Two Lines Diverge on a Graph ...

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the difference. --Robert Frost (The Road Not Taken)

This graph from McKinsey illustrates the financial benefits of leveraging technology to increase productivity by plotting change in labor cost vs robotics from 1990-2014.The economic advantage in robotics-driven manufacturing (or AI-driven anything) comes from the resultant gain in productivity for each remaining human employee. Since private education has yet to find a means of production that truly leverages productivity, we have financed cost increases along the upper line via (1) higher tuition prices, (2) thinner margins from greater discounting, and (3) lower than optimal wage increases for teachers and staff.This is not a call for robots to replace teachers (necessarily), but rather a suggestion that boards bothered by higher-than-CPI rates of tuition increase accept the limits of our no productivity growth model and instead discuss how the means of production can change to something less labor intensive. A few schools can avoid this reality via a shelter provided by their endowments, but for the overwhelming majority the brutal fact is that following the upper line dictates higher-than-CPI price increases. Whether or not this is sustainable for all is another question. And the answer is probably not.