The End of the University as We Know It. By Nathan Harden. The American Interest, January/February 2013. Also here.
Does Online Ed Spell Doom for Traditional Universities. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, December 16, 2013.
Harden:
What
about the destruction these changes will cause? Think again of the music
industry analogy. Today, when you drive down music row in Nashville, a street
formerly dominated by the offices of record labels and music publishing
companies, you see a lot of empty buildings and rental signs. The contraction
in the music industry has been relentless since the Mp3 and the iPod emerged.
This isn’t just because piracy is easier now; it’s also because consumers have
been given, for the first time, the opportunity to break the album down into
individual songs. They can purchase the one or two songs they want and leave
the rest. Higher education is about to become like that.
For
nearly a thousand years the university system has looked just about the same:
professors, classrooms, students in chairs. The lecture and the library have
been at the center of it all. At its best, traditional classroom education
offers the chance for intelligent and enthusiastic students to engage a
professor and one another in debate and dialogue. But typical American college
education rarely lives up to this ideal. Deep engagement with texts and
passionate learning aren’t the prevailing characteristics of most college
classrooms today anyway. More common are grade inflation, poor student
discipline, and apathetic teachers rubber-stamping students just to keep them
paying tuition for one more term.
If you
ask students what they value most about the residential college experience,
they’ll often speak of the unique social experience it provides: the chance to
live among one’s peers and practice being independent in a sheltered
environment, where many of life’s daily necessities like cooking and cleaning
are taken care of. It’s not unlike what summer camp does at an earlier age. For
some, college offers the chance to form meaningful friendships and explore
unique extracurricular activities. Then, of course, there are the Animal House
parties and hookups, which do take their toll: In their research for their book
Academically Adrift, Richard Arum and
Josipa Roksa found that 45 percent of the students they surveyed said they had
no significant gains in knowledge after two years of college. Consider the
possibility that, for the average student, traditional in-classroom university
education has proven so ineffective that an online setting could scarcely be
worse. But to recognize that would require unvarnished honesty about the
present state of play. That’s highly unlikely, especially coming from present
university incumbents.
The
open-source educational marketplace will give everyone access to the best
universities in the world. This will inevitably spell disaster for colleges and
universities that are perceived as second rate. Likewise, the most popular
professors will enjoy massive influence as they teach vast global courses with
registrants numbering in the hundreds of thousands (even though “most popular”
may well equate to most entertaining rather than to most rigorous). Meanwhile,
professors who are less popular, even if they are better but more demanding
instructors, will be squeezed out. Fair or not, a reduction in the number of
faculty needed to teach the world’s students will result. For this reason,
pursuing a Ph.D. in the liberal arts is one of the riskiest career moves one
could make today. Because much of the teaching work can be scaled, automated or
even duplicated by recording and replaying the same lecture over and over again
on video, demand for instructors will decline.
