Slashdot Mirror
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
For many (most) traditional four-year college students, the primary value of the experience is something that a MOOC or Khan or whatever online can never ever replicate.
College is for many kids the first time you will live away from home, with all the distractions and temptations of the real world - but without losing your job and ending up homeless if you get too drunk and are too hung over to go to class the next day. It is a concentrated social mixing bowl where members of the opposite (or same as it may be) sexes come together with no parental supervision and have to figure out how to deal with each other - but also surrounded by a throng of peers to help them figure it out or support them as necessary. It is a halfway transition period between full-time schooling in which you are expected to learn and recite facts obediently and a world where you are expected to challenge authority figures and be fully responsible for all your own decisions.
It is, in short, the real world but with "training wheels" on.
I can't speak for anyone else, but four years of training wheels after high school just barely got me to the point of being a functional adult who didn't melt down when exposed to reality. (I also really, really, enjoyed it too.) Away from home, full-time, co-educational college is an experience at that period of life that I think is irreplaceable and can't ever be matched by a different model.
"95% of all Slashdot
The cost of college in the usa is to high and trades are being pushed down way to much as well.
Just letting student loans be discharged in bankruptcy can lead to a lot of stuff being fixed. It may force schools to cut costs and maybe even cut the fluff and filler replacing it with classes that cover skill gaps. Also can force trade schools to maybe cost less not be part of the 4 year system.
There are people who want to learn and not go to a 50K-100K party to get a piece of paper.
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"
End of college? Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaan! *raises fist*
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Saddleing people with a lifetime of debt is not the answer. A governments duty to its constituents is to provide them with the tools to thrive in the environments that they find themsleves. This is why primary and eventually high school educations became eventually mandated as free and eventually required of all citizens under their jurisdiction. There is no way that something that can only be obtained by money can be considered equalizing in any democracy.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
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.
One of the few things I learned in college was how to learn things.
I was lucky; I was homeschooled before college, and as a result learned how to learn things with directed self study instead of just doing what teachers said.
It made college way more valuable to me as a result, but it also made life after college better because there was never a point where I thought "Yep, done learning now, time to work for a few decades".
The sooner we can get people into a state where they enjoy and can learn on their own, the better everyone will be.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
..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.
Everyone I've ever known that described a college degree as 'a piece of paper' was bitter about it it some way - either their family or personal situation had not allowed them to go, maybe they'd been denied a job opportunity without it, maybe they'd flunked out.
And mostly everyone I've ever known who hold college degrees in high regard are not that good at much of anything.
I have a Masters degree with a near 4.0 GPA in my junior/senior undergrad years and my graduate years (don't ask about fresh/soph, I was still growing up). And all of that means basically shit. My degrees are pieces of paper, although they are pieces of paper which for some reason hold clout with VP and C-level executives. That is why I got them after all. And while it is impossible to know which if any jobs I have gotten or which salary negotiations have been enhanced based on these degrees, I feel the cost was worth it.
The main cost of the degrees was not the dollars spent on them, it was the opportunity costs from spending time in class and doing assignments instead of learning more useful information at a more rapid pace. But I have no regrets (I spent a great deal of my free time learning that other information anyway). It is important to take the world for what it is instead of what you wish it would be, and in this world many important people see great value in these pieces of paper.
Perhaps if I had gone to MIT or Stanford I would have a higher opinion of a college education, but that I can never know. (not that my program wasn't highly rated, just not a top 10 school in my field)
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Why go to college when 50% of the jobs in the economy have simply vanished ? What would you study ?
This is what's known as a "rationalization". Pick the one explanation you like, and then find some evidence to support it.
To really choose the best answer without experimentation, you write down *all* the possible explanations, and then pick the one that seems most likely.
(If you can do experiments you can eliminate explanations directly - but when you can't do this, the best course is to list all explanations and pick the simplest one.)
A simpler explanation of the low pass rate is that the online courses are of poor quality.
And indeed, many of the online courses are very low quality - especially the ones from high-end players.
The "Probabalistic Graphical Models" course by Stanford is known as a weeder (students get caught off guard with the difficulty), and the online version demonstrates this: the video shows Daphne Koller standing at a lectern droning on and on(*) with no vocal variety, reading the text of the online slides to the viewer... completely uninteresting and making a simple course boring as hell. (sample video.)
I thumbed through the edX course listing and hit on a course I liked - and the introductory video contained absolutely *no* information about the course! The full text of the course description read something like: "Join me as we explore the boundaries of $subject". (Is it a difficult course? Is it introductory or advanced? What level of math is required? What's the syllabus?)
I mentioned it to the head of edX in a private E-mail, and he responded by saying "that's an affiliate course [ie - from an affiliate institution] and we don't have control of the quality or content".
(WTF? You're running a startup and you don't have control over the quality? And he seemed to intimate that he was more interested in building the scope of their selection than the quality.)
Kahn academy is trying to get feedback from students to improve their presentation and make their lectures more effective, but I don't see any other players doing this.
Everyone's just taping their lectures and putting them online(**). The situation won't change until everyone burns through all the seed money and has to start making a profit based on results. For example, edX got $60 million in seed money, and they're burning through it with no viable business plan.
(*) Keep in mind that I'm critiquing the course, and not Professor Koller.
(**) For a counterpoint example, consider Donald Sadoway's Introduction to Solid State Chemistry, which is *not* a MOOC lecture series but is free for online viewing. Light years ahead of any MOOC course and well worth viewing.
Here's the thing—we may not actually want every otherwise unmotivated late teen to be sitting dubiously through college courses just because it's either that or go back to their dorm and twiddle their thumbs. Some things:
- There is an oversupply of graduates these days in most fields and at most levels
- A dawdle-dawdle unmotivated student is not doing their highest quality learning
- Even students that will eventually use what they learn may not do so for years
- In the meantime, what they learned is getting very rusty between learning and use
So with these things said, *how about* a model in which:
- People are not motivated to learn something until they need to
- Once they need to, they are happy to blast through it intensely
- And they will put it to use right away
- And their motivation comes from needs (for a raise, to be competitive, etc.)
I would think this would help to mitigate some of the particular supply/demand problems on all sides (for an education/for students/for graduates as employees).
The one caveat, and it's an important one, is that we do of course want people to be generally mature, thoughtful, capable, and culturally literate if they are goint to be participating in society, and right now high schools are failing utterly at even touching these points.
So to address that need, let's just require a minimal level of "general" college-level education, say a one-year or two-year degree that as no "major" or "minor" selections and issues no grades, but certifies literacy about politics/citizenship, social science (particularly social problems), national culture, basic quantitative reasoning, and so on—enough to become a careful thinker and to better understand "how to learn stuff."
This general education certification would be required in order to:
- Vote
- Get a business license
- Sit on a corporate board
But would be disconnected from particular vocational or other subject-oriented learning issued via, say, MOOCS as well as face-to-face alternatives. And instead of a major in a single discpline, outcomes from MOOC courses could be used to calculate a nationally databased and relatively involved (many measures) "bar chart" for each student, that tallied their experience and competence with particular subject areas, expressed quantitatively as a figure without an upper bound, that is added to with each additional course, and perhaps incorporating quantitative feedback about their performance from employers as well:
So instead of wanting someone with 4-year degree and a "major" in computer science, employers could seek someone with their general education certification along with "at least a 1400 in OS design, a 650 in Java, and a 950 in medical organizations and systems" and so on.
Over the course of a lifetime, scores in any particular area could continue to increase, either by taking additional MOOCs to get more exposure, or by having employers report on accumulated skills and experience to the system.
So that someone that took only a few courses in X in school, but in the real world and on the job, became—over 20 years—the best X in the country, would have this gradually reflected in their national education/experience scores as the years of experience and successes mounted.
Meanwhile, we'd also no longer have the weird mismatches that come when an employee has a degree in Y but actually works in Z, and then has to explain this in various ways to various parties. First of all, at the level of the 1-or-2-year general education, they would no longer gret a "degree in" Y. That would be handed by MOOCs and represented in varous numbers that increased as the result of completing them.
But if someone did do an about-face and choose an entirely different subject or work area in life, this would also gradually be reflected in their education/experience scores. We'd know when someone who'd studied chemistry in their '20s finally became a "real biologist" because their scores
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Off the top of my head..
- Slacking off is alright, if you balance it with a healthy dose of all-nighters of work to make up for it. Meeting deadlines is all that matters, not pacing.
- Cheating and plagiarization have value, as long as there's a fair balance, and you do it properly. One person can't attend all the classes and do all the assignments, as there aren't enough hours in the day. Early lessons in crowdsourcing, before that was a word.
- Money management. Do I use my pocket change to photocopy those pages from the textbook (I couldn't afford) that I need to study, or do I use it for bus fare so I can get home and get some sleep for the first time in 72 hours?
- Learning how to learn, as others have said.
- Women will only care about how tall, rich, and physically attractive you are, for many, many years to come. Plan on being shunned for the next couple decades (in my personal case, at least)
- Bureaucratic bullshit is a fact of life. Deal with it.
I'm sure there's more, but there's my top handful.
I think more places that teach free classes is a good thing... maybe it will force colleges to go to more sane levels in pricing
Most "free courses" are basically the introductory units from a university 101 class or a master's programme, and designed to advertise the school to you. Berkeley have some fantastic courses on Coursera -- they clearly put a lot of time and money into them -- but once you've signed up, you're a marketing asset for their (very) expensive accredited distance programme.
Besides, free courses tend only to be capable of teaching "basic skills" which can objectively be marked right or wrong, so "coding" but not "systems design". This means that the future for them is to remove some of the grunt-work from teaching staff, and allow them to focus on the higher-level abstractions. If there's any justice in the world, it will lead to a higher quality of education. Sadly, it is more likely to be looked at as a cost-cutting measure, and higher-level learning will be left by the wayside....
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
And mostly everyone I've ever known who hold college degrees in high regard are not that good at much of anything.
Perhaps if I had gone to MIT or Stanford I would have a higher opinion of a college education, but that I can never know. (not that my program wasn't highly rated, just not a top 10 school in my field)
I hold my degree in high regard, but not all degrees. I was fortunate enough to be able to study CS at a truly world-class institution, where practically every other week the teaching staff were complaining about how the industry kept trying to tell them to stop teaching CS and just churn out bog-standard "coders". As a result, even after almost a decade without coding, I'm now writing software again using all sorts of computational abstractions from custom datastructures and tree-traversal to propositional logic and FP.
The job of a good teacher isn't just to make sure you learn as much as possible -- students learn (quantatively) most when they're studying stuff that's easy to learn, and that doesn't require a teacher. What the teacher should be doing is teaching the stuff that is hard to learn -- the stuff that students can't do on their own. Most MOOC courses are the former, and a tiny few are the latter, and a few more again are somewhere in between.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I have a Masters degree with a near 4.0 GPA in my junior/senior undergrad years and my graduate years (don't ask about fresh/soph, I was still growing up). And all of that means basically shit.
No, that's exactly the point. Vast numbers of kids spend their first couple of years "growing up." Some of them fail miserably, most of them muddle through fairly well, and some of them excel. What company can afford to take the risk hiring an untrained person, without even a 'track record' of trainability, when that kid may decide he'd rather spend lunch drinking beers?
College isn't supposed to be job training - you may get some skills that are useful in a job, but the point is not to teach you how to be a junior programmer at Microsoft. College, especially residential college, is life-training: how do you balance your freedom to do bong hits all day with your responsibility to pay rent? How do you balance your desire to post /. with your employer's desire that you accomplish tasks? How do you get stuff done when your teacher/manager is a clueless moron? What kinds of tasks/problems do you enjoy?
If you've figure that out by the time you're 18, you're truly exceptional. Not special-snowflake exceptional, but Bill Gates exceptional. College, and even a job, are likely to hold you back. Unfortunately, many people think they are Bill Gates, when they are only a special snowflake.
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]
I think that where it will be most interesting is that right now it is very very very hard to get into a top tier school.
I suppose this depends on your perspective. Admission rates at Harvard/Stanford/MIT are around 6%; Cornell, Duke and the like 15%; Baylor, Georgia Tech, U Mich around 40%. Those are all great schools and offer great educations. The marginal benefit from attending Stanford (#4) over Cornell (#15) or Baylor (#70) is pretty negligible, and I would put all those schools in the "top tier," and 40% admission rate is not even one-very selective.
Most of those schools don't treat their own MOOCs the same way they treat their residential classes (ie, don't offer credit for them). Those that are experimenting with online courses for credit, or even online degrees, do so as a separate track from their MOOCs. Online classes serve a difference audience with different goals than residential instruction.
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.
I am still scratching my head as to why MOOCs are supposed to be such a revolution. The problem in education has never been access to the information itself. You've been able to learn all the information and concepts taught in most undergraduate courses for pretty much free since the invention of the public library. Video lectures in correspondence courses have been available since VHS. The only thing the internet adds is the potential for real-time interactivity. But in a MOOC, any interactivity is going to be very limited, as the professor can't realistically answer questions from thousands of students.
I work for a major online school that happens to offer some free courses in a secondary product. You are exactly correct. We only give them away for free in order to drive traffic to our paid offerings. They are seen as just a new type of marketing site.
I learned that I can learn a lot faster on my own. Maybe not everyone can, but after suffering through classes with people that seemed to not be able to get basic concepts in physics and calculus, I realized that I could buy the text books and teach myself at a much faster rate. And since the computer lab was open to the public, I had full use of the facilities to do the homework assignments.
What I hope happens is that those that need college to learn continue to have the opportunity to go. And the smart people that don't need it will stop having to justify themselves simply because they don't have a piece of paper that says they had to spend a lot of money to learn something because they weren't able to do it themselves.
I'd much rather hire self-motivated people who can learn new things by themselves. They are much quicker to adapt to changing technology than someone that had to go to school to learn.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
I'd argue that a big part of it is being given assignments that stretch you more than you've been stretched. You don't have to do original research to be geniuinely challenged and grow from the experience. You just have to be given an assignment that requires you to dig for answers and fail. You have to exhaust most of your options when trying to figure something out. It's something we should probably be doing much more to kids well before they get to college, but college seems to be where we start doing it, so that's where the value is.
Since this is slashdot, there will be a million posts by clever college students who are doing really well in their classes and see them all as a waste of time. "Nothing at a university can challenge me! I'm the hottest shit that ever was shat!" All I can say is that they either didn't choose programs that were challenging enough for their level of talent or they're unusually talented people--the most brilliant of the most brilliant--and the world was not really designed for them. Or they're badly overestimating their level of talent, but that almost never happens.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
The marginal benefit from attending Stanford (#4) over Cornell (#15) or Baylor (#70) is pretty negligible
From a knowledge learned perspective you're likely correct, from a branding perspective you couldn't be more wrong.
Some of my "worst" teachers have taught me valuable lessons outside of the class and subject area. How well you can deal with unreasonable people may help you more than you realize when you are just a young college student.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling