Television and Efficiency in Higher Education

ITV has long been heralded as providing the potential for substantial improvements in the quality, or reductions in the cost, of higher education. Yet there exist no analytical models that would allow a quantitative expression of the extent to which ITV could, in fact, improve educational efficiency. Our purpose in this paper has been to develop such a model. The model is developed in terms of efficiency improvement in a 2 year professional school; it generalizes readily, however, to any institution of higher learning that has a substantial number of multi-section courses. In addition to development of a theoretical model we experimentally tested our proposed approach in an introductory microeconomics course at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Our results reconfirmed the well established result that substituting ITV for live instruction has insignificant impact on student learning, and our detailed analysis of student attitudes (expressed in part as willingness to pay) gives confidence that ITV (combined with small group discussion) can be an acceptable substitute for lecture instruction in higher education. Given this high degree of substitutibility, application of our quantitative model indicates substantial efficiency improvements to be possible in higher education through relatively limited use of ITV.