“Affordability” is the most problematic of the three goals because our definition is unusual and because there are two quite different approaches to improving affordability within the framework of 3fold gains.
Defining affordability
The price of education for students or their benefactors (e.g., state governments);
Costs in money and time of providing education to students or for the students to pursue that education. So, one way to improve affordability for students is to save them commuting time by offering courses and services online. Another way to improve affordability through better educational strategies (etc.) that together help more students get a BA in, say, 5 years instead of 6.
Whether students, faculty and staff, and the institution itself have the resources and motivation to invest the money and/or time. For example, when budgets are cut, an institution might review 20 programs and then cut one they decide they can’t afford, even though it was not the most expensive (but essential) program to run. (our definition)
How to improve affordability as part of making 3fold gains
We described in the “How” tab the way that evidence-validated teaching and learning activities such as High Impact Practices can, as a side benefit, improve affordability for the students (especially for the students at an economic disadvantage) and for the institution.
I’m guessing that an even more powerful way to manage affordability comes from enough buy-in to the improvements that it becomes marginally more possible to reallocate resources rather than to simply add the costs of innovation to an otherwise unchanged core. In the book see the chapter on Governors State University for an example of this kind of reallocation (especially pp. 50-51).
More bluntly:
3fold gains cannot be sustained without altering core practices and culture through continual reallocations of time and money.
In contrast, it’s often self-defeating to take the politically safe route: fund all innovations with new revenue (leaving existing budgets untouched). That unchanged core will, sooner or later, distort or eliminate these marginalized innovations.