NYT Fighting the Future of Higher Ed. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, February 19, 2013.
The Trouble With Online College. Editorial. New York Times, February 18, 2013.
Revolution Hits the Universities. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, January 27, 2013.
The End of the University as We Know It. by Nathan Harden. The American Interest, January/February 2013.
Mead:
Every
new idea has problems and online ed is no exception. But the New York Times seems inordinately eager
to call the whole thing a waste of time. Yesterday’s editorial, “The Trouble
With Online College,” is oddly dismissive of what is likely to be the biggest
threat to traditional college patterns of instruction: the “hybrid” course in
which the equivalent of a TA or a tutor works with small groups of students
around a lecture course.
Training
people to teach these classes may work, warns the Times, but is expensive: “Hybrid courses are rare, and teaching
professors how to manage them is costly and time-consuming.”
Perhaps—but
it’s much, much less expensive than the current method of having virtually all
classes everywhere taught by full PhDs. A college or institute that trains
tutors and assistants to teach one particular course could really save a ton of
money by replacing PhDs (many of whom are not particularly good teachers, and most
of whom are anything but intellectual leaders in their fields) with highly
trained and focused tutors. These tutors, while not knowing a field in as great
a depth as a PhD, would be able to provide students with a better experience in
one particular course than most PhD faculty at most colleges can now provide.
Does
the Times really think it’s more
expensive to train people with BAs to be TAs in a physics course than it is to
train and hire PhDs?
The NYT editorial board seems deeply
invested in the existing model, viewing new forms of higher ed with sentiments
similar to those with which the American Blacksmiths’ Association viewed the
early cars. Those early cars did have a lot of breakdowns, and there were a lot
of problems with them. But it was pretty obvious to everyone but the Livery
Stable League that change was coming.
There
are serious questions to be asked about the future of American higher ed. We
need to make training and job qualifications much cheaper, and at the same time
we need to revive and strengthen the concept of liberal education. But until
places like the NYT accustom
themselves to thinking outside the blue box, that debate is going to be less
rich and thoughtful than it needs to be.
