The coming disruption of colleges and universities
nymag.com
nymag.com
The future of education is not moving tests online. It’s no tests at all. The future of education is workshops.
Teachers as mentors, not lecturers and truancy officers. Exercises instead of lectures. Peers instead of tests. Projects instead of grades.
After completing a workshop, you have a project to show for it - not a score. After completing a workshop, you have an alumni network to draw on.
Workshops are self-directed. There’s a schedule to the exercises, but enough room for people to go at different paces. Students work in the open, and learn from each other. Students are encouraged to collaborate, instead of punished as cheaters. Students compete by seeing what’s possible.
Workshops are about learning to do great work, instead of learning to pass a test.
Workshops are the future of education.
COVID-19 has just accelerated this by moving schools online and laying them bare. Online there's no having lunch together, flirting, or getting dressed up. Online there's none of the things that made school more than a test. As the schools move online people see the emperor has no clothes.
Maybe there are completely dystopian schools where no communication is going on. Everything exists somewhere. But it is just not true that it is universal experience of school.
What does an employer get in your scenario? Four years of 'projects' to sift through? How do they know what a good deliverable looks like for a CS 61A class at Southeastern Louisiana State University?
No grades works great at Yale Law, when you're dealing with a group of the most talented and motivated young people on the planet. That will not work in a mass education system, where the need to make the grade is the only thing getting half of the kids out of bed in the morning.
As someone who participates in interviewing undergraduate candidates, I prefer those that have projects to talk about over those who tout their GPA. Project work correlates very well with aptitude and initiative.
Projects require deep understanding, research, trial and error, and fully integrative thinking. There's no better way to learn and grow.
I’ve run into this when interviewing or going through resumes of entry-level engineers. A lot of them will have a similar senior capstone project, so now I’m back to looking at GPA or some other signal.
“Yes yes you worked on CMU’s autonomous vehicles program. So did the other 10 candidates, but tell me what makes you truly unique? “ etc.
We might be looking for different things.
I'm just looking to hire self-driven folks that know how to program, problem solve, and communicate. I'm not looking for pedigree, elite status, or anything of that sort. In fact, I don't even care if candidates went to college. If they can demonstrate that they know what they're doing, then that's fine by me.
I predict cookie cutter projects won't be an issue. If a candidate can talk in depth about their project, the choices they made, the things they learned - that's good signal. It doesn't matter if everyone performs the same exercise, because not everyone will come away with the same experience.
I'd argue most capable people will come away with largely the same experience.
Like you, I have a bias toward projects and self-motivated individuals. What I'm saying here is that right now you filter toward that, because everybody has a good GPA, so it's not as strong of a signal. If you change the education system so that everybody has great project experience, you're going to swing back to some other metric to filter people out (like GPA/prestige of university/training program/etc.).
I don't think you can ever really escape it.
In my example, everybody has great project experience and a great GPA. So how do I decide? Well, I start looking at other things like maybe they're the captain of the volleyball team.
(speaking for university hires here at least).
And if they are not good, what it is exactly that they are missing? Then it makes sense to look for the specific thing most are missing. But it makes less sense to look for some special person without being able to define what special you look for and chasing random signals instead.
I was thinking about this point the other day. What made me question it is that everyone that goes to college went through 12 years of education that wasn't too dissimilar to that. But for whatever reason that is not considered.
But lectures have their place. A lot of times, you need information transfer from someone who knows a lot to someone who knows little. I am in favor of video lectures with active learning components to self-test yourself.
Also, subjects like Mathematics, require a lot of practice of, perhaps, boring questions. While some practice can and should be done collaboratively, a lot of it has to be done individually. There is no substitute for that.
I know the bigger point you're making, but it has dawned on me recently that life after school is always about passing the test. Every interview that I've faced has required me to study in order to pass the test to get in.
I teach at NYU also. I teach very experiential, active, project-based courses. My students, for projects in my class, get written up in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Inc; they speak at Harvard, TEDx; they get funded by Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt; supported by the Dalai Lama; they get promoted at their jobs without asking. Again, this is for class projects, not just later in life.
But what does the Dean I report to talk about when reviewing my syllabus? She asks "Where are the papers?" She says "It needs more academic rigor" and tells me to assign more papers to read and write. Even so, beyond their practical accomplishments, I would stake any of my students against their lecture-and-case-study-taught students in theory and impractical knowledge too.
As an adjunct, I get nearly zero resources or support. My courses use a fraction their costs -- no office, administrative support, faculty lunches, coffee, etc.
A student who told me he learned more marketing in my entrepreneurship class that was at NYU but not Stern (NYU's business school) than from his Stern marketing class said I could quote him but not by name since he didn't want to get in trouble with the school.
An entire generation has been saddled with enormous debt to line the pockets of non-instructional staff. You reap what you sow.
The only shame is that it won’t hit the very top layer of exploitive institutions. But wiping out some is better than nothing.
This was in the 70s and early 80s, so remote learning is certainly viable even without the internet. They went to some seminars and tests in person, and there were summer camps and such held at university campuses during the holidays. The course is held on a schedule, you don't really work at your own pace and have to keep up, and you have an assigned tutor. Getting a degree this way could take a long time, twice as long as usual but there is also an option to do the degree full time in 3-4 years. It's not cheap though, a Computer Science course has 3 stages, corresponding to years at college, and cost about £6k per year.
The Open University still exists and seems to be going strong, and having just taken a look it seems they make extensive use of the internet. Is there anything like that in the US already? It seems to me this is a very well established and proven approach.
https://www.extension.harvard.edu/academics/bachelor-liberal...
I think they are usually focused on practical knowledge. I think a lot of land grant state college type places have an extension school focused on training up farmers:
It's not really the same as the OU.
But even then, there isn't an online replacement to the college experience, which is in person with large groups of friends learning how to live on your own a bit in a safe, educational environment. No one wants to stay at home and take online classes and live with their parents.
That got me thinking, a huge part of the reason why some people fight/pay to get into the best universities is so they can get into the best companies. Isn't the university just a middle man at this point?
Then my next thoughts are mostly along the lines in what is discussed in this article.
Whether you want to get into tech, academia or government you will try to get into the best universities because they have the best alumni network, the best resources and the best name recognition.
Now of course this only applies to extremely ambitious people (I don't think being ambitious is necessarily a good thing). Plenty of people are fine working at a regional bank. Plenty of people are fine living a simple, stable life in a local government administration. Those jobs can even be attractive to ambitious people, if you're a first generation immigrant from a dirt-poor background, a stable local government job with decent pay and benefits is certainly something worth striving for. For such people a local community college will provide just the same level of knowledge and skills they'd get at a big name university.
I can't quite put my fingers on what's wrong with the article, but it rings to me as the perspective of someone who's only familiar with fancy colleges and has little knowledge (or care) for what actually goes on and who actually goes to smaller institutions.
It is party credentialing, partly middle man, but I personally learned a lot and I think going to university gave me a lot. Then again, I live in a place where I did not had to go into lifelong debt for it.
We dont know how to do good online education yet. The biggest problem seem to be that people get demotivated and drop up in much higher rates then when they go to same course in person.
But even if we would, I dont think online education will solve problem of student debt. That did not happened because it would be impossible to provide affordable education or impossible to hire people from cheaper universities. The same pressures and systems that made in person education expensive, the same system that greatly favors students from few universities for prestigious positions will make online learning have the same problems.
The average Bachelor’s graduate in the US has $38K in debt the day they graduate. If you go in state to a state school you will on average pay even less. If you don’t get an expensive graduate degree in a field with no jobs you’re not going to be swimming in debt.
The actual issue of "picked obviously bad degree with no jobs" is rather small. Most students go for practically sounding degree.
If the purpose of education is to learn something about the world, become an informed citizen, and contribute to (or at the very least, become aware of) human intellectual, scientific and artistic achievements, then no, a tech company isn’t much of a substitute.
Unfortunately these two things have been conflated, lowering the value of both. Personally I would like to see the university split into two: one half technical education based on economic needs, the other half focused on educating people. St. John’s in Annapolis / Santa Fe seems like a good model for the latter.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John's_College_(Annapoli...
Conflating real education with job training and certification of intelligence and conscientiousness does not lower the value of education but it does make training and certification easier to sell by adding some of the lustre and prestige of scholarship to trade. This is to education’s benefit. Without it there would be many fewer people studying fields with no jobs or very few like the Studies, Psychology or Physics.
There will always be those whose parents can afford to spend a lot of money on a finishing school. Everyone else will need to get a job and there’s not going to be much support for subsidizing that from those whose children aren’t going to attend.
1. Providing a well-rounded education is somehow impossibly expensive, whether with modern communication technologies like the Internet or paper books. Surely the solution is to make this education cheaper, not to simply get rid of it?
2. Ignoring the fact that a democracy doesn't work if citizens aren't educated. Quoting The Great Books of the Western World:
This answer...assumes that we can leave all intellectual activity, and all political responsibility, to somebody else and live our lives as vegetable beneficiaries of the moral and intellectual virtue of other men.
The trouble with this assumption is that, whereas it was once possible, and even compulsory, for the bulk of mankind, such indulgence now, on the part of anybody, endangers the whole community. It is now necessary for everybody to try to live, as Ortega says, "at the height of his times." The democratic enterprise is imperiled if any one of us says, "I do not have to try to think for myself, or make the most of myself, or become a citizen of "the world republic of learning."
Forcing education on people does amazingly little to change their tastes.
If democracy doesn’t work if citizens aren't educated how did it work before universal primary or secondary education? The US, UK and France among others had a wide franchise long before a high school education was normative.
And education doesn’t even make informed citizens. Only 40% of the US population can name all three branches of government. Most people are ignorant of civics in all countries. You can’t make people retain information they neither use not care about but you can make their childhoods worse by wasting their time.
Forcing a simulacrum of education on the unwilling or unenthusiastic has low, low returns in knowledge.
Post Civil War, the four-year liberal arts education took on the role of finishing school for the children of the upper middle class. Vocational training was unnecessary, since they were expected to return, suitable spouse in tow, to the family business. The education, to the extent that it mattered, was to provide them with background for their role as leaders in society.
Students preparing for science, engineering, and the other grubbier majors were looked down upon, particularly the students from the lower classes on scholarship.
I don't buy the idea that being educated to be a productive person is not an education, or is somehow inferior.
I've seen too many non-STEM educated people who could really use a couple courses in statistics, what the scientific method is, how to discern gold from pyrite, what percentages mean, using data to find answers, distinguishing wealth from income, understanding exponential behavior, understanding what a chaotic system is, etc.
Besides, knowing what general relativity is just mind-bending (pun intended!).
> one half technical education based on economic needs,
The idea that scientific education is not practical is incorrect. For example, scientists contributed massively to the victory of WW2?
> Knowing what general relativity is or how to discern gold from pyrite has nothing to do with the economics of getting a good job
I used pyrite as a metaphor, it's colloquially known as fool's gold. Less delicately, learning how to distinguish shit from shinola. This is quite a valuable skill.
As for general relativity, the background needed to understand what it even is means your mind is trained, and this training is highly marketable and useful. Then being able to marvel at it is a wonderful thing, indeed.
Many of them don't really have statistic class that would teach practical statistic either. They don't end up being able to pick samples and work with them nor understand statistical methods. They end up able to prove few conjectures.
I am not saying they should teach that, these are often not relevant to the degree.
Yes, it is. Technology is applied science. My degree is BSME - Bachelor of Science Mechanical Engineering. Freshman required classes for BSME were all science & math. Engineering classes came later, and were built on that foundation.
I don't understand where the notion that science is something else is coming from.
> Many of them don't really have statistic class that would teach practical statistic either.
Statistics is foundational to technology. For example, you cannot compute the reliability of a design without understanding statistics.
> these are often not relevant to the degree
That is just not so.
Even so, a humanities degree does not include science or statistics.
The heavier CS classes required lots of induction proofs, and the crypto classes were entirely probability oriented.
My main quibble is with the original post that supposed STEM degree holders are more rational than non-STEM degree holders, as being exposed to a subject during a semester or three in school doesn't guarantee retention after graduation if it goes unused.
But who knows, people also have quite a short memory, so it might be forgotten 5 years down the road.
So, with that, I think schools / majors that are aimed at "essential services" will see a rise in applicants.
So I see a cohort of “high end” schools that offer low volume/high cost product (basically the Apple approach).
A few mass market winners that are essentially online only.
And some private sector “tutor” kind of places that provide a kind of third party recitation or handholding where needed.
The mass market winners may not be obvious either. The obvious candidates are the existing large high-reputation institutions like UT and UC but they may struggle institutionally to adapt. It could be a U of IL (which has already been innovating in this area), or NYU whose administration appears right now to be whistling past the graveyard but which has shown an ability over the last couple of decades to adapt significantly.
And I expect community colleges, at least where they are well run like California’s excellent system, to really adapt rapidly to “online plus a little in-person supplementation.”
That’s only possible in places where universities are businesses. Elsewhere (most of Europe for instance), it would be super easy to counter this trend: don’t give the new comers the national habilitations that make the awarded degrees recognized and thus worth something.
He found a job as a developer so he’ll use the year working and (implicitly) networking which should improve things at graduation time. Internships are being cancelled or virtualized so a real job at one of those companies is more valuable at the moment. In some ways an internship in a structured internship program can be better, but not in 2020.
I like the education he’s been getting (and more importantly he does too) but the rest of the value add has been gone this semester. A big part for him has been the connection with the faculty (how did he find this job at $bigco?). No point in paying for that until things settle down.
"I think Jeff Bezos is going to offer the COVID-19 test as part of Prime membership. I think that’s where we’re headed."
Slightly off-topic but hilarious nonetheless!
Interesting concept, I went ahead an ordered a copy on Amazon. Not sure when it will arrive as all my USPS stuff has seen a 5-7 day delay, but looks like it's worth exploring.
I actually declined all the offers to be included in several 'rush week' inductions, I despised 'campus life' by the end of my incoming Summer Freshman year. And the notion of 'paying for my friends' was not just alien to me, but counter intuitive as I was already living and working alongside Pro-drivers, Industry leaders in Motorsports by the time I was 17 and going to Industry parties and gatherings by 19.
Later in my upper division courses I found out how critical getting a passing grade was less about what you knew, then who you knew as the Frats were running exams. Funny enough, some of those Frats would also get caught in a Drug Sting by the Federal Government that year, too.
I hope MOOCs play a strong role in the future of education. They're awesome and easily accessible to everyone. This could be the start of the democratization of education.
However, the flip side is that there exists lower-tier institutions because there are lots of people who would not do great. If you keep a Stanford education meaning what it means today then those folks would flunk.
Look at the MOOC experiments where the percentage of people who pass is in the single digits. (There are all kinds of arguments that some people only sign up for part of the course anyway, that people can take it three times at much less cost than the traditional way once, etc., but single digits is a shock.) There are lots of people who have the skills and motivation to succeed, which is wonderful. But there are also lots of people who will fail to swim, but who are now being helped by these other places.
Could you elaborate on this? I've done a couple of MOOCs recently (Coursera in conjuction with Columbia, Princeton, etc). I could see that tens of thousands of others had enrolled. I'm curious about what the completion rate is. I personally got some value out of them. I'm wondering why they might be considered failures. In fact I'm seeing lots more courses come up.
I personally signed up to many courses I did not even intended to finish. And even where I intended to finish, it turned out too much. I could do required 6-8 of work for first few weeks, but sooner or later there is deadline in work or personal problem that you have deal with and will stop the course. It was free and I learned something without finishing it anyway.
In one case, I dropped out from final test while having all previous homework done and full credit up to that point. I just decided that learning for final test would be too much effort an stopped.
Actually relevant study I have seen compared online and offline version of the same course, in the same year and students who all paid to study (e.g. normal students). The online people dropped out or failed much more often then offline, but it was not single digit. I cant find it now.