations and less-formal discussions, are beginning to demand extra compensation and ownership rights for the new electronic coursework they develop.
Professors also want some rights to approve courses or degrees imported from outside their institutions, and assurances that connecting to the information highway won’t cost them their jobs.
“If we were in a period of budget growth, people wouldn’t worry when they saw the Board of Regents asking for $10-million for distance learning,” says Kris Anderson, president of United Faculty of Florida, which is affiliated with the National Education Association. Professors fear, she says, that “there will be pressure to buy products instead of hiring new faculty.”
Both the N.E.A. and the American Federation of Teachers have identified technology-related issues as high priorities for their higher-education members.
To date, debates over technology have not developed into pitched battles. But people like Mr. Mingle, of the State Higher Education Executive Officers group, note that the issues could heat up considerably if states started looking to technology not only as a tool for avoiding the costs of new campuses and professors, but also as a means of eliminating duplicative programs or institutions.
No one has publicly endorsed such uses of the technology, but Virginia has quietly been taking steps in that direction.
In 1991 the state removed restrictions that blocked public colleges from serving students outside of their geographic areas. And a panel appointed by Gov. George F. Allen, a Republican, to improve government efficiency has asked higher-education policy makers to identify all the college-level courses that could be made available in Virginia through technology. The idea is that the public colleges might someday receive some of those, rather than develop their own programs.
The state’s higher-education policy-making board has also been rethinking enrollment planning and will soon recommend to the General Assembly a new formula for financing construction that reflects its interest in using technology to educate many of the 80,000 new students Virginia expects by 2008.
The formula would let institutions use construction funds for technology, on the assumption that they could accommodate more students off their campuses and, therefore, need fewer classrooms and smaller libraries.
Virginia has also begun developing “virtual libraries,” through which its students at those remote sites could electronically gain access to resources. Mr. Davies says the state has spent more than $5-million acquiring rights to use materials in electronic formats.
Utah is also wrestling with policies that reflect its shift to a system under which more and more students will receive higher education through EDNET and UtahLink, statewide networks of video and computer links. Utah expects the number of students attending its public colleges to nearly double by 2010. About 100,000 attend now.
“You can’t handle all the growth through technology,” says Cecelia H. Foxley, the Commissioner of Higher Education. “But we clearly are not planning to replicate nine different campuses. We will keep the building to a minimum.”
She says that, so far at least, the state is not thinking about requiring students to take a certain proportion of their courses electronically.
“We’re not to that point yet,” she says. “But I’m not saying that we wouldn’t entertain that concept in the future.”
Higher-education leaders in other states where networks are being developed are also modifying policies or weighing changes.
This week, Maryland’s Commission on Higher Education is scheduled to vote on whether to allow students to receive their degrees entirely through distance-learning courses, provided that at least half of those courses were taken through interactive video -- soon to be widely available through the statewide network.
In Kentucky, where the state expects to have 60 to 70 electronic college classrooms readied for hook-up to the state’s TeleLinking Network by the end of this academic year, higher-education officials say they expect to revise financial-aid policies and other rules to accommodate students who will receive their college educations from a number of institutions.
Maine, meanwhile, is also pressing ahead with efforts to simplify its advising, financial-aid, and registration policies to encourage more students to use the Education Network.
Mr. Connick sees the network as a tool for enrolling more adults from the state’s rural regions and islands without having to hire additional professors. He says the state could also use it to bring in courses and degree programs not available from state institutions, as it now does with a master’s-degree program in library science offered by the University of South Carolina. (The degree is also offered in Georgia and West Virginia.)
“The great beauty of it is, Maine taxpayers didn’t have to pay a dime to develop it or bring it in,” Mr. Connick says. And when demand for that falls off, the Education Network of Maine can cancel the library degree and bring in other courses, he says, affording a level of flexibility that most presidents of traditional colleges would envy.
Not everyone, however, is caught up in the excitement of the new opportunities. Some higher-education leaders are concerned that overly zealous advocates are counting too much on technological fixes to solve educational problems. These skeptics are particularly wary of plans that depend on using networks to solve fiscal problems.
Faculty critics of the Maine network note, for example, that it has not attracted many students who live far from a campus, and that its enrollment of 3,500 students is far below projections.
Maine’s experience also raises questions about whether such networks can really save states money. Mr. Connick says the state is indeed economizing, even after paying professors extra for teaching on the network and for hiring assistants to help read papers and exams. But his calculations do not take into account other budget items that are likely to grow if use of the network expands, such as the costs of student advising, royalties for faculty members on copyrighted teaching materials, and the expense of making library books themselves -- not just catalog listings -- available electronically.
It is precisely because of such costs that officials in other states urge caution when promoting networks as tools for higher education.
Oregon, for example, has been using its EdNet, a system that relies primarily on televised broadcasts delivered by satellite, since 1989. Through the network, which is expanding to include computer links, more than 100 college-level courses are delivered to sites throughout the state.
The system is considered a success not for financial reasons, says Holly K. Zanville, the associate vice-chancellor for academic affairs for the State System of Higher Education, but because it allows the state to serve more students. “We don’t think it’s saving us any money,” she says.
The University of Wisconsin System has also been studying the range of issues and costs that the state must face as it develops its BadgerNet network, linking the 26 campuses of the system as well as public schools, technical colleges, and other state agencies.
Officials in Wisconsin are enthusiastic about the network’s potential, but also realistic about the built-in costs.
It may be years before networks revolutionize higher education, says Lee R. Alley, the University of Wisconsin’s associate vice-president for information technologies. But already, he notes, public higher education is being asked to serve more students with “flat budgets.” The information highway, says Mr. Alley, is a “feasible and economically practical” way to do that.
Iowa Communications Network
A state-financed and state-run network for audio, voice, and data transmissions. The $100-million network has been operating since mid-1992, with 126 schools and colleges already hooked up. The state hopes to have 500 more connected in the next five years. The network is restricted to schools, colleges, hospitals, and state agencies and has no private customers.
Maryland Distance Learning Interactive Video Network
A network capable of carrying two-way audio and video signals and some data signals. It was developed with about $30-million from Bell Atlantic of Maryland. The state hopes to have 300 schools, colleges, and “cultural assets,” such as museums, linked to the network in three years.
Bell Atlantic is also donating $50,000 worth of equipment to each of 270 sites to help them hook into the network and will then charge users a monthly tariff of $1,365 per hook-up. (The tariff will rise to $2,730 in two years.) Twenty sites have been hooked up thus far. Bell Atlantic also hopes to make money by connecting businesses and individuals to the network.
North Carolina Information Highway
A network that uses some of the most advanced technology available for carrying voice, video, data signals. Developed as a state effort to improve government efficiency, it was financed with investments by G.T.E., Carolina Telephone (a division of Sprint), Southern Bell, and Access On, a consortium of 25 independent telephone companies. The state hopes to have as many as 150 schools, colleges, libraries, local governments, and health and criminal-justice facilities linked by the end of 1995, and more than 500 in the next five years.
More that 40 sites are linked now, and are paying a tariff of $4,000 for the first 64 hours of service and an hourly rate of about $50 for usage above that. The state may alter the rate structure after this fiscal year. The General Assembly appropriated $7-million, to be awarded as grants later this month, to help institutions pay for equipment that is needed for linking to the network. The companies also plan to sell network access to commercial customers.
Nysernet
A nine-year-old effort that was started by a consortium of 15 universities and research laboratories in New York State. Primarily a link to the Internet, NYSERNet has recently begun upgrading the speed of its connections so that it will be able to transmit broadcast-quality signals. The $20-million network has been financed largely from fees paid by its 600-plus affiliates, which include colleges, schools, hospitals, and corporations. About 30 per cent of its financing has come from New York State and the National Science Foundation.
State officials consider NYSERNet the state network, although it is run as a private, non-profit corporation. As such, the organization places strong emphasis on providing its affiliates, and others, with such services as Internet training and consulting.
Utah Electronic Highway for Education
An amalgamation of several state efforts for using technology in education, including a $16-million interactive video network known as EDNET, and a $4-million data network called UtahLink.
EDNET now links 64 schools and colleges, and the state plans to have as many as 200 secondary schools connected within four years. UtahLink is designed primarily for secondary schools, but can connect to networks that already link the colleges and universities. The state hopes to add 480 schools over the next four years to the 35 that are now connected to UtahLink. There are no connection fees or tariffs for EDNET or UtahNet because state funds cover those costs.
