Will Your College Survive?

Rather than chime in on usefulness of college for learning programming (a reductionist way to look at it), I'll take another approach.

A strong CS program in a university (e.g., one of the top-20 for CS, which is actually very a different list from the usual "brand name" schools) is where you learn that your aptitude and previous programming experience won't suffice: you'll also need to apply yourself, handle stress, manage your time. It's harder than many industry programming jobs (which is not only better job preparation, it's also strong incentive to find a position that isn't seen as boring, i.e., one that pushes you).

Draw your own conclusions, but I'd suggest speaking to a CS graduate from Berkeley EECS, Stanford, Harvey-Mudd, CMU, University of Washington, UWaterloo, et al about what their program was like.

[Disclosure: I didn't attend such a program myself and I turned out okay. However, have I had a chance to do it over again, I'd have attended one of the above mentioned programs -- not because I'd be in a different spot professionally, but because that experience is intrinsically valuable.]

I have a hard time believing that the social experience of universities can be matched with an online based education. I am as much of a product of the people I decided to associate with as I was with the professors I met in the classroom. Late nights talking about life, learning how to live, work, and interact with other people -- are experiences that are going to be difficult to recreate online.

Yes, they'll survive. Will they have to adapt? Of course they will, but no one is better positioned in the education system than the...education system. Our colleges won't look the same in 10 years, but I guarantee the names will be familiar.

"Peter Thiel believes smart people don’t need college, and he’s right"

I don't really understand this argument. Need? You go to college to learn things. Smart people don't need to learn things, nor do dumb people. The system needs work, the price may be out of whack, but nobody can deny that college (and the education system in general) is generally efficient at the diffusion of knowledge.

Disclaimer: I love school. If I could spend the rest of my days as a full time student, I would.

"The Internet is the first technology since the printing press, which could lower the cost of a great education and, in doing so, make that cost-benefit analysis much easier for most students."

Perhaps it will bring the cost of an education down to the point where even a TechCrunch writer can afford to learn basic grammar as it pertains to the uses of subordinate clauses and commas.

The problem with online education is the lack of available credentials that are well recognized. The main reason people pay $50k a year to go to a top school is to get the well recognized credential. The ability to learn has gone online. Many top colleges such as MIT, Stanford, Yale and Harvard have put some of their course material online but you can't get recognized for what you have learned. Someone needs to create a prestigious, low-cost online undergraduate degree for students that can't afford a conventional college or who don't want to be tied down to one location for 4 years.

Right now I would say that the University of London International Program is the most respected program available in the category: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_London_Internatio....

I look forward to more known universities creating online versions of their educational programs but I think top universities that have no problem attracting students will resist making the change. And for new programs, getting the necessary prestige and recognition will be a very uphill battle but I hope some social entrepreneur will find a way to crack the code. Also, Salman Khan has a lot of interesting views on the topic of the college of the future: http://abiekatz.com/2011/06/salman-khan-presents-his-vision-...

Doctors should not operate on themselves, lawyers should not represent themselves, and academics who are totally detached from reality certainly should not diagnose themselves.

Notice the total detachment from reality in these remarks:

William Bowen, who later became President of Princeton, first put some math to this in 1966. The problem is not the cost of football teams or palatial dorms; it’s a lack of productivity growth. Putting a professor in a room with 25 students cannot become more efficient every year, while almost everything else in society does.

The problem is not one of scale or efficiency; it's a complete mismatch between value needed and value supplied.

Academia continues to double its prices, knowing full well that they can only be paid by taxpayers while supplying its end users with a product that will never enable them to pay back those loans. And continues to churn out "communications majors" without basic communications skills while industry pines for engineers. What a scam.

My alma mater continually seeks my advice on how to improve their fundraising. I tell them to forget about fundraising and provide better value. They could start by getting up off their asses, getting out into the real world, digging more than one superficial level deep, and finding out what is really needed. Lowering prices and adding sciences couldn't hurt, either.

> Peter Thiel believes smart people don’t need college, and he’s right

To be honest, most of the classes I've taken in my life (not just in college but in grade school as well) taught me very little that I couldn't learn by myself from a textbook. And in many cases, I did indeed end up teaching myself the material from the book (usually beforehand). This means that class time would essentially be a review session, or a time to highlight the topics that the professor wanted to focus on (useful for the exams). So the classes were definitely beneficial, but arguably unnecessary. This is partly a function of my own study habits and workflow, but I imagine that many other motivated students are in this category. And in the age of the Internet, the ability to teach yourself will become even more valuable.

That said, I wouldn't say my time in school was wasted, even if I could teach myself most (though not quite all!) of the things I learned in my classes. At least in college, my favorite classes were the ones which challenged my previous beliefs or forced me to consider things in another light (yes, this can happen in CS, too!). When you're learning things on your own, following your own interests, there's a natural tendency to avoid this kind of dissonance, which provides a sort of selection bias in what you end up learning.

Furthermore, college is a great time to meet other people and engage with them on an academic level. This can be your professors, who are oftentimes domain experts, or other students who share your interests. (Or even other students who don't). Yes, you meet smart people in the workforce and other aspects of life too, but it's rare to engage with them on the same type of academic level as you do when you're in an academic setting. (And even if you could simulate this through online classes... call me old-fashioned, but I still put a premium on in-person, face-to-face interaction).

My formal education has been incredibly valuable - just not for the reasons one typically considers a formal education to be valuable. If that's all you're considering, then yes, online classes can simulate most of that. But for me, they would have missed the most rewarding parts of my academic experience.

It just needs to be pointed out: an education at Random State University can be had for less than $10,000 a year. Taking that degree in a low-cost state would enable low expenses overall.

The Open University in the UK has offered relatively respectable degrees in traditional subjects since 1969. It's popular (around 169k students according to Wikipedia), but certainly hasn't replaced brick and mortar universities.

On the subject of tuition, my uncle has worked in government as an auditor for years now. Now that he's in a state job, he's come across something interesting.

One of the biggest state universities here has been dumping huge amounts of money into research. What has come out of it? Absolutely nothing. It's basically a few people getting obscene money, employing support staff, and not producing anything.

A full audit hasn't been performed yet, but based on initial data, he thinks that if this activity is ended, tuition could drop by 40% or more.

Not going to happen until the college experience ceases to be ingrained in the American Dream.