Zephyr Teachout, writing “A Virtual Revolution is Brewing for Colleges” in tomorrow’s Washington Post, picks up where Kevin Carey left off, envisioning an aggregation of higher education. “The funding of academic research, the culture of the academy and the institution of tenure are all threatened,” writes Teachout. “... Online degrees are already relatively inexpensive. And the price will only dive in coming decades, as more universities compete.” She’s scary smart, a visiting professor at Duke Law School, and handled the internet side of Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign.
Teachout draws parallels between newspapers and universities in bright bold lines that can’t be missed. Or ignored. “Just as the new model of news separated ‘the article’ from ‘the newspaper,’ the new model of college will separate ‘the class’ from ‘the college.’” Whoa.
Teachout writes that community colleges are already “working with limited resources to maximize their offerings through Internet aggregation.” Meanwhile, Minnesota Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller (DFL-Minneapolis) said on Minnesota Public Radio’s Midday yesterday that Minnesota’s community colleges have the second-highest tuition rates in the US. This isn’t going to be pretty.
Like Carey, Teachout is convinced that the only thing standing in the way of higher education aggregation is accreditation (although she doesn’t use the word). In the near future, higher education aggregators (think Google and Huffington Post relative to your local newspaper; if you still have one) will serve as a consumption portal. Students will be able to pick and choose classes from a wide variety of different institutions instead of being locked into the offerings of a single university.
This isn’t anything new, really. It’s just that the internet reduces the friction. While my degrees (one’s still technically in process; it’s a long story) came from a then-small Georgia college, I did a lot of my upper-level coursework elsewhere—everywhere from Berkeley to the University of Chicago.
Teachout says the current higher education system is built around redundancies: at any given time, on any given weekday, hundreds of professors are teaching basically the same thing to thousands of undergraduate students. When those redundancies are eliminated, “... we will see a structural disintegration in the academy akin to that in newspapers now,” writes Teachout. “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.”
It’s important to note there’s a potential scaling issue here: What might work well for undergraduate-level survey courses, may or may not scale to graduate and post-graduate level work. And Teachout doesn’t address the self-examination that can only come with going away to college for four (now five!) years. At least in the US’s dominant culture.
Teachout wimps out at the end of the article, calling for more higher education funding at a time when public funding of public institutions is falling steadily (the citizens of Minnesota fund less than 30% of the University of Minnesota’s budget):
“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.”
Replace “higher education” with “newspaper” and “college teaching” with “bureau chief” and you see the indisputable parallels. Both institutions are being shaken to their core. It’s our collective responsibility to make sure what comes after is qualitatively better, retaining the best these institutions have to offer. Step one is agreeing that it’s necessary and a priority.
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