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The Arrival of Free Online Education
(By Jeff)
For the second time in as many weeks, I find myself taking content cues from Kirsten Winkler over at Disrupt Education. This time, however, Kirsten’s posting merely gave me the budge I needed to publish, rather than being the basis for my entire post. (Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography comes to mind here…I seem to recall there being a passage in which he discusses learning to write simply by copying passages from the classics.) Kirsten’s Thursday post is about the various purveyors of free online education, including Coursera and edX (the Harvard-MIT partnership that was formally announced earlier this week). Wednesday, Kevin Carey over at The Quick & The Ed wrote a piece about the edX announcement.
(Personally, the topic is of interest to me because I recently enrolled in two online computer science courses: CS101 at Stanford offered through Coursera and CS101 at Udacity. Why am I taking two introductory computer science courses? Good question. First, I’m taking computer science at all because in hindsight, it’s painfully clear that it is the area I neglected the most during my formal education. For all the trouble I have speaking any of the various natural languages I took throughout my formal schooling years (Hebrew, French, German and Spanish), my ignorance vis-a-vis computers is astounding. And I’m taking two because I figured my first experience with online education provided a good opportunity to compare and contrast two providers. And perhaps the classes would complement one another. For example, the Stanford course focuses on Javascript whereas the Udacity one teaches Python. And I’m not taking three because that seemed overwhelming.)
As I intend to do with most things related to education technology, I’m going to leave the heavy lifting to people who know a thing or two about the sector. My contribution will be asking more questions than I can answer about how this will impact the issues that I follow most closely. I happened to be emailing with Casey Jennings (COO at 13th Avenue Funding) today and we were discussing just such questions. To what extent will free online classes make expensive brick and mortar learning obsolete? As Casey says, “Free is easy to finance.” Are there certain types of learning that can’t be “webified”? Kevin Carey takes a stab at the first question in his conclusion:
Harvardx won’t compete with Harvard University in the business of running admissions tournaments for aspiring members of the ruling class or assembling great minds in a single place to conduct world-class scholarship and reseach. Harvardx will be competing with everyone who isn’t Harvard University, or its general equivalent. Expensive, newly-arrived, brand-deficient for-profit online colleges probably have the most to fear, followed by over-priced private non-profits and then lower-quality non-selective public institutions. It’s going to be interesting to watch.
To the extent that he’s right, I think this can definitely be considered progress. “Expensive, newly arrived, brand-deficient for-profit online colleges” are, in my opinion, some of the biggest offenders when it comes to driving up overall student debt. Their costs are high and their product quality is generally lower. They make promises to students they can’t keep and then proceed to laugh all the way to the bank, taking tax-payer dollars and the financial futures of sadly gullible students with them. (See Senator Tom Harkin’s quote on one such online-education operator, Bridgepoint: “In the world of for-profit higher education, spectacular business success is possible despite an equally spectacular record of student failure. Bridgepoint is a private company, but it is almost entirely dependent on public funds…I think this is a scam, an absolute scam.”)
I really didn’t intend for this to become an invective against for-profit higher education. Afterall, Udacity is for-profit. The difference between Udacity and Bridgepoint, however, is night and day. Cost, quality and most importantly, the promises made to students are vastly divergent. I predict that the arrival of free online education will do more to “tighten” the nonprofit higher education industry. As the labor market wizens to what is and isn’t replaceable with respect to a traditional brick and mortar college degree and experience, both online and offline providers will adjust their services accordingly.
The Uncertain Future of American Colleges: A Roundup of Articles from Around the Internet
(By Jeff)
A quick run-down of a few recent posts from around the internet raise some interesting questions.
1. Frank Bruni’s Sunday NYT column entitled The Imperiled Promise of College. Without getting into specifics, Bruni laments the rising cost, declining benefit, and social stratification of American colleges and universities. It’s a well-told tale, but worth of repetition to be sure. Towards the end of his monologue, Bruni raises the idea of using incentives to nudge students towards “fields of studies that will serve them and society best.”
I don’t always try and bring it back to human capital contracts, but when they’re relevant, why not? One of the possible benefits of widely using HCCs is an alignment of incentives so the students who are interested in studying subjects which tend to lead to more lucrative careers (though certainly not a perfect indicator, one way to measure a profession’s utility to society is by its relative compensation) not only do so but also do so at the colleges and universities which are able to provide the best valuefor the dollar. For instance, if two students earn degrees in computer science, one from MIT (total tuition: $160,000) and one from University of Maryland, Baltimore County (total in-state tuition: $80,000; total out-of-state tuition: $120,000), and get jobs paying $80,000 and $70,000, respectively, right out of school, investors will see the latter student as earning a better ROI and will prefer to invest in her over the Harvard graduate. In effect, this will signal to Harvard that they must either lower their tuition (at least for computer science majors) or their CS graduates must earn higher salaries if they are to be competitive in a HCC finance market. (Side bar: If you aren’t familiar with Freeman Hrabowski, the President of UMBC, check out these profiles at 60 minutes and Time.)
People Capital is another peer-to-peer lender like SoFi that offers a way for students to secure loans outside of the traditional lending market. People Capital’s innovation is to use personal information such as school, major, GPA, SAT scores and length-of-time to graduation, rather than a student’s credit score like commercial lenders, to measure risk and determine interest rates.
(Side bar #2: Business Week has, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive measurement of college ROI data to date. Click here for analysis, data table, and methodology. I hope to write a future post on this topic as well, so do check back if you’re interested.)
Naturally, this leads to the question of whether colleges and universities should charge differential tuition rates based on a students course of study. Complications abound, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a valid question. I predict we’ll start hearing much more about this in the coming years as the higher education industry gets increasing amounts of push back about rising tuition and decreasing benefits.
2. 
For another high-profile inquisition into the benefits of college, see Richard Vedder’s Why College Isn’t for Everyone in Business Week. My first reaction: I worry about the implications of Vedder’s not-for-everyone mindset on education reform efforts that are predicated on a belief that everyone should be able to go to college (a belief that I share), especially in light of the absence of any widely available alternatives to a college degree that allow for even the hint of possibility for upwards social mobility. My second reaction: My first reaction still stands, but Vedder’s commentary on the necessity of understanding the limitation of statistical averages in telling a story is incredibly important.
Third, not everyone is average. A non-swimmer trying to cross a stream that on average is three feet deep might drown because part of the stream is seven feet in depth. The same kind of thing sometimes happens to college graduates too entranced by statistics on averages. Earnings vary considerably between the graduates of different schools, and within schools, earnings differ a great deal between majors. Accounting, computer science, and engineering majors, for example, almost always make more than those majoring in education, social work, or ethnic studies.
The phenomenon he’s referencing here is that although lifetime incomes averages of college graduates are vastly greater than lifetime income averages of non-college graduates, the variability in lifetime incomes is significant and too-often ignored. In fact, it is this variability in individual lifetime incomes that make equity instruments (such as human capital contracts) far more appropriate than debt instruments (such as loans) for financing education.
(Side bar #3: I recently came across two more interesting equity-based proposals for financing education which I will profile in more depth soon. For now, though, check out this article on CNN that focuses on a early-stage proposal for an alternative to traditional higher education finance at Clarkson University in Upstate New York. The article also briefly mentions an organization called Fix UC which advocates for an entire overhaul of the tuition system throughout the University of California system by very directly utilizing a human capital contract set-up.)
3.
Planet Money produced a succinct infographic/text combo entitled What America Owes in Student Loans as a part of its ongoing What America (not sure if this is the official name or not) series. 
With the caveat that the Planet Money piece relies heavily on averages (see #2 for forewarning), author Lam Thuy Vo presents an interesting counter-conclusion to Vedder’s:
But it turns out that the rise in total student debt is not primarily the result of each student borrowing more money. It’s the result of more students going to college.
“The main force pushing up the total amount of outstanding student debt is growth in the number of people going to college,” said Sandy Baum, an analyst at the College Board.
Average debt per college graduate is rising — but not nearly as fast as total student debt.
Now, it may very well be that both Vo and Vedder are correct, but I wonder what it says about each of them that they choose to interpret the data the way the do?
4. I don’t make a habit of trolling the pages of the American Enterprise Institute website, but when a Google search or an article I’m reading points me in that direction, I’m not opposed to exercising my open mind. So, with that introduction, I give you Lights, Camera, Crazy!, a book review of Andrew Ferguson’s Crazy U, by Michael Rosen. The book blends, as Rosen writes, “broader cultural, political and economic insights into higher education trends with a deeply person, and surprisingly moving, account of Ferguson’s and his son’s own experience visiting, applying to, and ultimately enrolling in college.” Topics in the book range from skyrocketing tuition, college rankings (I’m getting tired of saying this, but rankings are also a planned topic for a future post), standardized testing and the blogs, brochures, websites, fellow parents and admissions officers that make up the rest of the hellish admissions process.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last few years of being involved in education in various capacities, thought, it’s that no other sector of life leads to stranger bedfellows. Somewhat confusedly, I found myself nodding in agreement (though I’m going to tell myself it was only in acknowledgement) during a few passages of the review. Namely:
Much of this obscene acceleration in prices can be laid at the feet of the federal government, which, in a vicious cycle, subsidizes loans, makes direct grants, and offers loan forgiveness, all of which in turn spur higher education institutions to hike tuition further, which in turn necessitates further government aid.
“It’s the same problem that afflicts health care,” Ferguson posits. “A large portion of the people consuming the services aren’t paying for the services out of their own pocket. The costs are picked up by third parties.” One massive, 10-year study Ferguson quotes found that “each increase in Pell aid is matched nearly one for one by tuition increases” among private schools.
I don’t know that I completely agree with Rosen’s paraphrasing of Ferguson’s conclusion that much of the blame “can be laid at the feet of the federal government,” and I certainly am not on board with where Rosen seems to be heading that the federal government should stay out of education finance, but I do agree that the mechanism which he describes of increasing amounts of aid being eaten up by tuition increases leading to increasing amounts of aid and so on is alive and well. The single biggest problem is the lack (or extreme delay) of feedback signalling and the use of debt in the first place. One problem is easier to fix than the other and while I have made no secret of being a huge fan of human capital contracts and other equity instruments, I think efforts by companies like SoFi and People Capital to inject some humanity and accountability back into the process are huge steps in the right direction.
Also, the comparison of health care to education with respect to out-of-control costs and using HCCs as a possible solution reminded me of an article I stumbled across recently which proposes to use human capital contracts as a way of reining in medical school debt. This proposal is much more education than health care related, but it’s another interesting area of overlap that was worth sharing.
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Note to self: get to work on posts about People Capital, college ranking system, The Clarkson Proposal (sounds like the title of a spy thriller, right?), Fix UC, Business Week’s College ROI series.
Teaching Tolerance in Crown Heights
Crown Heights is one of the most diverse neighborhoods in all of New York City. Just take a stroll down Eastern Parkway or Utica Ave and the sights and smells are beautiful, vibrant, and strikingly unique. It is also a neighborhood that has a history of racial and religious tension. I spend 2-3 days each week in this community and have always wanted to learn more about how the African-American and Jewish communities coexist, especially after the riots that took place in 1991. Outside of trolling the internet and brief conversations with Crown Heights residents, I’m still not 100% sure.
This video doesn’t answer all of the questions that might arise, but it is great to know that young scholars and community members are interested in learning more, too. These young women came into this neighborhood with no knowledge of the existing conditions, they were able to ask serious questions about each of the communities and learn more about how they came to be. Through the lens of their upbringing in the Caribbean, they questioned the division of the two communities and the stereotypes that came along with it. This type of project based learning helps teach tolerance in a way that resonates not only with these four scholars, but for each of the people that they were able to interact with. I hope that they are able to continue this conversation throughout Crown Heights and share their experiences with others. In this case, a little knowledge can go a long way.
Is Eating Meat Like Being Racist?
(By Jeff)
I spent the latter half of last week in Los Angeles seeing the city and scoping out potential nesting places should I decide to go to USC Business School next year. Unsurprisingly, my time spent in a stationary car on I-10 was not the most interesting event of the weekend. Surprisingly, however, neither was meeting my potential future classmates. Instead, a routine meet-the-girlfriend’s-cousins afternoon ended up capturing my conscious and subconscious thought well after the day was over, and not just because of the insights it provided into Laura’s various psychoses idiosyncrasies.
Laura’s cousin, Ruby Roth (author’s website), has made headlines over the last few weeks for her new book, Vegan is Love (click here to buy it). 
Appearances on Fox & Friends and NBC’s Today Show have stimulated endless blogosphere chatter and generated a deluge of mail for Ruby, from supporters, detractors and the occasional psychopath alike. Just google “Vegan is Love” and you’ll see what I mean.
My personal food journey: There are myriad reasons why people go vegetarian or vegan and I won’t attempt to enumerate them all. I first experimented with vegetarianism as a senior in college when awareness about the environmental impact of modern meat-industry practices led me to give up meat. I started strong but eventually relapsed after a few months. My struggle was ongoing and although I wouldn’t say I was ever a true vegetarian again, I certainly cut down the amount of meat I ate significantly. Soon thereafter, I found myself living in New Orleans and the idea of being a vegetarian was a joke.
Fast forward two years and after 3 months of living in a tent and on a sail boat in the Pacific Northwest, I was ready to try again. I moved to Boston and started dating Laura, who was a vegetarian herself. For anyone who has ever dated a vegetarian, you know there’s little difference between that and being one yourself. Luckily, that was my goal, so the added support was welcome. Over the last year and change, I have cracked on numerous occasions and eaten meat, but I am much more comfortable presenting myself as a vegetarian than I had been before because 95% of the time, that’s what I am.
On the way home from a walk to the neighborhood coffee joint, I asked Ruby’s longtime boyfriend and devout vegan, Justin Bua, about the source of his vegan ethic. (Side bar: Roth and Bua co-edit a website about their experience as vegans: We Be Vegan.) Having had the experience of trying to explain to my unsympathetic college roommates why I would no longer be eating the turkey in the fridge that I had purchased the previous week and been immediately and unceasingly subjected to their ridicule and ire, I know how hard it can be to explain why one makes the food choices they do. But I asked anyway. I felt like playing the devil’s advocate.
As Justin went down the list of health problems, environmental problems, economic problems and moral failings associated with eating meat, I listened and nodded in tentative yet tacit agreement. His fundamentalism seemed like a weakness so I made that my target. I asked him whether eating less meat was better than eating more meat and he said no. I asked him whether eating less meat that was raised ethically was better and he again said no. I asked whether eating one deer a year that lived off undisturbed land that you tracked for days and hunted with a bow and arrow was better and he said no once more. At some point in the discussion, Ruby finished the radio interview she had been conducting in another room and joined us. She, too, agreed with Justin on each point.
I knew that each of these cascading scenarios was better than eating wheelbarrow-fulls of pork shoulders purchased at WalMart. They had to be. But Justin and Ruby wouldn’t budge. They just kept repeating that people who concoct these quasi-restrictive diets that still included meat were only lying to themselves about meat and how it was raised, produced and delivered to our tables. And by extension, they were equally guilty in perpetrating all the evils of our meat-filled culture.
Their argument rested on 2 points that when taken together provided a stout defense of pure vegetarianism that I found hard to argue with.
1) We just don’t need to eat meat, so why do we?
2) The reality of the conditions in which the vast majority of meat is raised is completely abhorrent. (Even my word choice is indicative of our ingrained meat-eating culture: I talk about meat being raised as if it wasn’t at one point part of an animal.)
In what I understood at the time as a bit of hyperbole, Justin kept comparing eating a little meat to only keeping a few slaves. The next day, though, a friend sent me the article that appeared on Jezebel over the weekend, A Complete Guide to ‘Hipster Racism’ and all of a sudden, Justin and Ruby’s arguments clicked into place, rather uncomfortably. Could Justin have been right on some level? Was eating any amount of meat alright when it was so clearly unnecessary and so frequently cruel? There’s no amount of acceptable racism, so why is it OK to murder a small number of animals to eat their meat? Before you get up in arms about the difference between people and animals, let me cut you off. I get it. But philosophically, can we be alright with a small amount of something that we recognize is terrible? (See #2 “Recreational Slumming” in Hipster Racism article.) And the more uncomfortable questions: what should I think about my friends who eat meat? Is that like having racist friends?
Human Capital Contracts and College Affordability (Click on Me)
Erica Price at Whiteboard Advisors gives her take on human capital contracts.
Her second point is the most interesting:
They promote alignment of market needs and college degrees. When investors have a stake in post-college earnings, they can choose to “invest” in students who are planning to enter fields with high levels of job growth or earning potential (e.g. STEM fields, healthcare, etc). As a result, students seeking investor-backed funding are incentivized to consider these fields. While not making any judgment on the value of certain majors (or a liberal arts education in general), I’d argue that our economy benefits when we produce college graduates that can fill the human capital needs of the market. Investors encouraging certain majors also doesn’t seem much different than a parent suggesting to a child that if she wants funding for college, she should probably add an economics major to her political science major, since political science majors are good for cocktail conversation but not much else, and we aren’t sending you to college just to party, after all. (Just… as an example.)
The (Space) Cowboys at 13th Avenue Funding
(By Jeff)
A couple weeks ago, as I was reading bits and pieces of this and that and generally just clicking around the internet looking for material about human capital contracts that hadn’t been written by Miguel Pallacios Lleras I stumbled across this article that mentioned a guy named Tonio DeSorrento. I sent Tonio a quick email explaining who I was and that I was interested in learning more about HCCs and he promptly responded saying that he would be happy to talk to me. So we talked. Predictably, the conversation flowed mostly one direction as I didn’t have much of substance to offer, but I listened well and took notes and sent him a thank you note promptly. Sometimes that’s all it takes.
I looked up some of the people he had told me about (there were others, he said, whose names he couldn’t share because they hadn’t yet gone public[1]) and saw that one of the groups, 13th Avenue, was in Boston. With Tonio’s permission, I used his name to introduce myself to 13th Avenue’s COO, Casey Jennings, and he agreed to meet me.
You’ve probably never heard of 13th Avenue and that’s unsurprising. While they’re not exactly in a silent phase—they have plans for a pilot program this fall—they aren’t out there jockeying for media attention either. (Indeed, though this group has many strengths, one look at their website makes it clear that PR is not one of them.) What they do have, however, is passion and experience. Remember the movie Space Cowboys? The one where Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland and James Garner play four over-the-hill astronauts who go back into space on a mission to repair a decaying Soviet satellite operating archaic guidance systems that ends up being more complicated than they anticipate.
Yeah, 13th Avenue is like that. Not to beat the metaphor to death, but Casey, CEO Robert Whelan Jr. and founding partner Ed Lowry are the astronauts. Financing higher education is the soviet satellite. Equity is the archaic guidance system. Could human capital contracts be the fix?
I don’t pretend to be an expert on any of the above topics, but I like to think that I am conversant and Casey impressed me with his knowledge and perspective. A self-described finance “gear head,” Casey first took an interest in education finance at the encouragement of his political scientist brother who asked how we as a society can “de-risk” students who have done everything they can to go to college but are financially unable. His extensive finance career clearly provides the lens through which he sees these issues, but he is not limited to a strictly quantitative analysis. Casey says most of the learning that he and his team have experienced has been around the concept of community and cites Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone as being very influential on the group’s thinking.
Whereas many upper middle class families view financing discussion and decisions as private, lower-wealth communities see the destinies of individual families as more intertwined. Decisions about financing have implications for entire neighborhoods and as such, the conversation has to be brought to a higher level. One-on-ones with a student and her family will not suffice. Over the past year, 13th Avenue has conducted numerous town-hall style meetings with students, families and community members to get feedback and help shape their program.
Robert Whelan Jr. (who, I’m told, couples Eastwood’s good looks and salesmanship with Garner’s down-home demeanor), is the organization’s founder and front man. His own experience growing up in a blue-collar family planted the seed for the idea that would become 13th Avenue. After a very successful, nearly 30-year career in finance, Robert attended Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative (scroll down to paragraph 12 for the portion about Robert) in 2009 and the seed sprouted. His dream, he realized, was to use his deep contacts and experience in finance to make “college education financially available to everyone with the qualifications and desire to go.”
Robert and Casey had met professionally years earlier and generally ran in the same circles. After Robert’s experience at ALI, Casey recalls receiving a phone call from him. “I want to start an organization to reform education finance. Got any ideas?” Robert asked. Casey’s response: “You’re buying breakfast. I’ve got a great idea.” That was mid-2009. Now, almost three years later, they’re ready to test their idea. They have 21 students signed up for a pilot program at a California community college for this fall. Each of the students has completed his or her associate degree and is transferring to a 4 year institution to earn their bachelor’s. 13th Avenue will provide each student a maximum of $15,000 over the next 2 years to pay for tuition, books, and other costs associated with going to college. Students are encouraged to only take what they need (repayment rates will be prorated accordingly) and payments will be made directly to the university or other payee on the student’s behalf.
The third member of the 13th Avenue team is Ed Lowry, an environmental law attorney whose cousin happens to be Casey’s wife. Ed and Casey had previously collaborated on an attempt to reform infrastructure financing in California which in Casey’s estimation “failed miserably.” In addition to being the resident legal expert, the street in Sacramento where Ed’s house is located also provided the organization’s name. Legal counsel has been a particular thorn in their side as Casey says numerous layers have refused to work with them because of the complete lack of any case law on human capital contracts leading to concerns about enforceability. (I recently found this posting by another ed policy amateur that discusses the legal side of HCCs.) Casey gleefully reports that Manatt, Phelps & Phillips is graciously providing pro bono counsel now, but says that a previous law firm that had been providing services on a pro bono basis fired themselves over the potential for legal kerfuffle of 13th Avenue’s cause. “Pro bono” and “fired” are not terms usually seen in the same sentence.
Casey is vocal about his skepticism that human capital contracts can be implemented on a for-profit basis, although he’s not opposed to people trying. Right now, he says, his goal is to prove that they work with low-income populations at all. Then: share his tools with anyone and everyone who wants to replicate 13th Avenue’s program in their own community. His vision is an online resource where contract templates and other resources will be available under a creative commons license. Individual social entrepreneurs will then be able to download the material and, per their terms of use agreement, report back to the community about their experience implementing human capital contracts. In this way, a wiki guidebook will emerge to help each successive entrepreneur.
For instance, one unexpected feature of the student population with whom 13th Avenue is working in California is that many of them are undocumented and consequently unable to access any other forms of state or federal financial aid, though there is an in-state tuition exemption provided to such students under a 2001 law: AB 540. Furthermore, California state aid will be available starting in 2013 on a limited basis to high-achieving undocumented students who are on a path to citizenship under the California DREAM Act. Each year 25,000 undocumented students graduate high school in California. Clearly, 13th Avenue’s experience navigating this particular context would be invaluable to anyone working with similar populations.
In atypical cowboy fashion, Casey ultimately hopes that government, at the state or federal level, will take up the idea of human capital contracts, but until then, it is on social entrepreneurs like him to lead the charge. We wish 13th Avenue the best of luck.
[1] It has subsequently become clear that SoFi was among these stealth flyers. Click here for my previous post on SoFi’s launch.
Turnaround Arts (Click on Me)
With schools and districts slashing funding in order to balance budgets, arts and humanities are usually the first to go. Having worked in a school that lacked both Art and Music, the potential of initiatives like Turnaround Arts are exciting prospects.
Although this program is only being rolled out in 8 sites (Portland, Oregon; Boston; Des Moines; Denver; Bridgeport, Connecticut; Lame Deer, Montana; and the District of Columbia; New Orleans) it should be an indicator of whether or not a combination of public grants and private donations will be enough to revive what used to be a cornerstone of public education. Here’s to hoping it will.
On another note, the word “Turnaround” is being used a bit a too much in education these days. Love to hear thoughts and comments on this.
The Creative Monopoly (Click on me)
This was so good, I just felt the need to repost it. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor and take 5 minutes.
The 3 Main Obstacles in the Way of Education Reform (Click on Me)
3 Main Obstacles in the Way of Education Reform, according to Andrew Rotherham:
1. We buy reform…
Hard decisions are taken off the table because the political math is about addition. In other words, more money means policy changes tend to be additive and not transformative. Zero-based budgets, meaningful fiscal and performance audits, and other tools to address duplicative spending are still rare in education.
2. Schools lack for an adequate way to measure teacher performance…
The problem is that, for the most part, agreed-upon, high-quality tools to differentiate teacher performance don’t exist.
3. Education policy is by its nature political, conservative and change-averse
At the very time we need our schools to become more effective and more agile for the job we need them to do tomorrow they are still saddled with yesterday’s constraints.
I tend to agree with Rotherham. I think his best point is his first, about the default for reforms to be additive rather than transformative. Another way to say this is that the incumbent never loses. By virtue of the slow and conservative nature of the change process in education, rarely is a program completely scrapped because by the time anyone gets around to discussing said scrapping, the now old program is too entrenched to amputate without causing further harm.
