More thoughts on this topic, from Michael Barone.
[Update a while later]
Roger Kimball notes another similarity with housing:
As I wrote in a piece for The New Criterion a few years ago,
“Many parents are alarmed, rightly so, at the spectacle of their children going off to college one year and coming back the next having jettisoned every moral, religious, social, and political scruple that they had been brought up to believe. Why should parents fund the moral de-civilization of their children at the hands of tenured antinomians? Why should alumni generously support an alma mater whose political and educational principles nourish a world view that is not simply different from but diametrically opposed to the one they endorse? Why should trustees preside over an institution whose faculty systematically repudiates the pedagogical mission they, as trustees, have committed themselves to uphold?”
Just imagine the sorts of sub-literate, ideologically charged nonsense that Women’s Studies debtor was battened on in her classes! The Australian philosopher David Stove, commenting on the Faculty of Arts at Sydney University, formulated a diagnosis that applies to the teaching of the humanities of most Western universities: It is, Stove wrote, a “disaster-area, and not of the merely passive kind, like a bombed building, or an area that has been flooded. It is the active kind, like a badly-leaking nuclear reactor, or an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle.”
There are incipient signs that a Great Recoiling from this intellectual disaster is beginning to form. It will be greatly aided by the economic disaster in which the institutional life of universities is embedded. “Why,” hard-working parents will ask themselves, “does it cost more than $50,000 a year to send Johnny to college.” Leave aside the question of what it is that Johnny is and isn’t learning in those ivy-covered walls. Why does his four-year furlough from the real world cost so much? One reason, of course, is that Johnny, assuming his parents are paying full freight, is paying not only for his own tuition: he is also helping to foot the bill for Ahmed, Juan, and Harriet down the hall. Colleges routinely boast about their generous financial aid packages, how they provide assistance for some large percentage of students, etc. What they don’t mention is the fact that parents who scrimp and save to come up with the tuition are in effect subsidizing the others. How do you suppose Johnny’s parents feel about that?
Honk if I’m paying your kid’s tuition.
Okay, I just – just! – got back from dropping off my stepson for his freshman year at college. Yes, we are with Sallie Mae. Why does stuff have to come out now? A couple of months ago would have been so much nicer.
Maybe he can drop out after the first semester and we will only be out $15K.
What they don’t mention is the fact that parents who scrimp and save to come up with the tuition are in effect subsidizing the others.
Amen and with the way that tuition has climbed it is making it almost impossible to do without loans anyway. This is a result of the states offloading their responsibilities on the federal government indirectly through these tuition increases.
Do we really need Universities anymore? Has the University system outlived its purpose?
Check out Salman Khan’s Youtube channel.
What they don’t mention is the fact that parents who scrimp and save to come up with the tuition are in effect subsidizing the others.
Not only that, but government student financial aid keeps tuition artificially high, and is basically a taxpayer subsidy of leftist faculty. Without government aid, colleges would have to compete on price, and some of the Marxists might actually have to get jobs in the real world.
Homeschooling is already a practical reality at the elementary and secondary levels. As Ed Minchau’s link shows, homeschooling at the college level is probably closer than we think.
homeschooling at the college level is probably closer than we think.
Distance learning has been going on since the 90’s at UAH and it should be possible to put together a world class faculty for an online U.
In addition to the high cost of tuition, there’s the cost of textbooks. I just got off the phone with my son who starts graduate school Tuesday. For one term, he’s required to buy 18 books (6 for one class alone) at a cost of $900.
Totally unrelated to the subject at hand but as of his completion of The Crucible yesterday my oldest son is a United States Marine!
Cecil Trotter
My sincere congratulations to you and your son. He has earned- if you will- a credential that is not likely to to be devalued with the passage of time. I wonder how many credit hours he would have had to taken and paid for to achieve a similar life changing educational experience on a University campus as opposed to Paris Island.
Semper Fi
Congratulations Cecil.
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Further to my “do we need universities” question: do we still need hardcopy research journals? Isn’t the blog format much better suited to the purpose of academic papers and journals? No refereeing required, the comment section performs that function. Hyperlinks and trackbacks would link papers together better than regular bibliographies and citation indices. Footnotes become popups or links to anchors in text.
The whole structure of a university education is based on political and social realities in Europe 600 years ago. You needed to gather those scholars together in one place or communication between them was all but impossible – it also helped for all scholars to have access to a common library. Faculty needed to both do research and teach the next generation of scholars, who needed to be gathered physically together.
Now we each have access to the largest library possible, right at our fingertips. We don’t need to be in the same physical place, because we’re in the same virtual place. And we all teach each other, and can publish something as fast as we can type.
At the same time Universities are inflating the cost of tuition, books geared to specific courses are short runs for a publisher, and vanity press in some cases (i.e. professors requiring their own textbook for a course). I can remember some of my undergrad linear algebra textbooks costing $100 or more 20 years ago, in some cases more than a dollar a page.
The same information can be posted on a web page or blog post or vlog and given away for free, as Khan is doing.
There’s also Wikiversity. And the Encyclopedia of Life. And Mathworld.
Anyone who wants to learn about anything at all can do it online. It’s getting better and more thorough every day.
At certain ‘elite’ schools the tuition covers the bundle of a) the education one chooses to pursue, and b) access to the interviews/on-campus recruiting conducted by the ‘elite’ employers. As pointed out by several above, the cost (not tuition) of the actual education component continues to fall while easy access to quality material continues to grow. The recruiting end hasn’t moved as quickly (yet). The bubble is likely to burst first where very little of the job access is being delivered. The admin’s ‘review’ of for-profit education and job-placement (debt service) is a look at where this is going.
Ed Minchau,
[[[Further to my “do we need universities” question: do we still need hardcopy research journals? Isn’t the blog format much better suited to the purpose of academic papers and journals? No refereeing required, the comment section performs that function. Hyperlinks and trackbacks would link papers together better than regular bibliographies and citation indices. Footnotes become popups or links to anchors in text.]]]
Actually the answer is yes. You may still find hard copy papers from the early journals of the Royal Society, and you have confidence that every word is the same as when it was written. If I cite that source in a paper today anyone may locate it and be confident what they are reading today is what I read when I wrote the paper. And what other authors have read. By contrast what is on a blog today may be gone forever tomorrow.
However where blogs would work well would be with working papers and floating new ideas, before they are put a more permanent form.
Thomas Matula:
Good points. The problem with putting everything online is that malicious editing (like Orwell’s “memory hole”) becomes too easy.
The invention of printing didn’t make handwriting obsolete; likewise computers won’t make printing obsolete. Jet airplanes didn’t make hot-air balloons obsolete. There are proper roles and purposes for each technology.
Dennis Wingo,
[[[Distance learning has been going on since the 90’s at UAH and it should be possible to put together a world class faculty for an online U.]]]
Having taught online since the 1990’s, and having assisted in the design and development of online business programs at mulitple different universities I know the technology is already there. The challenge is that the accrediting agencies are still geared towards traditional education and are only slowing allowing the organizational model to change to reflect the capabilities of the Internet.
You may still find hard copy papers from the early journals of the Royal Society, and you have confidence that every word is the same as when it was written
Indeed. In contrast, we have the travesty of the CRU and the concentration of the refereeing process in Climatology in the hands of a dozen people – or look what Chandrasekhar had to go through for more than a decade until Eddington died. With paper journals, the refereeing is a bottleneck that can act to suppress the truth rather than uncover it, much like the editorial board of a newspaper.
By contrast what is on a blog today may be gone forever tomorrow.
There’s also the Wayback Machine in the case of disputes over original text, if necessary. Perhaps papers would better be published as PDFs with the blog acting as the journal and discussion forum. Heck, isn’t arXiv already doing something along those lines?
I think the transition will happen over a very short time. There are a few universities – Cornell and MIT come to mind – which are already performing this transition, moving everything from curricula to course materials to journals online. If the supply of education is nearly free, they why take on a twenty-year debt load and go to university?
It’s the exact same problem that the music industry and movie industry have been battling since Napster, except “Education Piracy” might be a hard sell to the courts.
When I went to college back in the 50’s, I could see the beginnings of the current problems beginning to raise their ugly heds even then. I went on the G.I. Bill and always bought used books to save the taxpayer’s $$$. I slipped through in 3 and 1/2 years to receive my degree. It was a lot of fun. Grade penalties for not totally agreeing wih the professor were few and far between, but were definitely there. We had one professor who fought it tooth and nail. and kept reminding us that the college was for “opening our eyes to other opinions and opposing ideas.” He was in Philosophy in Education. I liked him. I did a paper with a young lady on Darwin, in which we put down the idea of “Evolution.” He had to “referee” the discussion on that one.
Ed Minchau (if it’s not too late and you still get to read this) – thanks for the link to Khan Academy. Just watched his mini lecture on path integrals. So clearly and patiently explained – and this guy has done 1600+ similar videos by himself, which are free to watch! Amazing. Never heard of it until now, so thanks.