Profs in the cloud: the perils and promise of online learning.

• Author: Kahlenberg, Richard D.
• Position: Higher Education in the Digital Age - Book review

Higher Education in the Digital Age

by William G. Bowen

Princeton University Press, 200 pp.

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William G. Bowen, the former president of Princeton University, is a giant in the field of higher education, having written ground-breaking books in recent decades on affirmative action at selective colleges, class inequality in higher education, the factors that improve college completion, and the role of sports at universities. He has now turned his sights on two of the most important issues facing colleges: the problem of exploding costs and advances in technology as a possible cure.

Higher Education in the Digital Age, a slim and highly readable volume, is built around Bowen's Tanner Lectures at Stanford University and includes reactions from four astute observers, Stanford President John Hennessy, Harvard education professor Howard Gardner, Columbia humanities scholar Andrew Delbanco, and Daphne Koller, president of the for-profit online education company Coursera. The collection of voices provides a thoughtful and provocative discussion of the emergence of online education, which Hennessy says is hitting colleges and universities with the force of a "tsunami."

Supporters of online learning argue that it has the potential to pull off a higher education hat trick: reduce costs, raise learning outcomes, and reduce inequalities. Bowen, an early skeptic, now declares himself a "convert," though one who adopts a measured tone. "I regard the prospects as promising, but also challenging," he suggests.

Early in his career, Bowen helped identify the "cost disease" facing labor-intensive industries such as higher education and the performing arts, which have found it difficult to raise productivity. Bowen invokes Cornell economist Robert Frank's observation: "While productivity gains have made it possible to assemble cars with only a tiny fraction of the labor that was once required, it still takes four musicians nine minutes to perform Beethoven's String Quartet No. 4 in C minor, just as it did in the z9th century." To make matters worse, the wage premium for highly educated workers, like professors, has grown.

These increased costs are then passed on to students. And to add insult to injury, states have simultaneously been cutting back on the funding of public higher education, shifting the burden to students. In 1980, state appropriations accounted for 32 percent of revenue at public colleges and universities, but by 2009 the...