The Future of Education

May 1 was decision day, the day by which high school seniors need to have selected which college they are going to attend.  Sarah has just been through the whole college application-admission-decision process and it was exhausting and stressful for everyone involved, especially her.  And we've talked a lot about "what's worth it," at our house -- which schools might be worth accumulating student debt for, and which ones aren't.  The cautionary tales in the newspaper, about young adults whose hopes for the future are on hold year after year, because of student loans that are outsized compared to their salaries, who feel like they can't get married, they can't buy a home.  The kids who borrowed money and got degrees and now can't find work in their field, and work as bartenders.  The kids who didn't even get the degree but still have the loans, and the parents who co-signed them.  The discussions in Washington about how much expensive student loans should be.

The major reason I have been absent from this blog for so long was Philip Zelikow's world history course on Coursera.  The course started in mid-January and ended in late April.  I was one of the almost 5000 on line students who completed the course and earned my Statement of Accomplishment.  I printed it out and put it in the folder with the certificates for all those courses I am required to do at work, even though no one cares that I did this and no one will ever ask me for it.  Registration was easy (a click of the mouse) and the course was free, although I bought the textbook and most of books that were on the additional reading list.  I didn't do all the reading but I did a lot of it and I watched every lecture, with frequent pauses for the note-taking that was required to do well on the weekly quizzes.  I printed out the maps and graphs that were the course's visual aids and they are with my notes in a binder that is now on the shelf with my textbook.

Of course a free online course -- even an excellent one like this -- is not the same as being in a small seminar with an excellent professor.  You don't have the real-time, in person discussion that helps solidify learning, and I didn't have to write anything at all, which certainly would have been required in Professor Zelikow's in-person, for-credit class at the University of Virginia.  But most university classes -- especially the introductory classes that I have been required to take along with my classmates at every institution of higher education that I have ever been enrolled in -- are not small seminars with excellent professors.  If you're lucky, the introduction to art history or political science or psychology class that you are required to take is taught by someone who has mastered the art of conveying information in a sufficiently engaging way to keep the attention of the hundreds of students in the class (a task that is probably far more difficult now because there are so many more things available to distract students than there were when I was in school).

Predictably the pushback at universities has started, the fear that professors will be replaced, that universities will be dismantled.  I would have more sympathy for this position if the courses that were at risk were seminars-with-excellent-professors, but they aren't -- they are (for now anyway) those huge classes that are required to get a degree, and at many schools are not available to all the students who need them.  Already in California there is discussion about giving credit for on line courses if the on campus version is not available (I don't know if the proposed legislation passed or not).  But it's too late.  The current model -- young people taking on huge debt to attend universities where they can't get the classes they need and when they can they are in huge classes that are no more personal than my video lectures by Professor Zelikow -- is broken.  It's going to change, and it needs to.  There are new models already, and there will be more.