US News & World Report has a list of the 30 best colleges for service learning. (It explains that “volunteering in the community is an instructional strategy [in which] service relates to what happens in class and vice versa.”) US News also provides lists of seven other approaches to enriching the traditional academic format of college, from “undergraduate research projects” to “study abroad.”

I am glad that service-learning is treated as a technique that is “believed to lead to student success.” It does help at least some students academically when it’s well implemented. I am also pleased that both my current and previous universities–Tufts and University of Maryland–make the top-30 list. These choices were made by an expert panel who reviewed formal nominations. They do not have the final word or ultimate wisdom; their list may be biased in various ways. But if you take it as a valid list, it supports a few generalizations about the field:

• Fully one third of the “winners” are small, private, liberal arts colleges, even though only a tiny proportion of American students attend such universities.
• The big state universities are not very well represented, notwithstanding their historic mission. There are just seven such campuses on the list: IUPUI, Maryland, Michigan, Michigan State, North Carolina, Portland State, and Wisconsin. That’s either because of an unintentional bias in the selection process or because the big state schools aren’t focused on community engagement.
• Among trend-setting, highly competitive Research I universities, the leaders in service-learning seem to include Brown, Duke, Michigan, Stanford, Tufts (if I may say so), Tulane, University of Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
• If I had a vote, I’d recuse myself on Tufts and Maryland but would strongly consider voting for Bates, IUPUI, Portland State, University of Pennsylvania (all selected by the US News panel), plus Pitzer, Georgetown, Minnesota, and Providence College, among others.

Anya Kamenetz has a good article in The American Prospect about the need for colleges and universities to cut costs. The problem isn’t just predatory lenders or cheap state legislatures; the real costs of college are rising far too fast and imposing unjust burdens on young people and their families. A major cause is probably the failure of higher education to achieve efficiencies that have cut costs in manufacturing and service industries. If everything else gets more efficient, but your activity doesn’t, you become more expensive. That’s the situation with both medical care and higher education.

Kamenetz is excited about initiatives like MIT’s Open Courseware, which is an impressive repository of materials created at MIT that can be used free anywhere else. The materials include notes, syllabuses, readings, illustrations, problem sets, and assignments. It is generous and helpful for MIT to contribute in the way (sometimes at a cost of $15,000 or more for each course, as Kamenetz notes). But the benefits will be substantial only if (a) the expense of developing course materials is normally a significant component of tuition, and (b) “courseware” can be used effectively by faculty who didn’t develop it in the first place. Both premises are possible, but I’m not overly optimistic.

I see two opportunities that might be more important.

First, I’m obsessed by the sheer number of people who are employed per student at particularly expensive colleges and universities. For instance, Harvard employs 2,163 faculty, 5,102 administrators and professional staff, and 4,800 clerical and technical workers for its 19,500 students. Only 18 percent of the total work force are professors. There are three students for every five workers. (I’m counting graduate students as students, even though most also teach, so the ratio is even higher.) Thus I wonder whether there could be significant efficiencies in administration. On the other hand, it may be that most of the administrative and professional staff are involved in externally funded research or clinical medicine, in which case shrinking their numbers doesn’t cut the cost of education.

Second, I do see prospects for new types of course that would be based on computers, would be cheap per student, and would complement the rest of the curriculum. Imagine that we continued to offer a college education that was broadly similar to what we provide today, with seminars, lectures, labs, and office hours. But students were expected to take one course that was a large-scale simulation of a complex phenomenon. They might, for example, be asked to play various roles (appropriate to their majors) in a fictional town that faced a health emergency. Students would have to conduct research, plan, and communicate as part of playing this game. Developing it would be extremely expensive (if it was any good), but it could be offered nationally at a marginal price of just a few dollars per student. Small local teams of faculty could customize the game for their own campus.

I wouldn’t want the computer to do the grading, but it could dramatically cut the costs of assessment by tracking the completion of assignments and scoring multiple-choice tests, leaving only writing to be hand-graded. If ten percent of students’ credits were earned in such courses, the saving would be almost ten percent of tuition. And if these courses were offered in residential universities along with traditional seminars, lectures, and labs, there would be little loss of face-to-face learning and community.

Colleges and universities commonly talk about serving “customers.” For example, Tufts University officially promotes a “Customer Focus” for its employees, which means: “Pay attention to and focus on customer satisfaction • Develop effective and appropriate relationships with customers • Anticipate and meet the needs of both internal and external customers.”

I understand and even endorse the motivations here. Students and others pay us lots of money, and we should try treat them respectfully, efficiently, and in a way that satisfies them. We can draw lessons from consumer-oriented businesses. For example, we mustn’t make students wait on long lines for no apparent reason, as was traditional in higher education even 20 years ago.

But we aren’t actually a business, and we don’t have customers. Our main products are education and new knowledge. That means that the people we “serve” include students, readers (and other users of our research), and collaborators in research or educational projects. Students and readers are not customers, because the customer is always right. His or her preferences should be met, if possible. In contrast, our job is to challenge, guide, and assess, whether the student or reader wants that or not.

Further, a customer is basically passive. Consumers actively choose what they want, but the company produces it for them. In contrast, our students, readers, and community partners actively co-produce knowledge with us. They are colleagues rather than customers. We need to teach them to see themselves that way (not as people who have purchased services).

We also have obligations that are not to any individuals but to abstractions, like truth and fairness.

Finally, the implication that we are providing an expensive customer service leads not just Tufts but the whole sector (including public institutions) to spend lavishly on things like residences, student activities, and support services. Harvard, for example, employs 5,102 “administrative and professional” staff (excluding clerical and technical workers and those in “service and trades”). Harvard has 112 full-time professional and administrative workers in its athletics department alone. This compares to 911 tenured faculty (or 2,163 total faculty). Harvard students no longer have personal servants assigned to them, as their predecessors did in the Gilded Age. But they have a similar number of service workers at their beck and call.

Meanwhile, the cost of higher education has far outpaced inflation for several decades, and four-year colleges have ceased growing even as the young-adult population expands. I am not sure that their core educational mission benefits from all this spending, but problems of access are becoming acute.