College for Grownups

"Adult Education" has this nagging stigma associated with it (though, thankfully, that's changing due to MOOCs and such). But still -- even when the major universities offer it, it's seen with a skewed tilt by much of the rest of the world.

Ask anyone who graduated from Harvard (undergrad), HBS, HLS, etc. about the Harvard Extension School and you'll get the eye-roll I'm talking about. I think in cases like this it's less because of the adult part but more because of the payola part -- anyone can sign up for HES classes provided they pay.

What I think is potentially interesting, and frankly am surprised isn't offered yet (or at least not widely), is the idea of continuing one's education into adulthood through the same university.

My personal motivation: When I was 19 and a sophomore picking a major, I chose what interested me at the time - business & psychology. I loved what I learned and am grateful for my college education.

But here I am 18 years later and my brain and desires have changed. I'm rabidly excited about programming and CS topics, and have done a pretty decent job of teaching myself through various online resources over the past few years.

My alma mater should capitalize on this -- they should offer a "supplemental degree" program where I can give them money, take classes (remotely or on campus), do the work, take the tests, and get a CS major supplement to my previous undergrad degree. It would maintain the full authority of the university and be a full bachelor's degree, just completed almost 2 decades after the first bit :)

I can't imagine I'm alone in wanting this sort of thing...

I dislike the condescending attitude of the author towards the young adults (referred to in the article as "children") attending college. The author claims that leaving home to live at college poses a "serious psychological risk". Are we talking about 18-year-olds or 5-year-olds? Are we afraid that these more-or-less fully fledged citizens, whom we allow to drive, smoke, enlist, vote, marry, and have children, are going to end up crying for their mommies and daddies because they left home too early? Ridiculous.

Where these "psychological risks" exist, it's probably more a symptom of failing to ween teenagers from parental dependence and teach personal responsibility than it is a symptom of college life.

To quote a younger friend of mine, who started college this year after bumming around Europe for a while: "After spending a few months 'in the wild', living in this relatively very supervised college environment seems absolutely mundane."

What this article, and many commentators in this thread, are forgetting is that the college/university system is not designed primarily for education. The reason why the college system is tailored toward young adults is because we as a culture have decided that college is the place for young adults to "find themselves." College is often the first time young adults begin living on their own; putting them in a structured institution with their peers is how many kids learn how to "grow up" (in particular, the children of privileged individuals who also want their children to receive some sort of education/job training). There are other issues with the higher education as an institution, but the segregation between older adults ("nontraditional" students) is not one of them, nor is the seeming lack of responsibility found at college (though sexual assault and substance abuse are serious issues that need to be addressed) - it's a defining part of the American "college experience."

It could be argued that you can "find yourself" without college, and while that's absolutely true I would say that it's hard to find a better institution to do so (other problems like rising tuition/loans notwithstanding).

College was originally for people who acted like grownups -- at 18 years old -- because those who went 100(+) years ago were expected to take it seriously.

Unfortunately, as time has gone on, at least in the US, colleges are spending more and more money on 'club-med'ing their dorms and such, giving the wrong impression of why you are on a campus to begin with -- and colleges are somewhat complicit in not caring nowadays about your success either, just in taking money from as many students as they can fill the place up with each year.

"First to market" applies as much to education as to business. The payoffs for finishing education sooner rather than later are enormous.

A student may benefit from being more mature if they delay college or graduation. But it's unlikely that benefit exceeds the compounding value of finishing the same amount of school two years earlier.

In other words, I strongly disagree with the premise that teenagers should delay college, for the same reason we strongly discourage people to delay saving for retirement.

Investment compounds. So it's confounding he accuses people of making a poor "major investment decision" while advocating a delay in investment. The answer whether to delay or start school unprepared is a math-intensive one, and is likely different for every student. But if you believe the majority of 18 year olds are prepared to continue school immediately for another four years, it seems reasonable to advise them to go to college immediately.

Does maturity compound? I don't know. Education definitely does.

> ...Greek systems that appeal to many affluent families but also incubate cultures of dangerous play... Rethinking the expectation that applicants to selective colleges be fresh out of high school would go far in reducing risk for young people while better protecting everyone’s college investment.

Reducing what risk? Of sexual assault and alcoholism?

I don't know if being young has anything to do with being a violently misogynist psychopath. Maybe being a victim of one does.

But the rest of the world tracks teenagers into either conscription or education at 18 too. There's less of a fraternity culture at Tsinghua for sure. I don't know if there's less sexual assault or substance abuse. Even if there were, we'd sooner indict fraternities than people being young, wouldn't we?

Teenagers and young adults are coveted by universities because they are old enough for their parents to let them do their own thing, but young enough that they are OK with taking on tens of thousands of dollars of debt for a questionable outcome.

Yes, remote, asynchronous learning is just the ticket for people who won't live close to campus and fight over seats for classes held at inconvenient hours.

While some fraternities are unruly, I don't see how it affects people who just go to class, study in the library, and live off campus. Is it common that older students get stuck living in frats or dorms? Or older students just can't resist the draw to party?

One comment and one book plug.

Apart from the aspects of privilege, acts of drunkenness, and social schmoozing, I think what is special about the "college years" is these are some of the rare moments where young people have a chance to live relatively worry free: no worries about one's mission in life, no worries about financial subsistence (for the privileged students, not the ones holding two part-time jobs in parallel), and relatively less social anxiety (when you're young, everyone likes you).

IMHO, it is only within such prolonged worry-free moments that people can learn vast amounts of science and go on to make scientific discoveries. As adults, it is much more difficult to learn at this pace---we pick up experience and can better plan our learning, but we rarely have vast amounts of time to dedicate to learning.

Why don't employers let their employees go on sabbaticals? Imagine you can work for four years receiving 80% of your pay and then you earn a year of your free time to travel and study full-time.

Ah and the plug is about my math & physics textbook for adults, which manages to reproduce the first-year of college experience (calculus and mechanics) in a very affordable manner. Available on lulu: http://www.lulu.com/shop/noBSguide/product-21899015.html (use coupon code DGY5 for 30% off, via lulu.com/home)

This is a big driver for the success of the bootcamp phenomenon. I'm a cofounder at one of the schools, and I can say that if college catered to career switchers, I would not have an easy market to serve.

"At Stanford, where I teach, an idea still in the concept phase developed by a student-led team in the university’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design calls for the replacement of four consecutive college years in young adulthood with multiple residencies distributed over a lifetime."

Multiple residency? Is the author out of their minds? People cannot even afford residency for a 4 year university, now they want people to pay for high school residency?

Cynicism alert. The purpose of widespread college education is socioeconomic. People simply wouldn't throw so much money and time after this game (starting, in some places, with preschool admissions, and often totaling near the half-million mark) if it weren't. The leaders of our society don't value culture or education that much; they do value tradition, pedigree, and position. Our colleges actually do a pretty good job of educating people who want to learn, but that's a tertiary purpose to the socioeconomic one that justifies tuitions at $50,000 per year instead of, say, $5,000.

The so-called party pathway through college is an all-encompassing lifestyle characterized by virtually nonstop socializing, often on the male-controlled turf of fraternity houses. Substance abuse and sexual assault are common consequences.

College is about protecting the young from an unforgiving society, by handling indiscretions (e.g. substance abuse) with the kid gloves, and protecting their early careers by giving them something close to the best possible work experience they can have at a given age.

A 30-year-old has fits and starts in his career and at least one job that took a painful. A 22-year-old coming out of college has an almost unblemished record. A mediocre GPA can be interpreted as evidence of being social, and while English majors might not place as well as CS majors, literature provides much more interesting conversation than a terminal middle-management position. That is what college achieves. It gets you 4 years into adulthood with a very low risk of having to explain yourself.

Also, we gripe about ageism afflicting the late-career not-that-old, but there's also a strong ageism directed at young adult men. The truth about most 17- to 23-year-old males... is that society doesn't like 'em too much. The social hierarchy is high-status men > high-status women > low-status women > low-status men. (That's part of why gender debates around social justice are so complicated; women get screwed on upside and men get screwed on downside.) Additionally, age and social status are correlated in men, generally upward until old age. Except for wealthy heirs, young men are seen as garbage until they prove themselves. (I'm not saying that this is right; it's clearly not.) College isn't just about making teenage men acceptable for society, but also protecting them during a time in which many people are predisposed to hate them, thinking of them as horny, reckless, socially inept monsters.

Traditionally, college was to protect young men from the horrors that society inflicts upon men of low status, the tricks and lies that throw them by the millions into wars that benefit the rich, and general career sand traps they'd fall into (just on account of being young and not fully formed yet) if they had to fend for themselves... and, also, to protect young women from men below their socioeconomic milieu. (The current clusterfuck surrounding college rape-- it turns out that ivory-tower institutions are completely out of their depth when dealing with a felony that is one of the worst things that one can do to another person-- illustrates, of course, that men of high socioeconomic status can be dangerous, too.) Socioeconomic class is about how long you can delay adulthood and the lack of a safety net and the period of life in which you're held accountable for your choices.

Widespread college also serves society by taking a large number of promising but at-the-time economically useless people off the job market. It protects the students, and it protects the market from their wage depression, and it protects society from a deluge of unemployed people who are (based on socioeconomic status and academic performance) presumed to be dangerous and intelligent enough to be threatening (in a revolutionary sense, i.e. "don't overthrow the government; party on your parent's dime for 4 years").

You're not going to see 30-year-olds in college because, in truth, they're too economically useful (whether they're paid well is another matter) and because they're not deemed to need protection at that age (rather, the young are judged to need protection from them). Also, it doesn't really work. College sells itself as the "get to age 22 without having to explain yourself" option, which is great because most of us would have to explain ourselves if we called our own shots from 18-22... but if you're 30 and just completed your BA, you'll still be asked to explain yourself, defeating much of the purpose.

Unrelenting demand for better-educated workers

Man, I wish. See, if there were "unrelenting demand", then software engineers would have no problem getting themselves sent back to school on full salary for part-time work. You'd see software engineers doing PhDs on their employees' dime as a common phenomenon, rather than a freak rarity. I'm not saying that we should have such a perk and we're certainly not owed or entitled to it, but it's what we'd have if demand were actually so high.

At the upper levels of education, demand is actually pretty low, as illustrated by the academic job market. In fact, the rarity of high-quality work experience is often used as leverage against top talent: they're typically specialized to such a point that few companies are doing what they're good at, and they have to take a cut (in pay or conditions) relative to what they're actually worth in order to protect the specialty.