Costs/Portability
At first glance, ALP may seem prohibitively expensive. When we first began planning for this project, we thought about making the argument that our goal was to demonstrate that we could achieve dramatically improved results if a school was willing to spend enough money. And we thought about asking what the cost would be to the students and to society if we we didn't improve the chances for these students to succeed.
However, Mark McColloch, CCBC's vice-president of instruction, who has to worry about the cost of things all the time, sat down to calculate just what ALP would cost and arrived at a surprising result.
For this calculation, assume that 500 students show up needing a developmental writing course and then ENG 101.
Under the traditional model, at CCBC where writing class size is 20, these 500 students would need 25 sections of the developmental course. Since the instructors for these courses are compensated with 3 faculty credit hours for each course, the developmental part of the program would cost the institution 75 faculty credit hours.
Under the traditional model, only 37% of the 500 students or 185 students would actually take ENG 101, requiring 9.25 sections of 20 students each. Again, the instructors for these sections receive 3 faculty credit hours of compensation for a total of 27.75 faculty credit hours for the ENG 101 portion of the traditional program for 500 students.
Adding these two costs, the total cost for 500 students under the traditional approach would be 102.75 faculty credit hours.
Under the ALP model, with a class size for the companion course of just 8, 500 students would require 62.5 sections. Since the instructors are compensated at just 2 credits per course, the cost to the institution for the developmental part of ALP would be 125 faculty credit hours.
The ENG 101 portion of the ALP program is also more expensive than the traditional approach because 100% of the ALP students take ENG 101, requiring 25 sections at 3 faculty credit hours per section for a total of 75 faculty credit hours for the ENG 101 portion of the ALP model.
The total cost for the ALP model would, then, be 200 faculty credit hours.
The following chart summarizes these calculations:
Traditional Model |
ALP Model |
For developmental portion: For ENG 101 portion: Total: 75 + 27.75 = 102.75 faculty credit hours |
For developmental portion: For ENG 101 portion: Total: 125 + 75 = 200 faculty credit hours |
Based on these calculations, ALP is almost twice as expensive per year as the traditional model. However, the cost per year is not the most crucial statistic.
Imagine that we are corporate executives thinking about acquiring a factory. The following chart represents the costs of the two factories to operate:
As with traditional developmental writing, the traditional factory's annual operating cost of$100,000 makes it seem like the more economical choice. However, when you consider the output of the two factories, you come to a different conclusion. The ALP factory produces four times as many widgets per year as the traditional factory, and so the cost per widget for the ALP factory is half the cost for the traditional factory.
In higher education we don't produce widgets, but what we hope to produce are successful students. And the data we presented under the results section of this web site (click here to go to results) shows us that ALP is actually less expensive than the traditional approach:
Table 7: the factory analogy
Table 8: costs per successful student
Table 8 reveals that the actual cost per successful student is slightly less under the ALP than it is under the traditional model. Under ALP the cost is .70 faculty credit hours per successful student. Under the traditional model it is .76 faculty credit hours per successful student.
So not only does ALP double the success rate and halve the attrition rate compared to the traditional model of developmental writing, it does so at a slightly lower cost per successful student.