The Future of College?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
> But then I remembered what I was like as a teenager headed off to college, so ignorant of what college was and what it could be, and so reliant on the college itself to provide what I’d need in order to get a good education.
One point not much addressed is that, while this style of education sounds great for the top five or ten percent of students, that leaves a large number that I (and I have experience with them) wonder about. There is some bias in people who went to top schools, and succeeded there, thinking about the way they would have liked to have been taught.
If a student has not done the reading, or not done the homework, or does not participate in class, do they get an F? Currently you work with people, trying to bring them along. Changing that would be a very sharp change in the current practice of education. (Or, will this education method lead to students doing the reading? That's a wonderful and tantalizing hope.)
That's by no means to put down the innovations, which are exciting. That's only to observe that often a person's thinking is influenced by who they are, and their experience.
But again, I am not saying the tech in the article is bad (if that's what you meant by a "well, what about this?" question), quite the opposite. I don't claim to know anything about Minerva's tech, I just don't believe the case is yet proved for its effectiveness when used with students who are at the fiftieth percentile.
It's remarkable that at a place like UC Berkeley (where I study CS), the pinnacle of innovation is videotaped lectures and programming assignment autograders. That, and iClickers during lectures (devices that let you answer multiple choice questions). Many universities have worse technology than many Fortune 500 companies - in areas that directly affect students. Apparently Berkeley's online course enrollment system limits the number of times you can login because it's based on a legacy telephone system originally designed for dialing in.
I've been thinking that technical/engineering education is the most ripe to be disrupted - someone with a CS education needs to rely much less on their credential/alumni network than someone with, say, a liberal arts degree. We're already seeing this with the coding schools that are all emerging.
To the extent this is true, I think it's only as a result of an employee's market in CS, something which won't always be the case (and hasn't always been). Also, wrt credentialing, CS is uncommon even among STEM fields; most engineering jobs strictly require credentials.
Education and mathematics are both liberal arts by most definitions, but in my experience, graduates in those subjects get jobs by merit rather than network or credential at least as often as in CS. (edit: in fact, based on what I've seen, education is far more meritocratic in the hiring process than CS.)
Finally, "liberal arts" can refer to the field, but it can also refer to the type of institution. So there's such a thing as a "CS liberal arts degree".
How could that be, when virtually all education jobs require either a teachers' certificate or a doctorate (depending on the job), both of which are credentials?
> You basically need to get an M.Ed.
Definitely not true.
At the very least, in STEM most high schools would prefer a subject matter Masters.
Most teachers opt to get an Masters for the pay raise, but it's quite common to be hired without an MEd, and my comment referred to the hiring process specifically.
The fact that Education MEds have no/negative effect but subject-matter masters have a positive effect probably has to do with the salary incentive and the fact MEds tend to be easier to get than subject-matter masters.
An intrinsically motivated MEd student could probably get as much out of it as a subject matter masters (esp. in primary education, where increased subject matter expertise probably isn't so helpful).
Which is to say, MEds aren't intrinsically bad, but because of external incentives might attract the wrong type of person.
> I can't imagine a sensible interpretation of the claim on education.
The literal interpretation will suffice; it's entirely well-defined even if you disagree with its truth value :-)
See also my response to the parent.
edit: higher-education is a different beast, but going way back up to the comment I first responded to, we're talking about education majors, who go on to secondary and primary education -- NOT higher education.
But:
1. private schools often don't require certificates.
2. At least the testing requirement for obtaining a certificate IS meritocratic and isn't prohibitively expensive. We could standardize the test, or each school could develop a test as part of its interview process. In either case, giving a test and judging potential applicants in terms of that test isn't unmeritocratic. It's actually exactly the opposite.
3. I would be very surprised if someone knew everything necessary to teach in a school -- administrative details such as laws and regulations, pedagogic literacy, and subject matter expertise -- without any formal education.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I think that picking up some minimal programming/design skills is sometimes less difficult and always far more interesting than a lot of what educators need to know.
When's the last time you heard about someone who self-taught themselves guidelines for mandatory reporting or how to handle IEPs? The appropriateness of teachers needing to know all of these things is an entirely separate discussion -- they exist, and teachers today need to know them. It's part of the job, so it's meritocratic to exclude applicants who don't know these things.
Gauging "success" within this system seems hard. It's hard to attribute success to a university when it's prestige ends up determining the calibre of its student body in the first place. And a clear feedback loop exists here. On account of the prestige associated with their college, students end up leading illustrious careers. Their "success" is a combination of their inherent pre-college skill and their credential, one could say.
Now, given the Minerva project, where the feedback loop doesn't exist and the quality of students are towards the higher side, how does one begin to test the efficiency of a new system without any proper control experiment?
Because of this difficulty in assessing the success or failure of this project, even though I hope and believe it works well, the general opinion might be that it failed.
For top 50 maybe. But outside the first page of US News report there's very little differentiation. Quick, what's the difference between Minnesota State University, Mankato and California State University, Fullerton, and which one is more prestigious?
I think it is key also to stack the deck from the beginning with prestigious people already affiliated with high status institutions who others want to be associated with but who are also high status on their own - that means scavenging from the institutions which are already high status.
Seems like Minerva has been able to do that successfully already.
Sorry, but nope. To date, there isn't a single entity that carries more prestige and influence than getting an "Ivy league" type high education.
> The Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning.
This is sound in principle, but education only won't have the returns that the Ivies do. Ivies are successful because they are filtering mechanisms, not because their teachers are substantially better than the rest of the competition.
If anything, the greatest threat today to established higher education is the likes of YC.
There's even some evidence that the filtering/signalling value of prestigious universities isn't even dependent on them actually offering you admission or you attending. Huh, you might ask?
The mere fact that a student applied to get into a top university (but then went elsewhere) has almost as much predictive value as actually being admitted and attending. See:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/revisiting-the-...
To wit (and quoting from the article): "A student with a 1,400 SAT score who went to Penn State but applied to Penn earned as much, on average, as a student with a 1,400 who went to Penn."
Now, the income effects measured there aren't quite the same as the "prestige and influence" to which you refer. But it's a hint that the signalling-powers of the Ivies might be open to unbundling, by infotech innovators like Minerva.
Fair enough, but that's a big IF. Higher education worth is predicated by a series of inputs, outputs and filters. Filtering is only good if the quality of character coming in is already high. In other words, how are you going to convince Billy and Sally who live in Greenwich, CT that telling their friends that little Jimmy applied and got into Minerva sounds any better than going to Harvard? You can't have high quality output if you don't have high quality input, and you can't attract high input without have high output. Simply filtering is largely a non-issue. (EDIT: Should clarify - simply filtering within the pool of applications you have is a non-issue, filtering in a wider macro context is the secret sauce of Ivies)
> But it's a hint that the signalling-powers of the Ivies might be open to unbundling, by infotech innovators like Minerva.
For nearly 100 years, Ivies have been susceptible to unbundling, yet haven't budged. What's different this time?
* costless digital networked replication and communication;
* replacement of traditional processes with software; and…
* much faster improvement-iterations, driven by data and math.
The formula is a little harder to apply to education, which is why education, from the Ivies on down, has had a decade or two reprieve.
But as the saying goes, "the hard part about Harvard is getting in".
You're joking, right? Y Combinator and accelerators like it are great programs for certain types of individuals, but they're hardly a threat to the higher education industrial complex.
Y Combinator has produced some great successes, but despite all the resources and access Y Combinator provides participants, Y Combinator has not discovered a recipe for startup success. The numbers make this very clear[1][2].
More importantly, there is only so much room to scale accelerator programs. Few companies emerge from these programs with cash flow sufficient to fund their operations, so they depend on the availability of angel and venture capital to support their portfolio companies. If you significantly expand the Y Combinators of the world, demand for capital would soon exceed supply, so you'd see a dramatic increase in the percentage of portfolio companies that die, and the speed with which they die.
Not in the slightest.
> Y Combinator has not discovered a recipe for startup success.
Nor has Harvard university. I think you're looking at the wrong output. YC (and other successful incubators) are about the alumni network, not the success of the startup. Just as universities are about the alumni network.
If you are suggesting that the Y Combinator alumni network is of immense tangible value, what research do you have to back it up? To be fair to you, there obviously isn't a whole lot of longitudinal data, but as I pointed out, Y Combinator's portfolio stats look pretty much in line with what you'd expect in Silicon Valley.
The value of an alumni network is tied to what it can reasonably do for you. Ivy League alumni networks have been tapped for decades for lucrative opportunities not easily accessed by outsiders.
While the university value proposition has become less compelling because of rising costs and a harsh economy, Y Combinator and programs like it will never come close to establishing the same type of value proposition for a simple reason: most young people who start businesses with no capital of their own and no domain expertise are not going to be successful.
1) I currently attend Boston University (as a grad student), and a good domestic undergrad gets a nice aid package. For families that make $40k-$80k/yr the middle 50% of aid packages ranges up to $56k per year against a $60k room and board cost.
2) The horrible Ivy Leagues are often even better. When my wife attended admission was need blind, and then after filling out your FASA the school gave the students a grant to cover the part of the cost that is supposed to be covered by student loans. Do you have two kids that are within 1-2 years of each other? The additional cost of sending a second kid can be as low as $0/year because the total contribution that the parents can afford doesn't change just because you have two kids.
One key to this article that is easy to glance over is that the target market is mostly foreign students. They do not get the same aid packages and end up paying full price at most schools.
I'm more optimistic as it's a for profit, so it has real motivation to grow without end, unlike a "real" liberal arts school but if the main selling point of your rivals is the selection effect and yours is the treatment effect you will never, ever reach their prestige.
All that said, this is awesome. It makes me substantially more optimistic that tertiary education might actually start applying psychological research. Minerva doesn't need to beat Harvard to change Harvard.
"One possibility is that Minerva will fail because a college degree, for all the high-minded talk of liberal education— of lighting fires and raising thoughtful citizens—is really just a credential, or an entry point to an old-boys network that gets you your first job and your first lunch with the machers at your alumni club."
and I also remember an article about Minerva a few years back where they said they were aware of this effect.
If its deans are teaching (not typically the case, but then 4 deans for a student body in the double digits isn't typical either), then Minerva seems to have solved this problem.
Is that accurate? Is this something temporary for their first couple of cohorts, or is this the intended setup?
Interesting in any case.
It's also worth noting that this is cheaper than private liberal arts colleges, but actually much more expensive than regional state universities, and even more expensive than some flagships (assuming in-state tuition and average scholarship). Which is also interesting. edit: based on the article, the target demographic seems to be high-quality foreign students. Which, again, is really interesting because that's a very different target demographic than most liberal arts colleges.
edit: I'll also be curious to see whether these sorts of institutions can get students into top PhD programs or MD programs, which tend to require lots of experiences that are really difficult to provide without physical space and tenured faculty.
>Each year, according to Minerva’s plan, they’ll attend university in a different place, so that after four years they’ll have the kind of international experience that other universities advertise but can rarely deliver. By 2016, Berlin and Buenos Aires campuses will have opened. Likely future cities include Mumbai, Hong Kong, New York, and London. Students will live in dorms with two-person rooms and a communal kitchen. They’ll also take part in field trips organized by Minerva, such as a tour of Alcatraz with a prison psychologist. Minerva will maintain almost no facilities other than the dorm itself—no library, no dining hall, no gym—and students will use city parks and recreation centers, as well as other local cultural resources, for their extracurricular activities.
Re: price. They don't intend to compete with state flagships, but with liberal arts colleges. Which state flagships are impressive without reference to programme? I'm not American but I do spend far too much time reading American stuff and my impression would be that the only public universities in the US that are vaguely comparable to HYPS are U Michigan and UC Berkeley, maybe Georgia Tech, which is itself very far behind the top four CS schools, MIT,CMU, Berkeley and Stanford.
Being better than Amherst may be an ambitious goal for Minerva's second decade but being better than a respectable college with no real national brand seems doable.
I commented on another article that this is an interesting solution -- externalizing certain costs of higher ed. It's a very effective strategy, and even makes sense on the large scale (civilization-wide) for everything except libraries, probably.
> They don't intend to compete with state flagships, but with liberal arts colleges.
Right. That's why I think it's interesting.
They don't compete on price with larger and/or state schools, but do compete on methodology.
They don't compete on methodology with (most) liberal arts colleges, but do compete on price.
It's a unique niche -- students who value liberal arts and can afford college but cannot afford/don't want to pay for a traditional liberal arts education. I'm not surprised they're initially targeting foreign students, seems like a pretty small market in the US at the moment. E.g. most students who are inclined to attend a liberal arts college are also inclined to prefer physical presence of instructors.
> Which state flagships are impressive without reference to programme?
State universities with a wide range of very strong programs: Illinois, Texas-Austin, Michigan, Washington, Wisconsin, N Carolina (Chapel Hill), and many others.
All of these schools out-rank Harvard in CS, for instance.
> but being better than a respectable college with no real national brand seems doable.
All of the universities mentioned above have national and international brands in several areas (I think my list is CS-skewed). I don't think Minerva will ever really compete with these schools, even if it is widely successful.
WRT regional colleges: I think that physical presence of full-time faculty is a pretty substantial benefit. You'd need higher-quality, full time faculty and really good technology to compete with even a mediocre but physically present tenured faculty member (tenure as a signal for "has experience teaching" + not ad junct/over-worked).
For this reason, I think that online programs which aim to compete on price without sacrificing quality face a pretty substantial HR problem. Training isn't enough -- faculty have to be available for office hours, need time to develop new curricula, etc.. This is probably not possible without hiring high-quality faculty as full-time employees.
As "coast-snobby" as academics can be (actually, this isn't really true, but accepting the article's premise...), I don't think anyone would turn down a tenured position in Nowhere, Indiana in favor of teaching online courses, especially if the work is contract-based.
That said, it's always possible to compete with larger universities if you define your scope. You'll see this in the recruiting materials of any university -- they choose a set of things they're really good at, and say "we're the best (small print: at the combination of a,b,c,x,y, and z). E.g. "student travel" is a metric used by Minerva.
>WRT regional colleges: I think that physical presence of full-time faculty is a pretty substantial benefit. You'd need higher-quality, full time faculty and really good technology to compete with even a mediocre but physically present tenured faculty member (tenure as a signal for "has experience teaching" + not ad junct/over-worked). For this reason, I think that online programs which aim to compete on price without sacrificing quality face a pretty substantial HR problem. Training isn't enough -- faculty have to be available for office hours, need time to develop new curricula, etc.. This is probably not possible without hiring high-quality faculty as full-time employees.
Most Physics postdocs don't get faculty jobs. Neither do most Chemistry or Biology ones. The Arts have an equally massive over supply of wannabe academics. Math,CS, Economics,Finance,Accounting all of these have lovely alternatives to teaching but lots of people like teaching as well.
As you pointed out the coast snobbery is bullshit. Academics move anywhere for tenure or a chance at tenure. But Minerva will take you if you're close enough to the right timezone and soon they'll all be close enough. WGU has shown that all online faculty can work though they don't have an all seminar system.
I don't know, it seems close enough to the Oxford/Cambridge tutorial system that it can work given cheap enough inputs, easily. Live in Thailand, teach students in Hong Kong, live in Coast Rica, teach in San Francisco. And the star faculty can't last. But you can get really good adjuncts without being as attractive locationwise as Minerva. Re:curriculum, office hours, remember, Minerva can actually tell their staff what to do.
I don't think there's much actual disagreement here,I'm only slightly more optimistic than you, eh?
> Re:curriculum, office hours, remember, Minerva can actually tell their staff what to do.
Right, but (at least ostensibly) they can't compel their staff to do that for free.
If a staff member is being paid way below what they could make in industry and isn't even on a tenure track, they have absolutely no incentive to work hard. Nor should they work hard, at anything other than getting out of an exploitative relationship with their employer.
It's easier to take advantage of people in the humanities, but then, taking advantage of instructional staff doesn't exactly create a convivial learning environment.
> given cheap enough inputs, easily
I guess that's really the thing -- I think for something like Minerva to really work they need full time, well-paid faculty. And without federal aid, that means they'll probably have trouble competing with regional state universities (without sacrificing quality, which kills to whole Minerva model).
Otherwise high-quality learning environments are impossible to build and maintain.
> but lots of people like teaching as well.
One model could be finding people who have moved on to industry but still want to teach a course or two a semester. It might be possible to make this work.
BUT -- that's not a new model! Lots of colleges and universities take this approach, and it's pretty well-understood by pretty much everyone that this is a non-optimal situation. Even very bright people fail at the "teach after work" thing. It's just not possible to go as deeply as you would like without an hour or two before and after lectures to really prepare for the lecture itself well and then wind down/self-assess.
Higher Ed needs to come to terms with the fact that great -- or even half-decent -- instruction is a full-time job.
> I don't think there's much actual disagreement here,I'm only slightly more optimistic than you, eh?
No, there's no disagreement at all :-). I'm posing possible problems and you're suggesting reasons they're not problems or suggesting solutions. It's a true dialog :-)
To me Minerva appears to have a sound business model based on bringing foreign students in for an education with low overhead. This will take the most profitable students away from traditional schools, and require tuition to go up for the types of degrees that can't be offered in this environment.
Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, here we come!
> the education I received was well worth the $16,000 a year my parents paid, after scholarships.
> The students all now say they’re confident in Minerva—although of course they can leave whenever they like, with little lost but time.
The writer embodies the all-American liberally-educated Ivy League "coastal-elite" stereotype (writing in the Atlantic, after all), so I shouldn't be surprised at their reflexive apprehension towards an attempt to undermine the old institutions which are so tied up with that identity.
I spent a few months in a co-working space partly to learn new language more efficiently and partly to get out of the fall-into-lazy-mode-when-in-home mode when I didn't have a full time job.
As I was sitting there typing away on my Macbook Pro, reading manuals, watching tutorials on youtube, and feeding off of the intense energy of fellow 'coworkers', it hit me that the ambiance was much like being in a library in college. It felt much like being in a library when I was in college and even better, there was no restriction on food/coffee/beverage. I felt like I was in college again. And I could walk away from my computer without worrying about someone stealing it during the 5 min I was gone.
And I was paying only $300 a month (although I thought it was a bit over priced...). I recall I was paying nearly $10,000 a year (many years ago though) just for tuition. And I don't know about most of you but as a student of a large public university system, I had barely any useful interaction with actual professors.
I really think for someone young with enough time, discipline and motivated to work in the internet/tech industry, having one year membership in co-working space would do wonders. And it barely costs $3600/year plus your normal living cost (which would be free if you stayed with parents).