Breaking Radio Silence

It's been a loooong time since I last posted. Why? Well, I said most of what I wanted to say in my first posts. Now, however, SMARTHINKING is about to launch a new product that warrants another posting explosion. We plan to launch a new product called StraighterLine in May.

Online Tutoring and VOIP

Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) is the use of two-way, voice communication – like a telephone – over the Internet. This technology has been around for a decade or so. For online tutoring, though VOIP will be a common feature in the future, its past and present have been characterized by more hype than usefulness.

Why the hype around voice? People are accustomed to being tutored in-person, implying the use of voice. Therefore, voice is assumed to be a required element of tutoring. It is not. Tutoring requirements for math and other subjects are the efficient communication of symbols (it’s hard to describe the quadratic equation over the telephone), graphing and drawing ability, and text input. In fact, when students are being tutored effectively, there are lengthy pauses while students and tutors are working through problems. The presence or absence of voice has no bearing on the length of these pauses. So, for the most part, VOIP neither increases the quality or efficiency of communication. It is simply more familiar. Though SMARTHINKING will offer voice in a limited capacity in some subjects starting in January, we have provided hundreds of thousands of tutoring sessions without it. In fact, VOIP can cause more problems than it solves. Among the challenges of VOIP are:

• Technical support – The number of students needing help with headsets, microphones, sound cards, bandwidth, processing capacity, voice installations, and simply turning the volume up, is significant.
• Bandwidth – Using VOIP requires more bandwidth than a whiteboard or chatroom connection. With the increase in broadband penetration, this problem is diminishing, but it is still present in dial-up and shared bandwidth connections.
• Archiving (Memory) – A whiteboard tutoring session can be archived by saving a single image or series of images. When a voice track is added, the memory needed for archiving increases exponentially.
• Archiving (Quality Control) – A tutoring session saved as an image can be reviewed in a couple of minutes or less. A voice track requires the reviewer to listen to the entire tutoring session (an average of 25 minutes long).
• Software installations – VOIP usually requires an installation of a program – rather than a flash or java download – onto the student’s computer.
• Glitches and Voice Quality – For many users, VOIP can result in tutors and students talking over each other, waiting for the other to speak when the other doesn’t realize it, and other barriers to the tutoring interaction. With students already frustrated with their academic work, adding communication and technical frustration can be the last straw.

For the most part, online tutoring companies that do use VOIP require students to install software locally, sometimes give away headsets and microphones, and do not archive tutoring sessions. Installation of software requires a significant amount of forethought on the part of the student/buyer. Shipping of computer accessories dramatically inceases cost and also requires forethought. The lack of archiving impacts quality control and dispute resolution procedures. Students using services that provide on-demand support to struggling students, like SMARTHINKING’s services, typically do not have the time or the patience to go through a significant installation process at the same time that they are struggling with their homework. Requiring such installation serves to limit, rather than increase, the number of students using these services.

Having said all of this, voice may be a requirement for effective live tutoring in some subjects. Foreign languages, for instance, would seem to require voice. However, on the whole, lack of voice has had no adverse effects on student tutoring demand or satisfaction. Once VOIP becomes embedded into operating systems and browsers and voice input devices (headsets and microphones) are standard computer accessories, it will be interesting to see whether students choose to use, or not use, VOIP. This is getting closer and closer to reality as more computers come with Bluetooth connections that can integrate with mobile phone ear-pieces. However, for now, in SMARTHINKING’s experience, VOIP serves to limit the market for tutoring rather than expand it.

Why Technology Hasn't Lowered Costs or Improved Quality in Education

Below is an article that was published in the Spring of '06 that I wrote for Threshold magazine, a publication of Cable in The Classroom. I am on their Advisory Board. In short, in every other industry, technological innovation is an effort to increase productivity. Productivity is greater output with the same input of labor or the same output with less input of labor. No matter the case, productivity is dependent upon integrating technology with labor -- something that education at every level has willfully ignored.

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OUTSIDE HELP: IMPROVING PRODUCTIVITY IN SCHOOLS

After capital expenditures, instructional labor is education’s biggest expense. Yet, despite the enormous potential of technology for improving the quality and quantity of instruction, and the enormous pressures on schools to reduce spending, little has been accomplished to enable greater teaching productivity. Put simply, to improve productivity, either more or better instruction must be provided to the same students or more students must be taught with the same resources.

Schools that expect technology investments to drive quality improvements and cost reductions would do better by focusing on products and services that answer questions such as:

* How do we free up more time for our most skilled teachers to perform the most complex instructional activities?

* What parts of the educational process are best done by computers instead of people?

* Are there parts of the educational process that could be performed more cheaply by others?

* What services does my school provide that cannot be done better or more cheaply by someone else?

The answers to these questions are neither simple nor easy, and they threaten traditional notions of appropriate student:teacher ratios, quality control, classroom design, funding formulas, salary structures, and job responsibilities. However, every successful technology innovation in the history of humankind has enabled people to do more with less. Education should be no exception.

PRODUCTIVE APPROACHES
Though these questions may be thorny and difficult, the traditional 20:1 student:lecturer model is giving way to more productive ways of offering instruction. While most examples are in higher education, they do offer models for K–12 education as well. Schools are combining their own instructors with other instructional services to create programs that are cheaper, more effective, and more scalable. For instance:

To free up professor time for course management, course design, and student intervention, the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS) contracted with a commercial company to grade student essays within 24 hours and adopted a textbook that included an essay-review service. The benefits? For the students, they receive suggested grades within 24 hours, have a third-party review, and the graders have more consistent training and provide more consistent assessment than could be provided in a traditional structure. For KCTCS, one instructor can teach more students, the per-student cost is lower, and some of the cost of providing the service is borne by the textbook provider.

After deciding to offer a program focused on math and writing for underprepared students, Kaplan University partnered with an online tutoring company to provide the assessment, content delivery, and tutoring components. The students receive tutoring access up to 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The school is able to shorten the development time of a program, reduce its risk and development costs, and rely on the expertise of a partner company for specific instructional activities such as online tutoring.

The National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) has worked with more than 50 colleges to redesign high-enrollment courses. NCAT results demonstrate that, by rethinking instructional labor strategies, schools can increase student success and decrease per-student costs. When schools make greater use of digital content and courseware and rethink student: teacher ratios, staffing patterns, and faculty roles, students need less intervention from live instructors, and more of what they do need can be provided by tutors, teaching assistants, or course coordinators.

The Baltimore City School System is one of many public school systems nationwide to hire teachers overseas to affordably meet the “highly qualified teacher” requirement
of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The system hired as many as 50 Filipino teachers to teach in the city’s schools. Additionally, many online Supplemental Education Service (SES) providers under NCLB use tutors located overseas. Whether in person or online, tapping the global market for educational labor allows more flexible staffing, and either lower-cost or more-qualified staffing.

WHY NOT?
Opponents might argue that the intimate teacher/student relationship is lost if grading is outsourced. However, the reality is that the intimate teacher/student relationship is an ideal that is far less common than we would hope and is far more expensive than we would admit. Initial results from most of the NCAT’s projects and from the Kentucky grading project show that student performance actually improved, while per-student costs decreased. Another argument against such models is that outsourced instructors will have different teaching techniques and standards than those taught at a particular school. While there certainly are some teaching functions that are best not outsourced—particularly those that require
a high degree of socialization, such as most teaching of elementary students—there are many functions that can be easily outsourced. For instance, math, science, and writing fundamentals are essentially the same across schools, states, and countries. Most schools are already comfortable with outsourcing at least some elements of education—many schools that offer distance-learning courses do so through third-party providers, and textbooks and courseware are the result of outsourcing content development and delivery.

Every year, the cost of education outpaces inflation with no increase in overall student performance. In "The World Is Flat," the best-selling book that attempts to define trends and technologies in the global marketplace, Thomas Friedman describes how companies in almost every industry are “insourcing” their logistics—letting partner companies manage the tracking and delivery of their products and services—and outsourcing elements of their production process. These trends are increasingly part of education as well.

No matter how it’s defined, education, like other hidebound industries before it, is about to become part of a global market. In other industries, this has resulted in products and services that are cheaper and of higher quality. Viewed one way, this threatens the cost and service structure of American education. Viewed another, this is an opportunity to rethink the components and functions of a school and all of the political, economic, and accountability structures that surround it. If doing so can improve productivity in schools, more students will ultimately receive more opportunities to learn, achieve, and succeed.

Service Level Chicanery

For online tutoring, students want on-demand help. Frankly, why else would they choose to be tutored online? As the online tutoring industry evolves into a larger market, it is interesting to note the lengths to which companies will go to to promise on-demand assistance. For instance, Tutor.com claims on-demand tutoring on its web site and in various corporate blogs. However, their service is only available from 11 AM - 10 PM (PT). Perhaps a more accurate claim would be "on-demand tutoring except for 13 hours per day." Worse, TutorVista (and many other small tutoring companies) claim 24/7 tutoring. In practice, this means that a student can schedule a tutor at any time for any time with sufficient notice. It does not mean that a student can get help exactly when they want it. At SMARTHINKING, we offer true on-demand math tutoring for the fall and spring semesters. During the summer, drop-in tutoring is available for 16 hours per day because there is not a sufficient volume of students to support full 24/7 access.

Why would companies spin these little white marketing lies? Because true on-demand tutoring -- 24/7, drop-in, live service -- is more expensive, requires greater scale, requires greater expertise, and requires greater data than pre-scheduled tutoring. These companies are trying to attract customers without investing in the tutoring force and management expertise necessary to offer on-demand service.

To understand why on-demand tutoring is more expensive and more complex, it helps to think of on-demand tutoring like a customer service center. When you call a company or utility, you expect to talk to someone on the other end. Running such a center is very similar to running an on-demand tutoring service. A critical operational variable in a call-center is "utilization capacity." This is the percentage of time that tutors spend tutoring students. It utilization capacity is too high then students have to wait a long time for tutors. If utilization capacity is too low, then the company is losing money. For instance, if a tutor is being paid $12 per hour and utilization capacity is 50%, the cost per hour tutored is $24. But, because one or more tutors are almost always available, there are no wait times. So, utilization capacity and wait times are inter-related variables. To do it right, a company needs to set a service level target and then determine the target utilization capacity to meet that target.

So, utilization capacity and service levels are mutually dependent variables. However, achieving a target service level also depends on the average length of a tutoring session. For instance, if a typical session in a call center is 2 minutes long, then a customer service center doesn't need to staff as many people to achieve a low wait time because customer service representatives are frequently available. However, for online tutoring, the average session length is around 30 minutes. This means that, with a small number of students per hour, an online tutoring company must have a very low utilization capacity to meet minimum desired service levels. As the number of students per hour rises, utilization capacity can rise while keeping service levels constant. Because utilization capacity can rise, it costs less to offer on-demand tutoring with a large number of students than with a small number of students.

Lastly, to manage all of this efficiently, an online tutoring company needs management sufficiently skilled to schedule tutors appropriately and sufficient data to know when the peaks and valleys of demand are likely to be.

So, to sum up, true on-demand tutoring generates higher labor costs because a portion of a tutor's time will not be used, requires scale to keep the unused portion of time as small as possible, requires management expertise, and good data systems. This is a significant investment that all small online tutoring companies are unwilling to make. The expense of true on-demand tutoring combined with its attraction to customers is the impetus behind the false advertising cropping up in the online tutoring industry.

Defining Online Tutoring Quality

What is quality education? What is quality teaching? How can one measure it? These are some of the thorniest questions in education today. No single system or metric can determine it. For instance, standardized tests suffer from the fact that students may not test well, may have been trained on the wrong material, or may be having a bad day. Student survey data may reflect student opinions of the teacher rather than opinions of the learning. For instance, numerous studies in post-secondary education show a positive correlation between lenient grading and student satisfaction. Longitudinal data from schools, such as job placement rates or lifetime earnings of students, cannot be easily compared to each other because students at different schools enter and exit with different skill levels. Lastly, portfolio analysis -- the compilation and examination of a given student's work over a period of time -- suffers from the subjectivity of the teacher. Due to the flaws of any single metric, those that need to measure educational quality -- such as schools, accrediting agencies and parents -- are forced to rely on a meta-analysis of all of the metrics listed above, input analysis (credentials of instructors, training processes, and others), and reputation.

So what does this mean for online tutoring? A quick search of the Internet will demonstrate that every online tutoring company claims to have "high quality" tutors. Most will claim that their tutors are extensively trained. All list fabulous quotes from users. All show terrific survey results. All claim grade increases. So, how does a parent or a school determine who really is better? Using the above framework, they need to look at inputs, metrics, and reputation. Of these three, inputs are the least manipulable because inputs impact the cost structure of a business. They are also the least advertised, because they are a proxy for educational quality. However, they probably provide the best indication of the educational value of a service.

INPUTS
By looking at what goes into the tutoring process, one can get a sense of what should come out. The inputs that are relevant to online tutoring are tutor credentials, tutor training, tutor oversight, tutoring philosophy, service availability, service levels, breadth of service, and ease-of-use.

1. Tutor Credentials: Generally, tutors with advanced degrees in their discipline have a better understanding of the material than those that don't. This is particularly relevant in math and science. Companies that don't indicate the degree levels of their tutors are typically relying on current college students or graduates as opposed to masters level and PhD tutors.
2. Tutor Training: Just about everyone has been taught by someone who is brilliant in their discipline, but doesn't know how to teach. Tutor training on how to tutor is just as, if not more, important than subject level expertise. When students need help, they are typically frustrated and lack confidence. An effective tutor not only helps them with the subject matter, but encourages them as well. At SMARTHINKING, we call this the "affective" element of tutoring. Again, every company will claim to do this. However, if a company is serious about tutor training, its tutors will be part-time employees as opposed to independent contractors. Though hiring tutors as independent contractors is simpler and cheaper, IRS regulations require that any position that requires significant training as a job requirement must be filled by an employee.
3. Tutor Oversight: Tutoring is a one-to-one social experience that combines the delivery of subject knowledge with, hopefully, the social cues necessary to encourage the learner. However, as with any human interaction, there can be miscommunication between student and tutor, mistakes made in the provision of information, and differences in communication styles. Identifying and addressing these sorts of issues requires the subjective perspective of experienced educators. At SMARTHINKING, we have former college professors that oversee each of our disciplines. Further, they contribute to the scholarship surrounding online tutoring.
4. Tutoring Philosophy: An online tutoring service can be a learning service or an answer service. While not mutually exclusive, they are certainly not the same. Frequently, students want an answer, not a lesson. Tutoring companies that evaluate their tutors solely on student satisfaction ratings give tutors the incentive to do the work for the students. While this might make good business sense for a company trying to sell its services to consumers, it's not good education.
5. Service Availability, Breadth and Levels: All of these inputs are for naught if an online tutoring service doesn't provide service at the moment and in a subject that the student needs it and without an onerous wait time.
6. Ease-of-Use: Again, all of these inputs are for naught if the online tutoring technology is not user-friendly and capable of supporting educational interactions. For instance, Voice over the Internet (VOIP) is a feature that is frequently requested, but seldom used. This is because the set-up and performance for VOIP -- microphones, speakers, soundcards, volume settings, bandwidth, archiving, non-duplex service, voice lagtimes, and others -- make it more cumbersome than helpful. Also, math notation is notoriously difficult to do on the Internet. Technology that enables easy superscripts, subscripts, fractions, graphing, and other mathematical symbols enables effective online tutoring.
   

METRICS
Every tutoring company, SMARTHINKING included, touts its student survey results, quotes from satisfied customers, and sample tutoring interactions. Frankly, all of these are easily manipulated for marketing purposes. The only outcome metric that is more objective than the others are independent studies conducted by clients or others. While these will certainly have their share of methodological flaws, the bias of the company is removed.

REPUTATION
Because outcome data is so manipulable and input data is hard to discern, reputation and, by extension, brand, plays a role in determining educational quality. In large part, reputation is created by quality service over time. It is also reflected by a company's client base. For instance, to determine educational quality, one might look at the tutoring services chosen by other schools and educators. Presumably, other educators will vet a tutoring company on its educational features more fully than a parent, student or library might.

Despite the emphasis on testing in No Child Left Behind, the pressure being put on college accrediting agencies to measure school quality, and the growing demand for consumer educational services, the question of what is educational quality is not likely to be solved soon. In the meantime, those who need to look at quality are best served by evaluating an education provider holistically on inputs, metrics, and reputation, with an emphasis on inputs.

P = MC and the Implications for Textbook Publishing and Colleges

Since the advent of the Internet, many prognosticators (myself included) have predicted dramatic transformation in the education industry and the textbook publishing industry. Unfortunately, when I go to a conference today, I hear rehases of the same keynotes as I heard a decade ago. Fortunately, there is some evidence that these transformations are finally happening in both education and textbook publishing.

The decade long belief in transformational change stems from a central tenet of microeconomics. It is that, in a perfect market, the price of a good is equal to the marginal cost of production and distribution of that good. The Internet renders the marginal cost of production and distribution of educational content to almost zero. For example, it costs almost nothing to produce and distribute one more copy of a digital algebra textbook. In theory, a competitive market would push the price down to almost zero. This has dramatic implications for the textbook industry and for educational institutions.

However, neither education nor the textbook publishing are perfect markets. As I noted in another post, the market for higher education is rife with trade barriers. The market for textbooks suffers from a mismatch of the person who makes the buying decision (the professor) and the person who pays for the book (the student). This means that the professor has no incentive to search for low-cost options. Further, the school also frequently receives a portion of a book-store's revenue, further reducing the incentive to reduce costly middlemen. Here is a comment that I wrote about an article about high textbook prices in a higher education trade magazine:

"Textbook prices would come down dramatically if:

1) Colleges made institution wide textbook decisions and bundled the cost of those books with the price of college, instead of letting each professor make their own textbook decisions.

2) Colleges didn’t look to their bookstores as revenue centers.
It is no wonder that textbook prices soar when the professor makes the buying decision, but the student buys the book. If the cost of a new textbook mattered to an instituiton, like it would if it had to be factored into tuition, the school would have an incentive to make better decisions and to shop based on price. Right now, there is no incentive for professors to do this. In fact, many of the largest for-profit schools have done this and they have driven textbook prices way down for their students.

Also, publishers would be thrilled to sell books directly from their websites and cut-out the middleman — the book stores. However, most colleges look to their bookstores as revenue centers. The college gets a piece of the profit. Therefore, the college frequently is the middle-man, again, with no incentive to cut prices."

So what's the good news? Publishers are aware that their existing textbook economic model is not sustainable. The growth of for-profit schools and the extension of the practice making institution buying decisions, the growth of free-content initiatives, and the growth of ad-supported textbooks are all portents of a different economic model. Increasingly, publishers are trying to figure out how to become service providers instead of content providers. Recently, SMARTHINKING announced partnerships with 3 of the 4 largest higher ed textbook publishers. Tutoring services, combined with an increased reliance on instructional administrative systems, are the sorts of products publishers will be selling in the future. These will be sold as subscriptions rather than as things (like books). In short, today students pay for content and get a lot of ancillary materials and services. Tomorrow, students or schools will pay for the ancillary materials and services and the content will be free. Educational institutions are confronted with the same challenge. Does it really matter where someone learns college algebra? What is the value that an individual school brings to education? A question for another posting…

Higher Education Free Trade Agreement (HEFTA)?

Distance education removes the geographic barriers to educational choice. Once removed, those courses that are the same across schools --typically those taken in the last two years of high school and the first two years of college -- become commodities. As a commodity, standard economic theories can be applied to their pricing and consumption (or lack thereof). When you look at the higher education market through the lens of international trade theory, one can see ways in which the cost of high school and college can be dramatically reduced. One can also see why such changes are slow to happen.

Here's an excerpt from my master's thesis that I wrote in 1997, which, astoundingly and unfortunately, is still relevant today:

"The problems of integrating institutional course offerings is similar to the evolution of international trade and the creation of a global, integrated economy. In the international arena, each country could be said to produce roughly two classes of goods, those that they produce exclusively and those in which they compete. For instance, the climate of Mexico allows the growth and export of oranges and the cold waters of Finland provide cod fishing unavailable in Mexico. Clearly the orange and cod trade between both governments will help the other. However, both America and Japan compete to produce automobiles. Although Japan might produce better and cheaper automobiles, and the American consumer would prefer to purchase a better and cheaper automobile, political pressures conspire to prevent such purchases. Because “competitive” products are common to both countries, they are likely to affect more consumers, therefore, the benefits gained by sharing these products are likely to be larger than the benefits gained by sharing “exclusive” goods. As countries increase their trade, their economies become more integrated.

In distance learning, the colleges can be considered countries and their course offerings can be considered to be “exclusive” and “competitive” goods. Finally, as national economies or institutional curricula become even more integrated, industry specific government subsidies and regulatory barriers in international trade and state subsidies to specific institutions in distance education could affect the competitive balance."

To extend the analogy, two schools will be willing to import and export their low-enrollment, highly specialized courses (say, Mandarin Chinese and bio-mechanical engineering) because importing these does not threaten their existing courses. However, they are much less willing to import college algebra, english composition and chemistry 101, because these courses will threaten a school's existing math, writing, and chemistry faculty. To put it more bluntly, why won't a 4 year college which charge $1000 per course simply outsources its english 101 course to a community college which charge $250 per course? While consumers benefit from the first scenario, they REALLY benefit from the 2nd.

Though much of higher education has become a commodity in the last decade and the number of educational providers has grown substantially, the established educational players have little interest in "opening their borders" to credits granted at other colleges. Like taxation, subsidization and regulatory barriers in international trade, schools have a number of tools and policies at their disposal to keep their borders closed. For instance, individual schools set articulation policies and graduation requirements. Groups of like-minded schools set accreditation requirements which have important financial implications. State and federal governments provide price subsidies that affect the market for courses. Lastly, the byzantine labrynth of articulation policies, graduation requirements, accrediting agencies, and financial aid information limits the transparency of the process. Even if credits are officially transferrable, if it is difficult to find that out, students will be discouraged from trying in the first place.

* Articulation policies: Each school sets its own policies about the courses from other schools that it will count as credit. For instance, even when a public institution and a for-profit institution are accredited by the same body, public institutions (importer) are reluctant to accept credits from for-profit colleges (exporter), where for-profit colleges (importer) are very likely to accept credits from public colleges (exporter). A similar dynamic exists among 4 year and 2 year institutions. These are similar to regulatory policies that might be enacted at a national level. For instance, a government may decide that only products from countries with certain environmental or labor laws are allowed to be imported.

* Graduation Requirements: Even if a school does import another school's credits, other regulatory barriers are likely. For instance, an importing school might count a student's course as credit, but not credit toward graduation, or not credit in a specific discipline necessary for graduation. Though not monetary, this is, effectively, a tax. A student may import the course as credit, but may have to pay for this course again or pay for a different course when it's unnecessary to meet graduation or distribution requirements.

* Accreditation: The regional accrediting agencies are funded by their member institutions. The agencies' purpose is to help institutions improve. However, because this is a quality assurance body created by the members that it oversees, its ability to impose dramatic change, impose requirements contrary to its members vested interest, and to respond to external forces is dramatically limited. By linking regional accreditation to a student's ability to receive federal financial aid, regional accrediting agencies are the de-facto quality assurance bodies for higher education. This is similar to the multi-national groups that govern economic policy. For instance, an accrediting body could be compared to the OECD, European Union, or World Bank donor countries.

* Price Subsidies: Higher educatoin is one of the few industries where for-profits, non-profits, and publicly subsidized non-profits offer the same product at radically different prices. All states subsidize their public higher education systems to greater or less degrees. These subsidies, in turn, affect tuition. With tuition artifically lowered, it is difficult for cost-effective solutions to enter the marketplace. The United States continually complains about how EU countries subsidize AirBus in its competition with Boeing in the sale of aircraft.

* Information Asymmetry: This means that the school knows its articulation policies and graduation requirements, but it is extremely difficult for the student to find it out. It is even more difficult to find it out for many schools that the student might be considering. Without having the appropriate information, the student is discouraged from piecing together a lower-cost educational path.

In every other industry, new technologies increase productivity which drives costs down, improves quality, or both. Usually, it is the free market which forces these productivity improvements. Companies that use new technology effectively, frequently start-ups, force established companies to comply, thereby improving the productivity of the entire market. In education, though the technologies exist to dramatically reduce costs and improve quality, the market dynamics do not.

However, I believe that market realities are creating serious cracks in the regulatory structure that protects existing colleges. First, the cost of college continues to rise faster than the rate of inflation and students are seeking ways to piece together an affordable college education. Even the cost of publicly subsidized education has risen to the point that low-cost, high quality, unsubsidized course offerings can enter the market place. Second, students are increasingly turning to distance education for convenience, if not price. This creates a competitive market for distance education classes. As schools compete for students, they are increasingly willing to accept another school's credits in order to attract a new student. Third, as schools are increasingly willing to accept another school's credits, schools are being forced to examine and open up their articulation policies. Public institutions are increasingly enacting articulation agreements among themselves or are being forced to do so by the state government. Fourth, as a result of greater articulation agreements and the searching power of the Internet, credit transfer policies are becoming increasingly transparent. Fifth, the federal government is beginning to take a much harder look at the role of accreditors. Ultimately, the federal government needs to decide if an accrediting body is a self-improvement club or a quality assurance entity. If the former, the financial aid shouldn't be tied to it. If the latter, schools should have a more limited voice in the standards that it sets.

It is a shame that the Internet has not driven the cost of education down. However, today, in higher education, one can see the first cracks in a market that has been protected for a century. If I'm lucky, higher education will be cheaper for my kids than it was for me.