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The End of College? Not So Fast
An anonymous reader writes: The advent of MOOCs, Khan Academy, and the hundreds of other learning sites that have popped up caused many people to predict the decline of expensive, four-year universities. But Donald Heller writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that most of the people making these claims don't have a good understanding of how actual students are interacting with online classes. He points out that it's a lot easier for a 40-year-old who's in a stable life position, and who has already experienced college-level education to work through an MOOC with ease. But things change when you're asking 18- to 20-year-olds to give up the structure and built-in motivation of a physical university to instead sit at their computer for hours at a time. (The extremely low pass rate for free online courses provides some evidence for this.) Heller also warns that prematurely hailing MOOCs as a replacement for colleges will only encourage governments and organizations to stop investing in institutions of higher learning, which could have dire consequences for education worldwide.
One of the few things I learned in college was how to learn things. Today I could teach myself almost anything. I know how to assemble the resources, how to study them, how to test my understanding.
Freshman me would not have a clue how to do this.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
What I want to know is why anybody would expect online education to replace traditional education any more than the printing press and wide availability of books made traditional education obsolete. Widely available course materials are great and we're a richer world now that we have them, but the fact that universities survived the democratization of books should tell us that real schools still add some value above and beyond the raw information.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I've given them an honest shot, but like many I could not finish a course. I found that the lack of a face to face human communication was a huge stumbling block to success. Especially thring to learn python, math subjects, etc. It is far easier to be spoon fed knowledge and walked around complex subjects with your hand held. The main weakness in MOOCs is the lack of human interaction and instruction when you are not able to figure it out on your own.
..is that people (employers, students, everyone) are starting to treat universities as trade schools -- job training factories.
That's not the purpose of university. Never has been, never will be (hopefully).
What we need is a better system of trade schools (ala med school, law school, but to expand that to more trades), to revive the concept of apprenticeships, etc.
MOOCs aren't the answer. Like other forms of non-traditional schooling, they are a nice way for adults and others to supplement existing base knowledge (i.e. keeping knowledge of a field current), but are not a replacement for real schooling.
Most of what I learned in college was how to jump through hoops. Jump through all the hoops in the right order, and you get your piece of paper.
Or you could use the time you're not in class to explore the other opportunities the environment offers. Go to work in one of the labs on real problems. Build something kooky, just because you can. Join the flying club.
The piece of paper indicates that you can meet minimum criteria. The education shows up on your resume. The piece of paper shows you're allowed to drive a car; the trophies show you're actually good at it.
The value of a degree is that it shows to an employer that you could get into a high value institution. That means the institution has no incentive either to expand provision or reduce fees (or indeed control costs at all). So unlikely to drop any time soon.
[FUCK BETA]
No, it will do quite the opposite. Colleges do not bear the risk of loans not being repaid, the taxpayers do. Making loans discharged would significantly increase the amount of debt students are willing to take on, because if they fail in their chosen career they can just start over fresh. The government will happily just eat the losses because it is a drop in the bucket to the federal budget. This will lead to higher tuition rates, more students taking on less socially useful degrees, and a further lower of higher education quality.