Posted on 10/15/2012 6:35:33 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Higher education is in transition and with a coming proliferation in online courses could be totally free for many within a decade. The status quo won't yield easily. But this is looking like a real answer to runaway student debt.
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NANTUCKET, Massachusetts — As few as 10 years from now, quality higher education will be largely free—unless, of course, nothing much has changed. It all depends on whom you believe. But one thing is clear: The debate about financing education grows louder by the day.
Experts with a wide range of views on the subject, including the always-interesting Harvard professor and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, weighed in last weekend at the Nantucket Project, a big-think conference in the spirit of TED and Aspen Ideas Festival. The most provocative, though, were hedge fund billionaire Peter Thiel and the author and entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa.
Thiel has gotten a lot of attention for his view that higher education is broken, and that many kids would be better off saving their money and going straight from high school into a trade or developing a business. His “20 under 20” fellowship grants high school graduates with a sound business idea $100,000 if they agree to skip college and go right to work on their idea.
Wadhwa’s views are less well known, even though he served as a counter-point interview last May on a 60 Minutes segment featuring Thiel. Wadhwa has unwavering faith in the power of technology to fix much of what is wrong with the world, and he believes that online courses will revolutionize higher education and cut the cost to near zero for most students over the next decade.
(Excerpt) Read more at moneyland.time.com ...
In Pittsburgh they have The Pittsburgh Promise.
A very large (five-figure) guaranteed scholarship to any student in the Pittsburgh Public Schools who can maintain a 2.0 and graduate.
The money came mostly from UPMC (in the form of a bribe to keep the city from looking too hard at all the untaxed property they own as a “nonprofit”.
Will be fun to watch the fireworks when Obamacare puts UPMC under and they have to yank the guarantee away from The Children.
I think there are legitimate academic merits to physically participating in person. While there may be some classes that lend themselves to online learning--your example, in which a student is studying law--do you really not think it might be wise for that student to be able to have some social interaction with like-minded students? I'm not sure that reducing every human interaction to a tersely-worded text message, sloppily-composed e-mail, or even a jumpy-looking video conference enhances our way of life.
I've seen people who've taken online classes; I'm just not impressed that their educational experiences are the same as those who participate in person.
You might well ask someone who wants to learn to play the piano the same question. Why sit through all those lessons if you can pass the written test after 20 hours of study about playing the piano?
There is much to be learned about the actual practice of a profession by being there in person. Are you going to be a successful attorney if all you know of law is the book and the computer screen?
Knowing about something and knowing how to do something are entirely different things.
Zero is running lots of ads on radio stations geared to a younger audience here in FL talking about how Romney doesn’t want people to go to school. What those sad saps don’t understand is that he wants to prop up his lib friends in academia with their skyrocketing tuition costs because all he’s interested in doing is giving out loans which will burden these “students” for a large part of their working lives.
Having people unemployed yet in school also helps his unemployment statistics. Convenient!
Which means worthless.
I know several kids, ours included, who paid no tuition and lived at home, so no room and board and used this method to complete their degrees tuition free (catch is you need to live close to major state school and/or private universities.)
The plan: 1. AA from Community College using Dual Credit program which gives them the AA and HS diploma at the same time. 2. Make good grades and earn a merit scholarship to a state institution pays free tuition (I know they have these programs in Florida and Georgia.) 3. Grad school, do well on your GMAT or GRE have a good grad point on your undergrad, and be a TA which provides a stipend and pays your tuition to grad school. The trick is being willing to forgo the "college experience" by not living on campus, and living within commuting distance. Our kid's longest commute was around 35 miles each way...for the state school, and 20 miles for the private U where he did grad work. Now if gas was then, compared to what it is now, maybe it'd be cheaper to live on campus :)
I want a free boat:)
Additionally, I’ve looked at some of the MIT online offerings in computer science and engineering. There is no way your average freshmen will get much out of those. The MIT “freshman” courses are for juniors, seniors, or even graduate students at most other instititions.
I’ve always maintained that anyone can pass the Multistate portion of the Bar Exam with proper study. Law school has nothing to do with the Bar Exam.
However, as I have unfortunately learned during my years of practice, the ability to pass the Bar Exam does not mean you’re a good or even adequate attorney.
Wow! I guess the teacher’s unions have had a real change of heart and have convinced all of their members to voluteer their time instead of being paid.
And all of those buildings, built and maintained by volunteers!
This is a miracle! But I guess it only makes sense, following the path of free healthcare.
(/s)
RE: When I think of my own experience in college, I gained as much by being in an academic community surrounded by my classmates and professors as I did in the classroom
All of the above are true. However, here is one question -— AT WHAT COST? If your tuition debt is being comfortably paid for or you are totally debt free, then your experience is worth it. If you’re still a debt slave, I wonder whether “being in an academic community” is worth the price...
Looking back at it from over thirty years in practice, I can say that getting through law school was its own challenge, as was the bar exam, as was learing the ropes as a lawyer, as was learing how to try a case. Each of these hurdles exists within it’s own little world, and not much learned in one area carries over into the next.
I got MY education for FREE...(almost)....My employer paid for my tuition and I think my books also....I worked FULL TIME while I went to school FULL TIME (weekends, nights)....after me, the employer decided they shouldn’t pay 100%...hahaha. I decided to go at it with extreme focus and got an undergrad and MBA done in 3+ years. Course this was in the early 80’s.
I don’t think college will ever be totally free. I don’t think that the classroom experience will be entirely eliminated, either.
But on-line elements of education are making their in-roads into higher education.
Our local community colleges now offer many courses for credit either in the classroom or on-line. These on-line courses for credit will transfer into our state university system for four-year degrees.
The university colleges (”adult, non-traditional education” - what used to be called “night school”) in many places are moving heavily toward an on-line model. On-line courses with credit toward degrees. I know that Univ of Maryland and Villanova both offer various masters degrees with at least some on-line courses for credit.
The really big guys are also dipping their toes in the water.
Harvard and MIT have teamed up to develop and roll out “EdX,” which will offer many of Harvard’s and MIT’s courses on-line, albeit, for now, not for credit.
However, the on-line model IS moving into the traditional undergrad educational experience. At Harvard, my son’s computer science class (enrollment: 700) is available both in the classroom and on-line. He doesn’t need to go to lectures. He can just watch the lecture any time over the Internet.
There are in-person labs for the class, but most of the “teaching” is done through each student’s computer. “Mother” (as Steve Jobs used to say) is built into the box. If a student doesn’t understand something, he queries the knowledgebase. But if a student stumps the on-line knowledgebase, and asks a question that the computer can’t answer, well, there are teaching fellows wandering the hall to give desk-side assistance.
It’s difficult to see precisely how the contours of education will change over the coming years as a result of technology, and especially the Internet, but education is changing, will continue to change, and will look markedly different 10 years, 20 years from now than it does today.
"Free" and worth every penny!
Not as long as college athletics is big bidness.
Most countries have a strict entry exam, with limited seats.
So we wouldn’t have near the numbers of degrees, or schools. We also would have a much different class structure.
Higher education needs to be reformed, and radically so. I don’t think this is the best option.
That's a good point. In my case, my undergraduate degree was earned at a state school in the '60s where tuition and room and board was $600 per semester, an amount that could comfortably be earned over the summer and with a small part time job during the school year. Unfortunately, due to the easy availability of student loans, the cost of tuition has far, far outstripped inflation, so the days being able to pay as you go are probably long gone.
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