Disruptive Innovation vs. Harvard: Who Will Win?

Hmmm. I really like your ideas, but unfortunately I don't think the system you describe is the system Harvard is at the top of. I think it is at the top of the system where the goal is to have strong qualifications and get many incredible opportunities throughout life (not just a first job). It may also be a good place to become a better person, but ranking that seems much murkier to me. I can think of lots of things that could arguably be higher in the become-a-better-person rankings than going to Harvard or, indeed, any university.

> Delivering education at scale is not in itself hard. Coursera, Udacity, Khan, edX...lots of people are making a very good go at it. Delivering the personal and social development that comes with a college education - that's the hard part.

This is spot-on. The university I went to was good in terms of education; I learned a lot while I was there and it's definitely a cornerstone of my intellectual development. However, in terms of personal and social development, it was a dead end.

There are some institutions that manage to build thriving communities which encourage growth beyond the mere knowledge you gain there. That's something which you cannot replicate easily -- and a phenomenon that was long known. The wise men of the Lyceum or the Academia didn't spend their time there just for the lectures.

I don't know if Harvard is such a place, but if it is, that's a great asset for them.

This is the type of thing that come up every time a post-university world is mentioned. College is so much more than...

It's true but not true in a way that invalidates the arguments that college will become less important/desired. People spend 1-2 years trying to get into college programs and then 4 years of their life at college. Parents save for decades. Students go into debt for it. Governments give it priority in their budgets. The costs are huge.

The only reason so many people will put so much emphasis on anything is that it eventually impacts their socio-economic status. Some people take a year off to travel. This can be good for character development too. It costs far less in time and money. The reason its not an institution like college is because it doesn't directly impact socio-economic in the same way.

Especially with old, elite schools this is as much about impacting students' social identity & skills as it is about their intellectual and technical skills. Its often best to approach the socio-economic status thing from an angle. All these things can't be decoupled. If college stops becoming the path to getting high paying, high status jobs, it will not be worth the cost.

I think the erosion will start farther down the food chain than Harvard though.

"But a college education is so, so much more than just taking classes and getting good grades. It is about developing as a person, finding yourself."

Yes, and, furthermore, its because of similar intangibles that companies like Goldman like to hire Ivy League graduates. The idea that Goldman hires Harvard MBAs because that's their best proxy for specific technical skills is, well, I guess it's kind of sweet in its naivete. The old boy network that the post mentions in passing isn't an accident, it's the point - a Harvard degree isn't a proxy for technical skills, its a proxy for a particular kind of person with a particular kind of outlook, and that's what gets people hired.

> ...college is not, in itself, all about the lectures and grades.

The great thing about Khan et al is that they have "disrupted" the lecture part of the equation. I would like to see this result in more emphasis on research for the professor and less on lecturing. This will also make class time more about rapport building with one's professor and fellow students.

> He assumes that you should go to Harvard because you want to get a good job and leave with the best qualifications. This is not why you should go to Harvard. [...] students should really be going to Harvard to become better people.

Nevertheless, that is why people DO go to Harvard. For qualifications, connections, and the boost to their reputation. $250,000 (assuming you graduate in 4 years) is an awfully expensive way to become a better person if that is your sole goal.

When your best case for universities is "education isn't the thing that really matters", you know they are in trouble.

Harry Lewis is a very profound thinker, who also has put some of his coursework online. Good link.

A couple thoughts on this:

- Harvard is the last to worry about on-line disruption. Every other school will be disrupted before then. People will want to send their kids there purely for the elite association. Boston University, Boston College, Brandeis and Tufts will all suffer immense disruption before Harvard feels it.

- Despite this, Harvard does offer on-line degrees.

- Even still, the worth of graduate degrees seem to be going down. To cite his example, Goldman Sachs seems happier to keep around analysts with 2-3 years experience, rather than hire new MBAs. It's not getting rid of the MBAs, but they're devaluing the degree relative to 2-3 years of relevant experience.

It's not just you.

Especially in light of recent events where we definitely learned that, while some of the players might have changed, the power structure is still the same.

> I also have to question if this costly signalling game is beneficial for the society both in human and economic terms.

I don't think there is any question. The "elite" university phenomenon is about class, not academics.

This would make sense if elite education was actually costly, but it's not. Run http://npc.fas.harvard.edu/ for a middle-class family.

Yeah it's a little odd to compare them considering universities vary so widely from one another in a variety of facets whereas Coke and Pepsi have significant similarities. Furthermore, the implications of which university one attends is vastly different than choosing a soft drink.

...yes. I think it sort of undermines his point. Because people might not care about drinking Coke or Pepsi, but lots of people would pick a brand name cola above a generic one.

The same with colleges: you could go to Harvard, Yale, Penn, MIT...one of dozens of highly respected colleges and have a fantastic time. Like Coke and Pepsi, it's much of a muchness. But the next tier down - the 'generic colas' of university education, if you will - that's a little different. Not bad, per se - just different.

The analogy doesn't really help the argument, either. "Here are two companies that are massively successful primarily because of branding. So, clearly, the even more significant branding of higher education will be unsuccessful."

I'd say University fetishism is localized to certain areas of the US, too. I've lived on both the west coast (Seattle, San Diego, Colorado) and east coast (Boston). In Boston, where you go to school matters....a lot, likely due to Harvard and MIT being here, along with several other universities. When I lived on the west coast, it didn't matter nearly as much and I felt that I had an easier time getting hired at certain types of jobs.

German universities aren't very good at attracting foreign students and they tend to underperform in international rankings (in large part due to the previous point). I don't think German universoties are an example anyone wants to follow.

>"Measuring" educational products is functionally impossible.

Why? I'd agree it would be difficult, but "impossible?" For instance, I could imagine creating tests to measure a student's competencies in things such as engineering, programming, or foreign languages pretty easily. Then once you measure a student's competence at the beginning and ending of a curriculum, you have your measurement of the educational product. Not that standardized testing is the answer, or easy for any subject... but it's an example.

>teachers keep going back to the same methods that have always been used.

Maybe if they either don't care or if they don't see a reason to change. I'm helping teach a course starting next month, "Technical English" (for non-native speakers), and am always looking for ways to improve on what I did last year. In fact, if anyone out there would like to talk to my class about your job over skype one day, I will integrate that into my curriculum right now. (You could add "guest lecturer" to your resume as a possible incentive).

The author of this article is the founder of knewton, and educational software company for k-12. Their software optimizes questions and educational material for student based on measuring how fat the students are answering questions, in what types of questions they are wrong, etc.

They are deployed in some schools , and they show a big improvement for student results.

So i'm not so sure measuring is "functionally impossible"