Via Brad DeLong, an article by Kevin Carey in the Chronicle of Higher Education starts with the obvious — the internet is killing newspapers as we knew them — and asks whether the same will happen to universities.
Much of what’s happening was predicted in the mid-1990s, when the World Wide Web burst onto the public consciousness. But people were also saying a lot of retrospectively ludicrous Internet-related things — e.g., that the business cycle had been abolished, and that vast profits could be made selling pet food online. Newspapers emerged from the dot-com bubble relatively unscathed and probably felt pretty good about their future. Now it turns out that the Internet bomb was real — it just had a 15-year fuse.
Universities were also subject to a lot of fevered speculation back then. In 1997 the legendary management consultant Peter Drucker said, “Thirty years from now, the big university campuses will be relics…. Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable.” Twelve years later, universities are bursting with customers, bigger, and (until recently) richer than ever before.
But universities have their own weak point, their own vulnerable cash cow: lower-division undergraduate education. The math is pretty simple: Multiply an institution’s average net tuition (plus any state subsidies) by the number of students (say, 200) in a freshman lecture course. Subtract whatever the beleaguered adjunct lecturer teaching the course is being paid. I don’t care what kind of confiscatory indirect-cost multiplier you care to add to that equation, the institution is making a lot of money — which is then used to pay for faculty scholarship, graduate education, administrative salaries, the football coach, and other expensive things that cost more than they bring in.
I’m not sure I buy it. Let’s think about what good purposes a college or university might serve. Off the top of my head, I can think of several:
- Classroom-based education. Certainly important.
- Extracurricular learning. This includes everything from “participating in actual academic research” to “serving on the school newspaper.”
- Meeting different kinds of people. Not only do students get exposed to professors, and an academic way of thinking about problems, but they also meet other students, hopefully from a wide variety of backgrounds.
- Establishing independence. For many people, going to college is the first time one lives away from home, and begins to establish an identity separate from one’s family.
- Belonging to a community. From the university itself to numerous smaller subcultures within, college provides an opportunity to belong. As great as the Teaching Company is, it doesn’t have a basketball team in the Final Four.
Feel free to add your own. We can argue whether online learning can be effective in replacing the first of these — after all, hearing a recorded lecture is not the same as hearing it live. But it would appear very difficult to replace the others. The four years one spends at college are often the most formative (and perhaps the most enjoyable) years of one’s life. It’s not clear, of course, how much people are willing to pay for those other purposes, as important as they may be.
On the other hand, there is a long-established bargain at big research universities that could conceivably come unraveled at the hands of the internet. Namely: it is research and scholarship that attracts the faculty and establishes the academic reputation of a school, but it is teaching that brings in students and tuition dollars. This is not an arrangement based entirely on avarice; the top research schools bring in a lot more money from grants and gifts than they do from student tuitions. But it reflects a deep philosophical split, that might signal an underlying instability: from within academia, the purpose of the university is seen as the production of new scholarship; from outside academia, the purpose of universities is seen as the teaching of students.
In the case of newspapers, the internet made it harder to tightly bundle straightforward news with advertising and sections of the paper any one reader might not be interested in. In the case of universities, will the internet make it harder to bundle teaching and research? Quick, name the largest private university in the U.S. The answer is the University of Phoenix, founded in 1976, where 95% of faculty are part-time and the large majority of teaching happens completely online.
It could happen that more education-providing corporations (one hesitates to call them “universities”) could develop better ways to provide online classroom educations to a large number of students who are interested in the first purpose listed above but are unwilling to pay for the second. If that model catches on, it will cause dramatic upheaval in the economy of traditional universities. And, much as I love the internet, that would be too bad.
I have a couple of points:
1) I can’t stand crowds, and I found uni intolerable because of that. That’s just me of course. I hate bars and malls for the same reason. And Walmart *shudders*. I like having companionship of course (I’m human:P), but only in very small groups. Once the number of people around me exceeds ~8 I start to become very uncomfortable.
So for people like me (and there are a fair number of us) online education is superior in most respects. I can’t concentrate in large groups, and those large 100-150 person 1st year classes taught me nothing. Of course after that the class size decreases greatly, fortunately. Much easier for me to handle second year than first year.
2) Research != Teacher: Pure academics make piss-poor teachers. Because of the nature of universities, all of my teachers were researchers or grad students. Those people CAN NOT TEACH! They just aren’t good at it.
I’ve said for a long time that universities need to separate out into 2 distinct organizations: 1)research institutions, and 2)schools. FFS hire trained teachers to be profs, not some Nobel laureate who doesn’t know which end of the chalk is which.
You say that live lectures are better than recorded ones. This is true, but only if you have a prof that doesn’t simply stand there and read out of the textbook for the length of the class. I can do that on my own (and better), thanks. Is that what I paid a 1000 dollars for? So some moron can read me the textbook instead of actually teaching?
That ^ is what you get when you but researchers in charge of classrooms. That’s also one of the big reasons why undergrad programs have such a huge dropout rate. You go from highschools where they hold your hand through everything straight into a uni class where they do nothing except toss you an error-ridden textbook and say “osmosis some of that, will you?”
Not a smart method of maintaining an educated population. And people wonder why the rates of higher eduction are so low *eyeroll*.
There were altogether too many ‘of courses’ in that post. Can we have an edit function Discover? Pleaaaaase?
Students will still need help when they can’t understand things. There’s no practical way to do that without having a person physically there. Moreover, unless someone is being paid, people are rarely going to be willing to give much help.
A U of Phoenix model might work for lower level education and might substantially impact technical schools and community colleges. But any school that has subjects that are even moderately advanced will not be replaceable.
I think online teaching will be successful to the extent that we manage to “dumb down” a subject, i.e., reduce it to an algorithm. With access to good software and text, it is not too difficult to learn a set of formulas or procedures and some rules for recognizing when to apply them. But learning a set of skills that can for the most part be applied mechanically is not much of an education.
How do you teach someone to think creatively? To make connections between different fields that allow you to apply techniques developed for one class of problems to a different class of problems? I do that by having conversations with my students. Showing them where a mathematical formula comes from, why it works in some settings and not in others, illustrating the creative process and how to make connections by sharing plenty of examples and coming up with problems they have never seen before so that they get a real taste of thinking critically. And I watch them. When I see the “deer frozen in the headlights” expression on their faces I stop and ask them to tell me when they lost understanding of the discussion, then I talk to them to find out why and try a different example or way of looking at a problem to see if that helps. And sometimes they just have to figure it out for themselves, but I encourage them and give them as much guidance as I can.
I don’t think true education is going to go online, but I can see universities using electronic delivery to handle the teaching of purely technical skills more efficiently (on average) than is done in a traditional classroom setting. Maybe we will discover that certain degrees are little more than a set of skills and universities will contract in size, but I don’t see them vanishing.
As technology advances and telepresence becomes less expensive and more user friendly, I can see education going to more of an online experience. I believe there were several attempts in Second Life to replicate the classroom experience, without much success so far. That telepresence idea is brilliant – get the interaction between teacher and student as well as between students without the hassle of maintaining a residence at one location. As another poster said, the quality of the teacher is the important thing, so why not have the best teachers conduct classes for people all over the globe?
As for the whole college experience, there are vast numbers of people who managed to become mature and responsible adults without having a sleep-away college. Many students live at home while attending college, or have full- or part-time jobs that prevent them from entering fully into the community aspect of college. I would argue that people will figure out how to have communities without on campus lives.
No. College is too much fun.
More seriously though, my university does record some of its biggest lectures by the most famous professors, and every student knows that it is infinitely better to learn by going to the lectures rather than watching the video later- some exceptions perhaps, but frankly if it wasn’t important people would stop going to class. And I do think a research university has great potential for getting students involved later in life in what they want to do- my into physics prof ended up inviting me to work in his lab for example. And you probably learn more outside the classroom compared to in it… the list just goes on…
The ‘internet’ is certainly not going to replace universities, but it’s almost certainly going to complement the standard education, or maybe transform it, but ‘replacing’ seems somewhat ill-posed to me.
Because some of the stuff I learned is now seriously obsolete, I’ve been taking some grad-level courses online on my own initiative. I find the experience to be rather mixed. Of course, I’m not going to quit my job to attend classes I don’t strictly need so I can have a traditional experience, as that’s a rather self-defeating approach. For that very reason, distance learning is the best and only option for me presently, until someone in the area agrees to teach pharmacogenomics after 5:00 PM, and won’t try to force me to matriculate besides. Let’s face it, science grad. school is as much about getting cheap labor as it is minting new post-docs, and for that reason I don’t interest those who want to teach the traditional way, even if I offer to pay all of my own tuition.
That said, the technology really doesn’t presently allow for adequate dialogue between the professor and the students. I feel far too often the text is my teacher, or I must peruse the primary literature on my own to answer questions. I certainly do learn, and it’s good knowledge I’m getting, but what I’m doing is really just one step removed from a correspondence course, despite the rigor and accreditation. IMO, distance learning is nowhere near of the quality it needs to be, though I can see many ways in which the necessary improvements could address many of its present shortcomings. Having done a lot of teleconferencing myself through my job, the basic infrastructure is already more than sufficient, but the hardware most students have at their disposal isn’t nearly powerful enough to allow for wide implementation.
If and when it does become powerful enough, though, watch out. We have, as a nation, a public educational system that is nowhere near inexpensive and accessible enough to meet the needs of an increasingly challenged population. Private institutions are now well out of reach of many bright students, even with scholarships, and public universities in some states aren’t faring much better. The economic downturn is forcing more and more kids to work after high school, and maybe take gut courses at a community college or online to provide the flexibility necessary to even finish a degree at a state four-year institution. If the American middle class continues on its current economic trajectory, and our institutions of higher learning can’t find some way to adapt to this, then the college experience will truly be reserved for the wealthiest or only the most high-achieving students, while the merely above-average will effectively be shut out without incurring debts that make the cost:benefit a difficult one to justify.
It will be a sad day if that happens, because I valued my classroom experiences, and I miss them now. But with such a dearth of alternatives, and the financial burdens of working with what we’ve got growing completely out-of-pace with the economic reality, the bleaker future will be realized.
Last I heard Sean you were working at a university with a negligible undergraduate population and they still seem to be doing okay with supporting the scholarship stuff. Of course they don’t have to spend millions of dollars on a football coach, perhaps the two facts are related.
Undergraduate universities are going to go the way of the dodo. The vast majority of bachelors, and a good chunk of masters degrees are viewed as little more than purchased commodities by the public. So the provisioning of undergraduate education will be swallowed up by a handful of mega commercial for profit content providers, corporations that hire content specialists to author and validate curriculum. That much is certain, how existing academic institutions navigate through this change is an open questions. A few choices are available:
1. A university can become a truly research and scholarship orientated institution, where its sole purpose is procuring public and private funding for research and scholarship.
2. A university can try to become competitive with the corporate commercial for profit undergraduate content providers (perhaps by undercutting the corporate profit margin by providing publicly funded affordable online content, this would act as an important check on the content provided commercially).
3. A university could market the value added-ness of physical presence education over online content, essentially selling social membership and broader experience over knowledge alone, but as online degrees become less expensive this sell will become tougher to make.
Both of these undertakings are valid and worthy undertakings for any institution.
There is one other thing that will happen without direct intervention from academics: the quality and validity of undergraduate education will decline with commercialization without proper regulation. So what needs to happen is an enormous undertaking in political advocacy. Academics who belong to research and scholarships institutions need to have a legislatively enforced peer review of the content provided by commercial providers, something much more stringent than current institutional accreditation.
Of the five “good purposes” listed in the OP, only 1 — classroom-based education with direct personal interaction with professors — was not handled as well or better by my four years as an enlisted man in the military in the early 1960s. That is, four of the five are not unique to college and universities, and there are much less expensive alternative ways to achieve them (I write this as a former full professor in a liberal arts college and current visiting prof in that same college). Hence unless the OP author can make a case for that one being worth the cost of maintaining undergraduate education in universities, it’s a lost cause except for the ‘prestige’ factor and the social and professional connections established in some (but not all) colleges and universities.
Here is another reason why the Internet won’t beat a brick and mortar university: reputation.
Let’s be honest, the reputation of your chosen university does matter when looking for work. I have a feeling that in almost every circumstance the resume from Cal Tech is going to end up higher on the pile than the one from DeVry or U. of Phoenix.
The same is true for newspapers. But the difference is that newpapers (and bloggers) make their reputations every single day. A university (even an online one) can only do that a few times a year (whenever graduation is).
Online universities won’t be able to compete with brick and mortar universities unless they can product the same quality graduates. But in order to do that it will depend somewhat on who they admit. I have a strong feeling that the online universities will be drawing the lower percentile students — which could in turn will help improve the quality of the brick and mortar universities (since they’ll be getting higher percentile folks to begin with).
I’m not sure it will replace traditional education but it can certainly supplement it. There are ever-increasing barriers to traditional education, the primary one is cost. Maintaining brick and mortar buildings with limited enrollments will continue to make the internet look very attractive.
With the internet as a delivery system, the ability to create a truly diverse student body and an amazing global faculty can be very attractive. Physical limiations create educational restrictions.
The emotional component, the interaction cannot be replicated in any meaningful way. Other than that, I’m not so sure internet-based education is the devil at all.
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So, Google’s looking to buy Twitter and already has YouTube and Blogger.
What if Google put out an ad offering football coach style salaries to a handful of the very best teachers in every university level field?
And what if they began offering LIVE streaming video courses, with Twitter interactivity to anyone willing to pay, oh say, $10 per credit hour?
Suppose students maintained an online portfolio (blog) in a social networking site to collect, debate, refine, rethink, and share their learning? Throw in some local Tweet-up style interaction and the occasional topical “un-conference” that we humans seem to make happen organically and … are we there yet?
Would features like those address the “5 good purposes” and add a host of communication skills important in the real world of business and life as it’s evolving?
Assuming Google could get accreditation for such online courses — oh, yeah, Phoenix has already paved that road — how long could traditional universities compete with something along those lines?
I’m actually taking my online class through a brick-and-mortar university. The course is being taught by an adjunct. I’m sure this is arrangement is saving the host institution a boatload of money, and broadening their market considerably. I.e., it’s got “wave of the future” written all over it. The end result might be that the brick-and-mortar places wind up looking a lot more like the virtual campuses than most of us would probably like, with the staunch defenders of the ancient ways available only to economic and academic elites (being, too often, the same population, given the advantages in performance that socioeconomic status conveys).
Certain classes and majors probably could be handled online. My mom did much of her master’s in education via internet and video courses (somehow she managed to take 4 classes while going through cancer treatment which still amazes me).
However not all courses are lecture based. Last I checked it wasn’t practical to have a large chemistry or genetics lab in your house. Dissections on the kitchen table should probably be left to the Thanksgiving turkey. For artist students it can be hard to convince someone to let you draw them nude and via video just doesn’t work well.
So rumors of the demise of brick and mortar campuses is greatly exaggerated. However I do see a change in campuses as large lecture classes are shifted to the internet with colleges focusing on the smaller hands on classes and those based around discussion rather than lecture remaining on campus.
The following might fall under the umbrella of “belonging to a community,” but I think support is a big deal.
On an actual college campus, you can sometimes get face-time with the professor before or after class or during office hours to ask questions, and if not or in addition you can get face time with TAs to get help, and in addition to that it is easy to meet other students in the same class to work together. This last point I think is most important.
The course I TAed at Caltech had a laboratory component, and the professor told me it was too advanced for any other institution in the US — not because Caltech students are that much smarter; after all, this argument wouldn’t apply when comparing to Harvard or MIT etc. — but because no other campus had the *density* of science students, which made it particularly easy for freshman to seek out upperclassmen for help.
I also think it’s easy to underestimate the value of peer pressure and competition when embedded in a community devoted to a common cause. Many people conform to some measure against the performance of their peers. When working in isolation from home, they may not devote themselves as vigorously than when surrounded by others who are working hard.
Well, in my case I’ve got a large (rather state-of-the art, if I may be so bold) lab at my job, and maybe ten years or so ago, some decent schools in the area were willing to take people like me on an ad hoc basis, and allow us to fulfill the practical component of the course at work on our own time, which my employer was fine with. I know this because some of my colleagues took courses at these very institutions in the arrangement that I’m describing. Given that I know all the techniques anyway, what’s the big deal? It’s the conceptual stuff that I’m after, not busy work running rudimentary experiments on cheap equipment for the purposes of demonstrating my understanding of electrophoretic migration of nucleic acids, or whatever. For some reason, over the last four or five years, all those schools have ceased serving people like me, much to many of the professors’ chagrin, and so I went where they wanted me. Somebody else got my money, I’m guessing, because they have a much smaller research infrastructure, and hence must focus on weird things like teaching, rather than getting the hands required to attract large grants. If only the teaching were better. I can’t complain about the flexibility and the very genuine effort put toward serving me well, however, and when the experience catches up with the intention, I think for many an “alternative” student, distance learning will be a force to be reckoned with. And realistically, let’s face it: Most undergraduate lab education is next-to-worthless anyway. One isn’t really “experimenting” and the exposure to various techniques is so fleeting it’s of no value to employers or graduate labs. It certainly rakes in the fees, though.
No, I think the tragedy is to lose the relationships one forms with one’s fellow students and professors, but those relationships come at a very stiff price these days, and increasingly don’t cater to the needs of a student body of diverse backgrounds and circumstances. Why bricks-and-mortar places would want to cede so much to the virtual ones I can’t say, but I assume economics is behind all of it. Places of higher education will either become more accessible as they are, and thus compete as they are, or will transform themselves to survive in a burgeoning virtual market. I dont’ much like that prospect, but I think it’s not so outlandish.
I really think it is #5 that will keep Universities from going the way of the dodo… or newspapers.
Lots of good discussion here but I fear a major point is being overlooked: online learning (“distance ed” is the buzzword this year) is NOT cheaper than a brick and mortar education to the people that count the most, the STUDENTS! Phoenix and the other online unis are VERY expensive compared to your local state school or community college, and, since they’re apparently making boatloads of money now, they have no incentive to change this. As long as this remains true, online colleges are not going to replace brick-and-mortars schools for even lower division classes. Oh, they’ll grow, but so are the online offerings of conventional schools (where you get charged the same tuition as if you were sitting in the classroom). I teach DE courses and real-time courses and I tell potential online students NOT to take my lab online, if they can possibly avoid it. I try to make it an equivalent experience (it’s a damn good lab 🙂 ), but it’s never going to be the same as having me watch what 20 (or fewer, this time of the semester) students are doing in real-time. Anyone who has ever used Skype will know there are ways to increase student-faculty interaction in DE classes but what they sometimes forget is that that kind of interaction doesn’t come cheaply: now you’re talking about paying real salaries to your faculty rather than the 10% on the dollar (or less) part timers and adjuncts make. There will always be a place, and a growing one, for DE, and some incredibly poorly run colleges will probably fail or mutate bc of it, but it’s not going to rule the educational universe. And some very expensive colleges will probably fail also, once they drain their endowments, especially the ones that price fix tuition with “comparison colleges” (the quicker they’re gone the better).
Oh, any research uni that still has 200+ person survey courses should be ashamed of themselves (which of course includes my alma mater, whose chairperson (my ph.d adviser) seems to be proud of the fact). At my extremely poorly funded, atrociously administered, VERY popular college science lectures are limited to 45 and labs to 20.
First off lets look at the cost of going to a brick and mortor campus. You have the cost of your dorm, meals, books, transportation, alcohol, drugs, (To help you stay up all night to cram for exams), then you have the unwanted pregnancies, etc… I understand that you have an experience of being in a crowd where you meet other people but then again the statistics show that home schooled kids do better on the SAT test and they also tend to make more income then those that go to public schools. That should show you something.
The online schools like Phoenix lets you go at your own pace. So what if it takes five yrs to get your diploma, at least you will get it and most likely with higher grades. Someone said they would need a physical presence available if they have problems with a subject. Have you ever heard of on line tutors? For around $50.00 an hour you can have a web conferance with one. If I had been able to finish school before I got disabled I would have gone to collage but now I have a GED ad am going to collage online and am going to gradate with a 3.8 and have my degree in History. I am 47 yrs old and just recently decided to do this. Within the next two yrs I plan on being able to tell Social Security to take their check back because I don’t need it.
There are those who like me depend on these places. I am unable to get around a campus because of my disability. I suffer from chronic pain daily and some days are so bad I can’t get out of bed. I would have been kicked out of a physical campus already because I had missed to many classes.My daughter saw what I was doing and it inspired her to go back to school at 28 yrs of age. She told me that if I can do it then so can she. I have two granddaughters, 5 yrs old and 3 months old, who one day I hope will be able to afford to further their education but with the cost of tuition today and what it will be when they are old enough I’m afraid they will not be able to. These brick and mortor schools need to do something about that if they want to stay open. I believe the internet WILL replace universities if they don’t and soon.
For another take on this topic see: “Don’t Lecture Me, I Can Read!” at
http://elephantintheroom.ca/?p=18
Sounds good to me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFhLNCS4F1A
What about all the heart breaking philanthropy, endowed chairs, museums, labs, beautiful buildings, inspiration and competition ? Falling in love with your professor? infinite possibilities.