Author:
Chairman, Finance Rep, Policy Analyst
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Date Posted: 04:24:44 11/01/99 Mon
In reply to:
Chairman, Educational Planner, Policy Analyst
's message, "Re: A HYPOTHETICAL - SCRIPT - First Question!" on 04:18:49 11/01/99 Mon
CHAIRMAN: Yes? (pointing to one among several persons who want to ask questions).
FINANCE REPRESENTATIVE - QUESTIONS: I am from the Department of Finance. I understand that your proposal is based on the fact that funding for higher education is not going to increase in the foreseeable future. At the same time, you are advocating mass higher education. Can you give some comparative figures of what it would cost to expand higher education by building more institutions and maintaining them, and the cost of establishing mass higher education? How do you expect to fund the system and continue to maintain it? Personally, I doubt the practicality of the idea and hope we all are still around 20 to 30 years from now to see who is right.
POLICY ANALYST - ANSWERS: Thanks for asking those important questions. I am not going to predict how long I am going to live. That's why I want to start as early as possible to see if we can do something now about our present problems which will impact on our children and their children and future generations. I know all of us here who belong to various organizations have a responsibility one way or another for how things will work out for future generations. Whether we are in curriculum, finance, telecommunications, health, transport & other public utilities and the private organizations; we each can contribute to either the solutions or problems or both, of the future of our children and the nation.
To the questions, right now, I do not have specific figures to give. That is something I admittedly will have to ascertain with those of you who have actual expenditure figures. You are right to suggest financial implications of "higher education without campus". As I said in the beginning, there are many other implications some of which I am not yet clear about. I am working purely on very unsubstantiated guesstimates. To provide I perspective, our two universities alone cost a total of nearly $60 million to maintain each year. The total higher education budget is approximately $90 million of which about $15 million is for student scholarships to educate only 15,000 students. Members of the parliament each have available to them for 'slush fund', $500,000 x 109 gives a total of $54.5 million each year.
To give an example of the technology required for this new system. (Here, he shows an overhead about simulation of global costs of establishing a computer assisted learning program and explains the figures). If we take a rough calculation of say, 500 computers x $2,000 x 20 provinces works out to $20 million. Maintenance costs could be $2-5 million per year. Establishment of protocols for computer networking, programming and for the internet, I am not sure what this could be but if we start with a figure of $10 million, we would be looking at about $30-$40 million in the initial period for the system nation-wide. If we consider the number of students who could be served, we would have 500 computers x 20 provinces, we would have 10,000 students using the system each day (12 hours per day). If we're looking at a maximum of 4 hours per student per 16-hour day of open time for computer labs x 500 units in 20 provinces, we could be looking at 160,000 hours computer lab open time. This means a total of 40,000 individual potential users each day on the computer. And even if we are only using the system, say 60% of the time each day, we would still be serving a large number of students (24,000 students) as compared to the present full-time equivalent students in all post-secondary institutions of about 15,000 students. The per-student cost based on 40,000 students, (100% utilization of 10000 units at 4 hrs per student into 16 hours per unit of open lab time), of the present total cost estimates (including installation and operational costs) would be about $930 in initial period (3 years) and $165 in succeeding years. This compares favorably with the current student cost of $6,000 per student each year at UPNG, for example. This cost is for computer network and program systems and Internet facilities only and does not include tuition costs, electricity, modem and Internet communication user costs.
My suggestion is that someone is given the task of analyzing the economics - cost-effectiveness and cost-efficiency - of the existing delivery system and the proposed delivery system.
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