Welcome to White Pine Institute.  On this page, you will find answers to some basic questions you may have.

Why are continuing education (CE) workshops so expensive?

There are a number of factors that drive up the cost of continuing education events.  Firstly, obtaining approval to offer continuing education activities to each discipline requires lengthy and expensive applications.  The systems in place favor large organizations with staff dedicated to navigating the bureaucracies involved.  Individuals or small private organizations who want to offer such events are at a marked disadvantage as these overhead costs are considerable.

Secondly, marketing these events is quite expensive.  Most professional listservs do not permit adverting commercial interests (we should all be grateful for this) meaning that inexpensive email-based advertising is less viable than you think.  Newsletters, professional journals, and direct mailing have their respective fees and, trust me, they add up quickly.

Thirdly, venues and food are expensive.

Fourthly, there are considerable "opportunity costs" for most presenters.  Many hours are put into the development of workshops.  Presenters who primarily work in other settings need to consider the cost of leaving their practices for one or more days, traveling, and finding lodging.  It is very easy to commit to a workshop and end up losing money on the deal (trust me on this one).  While this may be an honorable service, it is difficult to justify on a regular basis if you cannot make it profitable.

Lastly, most of us have become accustomed to expensive workshops.  Providers of CE workshops will charge as much as they believe folks are willing to spend -- it's the capitalist way.  As we get used to expensive workshops, the costs stay high or creep up over time.  See my personal rant to the right....

My reaction

So here is my personal rant about CE events.  I recently attended a CE event that cost me almost $200 for a full-day workshop for which I received 6 CEs.  I have paid that much before and have grown somewhat used to it.  This time, however, I found myself stuck on one feature of the event:  $200 and I did not even get lunch!  Are you kidding me?  When did this become normal?  I thought to myself:  This system needs an intervention!  Adding insult to injury, I proceeded to add up the "opportunity costs" of closing my office for a day, traveling, the lunch that was not provided, etc.  Including these costs, this event cost me well over $100 per CE.  Okay, now that stings.

To be fair, there are a number of factors that make CE events expensive to provide and attend (see to the left).  However, I think attendees can be treated with a bit more respect.  I think that is why I was stuck on the lunch issue.  What exactly does that high registration fee pay for?  Well, in this particular example, I think the fee goes toward that company's carpet-bombing style of marketing.  There is no way a small company or individual can compete with it.  I must get 5-10 flyers per week about CE events.  Having ventured into this whole CE provider biz, I have some idea of what that costs now--even excluding the lost trees involved, the cost of that level of marketing is substantial.  You should know, you pay for it in your registration fees every year!

When I started White Pine Institute, a driving force was to offer high quality workshops that included much more value and were more reasonable in cost.  It is an ongoing experiment to see if it can really be done.  Here are a couple of my ideas.