The Future of Education
posted by Jon Siegel
Zephyr Teachout, a law professor at Fordham, predicts in Slate today that the Internet will tear apart education much the same way it has affected newspapers. In the future, says Professor Teachout, most classes will be offered online, students will pay by the class, a few big star teachers will get all the money, and the rest of us will be glorified TAs. “Within a generation, college will be a mostly virtual experience for the average student,” Professor Teachout says, and degrees will come from education “aggregators” rather than traditional colleges.
Professor Teachout may be one of the big stars in the new order (well, her webpage at Fordham does say that she is “an immensely talented and creative scholar”) but I’m not buying her theory just yet. If universities just sold educations, there’d be more to it. As Professor Teachout observes, universities incur big expenses that may prove unnecessary in the digital age. If we ran universities on a business basis, employed technology to the fullest degree, and got rid of a few bits of archaic nonsense such as tenure and scholarly research, I’m sure we could deliver education much more cheaply.
But universities also sell their students something else: the reputational value of the degree. An Internet “aggregator” of education services can’t duplicate that easily. Part of the reputational value of a degree comes from just those aspects of a university that the Internet would shed: having faculty who are research stars, not letting just anyone take classes, etc. Face it: if you were making hiring decisions, would your first choice be someone who graduated from a virtual school?
I think the reputational value of the degree is a big part of what universities sell, and I don’t think the Internet is going to erode that so quickly as Professor Teachout seems to believe. And that’s before we get to other things that real colleges offer, such as enjoyment, friendships, networking, and other things that come from actually being in the same place as your classmates.
Well, it’s always dangerous to say that the Internet won’t accomplish something. And in fairness, Professor Teachout does say that the more elite, “brand name” universities will be less affected by the developments she foresees than smaller, less known institutions. And that makes sense: the less reputational value your degree has, the more you really are selling education. But I don’t think my job is going to be outsourced to the Internet just yet.
September 11, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Posted in: Education
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Responses (4)
Ray Campbell - September 11, 2009 at 4:18 pm
In some ways, what Professor Teachout is proposing is a return to the past. In that regard, it’s worth remembering that there are lots of ways to structure and deliver higher education, and the 20th century American model isn’t necessarily inevitable.
In medieval Bologna, for example, the students ran the show, hiring the teachers, who were in effect entrepreneurs as well as scholars; while the university was a corporate entity, it bore little relation to what we think of today. When U.Va. was founded, professors were paid based on enrollment in their classes, a practice that influenced Jefferson’s designing the pavilions so students could stand outside open windows, thereby increasing the professor’s potential revenue. Even today, outside the US, the “rite of passage” aspect of the university is often not present; Complutense in Madrid, for example, is a tremendous school, but it’s a commuter school for students who largely still live at home with their parents.
By disintermediating the university, by creating the opportunity for students to gravitate directly to the best teachers, the internet does create the potential for disruptive changes in higher education.
Does that threaten Yale, Harvard or similar schools? I don’t think so. Aside from the prestige value of the degree, there’s tremendous value in the other students. Most Yale grads, for example, will tell you that they learned as much talking with other students in the dining halls as they did in the classroom.
At lower levels, I think it’s a factor that savvy administrators are going to have to keep in mind. Both the brand value of the degree and the quality of the experience will be important if a school is to thrive in the future. College and grad schools are way expensive now, and as alternatives arise the burden will be on schools to show that the extra costs of the traditional school are justified by extra value to the students. (There’s a bit of an allocation of cost issue built into this – assuming that legal scholarship has positive social value, it may or may not have direct educational value to the students taking a course, and given a choice they may not choose to pay up for the full research university program when they bear the costs and the benefits are realized by society at large.)
A lot of schools are anticipating that virtual learning is coming and, in various ways, participating in it. Yale has put some classes online, gratis. I’m currently “auditing” a class on Game Theory taught a couple of years ago by Ben Polak, and the MP3 version provides a tremendously stimulating way to use my commute time. Penn State has a “World Campus” where faculty can prepare and teach classes for credit for paying online students worldwide. I know from my experience with Polak’s class that virtual classes can be intellectually exciting; I expect that grading and certification will present challenges, but I expect those can be met.
Universities won’t tumble like newspapers did (for big ticket purchases with lifetime consequences, old patterns hold longer), but anyone running a law school or university has to be thinking about where this could be headed.
michael webster - September 12, 2009 at 7:22 am
Robin Hanson had an interesting piece on what universities sell, relationships with famous faculty.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/02/what-do-schools-sell.html
ZK - September 12, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Nobody else at Fordham is described as talented or creative, let alone immensely so.
dfb - September 15, 2009 at 8:46 pm
I doubt the digital revolution will completely eradicate face to face classes. There is still strong value attending class in person. That said, judging by the number of my fellow students (I’m a 3L) who regularly skip classes many people feel they do not need that face time. Instead of correspondence style courses, I think legal education is clearly headed back to undergrad with the reintroduction of the LLB. What better way to make the law more accessible, make more people hate lawyers less, and improve the cost of legal services.
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