The Man Who Would Overthrow Harvard
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A couple of my friends attend Green College[0] at the University of British Columbia (UBC). I crashed in their residence room for two nights during a cross-Canada road trip at the end of July.
The short time at Green College restored my love of higher education, which had been flagging toward the end of a drawn-out CS degree at the University of Calgary. Every morning the students meet for breakfast at a hall in the center of the residence compound, between 7 and 9. This is much earlier than my usual wakeup time, which hovers between 10 and 11. Green College has students from a wide variety of disciplines, and discussions accompanying the meal were a general mash of ideas far outside what I would ever encounter when hanging around my school's CS labs. It was a joy to participate.
The experience very clearly communicated to me that this is what I've been missing. Education in a vacuum is horrendously dull when compared to all these ideas bumping into each other around the breakfast table. It's inspiring; without the social aspect, school is reduced to jumping through hoops and learning the secrets behind magic tricks.
The idea of forming a close-knit community of students then transposing it to cities around the world has me grinning. Were I younger and capable of meeting the admission requirements...
But these experiences are quite expensive. It is not clear that they scale to our current egalitarian and pragmatic educational system.
Obviously we see that at some level. "He's a college man" doesn't have the cache it did in 1920.
> we should be focusing on where real and big problems
> lie: education for the masses, at affordable prices.
Getting into harvard has very little to do with smarts and has everything to do with the circumstances you were born into.
> A degree [at Minerva] will cost less than half the average top-end private education, which is now over $50,000 a year
At Harvard today, the minority of students pay full price. Over 70% of the undergraduate student body are on scholarship. Notably, if your family earns less than $65,000 per year you will pay nothing to attend.
Minerva wants to charge students $20,000. There is, as far as I can tell, no financial aid policy or bursaries available. And why would there be - Minerva is, after all, for-profit.
If your family is at or below the median household income in the US then Minerva is an extremely expensive proposition. Whereas at Harvard, and many other colleges, it's free.
For that reason alone, the value of being "from Harvard" is greater than being "from Berkeley".
We all live in "that world", it's not a choice ..
$200k is nothing, really, in the long term. It's one or two years of salary, whether you've gone to Harvard or Berkeley. It's the non-salary aspects that make the Harvard degree (not education) more valuable.
What do you mean by this? Are you talking about starting a startup? You could fund your own company for $240k and work on multiple ideas in that time (assuming your first few ideas fail quickly).
Where are you getting the $240k? If you could easily get a loan for that amount to do "whatever you want" instead of for higher education, a lot more people would be doing it.
How do you get a $240k loan if you are not studying at Harvard or a similar school?
I am not sure if aid and scholarship are the same thing. But according to this http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/1/26/diversity-lack-f... Over 45% of students dont even qualify for aid because their parental income is over $200,000
" we come to the stunning conclusion that approximately 45.6 percent of Harvard undergraduates come from families with incomes above $200,000, placing them in the top 3.8 percent of American households. Even more shockingly, only about 4 percent of Harvard undergraduates come from the bottom quintile of U.S. incomes and a mere 17.8 percent come from the bottom three quintiles of U.S. incomes."
Which also means that over half the students wouldn't care much about the cost of tuition.
[0] http://money.cnn.com/2010/04/09/pf/college/no-loan_financial...
At most Ivy Leagues it effectively is. Harvard also has a 'no debt' policy, so that aid really does have very few strings attached. The Crimson article you linked to uses data from 2010/11, whereas I'm using the latest figures from the admissions office.
That's one of the key things that separates a great university from a teaching college. Investments in the long-term careers of research professors. Teaching is just one of their responsibilities; they also research and publish. Same for their grad students. That takes subsidies that come in part out of undergrad tuition.
So sure, if you cut that out you're going to have cheaper tuition. But if this model were actually adopted on a wide scale, you'd also dry up the supply of great professors.
As an exceptional case it might work, but only by exploiting the investments of other institutions. Very "silicon valley libertarian" in that respect.
Brilliant.
Also, his reductionist approach to higher education means Minerva will lose a lot of the quality of education and community that makes a top-tier program worthwhile.
Someone has not paid much attention to the past 20-30 years of developments. Faculty salaries are a falling proportion of university spending. The current cost drivers are administration (both size and salaries) and capital outlays. For example, the University of California system spends only 30% of its budget on faculty salaries (that includes non-tenured faculty). And faculty are rarely, with the exception of med schools employing star surgeons, among a university's most highly paid employees. Look at what the top administrators make in comparison.
That said, one possible hassle I can see with this plan is that to bootstrap an "elite" reputation, and deliver these big core courses in a useful way, you're going to need some amazing professors, and as a PhD candidate with ambitions of teaching, I'm not sure I'd want to work for this university. Teaching via email and video lectures is unappealing, and (more importantly for catching top talent), I don't think it would be a good career move - they don't have the elite reputation yet, and I feel like at the end of my "flexible short term", I'd have trouble convincing a more traditional university that my experience wasn't from some online diploma mill.
State schools. They rock. And they're (relatively) cheap. For example, in-state tuition at the University of Texas is about $10k/yr.
Olin? Too bad they screwed up their endowment and have to charge tuition now. I wonder if that will affect the quality of the student body. But Olin was definitely a try at "instant elite."
That said, this particular article is hyperbole, as creating a institutional brand like Harvard is something you do not say you are going to do. A great example of this in recent history is Y-Combinator.
The perception of quality comes from actual quality.
At a place like MIT or Caltech, almost all the professors are also researchers. Undergraduates have a lot of opportunity to get involved in that research.
What research opportunities will be available for Minerva students?
At a place like MIT or Caltech, almost all professors are also researchers. They really like research, and teaching is kind of a drag.
What learning opportunities will be available for MIT or Caltech students?
Now, admittedly, the above institutions take teaching seriously, and the students will get a great experience. But the same isn't true in many public flagship universities where professors prioritize research over teaching.
That being said, I prefer being a researcher to being a teacher, which is probably why I'm not a professor.
If he went to Wharton Business school for undergrad, he does not have a liberal-arts education. History and literature are liberal arts, business is not. Yet he blames his lack of growth during undergrad years on the very same:
>My first six months, what did the consulting firm teach me? They didn't teach me the basics of how they do business. They taught me how to think. I didn't know how to check my work. I didn't think about order of magnitude. I didn't have habits of mind that a liberal arts education was supposed to have given me.
Perhaps he thinks he studied the liberal arts because he majored in Economics. But majoring in Economics within a business school is, as Wharton's website proclaims, a specialized, business-focused approach, which the site's copy actually contrasts with "a liberal arts setting." [1]
Such programs can't be grudged for failing to cultivate the mind, as their sole aim is "appl[ying] business methods and economic theory to real-world problems." Business programs will always fall-short of real-world experience in teaching business skills, since one is actually real.
If he had studied an actual "liberal art" like philosophy or history or French, he might have gotten the mental development that his program apparently lacked. I think those of us who truly delved into liberal arts programs, with the accompanying rigor, breadth of study, and dedication to teaching, found them a great boon to our mental capacities.
Edit: Another trend that's been irking me lately: the idea that you can "teach" someone to think through "critical thinking" classes:
>In the Nelson dream curriculum, all incoming students take the same four yearlong courses. His common core won't make students read the Great Books. "We want to teach you how to think," Mr. Nelson says. A course on "multimodal communications" works on practical writing and debating skills. A "formal systems class" goes over "everything from logic to advanced stats, Big Data, to formal reasoning, to behavioral econ."
There's a reason that "Communications" programs have a reputation for being full of fluff. If you want to learn how to communicate, communicate. Trying to "study" it isn't get to help you personally. If you want to learn how to write, write about any subject, and have your teacher tear your work apart. Communications skills are taught through experience. You can't sit down and "learn" writing skills.
[1] http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/undergrad/academic-excellence/B...
This isn't a question of "mental development" but of having useful things pointed out so that you don't have to suffer whatever damage accrues from not knowing them.
>"My first six months, what did the consulting firm teach me? They didn't teach me the basics of how they do business. They taught me how to think. I didn't know how to check my work. I didn't think about order of magnitude.
and then his goals for Minerva:
>"We want to teach you how to think," Mr. Nelson says. A course on "multimodal communications" works on practical writing and debating skills. A "formal systems class" goes over "everything from logic to advanced stats, Big Data, to formal reasoning, to behavioral econ."
Both these comments suggest that he's looking to improve the core critical thinking skills of his students. Indeed, he explicitly says as much. Thinking, reading, writing...these are historically fundamental goals of education.
They are not, however, merely "useful things" which can be pointed out. You cannot simply sit down and "learn" how to read/write/think, anymore than you be can taught a foreign language without actually speaking or writing it, or programming without coding.
They are "basic" in the sense that they form a foundation for other skills. What he seems to be aiming for is not "basic" in the sense that you use, which seems to cover tasks like "how to perform this financial function" or "how to use this technology." (But maybe that's not the sense you're using "basic in).
> I didn't know how to check my work. I didn't think about order of magnitude.
I suspect in these cases he learned some useful trick or mode of thinking in a matter of minutes by having someone point it out to him. Not so much "basic" as "simple".
And irrespective of whatever Minerva claims to do I think it is clear that many "elite" graduates feel there are simple, useful things not being taught in schools which ought to be.
I, like you, have a very hard time understanding the logic behind this. I don't have any idea how one could go about teaching a young person to think critically by sitting them down and saying, "to think critically, do A, B, C". I'm all for experimentation, and if Nelson thinks that he can do it better, I'll gladly give him the benefit of the doubt and wait for the data. I think it's hubris of the highest order for him to say that he's going to teach people to think. What he will do if he's successful is teach people how to compete in a modern technological economy, which is certainly a laudable goal.
Taking this a step further and claiming as he seems to that the Great Books are no longer necessary for students to learn critical thought seems absurd.
Just for the record as people read my comment, I will admit to being as biased as is possible to be on this subject, having gone to both the most liberal arty of all the liberal arts colleges[1] and a large liberal arts university[2].
[1] http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/admissions/learnmore/admission...
Technologists can have dumb ideas too, of course. But this particular dumb idea doesn't come across as a techie's idea.
There's a reason that "Communications" programs have a reputation for being full of fluff. If you want to learn how to communicate, communicate. Trying to "study" it isn't get to help you personally.
I think this is awfully pedantic. Your are making an assumption that for some reason this class won't involve communication, and will just involve studying, based on a quoted snippet of what Ben Nelson said.
>as opposed to receiving a generalized American-style "liberal arts education" (referring to the uniquely American method of having a core curriculum and general education requirements)
Neither a core curriculum nor general education requirements qualify an education as "liberal." At least, they shouldn't. The liberal arts are subjects, first and foremost. The humanities, social sciences, and hard sciences. Their power lies in their great history of consideration throughout civilization, their prevailing and constant influence on the affairs of the world, and the nuanced questions that lie at their center.
The liberal arts are inherently inter-disciplinary, and thus invite exposure to more than one. Moreover, the "teaching" of the liberal arts is far different than "research" in the liberal arts, a point often missed in larger university settings. If they are not taught well, you're not receiving an education of any sort.
I'm not criticizing Nelson's education, or at least, don't mean to. But what he's criticizing is not what he thinks. It may be that pre-professional economics degrees normally do impart critical thinking skills. Nelson seems to think they don't. I don't really care; what I know is that these requirements don't meet the demands of the liberal arts: http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/undergrad/academic-excellence/f...
Nelson seems to think they don't.
You're seriously misinterpreting what he says about how modern degrees don't impart critical thinking skills. His criticism is directed at Ivy League educations in general - not only pre-professional degrees but also liberal arts degrees: "I didn't have habits of mind that a liberal arts education was supposed to have given me. And not only did I not have it, none of my other colleagues had it—people who had graduated from Princeton and Harvard and Yale." It bears noting that Harvard has no pre-professional degrees except engineering (no business degree); it's clear his criticism is drawn out of his disappointment that a liberal arts education was supposed to give him and his colleagues critical thinking skills, but failed to do so.
Furthermore, the instant I looked at the link you posted, I could already tell that that wasn't actually the degree requirements for Wharton (I could tell that those were the requirements for a major but not for graduation). So that's a really poor example. The full degree and graduation requirements are listed here: https://spike.wharton.upenn.edu/ugrprogram/advising/curricul...
If you were to ask recent top graduates about 6 months into their first job what basic useful things they learned that they should have or could have learned in school I think you would find many recurring themes.
Why are students forced to unnecessarily learn things the hard way?
Amazon is a good role model when you look for a for-profit giant, but I'd like the top education model to look like Wikipedia. Heck, Wikipedia is a pretty good tool for kickstarting your interest in a given field, and it has plenty of references, too.
Why is this the case? Is teaching basically the last great guild?
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League_nude_posture_photos for more, and http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/up-against-t... for the story of one student who went through this process, Yale graduate and talk show host Dick Cavett.