Is College a Rip Off? - John Stossel & Physics Majors

[twofish-quant]

I have long held the belief, from when I used to do more programming, that one day the more general education classes (I would include most 2nd and 3rd year university courses in physics, math, and engineering) could be taught through a combination of interactive programs (mostly to organize and make useful knowledge-bases) and things like OCW. I've heard rumors of people doing it also, but I don't think it's really workable right now.

Since I like inventing the future, the question that I'm asking is "why is it not workable, and what can I do to make it workable?"

The big bottlenecks here are social and political, and if you look at those bottlenecks, I don't see them lasting very long.

One big problem is that people look at the "college experience" as a series of courses when I'd argue that the classroom is probably one of the *least* important parts of the college experience. That part of the problem is already done. One part that was missing was the career and academic advising parts, but things like this forum are fixing that part.

The only really big issue that I see is being able to monetize learning. I've taken a course, how do I convert that into cash to finance that learning?

The main problem I see is, as you say, there is no reason any educator would want to construct such a system - it would ruin their livelihood.

1) Ultimately you have to point out that the purpose of education is to educate. There is something in the teacher-student relationship that is similar to parent-child relationship. If you construct a system that messes up your life, but creates a better world for your kids, that's a good thing.

2) Something that you find in industries with massive technology changes is that your job as a company is to ruin your livelihood. If you don't construct a new system that destroys the old, you are going to be dead when that system evolves anyway.

(Maybe that is why OCW had a huge growth spurt to start and then suddenly things just stopped? When they realized what they were doing haha. I don't really know about it though.)

It's partly because MIT changed Presidents. OCW got a lot of political support from Vest and Hockfield wasn't quite as interested in it. It's not that Hockfield is a bad person, it's just that OCW is not on the two or three things that she cares most about. The other two people that are "thought leaders" at MIT are Hal Abelson and Woody Flowers. And then you have the ghosts of Margaret MacVicar and William Barton Rogers still influencing things.

MIT tends to change presidents every decade, and so one of the things that I'm interested in is the selection process for the president after Hockfield. Something that I think is going to be essential is if the corporation chooses someone that does put OCW on the list of two or three things that they care about.

I think it will have to come down to a government or state funded project.

US universities are massively subsidized by the government. There is a big difference between government-funded and government-managed. Government managed projects are political minefields. There are hundreds of interest groups, and any time you try something new, you have thousands of people that can and will say NO.

One thing that governments do is to write checks to institutions that aren't under these sorts of constraints. MIT gets massive amounts of money from the US federal government. Government gives MIT money with the only real string attached being to "do something that helps the US maintain global control." Here's money, come back with cool stuff.

If you want something done that is new and creative, you don't want more than twenty people involved. Fewer people, less political inertia. The venture capital system works this way. Instead of given a billion dollars to one company, you give 100 different loans of $10 million to different startups. 98 of the startups will blow up. 2 will change the world.

I see what you meant then - interestingly, I usually prefer the slow and methodical methods over rash movements, but sometimes playing it safe leaves you obsolete. It'll be interesting to see how things evolve over the years in "digital education," or whatever it might be called.

Except that digital education isn't a new thing. MIT is a very slow bureaucratic, consensus-based, risk adverse organization. Columbia and NYU are much less slow and bureaucratic than MIT, but they invested hundreds of millions of dollars into e-learning, and it all blew up on them (see Fathom). MIT was an extreme late comer to digital education with OCW so they avoided a lot of the mistakes.