There is an old saying, and to be honest I do not know the veracity of it, “Booze, gambling and cigarettes are recession proof. The businesses of sin always make a profit.” I do not have any idea where it came from, but I have heard it said more than a few times. Recently a friend said to me that I should add higher education to the list, but that would be true if there was not a bigger problem with fuel costs. Regardless of political affiliation or political leanings there is a discussion that we should have. If you are an administrator, faculty member, or student you would be well served to think about energy. Fuel. Gasoline. The fact is there are a lot of people squirming around, pulling their hair out, and in general panicking about the economy. I am not here to panic or cry foul. I want to talk about planning and solutions considering reality. Before this last iteration in gas price increases began my students and I actually looked at this as an issue and developed some technology solutions.
Whether a school of higher education is a community college, a university, a residential or commuter university each type of institution has sensitivities to the high cost of fuel. Everything from the shipping costs of paper and food, to the costs of cutting the grass are sensitivities all higher education institutions face. Fuel is a thread through the entirety of the economy. The cost of energy and fuel is rolled up in the shipping costs, delivery costs, transportation costs, and can appear as invisible except for the higher cost of products. Petroleum fuels for heating and the impacts of radical shifts in costs can only be imagined for next winter.
Whether fuel costs stabilize or not, whether war occurs, or supplies expand, retract, or a dollar a gallon gasoline is right around the door. The costs of fuel should be considered and the radical demands of energy-centric-inflation on the entirety of the provisioning and transportation process must be considered. The world at five or more dollars a gallon of gasoline is a different place than we have ever seen in the United States. Scooter sales, and larger mass transit ridership, handle the issues of today. It was not that long ago that the City of Chicago was discussing the doomsday scenario of shutting down the Chicago Transit Authority. In some places public transit is supported primarily by fuel taxes and with higher costing fuel those taxes are decreasing along with consumer demand.
When winter comes as fuel prices climb change will occur.
In the summer with the heat of election feeding the debate mechanisms and censoring the trivialities of community it becomes obvious that the compass of decision will not swing until after it is to late to enact change. The University may be a liberal institution of thinkers, but the fact remains it is a conservative institution of decisions. I am unaware and quite honestly do not care about the scholarship of why fuel costs are rising. I am however interested in mitigating the financial disaster to my institution and my students. The University should serve as a model of resilience to unmitigated fuel costs. Knowing that the chain of economic costs are linking in everything that moves or is transported.
In preparing thoughts on resilience I wanted to consider methods for making the University stronger, more capable, and consider the impacts on a commuter type university, with a limited number of resident students, in a fairly industrial/metropolitan area. What tools can we bring to the table that would require little or no guidance and could be quickly implemented with minimal costs. There is discomfort in change, but in some cases, that discomfort is better than pain. To be self-sufficient is nearing on impossible for a University, but to be sufficient is possible. No single solution answers all questions, but we can get close. In no particular order:
1. Hybridize all courses so that whether taught on a Monday plus Wednesday schedule or Tuesday plus Thursday schedule only one day a week meets. If the course is a lab course have that session meet. Otherwise and in most cases hold class meetings online. The use of current open source or free tools such as Skype and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) create interactive methods of holding class lecture sessions. There are a variety of additional programs for Skype and other instant messenger (IM) services that allow for power point to be shared. There are of course a large number of for-pay services, but we already know fuel costs are increasing we are trying to do this on the cheap.
2. Attempt to schedule all on campus meeting for Tuesday and Wednesday so that students are only attending those days. Hybridizing normal courses and making students still come anyways for other courses accomplishes nothing. Integrated scheduling and logistics is a solved problem.
3. Use the current technologies of Blackboard/WebCT or other course management software whenever available. Many custom modules supposedly exist. For those schools without course management systems Moogle and other open source tools can be used. Googles blogger tool could be used for a lot of course management efforts fairly easily.
4. Change staffing to 4-10s or 3-12s wherever possible. Use instant messenger or other remote networking components for off campus communications. Take a page from companies that have primarily virtualized and let people stay home to work. First you save on their gas costs. Second you can keep buildings in hibernation mode decreasing fuel and heating costs.
5. No more in person meetings of staff/faculty, especially if they have to be called in from home, and more importantly limit the number of meetings. Use instant messenger and voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) wherever possible.
6. Record convocation speeches of the principles and disseminate the video over the Internet. Do not require an all hands meeting. Especially a meeting that would occur when many of the participants might not be on campus. We can look at the cost of a convocation as the hours or minutes of time involved. For a thousand personnel driving to work at an average of 20 mpg for an average of 20 miles round trip that is fairly large economic cost.
7. Make professor/teacher/lecturer office hours online. First do not make professors come to their office every day, but secondly do not make students travel if they do not have to. Push the technologies of IM and VOIP. Use current technologies to allow for flexibility and embrace it as an institution. Not everybody is capable or willing to be this flexible. Not everybody is comfortable with communication technologies no matter the technology. You cannot allow the technophobe to imperil the willing and able.
8. Communicate the intentions of the University to the students. Where the cost of driving to school for a 20 mile round trip student four days a week at 20 miles per gallon at two dollars a gallon was eight dollars. That is a little over two hours of work at a minimum wage job after taxes. Now triple those coasts to nearing twenty four dollars total at four or more dollars a gallon and you are nearing a full days work just to pay for gasoline to go to college. Students need to see higher education being smart enough to respond.
The academic rigor of my courses will not waiver in the site of financial hardship for my students. There is always financial hardship for students. Even the creaking branch of a willow will break if bent far enough. The student in financial stress will fall away from higher education given enough stress. I can feel the pain as the cost of gasoline increases are wiping out every pay raise I have ever gotten, and I watch the increasing costs of food erode any lifestyle I might lead. Fuel and gas prices are insidious as they thread through the economy.
A high school that has been bussing for a long time may find that bussing is not the answer. Consider the security of busses sitting in a yard with 100 gallon diesel tanks and diesel fuel over five dollars a gallon. It doesn’t take anybody very long to figure that 100 busses represent a sizeable fortune in fuel alone. Has the security increased on that yet? The same holds true for the University facility vans and cars. Here is an example of secondary effects as more security is needed for the changing environment. In other words as fuel costs increase the security costs associated with that fuel increase. The distribution mechanisms and costs increase. It will be interesting to see how long it is before armed guards are found on fuel trucks and protecting ground storage at gas stations. For the University system the parking lot with thousands of cars represents a treasure trove of liquid assets.
There may be nothing to this issue and people may continue to flex under the increasing financial burden of fuel costs. SUVs and other vehicles may become recreational vehicles infrequently driven. Other strategies may arise in the failure of the education system to bend as students drive electric cars, walk, or bike to work. The financial impacts of lost parking revenues may be interesting. Standardized costs of parking fees when students are no longer driving to work may get some University systems in trouble for charging fees where they are not being used. Broad taxations and fees only are accepted when the associated services are broadly utilized. University systems should consider the topic of people and fuel to be a retention issue for students, staff, and faculty.
There are a lot of suggestions about the use of technology to allow a University to continue operations in steeply rising transportation costs. The suggestions are along one thread of inquiry and as such do not answer all of the problems not did I intend to do so. I would like to see a dialog started that considers the issue creatively. But, in the end, the fact is that we have to do something. The world is changing and it did not end at two, three, or even four dollar a gallon for gasoline. It will change again when we reach five dollars a gallon. The world and our society will continue to adapt the question is do we want the higher education institutions to be resilient and sustainable in the matrices of that change?
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