Posted on 03/25/2015 8:13:07 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
My Pope Center Clarion Call today is a review/essay of Kevin Carey’s new book The End of College. I found it fascinating and highly persuasive.
In sum, Carey argues that the old-fashioned college bundle (degree, fun, dubious learning) will soon be replaced by what he calls “the University of Everywhere.” The U of E is the vast assortment of online learning, assessment, and certification that has been gaining momentum slowly for decades. (His history of that development alone is worth the price of the book. If you’ve never heard of Patrick Suppes or Herbert Simon, you’ll marvel at their pioneering work.) The standard retort when online courses come up has been, “They’re not very good and can’t compete with actually being in the classroom.” Carey’s counter-argument to that is devastating. He actually took the online MIT introductory biology course taught by the famed Eric Lander and found that learning the material online was much better than being in the classroom.
What I find so appealing about the U of E is that it’s a spontaneous, unregulated, free-market response to the evident inefficiency of the educational status quo. Carey and I are in perfect agreement that higher ed is mainly run for the benefit of the producers (faculty, administration, and other hangers-on) with little concern for the consumers. Despite all the obligatory talk about commitment to educational excellence, most profs and schools are happy to let students “float on a river of mediocrity,” as he puts it. The U of E gives serious students the opportunity to opt out of that for more focused and far less costly alternatives.
This won’t eliminate traditional brick and mortar schools, but those that survive will be those that are student-centered (as the first university, Bologna was), rather than faculty-centered, as most now are.
The End of College is a very thought-provoking book. Here’s one thought: what if the U of E expands to include primary and middle education? That has already begun, of course. If higher ed in America is a high-cost, low-benefit operation run for the benefit of the purveyors, that is even more true with regard to our K-12 system. Imagine the brain power that would be released if sharp and ambitious kids could race through basic education without the constraints of assigned schools, age-groupings, governmentally-approved curricula and so forth. Also imagine the frantic efforts of the K-12 blob to hold on to their cushy positions once parents start demanding freedom to take advantage of the School of Everywhere.
They would get a better quality of students if they followed the example of the first university and had all the lectures in Latin.
The approach that I have taken with my children with their entire eduction (elementary thru college age and beyond) focuses on what their needs are at a particular time and balancing that with finances. My children have seen a mixture of private school, home school, public school, cyber school and traditional college. My elder daughter is now venturing into non-traditional college student role (e.g., not a full-time student on/near campus) where she is working and also going to college; sometimes part-time and other times full-time.
All of this is predicated on the notion of acquiring knowledge for different purposes. The current purpose for my elder daughter is career related. When my children were young, it was all about being literate. When they were high school age, it was about useful life knowledge and transitioning to a career/job. One of my primary education objectives for my children from the very beginning was never to constrain any of their options as an adult. In practice, that is basically making sure that they don't take some blow-off class instead of a more rigorous class that lead somewhere. For instance, to fill a graduation requirement a student can take a general math course or something like statistics for dummies. I would make my kids take calculus instead of general math and a calc-based stat course. They were never keen on math, but they could do it. However, the option for a further learning or a career that requires mathematics or statistics was never cut off.
I think this pragmatic approach is much better than government mandated requirements to learning/graduation. Both of my daughters have always exceeded government mandated requirements. By the way, this has little to do with intelligence or ability.
But we are in one of the top-ranked school districts in Pennsylvania and I didn't want her limiting her options for college by trying something new. I'm now sorry I didn't let her.
Pennsylvania has some very good cyber schools now (and a few fly-by-night outfits) which are cutting into the educrat revenue stream.
I’ve been arguing this for years.
The current system, culminating in debt that can’t ever be paid off, is not sustainable. And that doesn’t even address the bilge they are being taught.
Why limit yourself to a single university’s faculty when you have the technology to learn from the best in the world at whatever the subject?
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