Grover J. Andrews serves as associate director for instructional services at the Georgia Center.
Meanwhile, a recent issue of Adult and Continuing Education Today, (Vol. XXV, No. 13), published by the Learning Resources Network (LERN) carries an article about the current crisis that is occurring in many educational institutions because of a lack of support for their continuing education departments. The LERN staff indicate a widespread national trend of declining support which ranges from major budget cuts to complete elimination of whole continuing education programs.
Historically, the support for continuing education has been an on-again/off-again cycle, but with differing purposes behind each. In the first half of this century, college-based continuing education programs were fairly independent, self-supporting operations that existed on the periphery of the organization as an auxiliary enterprise. The prevailing philosophy of the academy was to tolerate these activities as long as they were done by someone else and provided little or no interference to their own programs. From the mid-century through the 1980s, continuing education came to be viewed by many as a "cash cow" that generated income that should be made available to the academy for its own use. Thus, the move from centralized operations to decentralized responsibility within the academic units accelerated. Today a major trend of the 1990s in higher education appears to be resource reallocation and cost-cutting. According to the LERN research, "continuing education operations" is one of the cost items that is being drastically cut or eliminated by many institutions.
Another point of view was expressed by Kay Kohl, executive director of the National University Continuing Education Association (NUCEA), in the NUCEA Newsletter, (Vol. 11, No. 6). Kohl discusses an increasing practice by business and industry -- the for-profit sector -- to expand their own in-house continuing education and training capacity including the granting of degrees that are accreditable. Others are discovering the income potential of time-shortened, high quality, degree education that is high tech, 21st-century relevant. One such example is the corporate giant ITT that now operates 55 degree-granting technical colleges that are open to the general public. Between these two positions exists many variations for providing and/or securing their "own education" for their own employees and/or becoming competitors rather than consumers of education offered by established institutions of higher education.
While there are probably many contributing factors to each of the situations presented in the LERN and NUCEA publications, I believe one common thread is the cost factor. The costs to many institutions to organize and operate a quality continuing education program may be viewed by some as too high! The cost to academic units to participate in a centralized unit may be viewed by some as too high! The costs to the consumers may be viewed by many as too high! The cost to many institutions to meet or beat competition may appear to administrators to be too high!
The elimination of support for institution-provided continuing education may be shortsighted. A greater need for continuous education at all levels will be extraordinarily essential for the 21st century society. I believe that one of the basic fuels for the next century will be a "high octane" mix of information, communications, and education multifariously delivered. I am worried that the trend of the 1960s when we discovered that less than 5 percent of all postsecondary education, credit and noncredit, was provided by formal educational institutions, will continue. Philosophically, I believe that the keystone for all of education -- degree, certification, and noncredit continuing education -- should be the formal educational institutions of this country and the world. However, to succeed with this responsibility in the next century, educators must find a new paradigm for the academy that is flexible, accessible, and maintains the rigor of quality while avoiding useless rigidity, at reasonable costs.
As an institution reexamines its mission to provide education for the citizens of the next century, it must seriously ask itself what is to be its role and scope of activities in the educational enterprise. The costs of participation may be high and we may ask ourselves, "Can we afford it?" However, to be active partners in the next century, our question should be "Can we afford not to ...?"
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