Structural disintegration of the Academy
(What is a Zephyr Teachout?, you ask. Well, according to her Huffington Post biography, Zephyr Teachout “teaches Election Law at Duke University School of Law. She is the former National Director of the Sunlight Foundation, Director of Online Organizing for Howard Dean's Campaign, and Researcher at the Center for Investigative Journalism in Bosnia-Herzogovenia”.)
Excerpts:
Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which "going to college" means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet….
The real force for change is the market: Online classes are just cheaper to produce. … Distance-learning technology will keep improving. Innovators have yet to tap the potential of the aggregator to change the way students earn a degree, making the education business today look like the news biz circa 1999….
This doesn't just mean a different way of learning: The funding of academic research, the culture of the academy and the institution of tenure are all threatened.
Both newspapers and universities have traditionally relied on selling hard-to-come-by information. … A student can already access videotaped lectures, full courses and openly available syllabuses online. And in five or 10 years, the curious 18- (or 54-) year-old will be able to find dozens of quality online classes, complete with take-it-yourself tests, a bulletin board populated by other "students," and links to free academic literature.
But the demand for college isn't just about the yearning to learn – it's also about the hope of getting a degree. Online qualifications cost a college less to provide. Schools don't need to rent the space, and the glut of doctoral students means they can pay instructors a fraction of the salary for a tenured professor, and assume that they will rely on shared syllabuses. Those savings translate into cheaper tuition, and even before the recession, there was substantial evidence of unmet demand for cheaper college degrees. Online degrees are already relatively inexpensive. And the price will only dive in coming decades, as more universities compete.…
Taking the newspaper analogy one step further, college aggregators will be the hub of the new school experience. In the world of news, the aggregators have taken over from the newspaper as the entry point for news consumption. Already, half of college graduates attend more than one school before graduation. Soon you'll see more Web sites that make it easy to take classes from a blend of different universities.
Because the current college system, like the newspaper industry, has built-in redundancies, new Internet efficiencies will lead to fewer researchers and professors. Every major paper once had a bureau in, say, Sarajevo – now, a few foreign correspondents' pieces are used in dozens of papers. Similarly, at noon on any given day, hundreds of university professors are teaching introductory Sociology 101. The Internet makes it harder to justify these redundancies. In the future, a handful of Soc. 101 lectures will be videotaped and taught across the United States.
When this happens – be it in 10 years or 20 – we will see a structural disintegration in the academy akin to that in newspapers now. The typical 2030 faculty will likely be a collection of adjuncts alone in their apartments, using recycled syllabuses and administering multiple-choice tests from afar.
…
So how should we think about this? Students who would never have had access to great courses or minds are already able to find learning online that was unimaginable in the last century. But unless we make a strong commitment to even greater funding of higher education, the institutions that have allowed for academic freedom, communal learning, unpressured research and intellectual risk-taking are themselves at risk.
If the mainstream of "college teaching" becomes a set of atomistic, underpaid adjuncts, we'll lose a precious academic tradition that is not easily replaced.
A friend found this -- 37th in healthcare:
4 comments:
Good grief, I hope she's wrong.
I doubt if she's wrong. The fiscal crisis seen here and abroad suggests that cheaper is better. The business side of education will eventually dictate how it is delivered. And the virtual world is virtually cheaper. Why teach 25 students when 225 can be handled by one teacher. The internet highway is faster--no parking, few or no books, articles, hands on stuff. No libraries to maintain nor buildings to build.
But how far up the education ladder can this go? BA or BS probably. But MA or MS? PhD? Tech/Career-- probably?
I suspect that we're not ready for a surgeon trained on line but in 30 years or so? Maybe.
I don't think it's a brave new world, just a new world.
I find it a terrifying world--but perhaps that is just a knee-jerk hatred of big change, which I freely admit to.
I worry about the loss of the college experience: everything from great discussions in class (and outside of class in the hallway after a particularly lively session), to the moral change that can happen when people are in the same room and residence halls with people of very different socio-economic backgrounds, ethnic and racial make-up, and so on, to the clubs and government opportunities (of very mixed quality, I realize), to having mentors who are actual, flesh-and-blood professors.
Scary, indeed, to me. I'm so glad that I went to college in the '70s. My experiences then seem priceless, to me.
Am I wrong?
"Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'."
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