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.
Who says being physically present is better?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16624-itunes-university-better-than-the-real-thing.html
There is one major issue that I haven’t seen brought up, but I know it happens in online education – cheating. This it not to say that cheating doesn’t happen in brick and mortar universities However, I know it happens in online education, because I’ve taken people’s online finals for them (this is why I’m posting anonymously.) Going rate was about 300 bucks for a math or physics final; little more for bio or chem as they weren’t my fields, and thus took a lot of wikipedia surfing to finish the test.
Now, if someone had offered me 300 bucks to walk into a classroom, sit in front of the professors and TAs, and take a final for them, I’d have told them to go to hell. No reason to risk getting kicked out of my university and losing my education, all because somebody realized I had never been in the class before then and that there was a name that didn’t seem to match my gender on my test paper. But an online final, why not? What’s the risk?
Again, cheating does happen in brick and mortar universities. But it’s a lot harder to see someone cheating their way through 4 years (probably 50 finals, 50-100 midterms, plus homework handed in on paper in someone’s actual handwriting) of physically taking a test in front of profs and TAs without getting caught, than it is to see someone paying people to get them degrees online in their spare time. Essentially, there’s a lot more reason for an employer to believe that the person from a brick and mortar university actually did the work to get their degree than for the person with a degree from an online university. No offense, as I’m sure most people with online degrees did the work themselves, but in the absence of anything else, I’m taking the guy who had to take all his tests and labs in person.
I’m “back to school” this year, after a twenty year hiatus, taking a mathematics course at a large Australian university. All I keep thinking as I sit in class is how UTTERLY inefficient it is to teach everybody at the same rate. The wasted brain-hours, if you were to add it all up, would be just staggering! This of course applies all the back through my education experience from kindergarten on up. If academia really wants to increase the amount of scholarship produced, this is the 500-pound gorilla in the room that no one is mentioning.
Yes, going to college back in the States was an awesome experience for me, for many of the reasons Sean suggested. But the system needs an overhaul in a bad way.
>This of course applies all the back through my education experience from kindergarten on up.
And I of course appreciate the irony of writing sentences like this when pontificating about problems in the education system.
Do I believe that for entry-level courses online discussion forums and lectures are enough to teach students who have a desire to learn: Yes. I also think that this sort of learning environment will never be enough for most students in the sciences. Technical schools and online schools may replace a universities for students desiring a career as an instrument technician or office professional.
I do not think that universities are in any real danger, though. Scaling down undergraduate programs to cater to pre-professionals and prospective graduate students and drastically cutting down on administrative overhead may be necessary to keep universities thriving with the new “.com schools”. And that sounds OK to me!
The internet will replace governments eventually; and computers will replace people; and the earth is 6000…oops! Sorry. Sometimes my oft-spoken lectures combine with one another; must remember to stay on topic. Anyway, just be one of those silver-tongued devils hired to produce internet lectures and your futures will remain secure and happy, whether or not those medieval thingys survive in more than name. Remember, change is the only constant in the universe (other than me, of course).
Distance learning is best suited to older people who have commitments that mean they can’t pack up and go off to learn full time for several months per year, and who – crucially – have the self-discipline and working experience behind them to know how to study in their spare time and on their own initiative. Distance learning is hard. Much harder than learning in a dedicated educational environment.
The comparison with newspapers just doesn’t work, because a university education is much more than students “buying” information from experts (even if some might not seem to fully understand this…). It’s not the classroom element of higher education that’s the major problem distance learning would have to overcome, but all the work outside the classroom that the student has to put in for a degree’s worth of study. Young students straight out of school haven’t yet developed the independent work habits needed to sustain distance learning. They’re learning new ways of working as much as they’re learning a particular subject, and they need the double-sided structure of campus-based authority and community to support this.
The bottom line financially is pretty simple: however expensive it is to educate undergraduates on campus, it’s the only way to ensure that enough of them complete their courses to keep an institution financially viable.
Online learning cannot accommodate lab-based teaching. You cannot learn how to align a laser, untangle that spaghetti of wiring, or even debug your data-acquisition program, without having physical access to the experimental setup. For this reason alone, the sciences at least are safe.
I think that for certain types of eduction, the brick and mortar schools can not be replaced. I also think that for families of sufficient resources, the reason to send their kids to college is not going to change.
The growth of online universities (and many states actually sponsor online university education…see http://www.umuc.edu/index.shtml ) serves a function and provides a service to people who already have significant professional or personal obligations.
Online universities simply won’t replace any program that can’t be replaced by an online program (that might sound tautological, but think really hard and its meaning should be clear). There is some equilibrium in the supply and demand plots that will be achieved, if that means that some professors might have to work from home instead of having an office, well then they should be happy about saving the environment 🙂
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Industrialization has replaced artisans in all manner of fields, but always with tradeoffs. A tailored shirt is almost always superior to a mass-produced one, but the mass-produced ones are much cheaper and usually “good enough.” So is mass-produced higher education distributed over the Internet “good enough?” Probably for some of the things universities are teaching now, but certainly not all. Lab/practicum courses are a good example of something that would be hard to replace with a purely Internet-based curriculum. Others here seem to feel that lab courses are not useful, and indeed some of mine were pretty cookie-cutter, but I also had labs that were incredibly helpful both in shaping my error-analysis skills and nurturing my scientific curiosity. And unlike Low Math, I did not have access to a state-of-the-art lab — or lab instructors — at my job. As an 18-year-old just out of high school, most of my friends with jobs worked at things like food service.
What worries me (aside from being in the position of the tailor, which I am as a college professor) is that the market will settle on the notion that online learning is “good enough,” but that this will involve some significant but difficult-to-quantify loss of quality in higher education. An example of this sort of thing in another area is agriculture. Industrialized agriculture has greatly expanded the food supply and made it cheaper, but with costs to food quality, the environment, etc. whose increased perception has driven a return to organic farming in recent years.
Another thing to be concerned about is that we might stagnate as a civilization, albeit at a relatively advanced technical level, because we no longer have a vigorous research enterprise. It used to be that large companies supported research laboratories that did basic research in addition to product-driven research. That era is mostly gone, and basic research (at least in the US) is done mostly in universities. If universities become unable to support basic research (however it is funded), where will that kind of work take place?
The issue of cheating, brought up by Anonymous above, will not be a problem in the future. I think that we’ll have online universities were students don’t graduate. They will simply follow courses to learn. They will verify for themselves if they have achieved the level of understanding they want to have by doing practice problems.
It is up to the employer to verify that the person he wants to hire has the skills necessary to do the job. So, not the university, but the employers should be in the business of making exams. The exams they set for job applicants can be used as example practice problems at (online) universities.
Also, the current teaching structure at univeristies is completely reversed relative to what it should be. The students are the paying clients, yet the Profs are making demands to the students to do their assignments and set the exams for them that they have to pass. This will be corrected in the future. Then, the students will be the ones who make demands and the Profs will have to do whatever the students want.
So, you’ll have students who want to learn certain subjects. They will use past exams used by employers to test themselves. They will pay their university to bring them to the level necessary to pass such exams.
Count Iblis,
I suggest you research some of the current law on job testing before assuming that exams could ever be given by employers. According to the supreme court it really isn’t legal, unless of course you happen to be a government employer. They get to test your IQ or anything else for that matter and use that information to determine whether or not to hire.
I’m currently a 28 year old undergrad with a disability and I can echo some of the concerns the gentlemen had about getting around campus. I solved the majority of that problem by only taking Math/Physics courses spring/fall and taking most of my gen-ed classes during the summer. The bigger solution however was going to a small undergrad school whose campus isn’t the size of a small town.
I’ll try to stay on point somewhat and say that I highly doubt online universities will ever replace B&M for two reasons:
1. prestige
2. environment (cheating/competition/motivation/etc)
I had the unfortunate experience of taking two courses with the University of Phoenix online and was very disappointed at the complete lack of quality control involved in their admissions process. There were people in my “Critical Thinking” course that were incapable of communicating with peers or the professor. I am not 100% sure on this but from what I’ve been told this person passed the course with a B.
If you want to see incentive for grade inflation—- look online. These online colleges are marketed as a easy/work from home at own pace solution to getting that piece of paper that will (maybe in an alternate universe without the US economic situation) get you a better job.
ON THE BRIGHT SIDE!!! iTunesU, MIT Opencourseware and others are AMAZING tools for a student, especially in cases where that student may not agree with the lecture style in his/her course. My personal experience with this is Dr. Lewin’s MIT freshman physics courses that are lectured in such an amazing manner. This isn’t to say that my current physics prof isn’t doing a great job, because he is. But, Lewin gets to play with expensive toys in class that help provide further intuition and elucidation behind the ideas being presented. And while we get some examples shown physically, being at a small underfunded (compared to MIT- I think nearly everyone is in that subset of schools) undergraduate university we don’t have the expensive apparatus and the army of TAs to set them up.
With that being said, I don’t simply skip lecture or play video games during them. I like to use the MIT lectures to provide what can sometimes be the different POV that either opens up a question I’m dying to ask my professor or teaches applications of theory that we don’t have to time or the equipment to properly do at my school.
To summarize my rambling post:
1. Changing laws on job testing- unlikely (effectual changes anyway)
2. Paid for online schooling – marketed primarily to people who want the piece of paper saying they have a bachelors without attending a school. I understand that there are many different reasons for this. However, the fact that it cost more than a B&M education, I have trouble keeping myself from the believe that at least a good portion of these students are doing it because its easier.
3. Free or very cheep online schooling- MIT Open Course Ware and Walter Lewin made me want to study physics (well him and Feynman but that was the written motivation). I guess you could say Feynman pushed me towards physics and Lewin made it fun! And making physics fun will solve the problem of retention and I think also the problem of quality of graduates where that problem exists.
OH! before I free you from my TL:DR rant, I wanted to bring up another good point. The more I see classmates hanging out on facebook and playing videogames or outright sleeping through lectures I have serious doubts as to whether they need to be in the classroom in the first place. Go go compulsory attendance (which I’m fairly opposed to but can see the other side of the argument)
You missed one huge purpose of the university system. It provides signalling, or certification. You’re probably about 1000x more likely to get an interview at google if your degree is from MIT than if it’s from University of Phoenix.
The current state of things is that good universities are better at teaching you how to learn and how to grow, while schools like U. Phoenix are more like trade schools, which generally have better quality teaching, and teach material that help you to get ahead in your job/business.
“I suggest you research some of the current law on job testing before assuming that exams could ever be given by employers. According to the supreme court it really isn’t legal, unless of course you happen to be a government employer.”
I would like to see some references for the claim that job testing isn’t really legal by private employers.
Distance learning at its finest
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/#29430384
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Great and thought-provoking post! Thank you!
Sean’s post reminded me of something an American carmaker might say. Some of the comments enlarged on the underlying sentiment- that if you are rich enough and smart enough to join one of the small and exclusive schools as a student, you wouldn’t have it any other way.
But when that small and exclusive school was once a land-grant college promising an affordable baccalaureate education to everyone who could qualify for entrance and stick the course…a promise to the American people is being broken.
Some of this stuff needs some basic re-thinking. We’re a nation of over 300 million depending on some pretty fancy stuff to keep us up to speed. And it seems to be pretty obvious that we’re not doing very well at that.
Sure, the physics guys can pat themselves on the back- right up to date with the latest thinking and all that.
But we are all the citizens who are supposed to be running this place, and just look at it- no money, no trains to speak of, on time or not, people in poor health and likely to get more so, incomes stagnant or declining- and this is even before we get to the environment that we have trod on so heavily.
AFAIK, a certain amount of rote learning is still essential in developing the ability to tell a hawk from a handsaw, and I’m not so sure physics majors, as smart as they may be, should be free from learning some real history, sociology, psychology (if only to scoff) and maybe a few other things too.
But most of us don’t need to be geniuses or inspired by Mr. Chips to become better people by learning something new. A computer syllabus and cheat if you want should be perfectly adequate to improve us somewhat.
There’s also the fact that now learning has to go on for your entire life. But the only people who find this easy to do- in fact, even get paid to do it- are the people at the universities!
Maybe they should set themselves to the question of how the rest of us can get the retraining we need when the entire technology changes every thirty years. I’m thinking the answer to that question might come in handy real soon. And I’m guessing computers will be involved.
You (OP) are assuming that your university experience is -the- university experience. It might be the ideal, but I think it’s true of a smaller and smaller proportion of students every year as the cost of school skyrockets while the value of financial aid plummets. I think you’ll find more people who will never be able to enjoy campus life because they’re forced to work long hours, or live far from campus to find affordable housing, etc. For these people many of the nominal benefits of a traditional college education are moot.
On the bigger issue, we need to remember that “the future” isn’t synonymous with 2010. A few years ago people would have laughed at the idea that I could buy a $300 computer and watch my choice of tens of thousands of TV shows and movies in a Starbucks FOR FREE. But I can do that now, with my netbook, a WiFi connection and hulu. (Okay, I won’t do it in Starbucks since bandwidth is limited, but I can watch it at home.) Today we have video IM but it’s still pretty crude… but that same netbook has a repectable webcam (1.3 megapixel) built into it. It’s not hard to imagine high quality video and a mutual ‘white board’ being readily available by the time today’s HS freshmen enter college. Watch the lecture, maybe live, then ‘chat’ with the instructor if you have questions… it’s not in person, but it might be better since the instructor could easily refer you to earlier discussions he’s ‘taped.’
On an even bigger picture, I was a math/physics double major. At the time I noticed that classes only made sense as I finished the next semester. I knew the mechanics (which includes proofs, etc), but lacked the bigger context to understand the material at a deeper level.
In the past few years I’ve come across similar material online, linked akin to wikipedia. It’s fascinating because I can follow links and learn related material, and that often gives me the perspective to really understand the original material. It’s not “one size fits all, in sequential order” like traditional classes. I think it will blow open math, science and engineering educations soon.
How do we handle degrees? I think a good answer is analogous to graduate programs. The first few years could be taught traditionally, or it could be done independently while keeping in touch with an advisor if there are questions, to ensure you cover sufficient ground, etc. Maybe non-traditional students pay for three credit hours per semester for the advisor’s time. The main thing is that graduation requires the equivalence of comprehensives and some independent work. In a physics program, for instance, you really don’t need to know that somebody can pass a calculus test or a differential equations final if you can see that they’re comfortable doing vector analysis.
I think that universities will still be needed for infrastructure- whether that be labs, telescopes, galleries, or studios. But the sad thing is that student fees seem to be going up, which is the opposite of what you’d expect if competition is increasing. When annual fees are greater than the median wage, you know something is wrong.
Sean, it is refreshing to see that you can sometimes make posts that are free from your favourite religious obsessions. Keep it up, you could never rival Dawkins’ scholarship.
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It depends on how businesses respond. If the majority start treating online university degrees equally with normal university degrees, then online will become more popular. The exhorbanent amount universities charge (and continue to increase) for tuition and everything is going to accelerate that change though.
You mention some key benefits for normal universities, but I’m not sure they are going to matter than much to someone hiring. Classroom-based education is necessary for a certain type of student and for certain subjects. I think the majority of people would get an equal amount of learning from an online class as they would a classroom-based one as long as there are real teachers available to email questions or talk over the phone to. Extracurricular learning is good, but I don’t see why things around your community couldn’t substitute for it.
Meeting different kinds of people is a definite plus in my mind. I loved my (abbreviated) college experience. I don’t think it really translates much to helping in the real world though. While your meeting different kinds of people, they are mostly in your age group and are going to have similar interests. When you get a job, your going to be meeting different kids of people across all different ages who will be significantly different. Also, we’re in the internet age where kids are often communicating with people all over the country or world before college. Establishing independence is a big one, and one of the major reasons I think parents will continue to send kids to college even if online alternatives become accepted. There are plenty of much cheaper ways of accomplishing this though.
Benefits 3-5 are great, but can be replaced by different experiences. They are not a necessity.
What preserves universities is power and politics. They are key points in the network of knowledge creation and diffusion. They hold the power to verify knowledge and to lend credence to knowledge via their status. Very few other institutions can do that. The internet by itself cannot replace that