I know you’re already sick of reading about MOOC’s. But I’m afraid there’s no avoiding them. In The Chronicle this morning, UCLA philosopher Pamela Hieronymi argues:
Education is often compared to two other industries upended by the Internet: journalism and publishing. This is a serious error. Education is not the transmission of information or ideas. Education is the training needed to make use of information and ideas.
And so forth, before concluding:
Can technology make education less expensive? College is expensive, but colleges do things other than educate. Many courses simply convey information and provide technical vocational skills. These could be automated, presumably at savings. The price tag includes the campus experience—an education of a different sort—with all its lovely, cherished amenities. But the core task of training minds is labor-intensive; it requires the…
There are two quotes from the Penn State scandal that I can’t get out of my mind. This:
In a confidential note, [former senior vice president for finance and business Gary C.] Schultz wrote, “Behavior—at best inappropriate @ worst sexual improprieties.” He also noted, “Is this the opening of Pandora’s box?” and “Other children?”
And:
“This approach [of failing to alert authorities] is acceptable to me,” [Penn State President] Spanier wrote in an e-mail to Mr. Schultz and [Athletic Director] Curley. “The only downside for us is if the message isn’t ‘heard’ and acted upon, and we then become vulnerable for not having reported it.”But that can be assessed down the road,” he continued. “The approach you outline is humane and a reasonable way to proceed.”
Is there some possible context that could put these words in a different light? Because these are the thoughts of moral monsters….
Last year the Obama administration implemented “gainful employment” regulations designed to identify higher-education programs, primarily in the for-profit sector, that load students up with debt in exchange for low-value credentials and degrees. The trade association representing for-profits promptly filed a lawsuit, and won a significant court victory yesterday when a federal District Court Judge ruled that the U.S. Department of Education failed to justify one part of the regulations. Because the part in question is intertwined with the regulations as a whole, implementation of “gainful” is now on hold. The U.S. Department of Education will need to appeal the decision and/or craft new regulations. But it’s important to keep in mind what the decision did and did not say – and to remember how disassociated this debate can become from common-sense notions of success in higher…
Over at The New Republic, I discuss how the K-12 part of Mitt Romney’s recently-released education plan is highly focused on markets and student choice. The higher-education side is, too, where it’s arguably more appropriate. College students are adults (although many just barely) who, in theory, can choose among a vast array of institutions. Romney is right to say:
“Students and their families must also be given the information they need to intelligently weigh the costs and benefits of the many options available to them. Better information about products and services helps consumers make more-informed choices, and nowhere is this as important as when students consider a postsecondary education. Despite requirements that colleges and universities report volumes of data to the U.S. Department of Education, there is no simple way for students to access that data and interpret its…
A couple of weeks ago, while discussing the announcement of the Harvard / MIT edX initiative, I included a brief recap of what’s been happening over the last six months in the land of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC’s), which began as follows:
Throughout the fall 2011 semester, a group of well-known Stanford professors had been running an unorthodox experiment by letting over 100,000 students around the world take their courses, online, for free. Those who did well got a certificate from the professor saying so.
Later than day, I received an email titled “error in your blog” from a person who works in communications for Stanford, which I’m reprinting with permission. The person said:
Students who did well did not receive a certificate. Neither Stanford nor the professors issued a certificate. All students who completed the courses received a letter from the professor saying that…
Today, Harvard University jumped on the accelerating online-education train. The creation of edX in partnership with MIT marks the latest development in what’s shaping up to be a fascinating contest between the nation’s leading research universities and its most ambitious private-sector entrepreneurs for domination of virtual higher education.
Things began heating up last December. Throughout the fall 2011 semester, a group of well-known Stanford professors had been running an unorthodox experiment by letting over 100,000 students around the world take their courses, online, for free. Those who did well got a certificate from the professor saying so. Then MIT announced the creation of MITx, a new nonprofit organization, branded by the university, which would also offer so-called Massively Open Online Courses, or “MOOC’s,” and would also offer certificates to those who earned them–a…
I spent the last two days on jury duty in the District of Columbia. (Whatever the broader shortcomings of D.C. municipal government, their process for hauling you into the jury pool every two years works with uncanny efficiency; watch this space for jury-related blog posts in early May 2014.) It was a DUI case, and, sidebar, before we talk about the need for statistics education, let me say this: If it at some point in your life you decide to spend a long Tuesday evening partying at the home of a friend / business associate known only as “Cesar,” and after the conclusion of said partying you elect to get home by driving 60 miles per hour through Rock Creek Park at 3:00 AM, and you get pulled over for speeding, and you fail the various standardized roadside sobriety tests, and get arrested for DUI, and rather than take a plea deal decide to avail yourself of your constitutional right …
The present for-profit higher-education industry is largely an artifact of federal financial-aid policy. Students have the right to sign over their federal grant and loan dollars to any accredited college, and if you look at how much the big publicly traded for-profits charge, you’ll see a tight distribution of price points that not coincidentally track closely with the maximum amount of federal loan money students can borrow. Because accreditation is difficult and time-consuming to get if you start from scratch, clever for-profits simply bought up existing accredited colleges, which is what led to the absurd spectacle of Bridgepoint Education, which runs a large for-profit online college out of an office building in San Diego, paying students to attend a Potemkin College in the middle of Iowa for the purposes of maintaining accreditation and therefore access to hundreds of millions of…
There’s an important distinction between what an organization does and what it sells. Sometimes those are the same thing, like at the sandwich shop near my office. But sometimes they’re different. For example, there was once a common misconception that newspapers were in the business of selling news stories to news readers, when they were in fact in the business of selling advertising to grocery stores and H.R. departments. They did the first thing in order to be able to sell the second thing.
So, too, with higher education. For example, there’s been a lot of coverage in the mainstream press of so-called Massively Open Online Courses, specifically the course taught by rock-star computer scientist Sebastian Thrun at Stanford, along with commentary from excitable policy analysts that this marks the crumbling of the higher-education monopoly and so forth. Unsurprisingly, Wired…
In a post titled, “We Need Both Plumbers and English Majors,” Kevin Drum suggests that Rick Santorum may have a point in criticizing the Obama administration’s focus on helping more people earn postsecondary credentials:
The detracking movement did a lot to undermine vocational education, and people like Bill Gates and others have since been influential boosters of the idea that everyone should go to college. But I’m with Dana [Goldstein] and the Ricks [Santorum and Perlstein]: not everyone either can or wants to go to college. We never needed to destroy the village in order to save it, and there are ways of addressing the ills of tracking without losing its benefits at the same time. American high schools ought to be as good at turning out plumbers as they are at turning out future English majors.
I think Kevin’s critique is off-base and a lot of this comes down to confusion between…
A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to testify at a U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee hearing on innovations in higher education affordability. You can watch the video here. It was an interesting morning marred by a long discussion of an essentially bogus idea: that college keeps getting more expensive because of onerous federal regulations.
Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) was the first to raise this notion, and she returned to it several times. She said it was an opportunity for bipartisan agreement on the committee given that Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) had cited it frequently during past debates. The idea, in a nutshell, is that the federal government imposes various regulatory burdens on colleges, and that colleges have to spend money to comply with these regulations, leaving them with no choice but to pass the costs on to students in the form …
In the State of the Union and again in a speech at the University of Michigan last Friday, President Obama laid out a new higher education agenda. As I wrote at The New Republic, it’s an ambitious and welcome plan that’s important less for what policies are likely to pass Congress in an election year (few) and more for setting the parameters of future debate. Naturally, the higher-education lobby hates it, because that’s what lobbies paid to protect incumbent interests in accountability-free government money are paid to do. I also note that Chronicle blogger Claire Potter, aka Tenured Radical, hates it too, in a way that, while not very convincing, is interesting to examine.
Potter says that “Obama is proposing to create a larger pot of money to withhold from institutions and systems that have not implemented neoliberalism quickly enough.” I don’t work in academia, so I’m always…
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum recently criticized President Obama’s initiative to increase college-going as “elitist snobbery.” Said Santorum:
I have seven kids. Maybe they’ll all go to college. But, if one of my kids wants to go and be an auto mechanic, good for him. That’s a good-paying job – using your hands and using your mind. This is the kind of, the kind of snobbery that we see from those who think they know how to run our lives. Rise up, America. Defend your own freedoms.
The chart below, from the invaluable Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, shows the educational attainment of auto mechanics in three time periods:1968-1971, 1988-1991, and 2004-2007.
In the early 1970′s, when Rick Santorum was entering high school, most auto mechanics were high school dropouts. About a third had a high school diploma, and only seven percent had …
There’s no doubt that the ongoing crisis of governance in California and resulting disinvestment in the University of California system is deplorable. But this recent Washington Post dispatch from UC-Berkeley doesn’t exactly paint a picture of a campus in deep crisis:
Star faculty take mandatory furloughs. Classes grow perceptibly larger each year. Roofs leak; e-mail crashes. One employee mows the entire campus. Wastebaskets are emptied once a week. Some professors lack telephones. … The state share of Berkeley’s operating budget has slipped since 1991 from 47 percent to 11 percent. Tuition has doubled in six years, and the university is admitting more students from out of state willing to pay a premium for a Berkeley degree … the number of students for every faculty member has risen from 15 to 17 in five years. Many classes are oversubscribed, leaving students to scramble for…
As was reported yesterday, well-known Stanford professors Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun are currently teaching an online course in Artificial Intelligence that is available, for free, to anyone in the world. Unlike the previous generation of open courses, which were limited to lecture videos and syllabi, students taking this course can submit homework and take quizzes and tests for grades. When the midterm was administered last month, 175 Stanford students sat for the exam in Palo Alto, while 23,000 non-Stanford students took the same test in locations around the world, with “many scoring on par with” the Stanford students. “Those who also complete the final exam this month will get a letter signed by Thrun, along with their cumulative grade and class rank.” They won’t, however, receive official Stanford college credit.
The higher-education system is currently set up so that a…
The newly published GAO investigation into academic standards at for-profit online colleges reveals, unsurprisingly, a mixed bag: Some of the for-profits expelled GAO investigators posing as students for cutting class, skipping assignments, and turning in plagiarized or deliberately bad work. Others let the behavior slide and happily cashed the tuition checks. Given that some big for-profits get 90 percent of their revenue from federal financial-aid programs, and many students at for-profits are academically and economically at-risk, this kind of scrutiny is entirely appropriate and the percentage of for-profit colleges with lax or nonexistent standards is far too high. This also highlights, once again, how the voluntary accreditation system is inadequate for providing the kind consumer protection and quality control students and taxpayers need.
A couple of weeks ago I was at a conference about higher education when someone observed that the word “tuition” has deep etymological roots in the guardianship / mentoring elements of learning, and that the present habit of discussing college “prices” reinforces a strictly transactional fee-for-service concept of higher education that demeans the institution. It’s a fair point, but then I read this Chronicle / New York Times article about the huge surge in recruitment of Chinese undergraduates to American campuses:
Not long ago, Tom Melcher of [the private consulting firm] Zinch China was contacted by the provost of a large American university who wanted to recruit 250 Chinese students, stat. When asked why, the provost replied that his institution faced a yawning budget deficit. To fill it, he told Mr. Melcher, the university needed additional students who could pay their own way, and…
Earlier this week Education Sector and AEI co-published a report on higher education disclosure. In a nutshell, colleges are required to report and disclose certain kinds of information to the federal government and prospective students, in exchange for which colleges receives billions of dollars in public subsidies through the federal student financial-aid system. It’s a pretty good deal, and yet we found that the majority of all four-year colleges sampled were failing to disclose information like the percentage of low-income student who graduate, despite the fact that they are legally required to do so.
Given that low-income students often struggle to graduate, this is crucial information. Yet most colleges responded to our request for information with some variant of “We don’t have to tell you,” “We don’t have that information,” or “Why do you want to know?” The U.S. Department of …
My new Chronicle column makes the case for converting the entire federal student-loan system to income-contingent repayment, administered by the IRS. To illustrate why this is a good idea, consider the recent Vanity Fair article (now an e-book) about Chad Harbach’s debut novel, The Art of Fielding.
In a nutshell, Harbach borrowed money to get an expensive Ivy League education and then a master’s degree. Instead of cashing in by developing world-destroying financial instruments, he spent the next decade doing culturally valuable but financially non-remunerative things like co-founding and editing N+1 and slaving away on his first book. In addition to the stress of working hard and having no money, he had loan collectors constantly hounding him for repayment. Then he finished his book, got a big advance, and landed on the best-seller list. After which he promptly wrote the student loan…
One of the principal differences between K-12 and higher education is that people representing elementary and secondary teachers often go to elaborate lengths in denying the extent to which they’re pursuing a narrow self-interested agenda at the expense of student welfare and the public good, whereas in college they’re completely upfront about it. Two recent examples illustrate. Last week, the Chroniclereported how Syracuse University chancellor Nancy Cantor’s efforts to enroll more minority and low-income students, provide more need-based financial aid, and improve engagement with the surrounding community is meeting resistance among the faculty:
One of the most-contested parts of Ms. Cantor’s plan to remake the student population has been the acceptance rate. The rate, which stood in the mid-50-percent range after she arrived, spiked up to around 60 percent in each of the last two…
Posts on Brainstorm present the views of their authors. They do not represent the position of the editors, nor does posting here imply any endorsement by The Chronicle.
is an evolutionary biologist, professor of psychology at the University of Washington, and author of more than 30 books, most recently Homo mysterious: evolutionary mysteries of human nature.
directs the program in history and philosophy of science at
Florida State University. His forthcoming book is Science and
Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science.
is a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the communications program at Columbia University, and a prolific author whose most recent book is a novel, Undying.
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