The Productivity Illusion

We all know that Baumol's "cost disease" formulation states that education is one of only two or three economic sectors to have failed to use technology to leverage productivity, resulting in higher than inflation price (tuition) increases over the past 5 or 6 decades. The "fix" would seem to be in finding ways to boost productivity, thereby literally letting us do more with less.I was reminded of this yesterday as I checked into the Hilton in Charlotte using its "digital key" check in and key utility via the Hilton app on the iPhone. While still in St. Louis, I selected my room and requested a digital key, which Hilton sent at check-in time on the day of my arrival. This enabled me to bypass the front desk and go directly to my room, transiting from my seat on the airplane to my hotel room downtown in under 30 minutes. And, at the probably savings of a desk clerk's salary, assuming multiple other travelers did the same. This boosts the productivity of other employees (serving me took not one nanosecond of anyone's time).There are myriad other, similar examples of technology increasing productivity at the expense of human jobs, and in many ways we just beginning to plumb the full depths of how far this can go (see the "cupcake ATM" for another example). To boost productivity - the lynchpin of any serious effort to hold the line on inflation+ tuition increases - private schools would need to do the same or have the existing faculty and staff serve many more students. In perpetuity!And therein lies the productivity illusion. Moore's Law may have had a long run in digital technology, but I am not at all convinced that human productivity follows a similar dictum. Also, to put it in classic social impact language, the theory of change at play in private, independent education is all about human interaction, not so the drivers of customer satisfaction in the business class hotel sector. It doesn't degrade, and may even enhance, my Hilton experience to use a digital key. I'm pretty sure that at some point less human engagement would damage a student's experience in school.We know how to create exceptional schools and have been doing so for more than 325 years in U.S. private schools. We don't know how to make them affordable to a broad swath of the population. That's the challenge we all face.