Surprising Things About School

I don't see how that is a failure? MOOCs are a platform for "just in time" learning. If you run into a problem at work you're not going to sign up for a four year university degree program to figure it out, but there is a good chance you will sign up for a MOOC and drill down into the specific parts that you need to close the gap to solve the specific problem you have. And when the next problem arises, you may continue further into the course. There is no reason to cover everything at once. This flawed opinion about failure may be directly related to #3.

> Economically we vastly undervalue education.

Because it hasn't shown economic value. The percentage of the working age population who have attained a postsecondary education has skyrocketed over the past 50 years, but incomes have remained stagnant. If the more and more people attaining a postsecondary education really were adding $10k to their yearly income like the article suggests, incomes would be rising substantially.

Those who have a degree, on average, make $10k more than those who don't. But since this simply measures high-achieving people against low-achieving people, income conclusions cannot be meaningfully drawn from it. It is important to remember that universities and colleges reject the lowest-achieving people at enrolment time, preventing them from signing up for class entirely. Medium-achievers who make it past the initial filter are put through academic rigour that sees them drop or fail out. That leaves only the highest achieving people able to graduate.

Nobody should be surprised that high-achieving people are able to make more money than low-achiving people. This would remain true even if colleges and universities never existed. Finding something that correlates with high-achievers does not tell us anything other than this group of people is more likely to be high achieving.

Allowing more and more medium-achievers to graduate from university still leaves them as medium-achievers in life and they will still end up in the medium-achiever work that they always would have (after all, someone has to do it). All while incomes remain stagnant.

After about 3 years of work, I managed to scrape together just enough to enroll in my local community college for two semesters, one class per semester. Total cost? At that time about $400 including books. And that $400 could have vaporized with one flat tire, or one visit to the doctor.

An acquaintance of my parents heard that I was going to college, suddenly took an interest and hired me sight unseen to come work at his startup in an entry-level developer job at 3x my then current pay. I worked there for a couple years and when I was close to finishing college, another acquaintance hired me and doubled my pay. After that I was attached to a growing career and haven't looked back.

But it all started with getting that tiny little bit of money together.

In the old days if you wanted to learn something, often you'd pay $20 to $50 for a book. For example, Amazon order search claims that somewhere I have a copy of "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming" by Norvig, which is supposed to be a decent book in the field, cool. Ironically maybe that IS the textbook for the famous AI MOOC class, I don't know, maybe it should be if it isn't. However I never finished the class, only glossed thru the book, and barely remember either.

I was curious about the topic, not trying to meet someone elses arbitrary goalpost, and the "graduates" metric isn't a useful number.

Kinda the difference between running because its a beautiful day out and I need exercise, and running a competitive marathon against live athletes in person solely for the goal of getting a number when I run thru a gate. I would guess in the general public the former outnumbers the latter 50 to 1, so the MOOC stats aren't unusual at all.

Another interesting analogy is "The Mona Lisa" painting is a failure if you measure its worth solely based on number of PHD students graduating who give it credit for them selecting "Art History" as a major. That doesn't mean it needs to be burned as a failure.

In this day and age I would hazard a guess that over 90% over University students...are there for a job and thats it.

It seems premature to say that it isn't provided that. You have your entire life to gain a college-level education. The primary reason that brick and mortar schooling is provided up front, in a relatively short span of time, is because it is impractical to visit that brick and mortar school on a regular basis throughout your entire life. Like the article points out, a major hurdle for a large segment of the population in accessing brick and mortar schooling is proximity to those brick and mortar schools.

Online learning has no such constraints. You can be out in the middle of nowhere and still pop into class whenever you feel like it. If it takes you 80 years to complete your college-level studies, great. To say that is a failure, only a few years after becoming available, seems to miss the point of what alternative means. If a MOOC had to be exactly like brick and mortar schooling, it wouldn't be an alternative, it would be the same thing.

Although I concede that a fatal flaw of MOOCs is that there are an infinite number of options online. While it may be impractical to visit 100 different brick and mortar schools to see who teaches a specific topic the best, online it is easy to do so and can be done in an instant. With that, there is no incentive to go through your studies only in one spot that can be tracked by a single entity. This makes it challenging from a business perspective, but not an education perspective.