rwebdb: Reflections

I’ve long known that one day I’d need to distinguish my rwebdb work from the Delta Project. Yesterday’s announcement of Delta Project’s TCS (Trends in College Spending) makes today the right time.

My last post provided an overview of TCS and included the results from an initial testing. TCS is an Impressive product, but it’s not where rwebdb is headed.

The issue of rising college and university costs in the United States is a point of tension in higher education today. It’s a widening fissure where leverage can be applied with some expectation of institutional change for the better. The current economic recession makes this time even more ripe for change.

There is considerable public disenchantment, frustration, and even disgust with major institutions in this country, that ranges from banks to corporations to political bodies to universities.

In my opinion that frustration is not unfounded. And it seems increasingly unlikely to me that we can rely on the institutions to fix themselves. That includes the government. Not that any of these will disappear; rather they will transmogrify when judged by standards today.

I think if you listen closely enough, you can sense where that something else is located. It is definitely not in our institutions. It’s rather in our people. It’s in our common bonds and in our ability to build tomorrow as if people and nature mattered. Time is on our side, if only we have the time.

Which brings me back to the Delta Project and TCS. The Delta Project is a Beltway (ie, Washington, DC) research organization. They do excellent work and have published many useful educational policy studies. But they exist in the world of politics and think tanks and policy and power. That is both valid and valuable.

However, I don’t believe that world offers much hope for tomorrow. I could be wrong. But rwebdb is a project that bets otherwise. My greatest hopes are that rwebdb will touch a nerve in people and provide encouragement for them to create tomorrow for themselves. And by people, I mean all people everywhere.