September 2, 2010
Public Higher Education Is ‘Eroding From All Sides,’ Warn Political Scientists
By David Glenn

The ideal of American public higher education may have entered a death spiral, several scholars said here Thursday during a panel discussion at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. That crisis might ultimately harm not only universities, but also democracy itself, they warned.

“We’ve crossed a threshold,” said Clyde W. Barrow, director of the Center for Policy Analysis at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. “Higher education is no longer viewed as a public good in this country. As tuition at public universities becomes more expensive, middle-class parents say, ‘I’ll bite the bullet and pay this for four years, but I don’t want to pay for it a second time with taxes.’ And families who are frozen out of the system see public universities as something for the affluent. They’d rather see the state spend money on health care.”

The mid-20th century suddenly appears to have been a golden age for higher education, said Wendy Brown, a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley.

“That era offered not only literacy but liberal arts to a mass public,” Ms. Brown said. “But today that idea is eroding from all sides. Cultural values don’t support the liberal arts. Debt-burdened families aren’t demanding it. The capitalist state isn’t interested in it. Universities aren’t funding it.”

The danger, Ms. Brown said, is that the public will give up on the idea of educating people for democratic citizenship. Instead, all of public higher education will be essentially vocational in nature, oriented entirely around the market logic of job preparation. Instead of educating whole persons, Ms. Brown warned, universities will be expected to “build human capital,” a narrower and more hollow mission.

And faculty members are unlikely to resist those changes at a time when two-thirds of them are on contingent appointments instead of the more secure tenure track, said Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors. They simply do not have enough power within the institution.

During a plenary lecture earlier Thursday, Mr. Nelson, who is also a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said he believes that the era of “incremental state funding for public higher education is basically over.” For the foreseeable future, he said, the traditional battles for higher state appropriations are bound to be losing ones.

“Complaining about the amount of external funding the university gets is a kind of amoral starting point,” Mr. Nelson said. “The first question should be how your institution spends the money it already has.”

His own campus, Mr. Nelson said, has recently seen several multimillion-dollar projects that were favorites of administrators but were not endorsed by the faculty.

“Without these boondoggles, they could pay contingent faculty more,” he said. “They could hire more tenure-track faculty. If they weren’t chasing these fantasy projects, there is a lot that could have been done to build the university’s educational mission.”

But Mr. Nelson did not take any of this as a reason to retreat. Instead, he said that faculty activists should open up a more basic debate about the purposes of education. They should fight, he said, for a tuition-free public higher-education system wholly subsidized by the federal government.

“Higher education needs to be reconceived as a public good and a human right,” Mr. Nelson said. “The only battle worth fighting now is a battle over fundamentals, not crumbs.”

You can also find the article at the Chronicle of Higher Education’swebsite: click here

Huffington Post
Anya Kamenetz
Posted: August 11, 2010 11:58 PM

A strange milestone was marked this week in the history of student loans. The total balance of all outstanding US student loans (given as $730 billion in DIY U, based on OMB estimates) is now estimated by Mark Kantrowitz of Finaid.org at more like $830 billion — $605.6 billion in federally guaranteed student loans, which have interest rates fixed and in some cases interest subsidized by the government, and a further $167.8 billion in private student loans, with interest rates that hover around 18-20%. Furthermore, Kantrowitz says, $300 billion in federal student loan debts have been incurred in the last four years.

This means the total balance of student loans has just surpassed the total balance of credit card debt for the first time in history. Each makes up roughly a third of the money Americans owe, mortgages excluded.

The good news here is that at least since the credit crisis in 2008, credit card debt has been going down slightly. Americans are saving more and spending less.

The bad news, of course, is that student loan debt is much more severe than credit card debt, because it can’t be discharged in bankruptcy. That means your only “recourse” if you can’t manage your loans is default, and in the case of federal loans, that means being pursued until you die. The federal government can and will seize your tax refunds, Social Security and disability payments until your dying day.

From where I’m sitting, the buildup of the national student loan balance looks like a massive betrayal of trust. People have been told for decades that this is “good” debt. In fact it’s really, really bad debt. Increasingly, high unmanageable debt burdens are falling on those least prepared to deal with the stresses and costs of college: the so called “nontraditional” adult, working-class student who is more and more likely to attend for-profit colleges that cost an average of around $14,000. And 40% and higher of these students are defaulting. (The same students default on their loans at higher rates when they attend for-profits, even controlling for demographics.)

This is starting to look more and more like the mortgage bubble. What was first depicted as an exapansion of opportunity now starts to look like a massive scam perpetrated on the socially disadvantaged. The difference is that while the mortgage bubble was happening, homeownership in the US actually rose to an all-time high. Whereas while we were adding $300 billion to our national student loan tab, college attainment among young people actually fell.

Someone with experience in the for-profit college marketing business told me that the same online sales geniuses who used to work for mortgage brokers are now employed by for-profit colleges. Their business is the same: fill out the forms, get the money, consequences be damned. Will we stop them this time?

If you are moved to action, check out the good folks at Student Loan Justice , who advocate restoring bankruptcy protection for all student loans.

You can also find this article at the HuffingtonPost by clicking here.

Five minutes before midnight on June 30, movers hauled the last boxes from a spectacular rented home in the Oakland Hills. The tenant’s lease was about to expire, and in his haste to get out, he left behind thousands of dollars of damage to the hardwood floors and Venetian plastered walls.

The tenant was Mark G. Yudof, president of the University of California. His midnight move was the latest chapter in a two-year housing drama that has cost the university more than $600,000 and has drawn senior U.C. officials into an increasingly time-consuming and acrimonious ordeal over the president’s private residence.

The effort to resolve Mr. Yudof’s housing problems has taken place while the U.C., the nation’s largest and most prestigious public university system, struggles with one of the worst financial crises in its history, including layoffs, student protests and tuition increases.

After six years as chancellor at the University of Texas, Mr. Yudof arrived here in 2008, vowing to bring fiscal responsibility to the 10-campus U.C. system. He chose not to live at university-owned Blake House, the traditional presidential mansion, which the university estimates requires $10 million of renovations and repairs.

Instead, Mr. Yudof, 65, moved with his wife into a 10,000-square-foot, four-story house with 16 rooms, 8 bathrooms and panoramic views. He said he needed the house, which rented for $13,365 a month by the end of the lease and was paid for by U.C., to fulfill his obligation to host functions for staff members, donors and visiting dignitaries.

Mr. Yudof held 23 such functions over a two-year period, according to the university. He also ordered a list of improvements and repairs — including air conditioning and 12 phones — that drove up costs and, according to staff members, tied up university officials in meetings and lengthy negotiations on issues ranging from water bills to gopher eradication.

After the Yudofs vacated the property at the end of June, Brennan Mulligan, the landlord, informed university officials that he intended to keep the U.C.’s $32,100 security deposit. Mr. Mulligan requested an additional $45,000 to cover the repairs for hundreds of holes left from hanging art, a scratched marble bathtub, a broken $2,000 Sivoia window shade and other claims.

“At some point, I got a call from the general counsel, and I’m like, ‘Why am I talking to the general counsel?’ ” said Mr. Mulligan, 40, a boyish Hong Kong-based business consultant and a U.C. Berkeley graduate who bought the Oakland house in 2003 after selling his bike-messenger bag company, Timbuk2.

“To me it’s like, ‘Is this how they spend their time?’ ” Mr. Mulligan said.

Among Mr. Mulligan’s list of complaints was the university’s failure to respond to a May 2010 notification from the East Bay Municipal Utility District that the district suspected a water leak on the property. By the time the leak was discovered, shortly after Mr. Yudof moved, the house’s bimonthly water bill had spiked to nearly $5,000 and 1.2 million gallons of water had trickled into the Oakland Hills, according to copies of the bills.

“It took the plumber 10 minutes to find the leak, literally 10 minutes,” Mr. Mulligan said at an evening interview at the house, the lights of San Francisco visible beyond the glass façade of the living room. “There was a broken pipe and a pool of water and I was just like, ‘Wow, this looks like that oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s just coming out.’ ”

Mr. Yudof said he was unaware of the leak.

On Aug. 5, Mr. Yudof’s aides presented Mr. Mulligan with a settlement agreement that would allow him to keep the security deposit and receive an additional $19,759.05. The university presented the written agreement to Mr. Mulligan on the same day The Bay Citizen filed a public-records request for information about the university’s expenditures on the house.

On Aug. 8, Mr. Yudof killed the deal.

He said he had been aware of the university’s discussions with Mr. Mulligan but balked at the settlement when he learned about the “outrageous and ridiculous” terms. He said his decision was unrelated to the public-records request.

“I thought it was totally inappropriate what they were doing,” Mr. Yudof said of his staff. “I don’t have to sign a settlement proposal drafted by the staff on this or any other matter. And I didn’t.”

In an interview last week, Mr. Yudof attributed the housing problems and higher-than-expected costs to Mr. Mulligan, whom he described as “the landlord from hell.”

He said Mr. Mulligan was often unresponsive to maintenance requests, and in one instance missed a payment to a vendor, forcing the university to pick up the tab for a significant repair.

According to university records, U.C. spent $19,423 to repair a two-person elevator that sometimes stalled between floors. E-mails released by U.C. under The Bay Citizen’s records request show that Mr. Yudof’s wife, Judith — who has knee problems that make it difficult to climb stairs — gently implored Mr. Mulligan to pay a delinquent bill from the elevator’s installer, which refused to service the elevator until the bill was paid.

The university ultimately used another company to repair the elevator; on one occasion U.C. paid $3,180.24 in overtime ($530.04 per hour) to complete the work, according to a copy of the bill.

Mr. Mulligan said he unknowingly missed the payment to the elevator company but then immediately sent a check by express mail. He said he did not see a bill from the university until he entered into negotiations for damages two years later and U.C. officials sought reimbursement.

The university paid $70,806.73 to move Mr. Yudof to Oakland from Texas and $39,107.30 to move him again when Mr. Mulligan refused to extend the lease. The frantic move from the Oakland location lasted from 7:30 a.m. to 1:45 a.m. the next day, according to billing records. During the three-week search for a new house, the Yudofs took up residence in a discounted suite at the Claremont Hotel & Spa in the Berkeley Hills, at a cost of $8,394.16 to the U.C.

“I don’t think it was a good experience,” Mr. Yudof said, referring to living in the Oakland house. “Under the circumstances, it was the best I could do.” The home was comparable to that of other university presidents, he added.

The U.C. spent $127,443 on security at the house, following threats against Mr. Yudof and several visits to the house by protesters.

Despite the near settlement, university officials said they intended to go to mediation with Mr. Mulligan and were prepared to litigate to recover the security deposit and other damages.

The money spent on the house came from a private endowment. It was a relatively small sum for a $20 billion, 180,000-employee public university that supports 10 campuses, five medical centers and a national laboratory. But the lavish spending and the numerous hours spent by university officials managing Mr. Yudof’s personal affairs have chafed some members of his team.

“He essentially turned the Office of the President into his personal staff,” a university official said.

Much of the activity took place out of public view. The Office of the President filed at least six reports of “interim actions” related to the house that took place between public meetings of the Board of Regents.

Mr. Yudof and his wife have settled into a new home in Lafayette. The rent is $11,500 a month. The house “potentially will save the university as much as 25 percent of what was required to maintain the previous residence,” according to a report filed to the board.

The new house is 4,837 square feet, less than half the size of the Mulligan residence.

Tucked in the new lease is a provision designed to help protect the landlord against damages incurred. “Landlord must approve any items affixed to the walls,” it reads.

sfainaru@baycitizen.org

Also available here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/education/22bcyudof.html?src=mv

Much of the news surrounding the University of California system has involved whether the network of universities will be able to survive its current budgetary crisis without shrinking in size or quality. In that context, it is no surprise that Christopher Edley Jr.’s plan to use online education to expand the university’s footprint “from Kentucky to Kuala Lumpur” has turned some heads — and churned some stomachs.

Edley, dean of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley, has been using his position as co-chair of the education and curriculum working group for the UC Commission on the Future to advocate for an ambitious expansion of the system’s online arm that could eventually include fully-online bachelor’s degree programs designed to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars.

California is not the only state eyeing online education as a way to increase access and cut costs. But while many states are looking to use the popular medium to reach adult learners or save money at non-elite institutions, the University of California is a top-shelf research university that boasts one of the country’s most competitive undergraduate programs. If the system does end up offering an online bachelor’s degree, it would be a big step for online education.

Edley’s idea is still in its early stages and has not been adopted into any strategic plan. The University of California Board of Regents has offered only informal, preliminary support, and the systemwide Faculty Senate has approved only a pilot program for 25 to 40 low-level, high-volume courses — not a full-blown online degree program. Still, the rhetoric and sprawling, transformative vision Edley has been pushing have been received favorably by some while eliciting alarmed responses from others.

Members of a union representing graduate student-instructors at UC, finding Edley’s plan for “squadrons” of teaching assistants serving on “the frontline of online contact” more than a little dystopic, showed up to a regents’ meeting in May wearing patches that read “Dean Edley = Class(room) Enemy.” Edley’s goals for online education at UC were primarily profit-driven, they argued in a statement, and would “undoubtedly end in the complete implosion of public higher education in the embattled state of California.” Some professors and media outlets have expressed similar concerns.

Edley says that the implosion of the system is precisely what the online program would help prevent. The law dean-turned-futurist argues that even if a combination of spending cuts and state aid keeps the system afloat through its current crisis, the system is not equipped to enroll the 45,000 additional students it would need to close its $5 billion budget deficit.

“We face an enrollment gap, rejecting more and more eligible Californians,” Edley wrote recently in an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle. “And a UC education likely will be decreasingly affordable, especially for the middle class… Our purpose is to advance knowledge while democratizing excellence. To do that, we must innovate.”

Edley says it is important that a pilot program affirm the quality of online courses before further stages of his vision are put into action, but he also seems to believe a future in which UC offers online bachelor’s degrees is inevitable, and that the university should take steps toward doing so with all practical speed. “Eventually, there will be online credit-bearing courses and B.A. degrees in the so-called quality sector,” his working group wrote in its proposal for the pilot. “…UC should be first, as soon as possible, and our ambitions should err on the side of boldness.”

The Pivotal Pilot

The pilot, which could begin as soon as this fall, would have a team of professors and course designers move 25 to 40 entry-level courses from the classroom to the Web in an effort to assess the “effectiveness, cost, and sustainability of online education.” Most of the UC courses that qualify as likely candidates are oriented to mathematics and the natural sciences — calculus, chemistry, physics, economics, etc. — but the system’s highest-volume courses also include freshman composition, sociology, and world history.

Functionally, the pilot courses would be similar to the 78 credit-bearing courses currently offered across the UC system; only students currently enrolled in the university would take the courses, and there would be no fully-online degree track. The difference is that the pilot would focus on using the latest online teaching tools — particularly synchronous features such as live chats and videoconferencing — to replicate the quality of the in-person survey courses they would replace. As the pilot goes forward, a research team will be tasked with exploring a number of questions, including learning outcomes, cost, faculty workload, the ability to prevent cheating, and the relative effectiveness of different methods within the realm of online teaching.

While Edley’s working group recommended in June that the university wrap up the pilot and interpret the data it produces “no later than fall 2011,” an official response issued by the Berkeley division of the Academic Senate on July 20 described this timetable as “impossibly optimistic,” noting the need for multiple trials and deliberate analysis. Edley admits now that the pilot could take considerably longer (“I personally am prone to err on the side of impatience,” he says), and that he is leery of outpacing support from the faculty.

“Timing will be inevitably determined by a mixture of substance and politics,” he says. “That’s the way the world works.”

Still, Edley says he hopes the pilot progresses as quickly as possible, and he recommended as much in a presentation last month with the Board of Regents, which has taken a particular interest in the law dean’s plan for global expansion and nine-figure profits. The university could not immediately provide the details of its financial modeling, but other documents suggest that the money would come from tuition, fees, and perhaps licenses for “premium access” to course content. Daniel Greenstein, the vice provost for academic planning at UC, tells Inside Higher Ed that the revenue projections are “untested assumptions” based on “what we see out there in the world.” Testing profitability, Greenstein says, would be one goal of the pilot program.

Pockets of Dissent

On the whole, professors have supported preliminary steps toward expanding UC’s online offerings. In May, the Faculty Senate unanimously endorsed the pilot program. Several campus-level faculty senates have even offered up their own courses as guinea pigs. “Advancing technology,” wrote a task force dispatched by the Academic Senate last year to study the issue, “may offer a significant opportunity that UC has yet to exploit, although it is well-positioned to do so.”

But some UC professors, like the graduate students’ union, remain skeptical. The Berkeley Faculty Association — a group of about 300 professors — put out a report in May that did not condemn the pilot but voiced concerns about where Edley wants it to lead.

The association was particularly unnerved by the idea of graduate student-instructors being the “frontline of contact” with online students, as Edley put it. For some, that sort of talk evokes a model many for-profit institutions have used to keep payroll expenses low and administrative control high: have full-time faculty put together the syllabus, then hire less-expensive adjuncts to deliver it. Faculty resistance to this sort of University of Phoenix-inspired arrangement was a major factor in last year’s implosion of the University of Illinois Global Campus, a similarly ambitious online effort. (Other large online programs based at large state universities have been more successful: UMassOnline enrolls nearly 50,000 students and earned the University of Massachusetts $56.2 million last year, and Penn State University’s World Campus has garnered similar returns.)

Wendy Brown, a political science professor at Berkeley who co-authored the Faculty Association report, told Inside Higher Ed that she has no qualms with a pilot going forward. What she worries about is the way Edley has been framing it as a first step toward something larger and perhaps more controversial. Inferring from Edley’s idea of graduate student-instructors forming the “frontlines of contact” with online students, Brown says she worries the law dean’s proposed cyber-campus would contribute to the displacement of full-time faculty members with adjuncts — a perennial concern among traditional faculty everywhere, given the decline of tenure and the popularity of the Phoenix model. “This is absolutely part of a larger set of proposals referred to by the Commission on the Future that describe the necessity of shrinking the letter-rank faculty and increasing part-time faculty,” says Brown.

Edley says this is not his agenda at all. He says he imagines online courses as being structured just like the existing face-to-face versions they would replace: A professor develops the syllabus and delivers the lessons, and graduate assistants lead discussion groups and grade assignments, under the professor’s supervision. Edley says that rather than enabling layoffs, the cyber-campus would prevent them, and might even allow the university to grow its full-time faculty in a way that it could never hope to under current conditions. “Our financial estimates make very clear that this might allow us to expand the number of ‘ladder’ faculty, rather than substituting adjuncts,” he says.

Other critics fear for the university’s brand. “UC faculty members are skeptical now, but in the future, employers and graduate schools will be,” wrote the San Francisco Chronicle in a July 18 editorial. The Berkeley Faculty Association report alluded to similar concerns about the capability of graduates who earned their degrees apart from “the academic-intellectual benefits of university culture.” Both seemed to imply that a University of California degree encompasses something beyond just a sequence of classroom sessions; it also means that the degree-holder has, in a less tangible way, benefited intellectually and socially from spending years immersed in campus life.

“Tons of research” supports the thesis that the online platform itself does not diminish in-class learning in many disciplines, says John Bourne, executive director of the Sloan Consortium and editor of the Journal of Asynchronous Learning. But what about the intellectual and social growth that purportedly occurs outside the classroom at traditional colleges? How important is it, from the standpoint of a graduate’s capability, and a university’s reputation, that students take part in the extracurricular parts of campus culture that online education has so far been at a loss to replicate?

Edley says that question interests him, and that he wants to explore it in the pilot “if we can.” But he points out that any progress toward an answer would be limited, since most students in the pilot will be currently enrolled students from the campus. Really, one would need a sample of students taking all their courses remotely. A draft prospectus for the pilot program mentions that some “fully distant” students could be studied through summer sessions and “cross-campus and dual enrollments”; but in order to get the strongest sample one would need an online bachelor’s program already in place. And even then, it might be years before researchers could have any idea of the post-graduate success of fully online students relative to their on-campus peers.

Really, the law dean says, people need to let go of the idea that the two types of experience can be compared in a tidy, definitive way. “Quality,” says Edley, might mean something completely different in the online world. “What will be key,” he says, “is making sure we don’t define quality as replicating or simulating everything that goes on on campus, but instead ask what is fundamental to quality, and then examine the trade-offs.” This, of course, is also an ambitious research question — one that could also be hard to resolve within a pilot.

Selling The Big Picture

Edley has hardly been deterred by his critics. His working group brought an expanded set of recommendations to a June meeting of the Commission on the Future, advising that the commission tell President Mark G. Yudof to, among other things, prepare a systemwide business plan leveraging online courses to “generate a large new revenue stream” that would prop up the system’s brick-and-mortar operation. Long-term net revenue from these courses “would be comfortably into 9 figures,” the group predicted.

The manifesto-like document also notes that while an aggressive approach to building the proposed cyber-campus might come with “internal political and bureaucratic risks,” it would be the best way to “mobilize support from potential donors, the legislature, and the general public.” Edley told Inside Higher Ed that he imagines the university might like to get its feet wet by first running a fully-online associate degree program before taking the plunge on the bachelor’s, but he reiterated the sense of urgency he has been trying to promote about beating peer institutions to the punch.

The Commission on the Future discussed the online manifesto at a meeting last month. “The consensus was that yeah, this is something to be moved forward — to be kept on the table when other things were taken off the table,” says Steve Montiel, a spokesman for the president’s office.

Edley’s plan won him a coveted audience with the Board of Regents this month. The law school dean took a more restrained tack in his presentation, emphasizing that fully online undergraduate degrees were “not on the table right now,” according to a copy of his PowerPoint presentation; in a slide listing things the Commission on the Future is “likely” to propose, he left off fully-online degree programs, predicting only that the commission would call for an “expeditious execution of the Online Pilot Project.” He also reiterated that faculty support would be essential to the fate of the cyber-campus, and that “large-scale deployment” would work only “if quality is achievable.”

The meeting was purely informational, and it would likely be a while before the Regents voted on any formal action related to Edley’s broader vision. But apart from one or two skeptics, the governing body took favorably to the idea of UC offering an online undergraduate degree program down the line if the pilot pans out, says Montiel. The Commission on the Future, meanwhile, would likely revisit Edley’s plans either next month or in the fall, he says. The commission will likely make its formal recommendations by the end of the year.

So all eyes are on the pilot program, on whose success any subsequent transformation of the system’s undergraduate curriculums would appear to turn. Beyond that, the question is to what extent the UC faculty — which so far has been guaranteed final say over any online course — would continue to support the administration if it moves forward on some of the more controversial aspects of Edley’s vision.

At a meeting of the systemwide Faculty Senate last week, representatives expressed general wariness of “the proposal to accelerate and broaden an online instruction program and to initiate planning for a coordinated approach” to a larger push for online education.

The general mood was clear, says Fiona Doyle, chair of the Berkeley division of the senate: Go ahead with the pilot — but as far as fully online bachelor’s degrees stamped with the seal of the University of California, those kids in Kentucky and Kuala Lumpur should not hold their breath just yet.

For the latest technology news from Inside Higher Ed, follow IHEtech on Twitter.
— Steve Kolowich

The article can be found by clicking here

(1) “UC professors raise doubts about online degree plan”; and
(2) Editorial: “Online education? Beware of glitches”

(1) UC professors raise doubts about online degree plan
lrosenhall@sacbee.com
Published Tuesday, Jul. 27, 2010

The University of California’s interest in offering an online degree is opening a new chapter in the debate over online education.

Many professors question whether the state’s premier university system should tread so deeply into cyberspace, where other prestigious universities have failed – and where some less selective colleges have thrived, sometimes with programs of questionable quality.

The professors are concerned that a virtual UC will waste limited resources, compromise the university’s academic reputation and divert it from its primary mission of educating California’s top-performing students.

The plan’s creator – Christopher Edley, dean of UC Berkeley’s law school – says the opposite is true. He contends UC can maintain its rigor online and that doing so will allow the university to reach more of those stellar students at a lower cost.

“How do we provide access to UC quality when the state is not there for us and the student demand is growing? We need an alternative to the bricks-and-mortar model, and this may be it,” said Edley, who also serves as an adviser to UC President Mark Yudof.

Edley acknowledges his biggest hurdle is getting buy-in from UC’s academic senate, the formal voice of the faculty. Their support is critical to any major educational changes.

Edley is kicking off the online initiative by raising $6 million from private donors to cover the cost of a pilot project. The money will be used to produce 25 to 40 online courses in subjects such as calculus, chemistry and freshman composition that typically draw huge enrollments at the lower-division level. Students at any of UC’s 10 campuses will be able to take the online classes, which may be available by spring. For the pilot, they’ll pay the same tuition as they would taking classes in person.

Edley envisions steadily expanding UC’s Web presence: adding upper-division courses, then offering a bachelor’s degree online, and eventually allowing people around the world to enroll in the virtual UC. Tuition for an online degree, should one be created, has not been determined.

Making a degree available online would allow UC to earn money that could be pumped back into the traditional campuses, Edley argues.

Not so fast, say many UC profs.

“Are we in the business of making money by selling services to non-students?” asked Dan Simmons, a UC Davis law professor who is vice-chair of the statewide academic senate. “People have created a set of expectations about the potential for online education that is not really there.”

Even professors who support a greater use of technology say the plan has flaws. Some like the idea of expanding online offerings, but don’t think UC should offer an online degree. Others think online curriculum should be developed and controlled by academic departments on each campus – not by UC’s statewide bureaucracy.

“I think they’re looking for a one-size-fits-all model, and I don’t think that’s the way to go,” said Cynthia Carter Ching, a UC Davis education professor.

Ching embraces online learning. She will teach an online class this spring and, before coming to Davis, taught two online classes at the University of Illinois.

In those classes, Ching and her students convened for an online lecture once a week using conferencing software. Each student took part from a computer that streamed audio and had a microphone for asking questions. Students also participated in online discussion boards where they read and posted comments about class work.

Ching’s classes were not part of Global Campus, an ambitious effort the University of Illinois launched a few years ago to create an entirely online program. It ultimately failed due to opposition from faculty and lack of interest from students.

In recent years, online learning has grown more common at American colleges. In 2002, less than 10 percent of college students nationwide were enrolled in an online class, according to research by the Sloan Consortium. Six years later, that number had grown to more than 25 percent.

But just because students take classes online doesn’t mean they like them.

“Even with a good instructor who monitored and maintained all the online material, I’ll never take an online class again,” James Mouradian, a UC Davis student majoring in computer science, said in an e-mail interview.

“The in-class lectures were a hundred times more valuable. You cannot ask questions to a computer and get meaningful answers.”

That may just be a matter of using the right technology, say professors who teach online. Mouradian’s online art history course involved logging in to watch a pre-recorded lecture. There were no discussion boards or other formats for online interaction, he said.

UC Davis professor Robert Blake uses live video chats to teach Spanish. The videoconferencing software allows students to break into small groups and practice their language skills.

“We’re dealing with students more and more who are very used to social computing. They’re used to getting online and doing projects together,” Blake said.

He is developing Arabic and Punjabi classes that will be available online to UC students across the state. Still, he’s not sure UC should rush into offering an online degree.

“Fortunately, the University of California has a governance structure that will allow the faculty to determine what is the appropriate way to mix these things,” Blake said.

“I trust my colleagues to put on the brakes at the right time, and also stick their noses out and experiment.”

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

(2) Editorial: “Online education? Beware of glitches”

It’s hardly surprising that, in an era of diminished state support, California’s university leaders are trying to find new ways to work around budget-related enrollment restrictions.

Those restrictions have prevented qualified high school students from attending a UC campus, and reduced access to courses for those who do get admitted.

Yet as the UC Board of Regents ventures more deeply into the world of distance learning – online programs and degrees – they need to be careful to put the needs of Californians first and not undermine UC’s reputation for quality.

At their July 14 meeting, the regents launched an “Undergraduate Online Instruction Pilot Project” with two parts – one for UC-enrolled students and one for “fully distant” students.

The potential for tapping fee-paying students far from California – the “Kentucky to Kuala Lumpur” dream – captured the headlines and the controversy. Based on the experience of others, there is good reason to be skeptical of a model where individuals never need set foot on a UC campus to get a bachelor’s degree.

But discussion of the “fully distant” market ought not to mask the real impact of the online project, which will be on California students. That online shift deserves more in-depth debate.

The heart of the project turns to online courses (typically no face-to-face meetings) for California students to meet their introductory and lower-division course requirements.

These are courses that:

• Have the heaviest enrollments on UC campuses;

• Are most in demand by community college students planning to transfer;

• Are the most oversubscribed;

• And are the ones the faculty are less eager to teach.

So the pilot project proposes to create 25 to 40 online options for high-demand lower division and foundation courses: writing and composition, basic math, calculus, economics, statistics, biology, chemistry, earth sciences, physics, physiology, communications, history, philosophy, politics, psychology, sociology, American studies, anthropology, business.

This covers a big chunk of the undergraduate experience. Students and parents need to pay attention to this shift and weigh in.

Certainly online courses have advantages for students faced with the choice of a 300-seat lecture class or being shut out of a course. They have advantages, too, for students with work or family obligations.

But these courses should not simply be treated as “requirements to get out of the way.” They are the principal gateway courses for students exploring a major.

Equally important, for non- majors, they may be the only courses students take in science or politics, for example, which should give them enough to be informed citizens. These need to be strong, interesting courses.

Nor should issues of student accountability be overlooked. How do you know that a student, and not someone else, is actually taking the exam?

Based on experience elsewhere, offering quality online courses may not be a cost-saver. Good online courses are time-intensive.

A few news stories from Inside Higher Education provide cautionary tales on this front.

One September 2009 story describes how the University of Illinois Global Campus “crashed and burned.” This attempt to attract a global audience was “going to be a cash cow.” Instead, “it’s kaput.”

Attempting to put up a high-quality program against dozens of low-cost, for-profit online operations proved more difficult than advocates thought. The university invested millions and attracted only a few hundred students.

Another story, featuring the University of Texas, is headlined, “Texas Kills Its Telecampus” (April 9). Money, the story indicated, “played a role in the TeleCampus’s hastened demise.” This experiment depended on a large annual subsidy from the UT system, plus fees from the campuses.

The University of Massachusetts campus-based online initiative, UMassOnline, has seen better success. It hasn’t set unrealistic goals for cost savings. “Not all success is financial” is the motto.

Distance learning has a long tradition in this country and can be an avenue for achieving democratic ideals of access. But to maintain UC standards of quality and a California-first priority, it has to be done right.

That means it is unlikely to be a cash cow.

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

By Alisha Azevedo
Contributing Writer
Monday, July 26, 2010
Category: News > University > Academics and Administration

As the University of California tries to absorb massive cuts in state funding, a recent UC report shows that without addressing the many financial challenges graduate students face, the academic quality of the entire UC system could slowly erode.

The report, as well as a recent survey of UC Berkeley graduate students, found many concerns about graduate students’ level of compensation, working conditions, child services and affordable housing.

These concerns and possible solutions will be addressed when Steven Beckwith, UC vice president for research and graduate studies, presents the Biennial Accountability Sub-Report on Graduate Academic and Professional Degree Students to the UC Board of Regents in September.

The report, started in April at the request of UC President Mark Yudof, states that though the UC remains strong academically – producing 7 percent of all graduate students nationwide in 2009 – the UC’s level of financial compensation lags behind competitors.

The gap in compensation levels between UC schools and competing institutions – around $1,001 for students admitted in 2007 – could contribute to lower enrollment rates, the report states. Despite an increase in the number of graduate student applicants to the UC in the last decade, 43 percent of admitted students enrolled, compared with a 57 percent enrollment rate at other top research universities.

“We know that our stipends need to be more competitive,” Beckwith said. “I don’t know in this budget climate if we’ll be able to do that, but that needs to be a long-term goal.”

According to the report, recruitment of leading graduate students provides a strong incentive for retaining faculty. Christopher Kutz, chair of the UC Berkeley division of the Academic Senate, said faculty depend on graduate students for success.

“In humanities and social sciences, it’s because the graduate students are the future of the profession,” he said. “In engineering and science, your own work as a faculty member is collaborative with graduate students. They are the main source of labor in research projects. The success of the projects depends on the graduate students you recruit.”

A May survey by the UC Berkeley Graduate Assembly of 21 percent of campus graduate students found discontent regarding reduced student services as well as disproportionate financial burdens on the humanities and social sciences. Affordable housing, the “biggest single challenge” for graduate students according to Beckwith, also proved to be an obstacle for 32 percent of respondents.

The assembly used the results of its 50-question survey to draft a letter to Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, asking him not to cut graduate student positions in the upcoming academic year’s budget, among other requests, according to Graduate Assembly President Philippe Marchand.

Marchand said a 3 percent reduction in GSI positions campus-wide has led to larger class sections and more work for graduate instructors. Undergraduates receive less personal attention as a result, according to Jessica Taal, UC Berkeley chair for UAW Local 2865, which represents graduate student instructors.

“The problem that we face is that not enough graduate student instructors are willing to come forward,” she said. “They realize they are overworked, but most feel that it’s part of the experience of graduate school and are afraid to complain about conditions because they want a good recommendation from their department.”

Of the 9 percent who responded to the portion of the survey for graduate student parents, nearly half gave the lowest possible rating for parent services, expressing frustration with a lack of affordable housing, limited childcare and expensive health care.

According to Heather Pineda, director of the Student Health Insurance Plan, past efforts to provide coverage for graduate student dependents proved financially unsustainable.

“Unfortunately, most insurance carriers won’t offer a dependent program that’s affordable to such a small population of students,” she said. “It’s been our experience that students have more affordable options in the insurance market than we would be able to offer them.”

Henry Powell, chair of the Academic Senate, said whatever the cause, losing graduate students will have a reverberating effect beyond the university, calling graduate students the “lifeblood” of the UC and critical to California’s “knowledge-based economy.”

“These kinds of cuts hurt the whole state because our economy is very dependent on discovery,” he said. “Often innovative and powerful research is done by graduate students.”
Tags: University of California, UC Board of Regents, UC Berkeley Graduate Assembly, UAW Local 2865, UC Berkeley

Article Link: http://www.dailycal.org/article/109889

In discussing the fiscal problems of the University of California with the Chronicle of Higher Education, President Mark Yudof argued that driving the budgetary problems for the university is the high cost of instructional salaries. According to this common argument, many costs of universities can be reduced, but the high salaries of tenured faculty cannot be lowered, and so the only solution is to find a less expensive way of delivering courses.

In the case of the UC system, the proposed solution is to turn to distance education. Unfortunately, the entire UC strategy is founded on two lies; the first untruth is that instructional costs are high, and the second misrepresentation is that the fiscal crisis is being caused by rising costs and decreased state funding.

To prove that the university is making most of its decisions based on false and misleading information, I analyzed the university’s own salary data from 2009, and I found that less than 9% of its total compensation is spent on undergraduate instructional positions.

In other words, if we take the total UC payroll of over $9.8 billion dollars, and we subtract the pay of the administrators, staff, coaches, researchers, and professional school faculty (Law, Medicine, and Graduate), we find that the university spent $960 million on undergraduate instruction. If we now divide the total instructional salary costs by the number of undergraduate students, 170,000, we find that each student’s instructional costs was $5,647 in 2009.

It is important to stress that the UC receives, on average, $10,000 from each undergrad student in fees and tuition, and the university claims that a third of this amount goes to financial aid, so the university brings in a net of $6,700 from each student.

However, the state also funded each undergrad in 2009 to the tune of $14,500. This means that the university made an instructional profit on each student of $15,553 for a total of $2.6 billion. In other words, teaching undergrads is a highly profitable business, and these students actually subsidize everything else universities do.

Undergraduates Provide Corporate Welfare

Of course administrators, will argue that we cannot exclude the cost of administration, staffing, buildings, research, libraries, and facilities; however, my point is that we cannot blame the instructional salaries for the budget problems of universities. More importantly, it is economic suicide to try to save money by reducing undergraduate enrollments or by accepting more graduate students.

Universities refuse to admit that their use of inexpensive non-tenured faculty and large lecture classes has driven down the cost of undergraduate education because administrators want states and students to continue unknowingly to fund external research, administration, and other non-instructional activities. While I believe we must continue to fund the research mission, we need to be honest with our stakeholders concerning where the money actually goes.

Since most people do not know that undergraduate students are actually subsidizing research and graduate education, they do not protest the constant increase in undergraduate tuition. Moreover, since the administrators running universities cannot or will not admit that undergrads are their true source of income, they end up committing institutional suicide. We can begin to see why budgetary transparency is so important; without clarity concerning what part of the university makes and loses money, no rational decisions can be made.

Huge Investment Losses

The other big lie concerning university funding is the role of financial investments in destabilizing budgets. For example, while UC administration has argued that since the state reduced university funding by a combined $600 million in 2008 and 2009 (after we account for $718 million in federal recovery money), the system had to raise fees 41%, furlough employees, and layoff teachers. However, during this same time period, the UC lost over $23 billion in its investments.

This means that the investment losses were more than forty times greater than the state reductions, but the university administrators never talk about these huge investment losses. In fact, at the last UC Regents meeting, after I brought up the lack of discussion concerning the UC’s investment losses, the head regent, Russell Gould, exclaimed that, “Our investments have outperformed our peers in the last twenty years.” Not only was this statement incorrect, but it shows how the people overseeing the university do not want to deal with the real issues. Rather than looking at their own internal problems, the UC administration’s central strategy is to blame all problems on the state.

Promoting Virtual Slums

Instead of admitting that undergraduates bring in profits and financial investments have caused a fiscal crisis, the university is claiming that online education is the only solution to increased deficits and the need to enroll more students. In this version of virtual slums, the idea is to expand the number of underrepresented minority students in the UC system by offering them an online version of higher education.

When I asked the main promoter of this program, Berkeley Law School Dean, Chris Edley, if he was aware that the low-income students he wants to reach do not have fancy computers, broadband access, or sophisticated software, he replied that the university would have to provide these technologies, but it would be just a drop in the fiscal bucket. Since Edley, like so many other administrators, has no idea how the university makes and loses its money, he feels free to make outrageous claims that have little connection to reality.

If universities want to improve their fiscal health and improve the quality of their educational offerings, the answer is to increase enrollments, rein in high-risk investments, and reduce the cost of non-instructional expenses. Of course, this type of policy would require an honest look at how schools actually make and lose money.

October 7th Day of Action and October 23-24th Mobilizing Conference In
Defense of Public Education and Public Services

The historic actions, protests and strikes of last Fall and Spring
showed our state and the nation that students, teachers, staff, and
our communities are determined to fight against the cuts, layoffs, fee
hikes, and the shrinking access to public education and services.
However, our fight is far from over. On October 7th, supporters of
public education plan to unite and demand accessible, affordable and
quality education for all.

Public higher-education is an engine of economic growth that benefits
all communities at large, but students of color across the nation are
being tracked into non-academic programs while ethnic and multi-
cultural classes are being cut. As public universities raise tuitions
to the level of private institutions, students of all ethnicities are
being denied access to higher-education on the basis of income— an
economic barrier that disproportionately affects people of color.

The knowledge and innovation coming from graduates of state-supported
universities create far more wealth in the state than the education’s
cost. Better educated citizens are shown to be more productive, pay
higher taxes, create a stronger economy, and provide more jobs. Thus,
it is important to seek out more revenue sources to support education
and public institutions, rather than focusing on decreasing funding.

The politicians and administrators say there is no money for education
and social services. But if there is money for tax cuts and prisons,
why is there no money for public education? Schools are now suffering
from inadequate staffing and pay-cuts. However, California’s budget
cuts are not only restricted to the education system. Our health
services, public infrastructure, transportation and library systems
will also continue to deteriorate. These issues are all intertwined.
How do we stop the degeneration of California?

We, the people, have the democratic power to beat back these attacks
and ensure that our public institutions effectively serve the public.
But to do so, members of all regions and sectors — adult-ed,
students, workers, teachers, activists, unions, and community
organizations — must unite and take action on October 7th, and
contribute our voices and thoughts to the October 23-24 conference at
San Francisco State University to defend public education.

The purpose of the October 23-24 conference is to democratically
propose demands, devise an action plan, and create a structure capable
of defending public education and public services for the benefit of
all.

We invite all supporters of education across the nation to attend and
participate in the October 7th day of action and the October 23-24th
conference.

For more information, visit http://defendcapubliceducation.wordpress.com

Sunday, July 18, 2010
Christopher Edley, dean of UC Berkeley School of Law, say…

A handful of administrators at the University of California are spearheading an effort to create an ambitious online educational program for undergraduates. The idea is that UC could become the first top-tier American university to offer a bachelor’s degree over the Internet. It’s a thought-provoking, fascinating and innovative concept. It’s also a highly risky experiment.

Online education has a place – even in the university system. For students, it’s impossible to beat the convenience and the accessibility of online learning. For workers, it can be a great way to expand their knowledge base without having to leave their jobs. Corporations, small businesses, even traffic schools – all of these institutions have shown that there’s a positive place for online education in our society.

But that doesn’t mean that the UC should jump into the fray.

As it stands now, online education is a hodgepodge effort by private, for-profit companies that are making gobs of money – but not providing much in the way of quality to students. UC Berkeley Law School Dean Christopher Edley, who is leading the online charge, said he first noticed this while serving on a university task force about community college transfer students. He noticed that large numbers of UC-eligible students – particularly African American and Latino students – were enrolling at for-profit online universities, such as the University of Phoenix, after graduating from community college. For whatever reason, he said, many students find online education more attractive than the experience they’d get at a bricks-and-mortar institution.

“Our inability to move quickly is creating a gap in the marketplace that these other institutions are running to fill,” Edley said in a recent meeting with the editorial board.

Edley envisions a high-quality, high-interaction method of online instruction – one that would provide lots of support for both teachers and students. “The excellence issue is what we have to resolve,” he said.

That’s for sure. All the PowerPoint slides and chat rooms in the world can’t replicate the power of an in-person learning experience, and it’s hard to see how a cyber UC degree would have the same status as a regular one. UC faculty members are skeptical now, but in the future, employers and graduate schools will be. Complaints about how a cyber college would dilute the university’s status and dumb down learning helped bring down a similar project at the University of Illinois after two years.

Apart from concerns about status – which are real, even if they’re not pretty – there’s an increasing amount of research that shows online learning is qualitatively different from regular learning – and not for the better.

Last month, the National Bureau of Economic Research began circulating a report from two Duke professors that examined computer use among a half-million middle school students. Their research found that the spread of home computers and Internet access corresponded with significant declines in math and reading scores. The study follows up on others that show that increased access to online computers isn’t good for student achievement. There’s also a growing pile of research showing that the way we learn online is different – that we learn things less comprehensively and more distractedly. Clearly, more research needs to be done, but does the UC want to jump into something that may be degrading learning, not increasing it?

There are also questions about money. The idea is that students would pay the same to take online courses as they do to take brick-and-mortar ones. It remains to be seen if they would be willing to do so. In addition, to teach the kind of online course that Edley is talking about, the UC is going to have to invest some money. Vice Provost Daniel Greenstein estimates that each online course would cost $16,000 to $50,000 to develop and deliver. (They could not answer how much it costs to develop and deliver a regular course.) There’s also ongoing technical support for both teachers and students, not to mention money for extra professors and graduate students as the university scales up to meet the demands of a larger audience.

Edley says many of these concerns will be addressed in a privately funded pilot project that will launch with 25 to 40 courses.

Given these realities – and the fact that the largest expense for any university is people – there is the possibility that this endeavor could be profitable. There is also the possibility that it could be a disaster – or that the UC would have to include so many students that it would compromise quality for the faculty, the online students and the students who have made the commitment to attend the UC in person.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/07/18/ED4S1EDLBO.DTL

This article appeared on page E – 4 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Richard C. Blum’s ownership of about $700 million in stock of two firms that run for-profit schools raises the question of whether his holdings are consistent with his role as a UC regent.

Michael Hiltzik

July 14, 2010

Conflicts of interest almost always involve money, but sometimes they raise more questions about the subjects’ perspective than about their wallets.

Consider the large investments University of California Regent Richard C. Blum has made in two for-profit higher education companies, Career Education Corp. and ITT Educational Services Inc.

Blum’s San Francisco investment firm is the largest shareholder in both firms, owning nearly 20% of Career Education and more than 10% of ITT Educational.

The firm’s combined holdings in these two stocks is valued at about $700 million, based on their recent market prices. That sounds like a lot of money, but I think we can concede as a matter of courtesy that Blum, who is a billionaire and the chairman of the real estate firm CB Richard Ellis, probably wouldn’t take any action as a regent merely to juice the value of those holdings.

But what do these investments say about Blum’s vision for higher education? Should an important official of what is arguably the most prestigious system of public higher education in the world also be a leading financial backer of an industry that has been coming under intense regulatory scrutiny because of persistent allegations of fraud?

Or put another way: If the chairman of the World Wildlife Fund held significant investments in, say, BP, wouldn’t people wonder exactly what he thought about how to balance environmental protection and oil industry regulation?

Blum, who was appointed to an unpaid 12-year term as regent by Gov. Gray Davis in 2002 and is the husband of U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, holds two degrees from Berkeley and has been a generous donor to the school. He has been especially outspoken about the role of UC and shortcomings in its strategic planning and administrative structure.

It may be inevitable that the holdings of a professional investor such as Blum would create the appearance of a financial conflict with some of UC’s own financial dealings. UC’s endowment pool and retirement fund have also held shares in Career Education and ITT Educational Services. UC says the peak value of the two stocks in the portfolios it outsourced to professional managers was about $10.3 million.

As of the end of 2009, those managers had sold off those shares, although both stocks are still held in the university’s passively managed portfolios, which are the equivalent of index funds.

“It’s misguided to assume that there’s a conflict of interest simply because there’s an overlap between personal investments by University of California regents and investments made by the UC treasurer’s office,” Lynn Tierney, a UC spokeswoman, said last month. Her statement was issued in response to an inquiry by Peter Byrne, a Northern California journalist who has written about Blum’s investments, including those in the for-profit educational sector.

Tierney said UC has strict policies designed to inoculate the decisions of its investment managers from interference by regents. “The real issue is whether regents communicate with the treasurer’s office about specific investments,” her statement said. “They haven’t and wouldn’t, period.”

Yet that raises the question of whether Blum’s ownership in Career and ITT is entirely consistent with his role as a UC regent. The question arises because these companies belong to an industry with a reputation for placing profits before educational attainment.

Blum’s office didn’t respond to my request for a comment.

As Sen. Tom Harkin, D- Iowa, observed in a recent report following a hearing, “evidence suggests that for-profit schools charge higher tuition than comparable public schools, spend a large share of revenues on expenses unrelated to teaching, experience high dropout rates, and, in some cases, employ abusive recruiting and debt-management practices.”

More than 90% of students in bachelor degree programs at for-profit schools graduate with federal loans outstanding, compared with 60% at public universities — and they default on those loans at three times the rate, Harkin noted.

Federal prosecutors investigated ITT in 2004, looking for evidence it had falsified grades, attendance and post-graduate employment rates; the investigation was closed the following year.

As for Career Education, last year, the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Education noted that the company’s flagship institution, American InterContinental University, got full accreditation from a professional oversight body, the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Assn. of Colleges and Schools even after the commission found that AIU inflated credit hours assigned to some of its undergraduate and graduate programs. The inspectors found the accreditation to be “not in the best interest of students” at AIU and suggested that the department consider whether it should “limit, suspend, or terminate” its recognition of the accreditation body.

Students and former officials at Career Education’s culinary schools have alleged in court in Los Angeles and San Francisco that the schools misled students into believing that their admission policy was selective and their placement rates excellent.

The lawsuits allege that the schools are open to anyone with a high school diploma or equivalency and the money for tuition, and that the high placement rates include graduates with jobs as pastry assistants and Starbucks baristas.

A lawsuit filed in federal court in Atlanta by former officials at AIU alleges that the school has violated a congressional ban on paying recruiters based on the number of students they sign up — and that the pressure to meet enrollment quotas led some recruiters to sign up students who couldn’t read.

Career Education has taken issue with all these points. Its spokesman, Jeff Leshay, told me it considers the government’s assertion that the accreditors failed to act diligently in dealing with AIU “unfounded.”

He wouldn’t respond specifically to the allegations in the lawsuits but said, “we stand by the quality of education and student-focused services that we deliver at all of our institutions.” In fact, he said, the company fills a void by providing career-based education to “a diverse and underserved student population, including many working adults.”

But the enduring questions about the integrity and performance of an educational sector in which Blum is a major investor places him in a curious and, yes, conflicted position. He’s a major player in the preeminent public university system in the world — and in an industry with probably more congressional investigations in its future. Can one man wear such different shoes?

Michael Hiltzik’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Reach him at mhiltzik@latimes.com, read past columns at http://www.latimes.com/hiltzik, check out http://www.facebook.com/hiltzik, and follow @latimeshiltzik on Twitter.

latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-column-20100714,0,4328845.column