Khan Academy Founder Proposes a New Type of College

This is a very important point. The problem, particularly in the US but not exclusively so, is that at the top universities the best faculty are not necessarily the best teachers. You can be a world class researcher and still be a terrible lecturer.

A truly great lecture is akin to a piece of theatre, especially in the humanities. Really, that's one of the problems with the methods that Khan promotes: they appear to work very well for quantitative subjects that can be accurately tested, but that doesn't apply to many of the arts.

I don't see why the humanities should be relegated to "ungraded seminars at night on art and literature". And, as others have pointed out here, one of the reasons Nobel laureates who are faculty may have little time for students is because they have a lot of other things to do: the same is surely true for the professionals Khan wants to advise students?

I don't want to sound as if I'm against the Khan Academy - it's fantastic. I think there is real value in implementing many of its ideas into standard education, and I know that's already happening with projects like edX and the like.

Let me be clear: I don't think there's anything wrong with this vision. This approach would probably be a success. It may be needed. The problem is this: somehow we mutated universities into a place where everyone goes in order to get a job. I think we benefit from having more people being educated at a university level, but that benefit is not purely practical. I don't think the point of getting higher education is getting a job. --

I think the vast majority of us (I include myself) would be better off focusing on learning and finding meaning through work. I have learned to appreciate the finer things of life (literature, philosophy, art, music) outside the context of formal education, as I gained life experience and learned to reflect on that experience. I don't believe I could ever have appreciated philosophy as a 19 year old. I just did not have the life experiences to appreciate the questions it tries to ask. No professor can supply those experiences, and the best the system can do is to simulate it.

So the traditional University, seeking truth, would continue to exist, but people would go there when their life experience propels them towards it.

In crass business terms, we unbundle training in specific skills, the important task of earning a paycheck, from the abstract pursuit of truth. In that sense, the University becomes closer to how a religious institution operates today. Commercial job skills get to be imparted by commercially driven entities, with employers playing a prominent role.

This could dramatically alter the economics of providing those skills, as we have found out from Zoho University. We not only don't charge students, we actually pay them from day one, and yet, over a 3 or 4 year period, their dramatic gain in productivity effectively pays for the investment in skill building. Yes, this is not the "abstract pursuit of truth" but that needs to be unbundled.

Liberal arts education seems to get a bad rap around here (I did take less higher math and science than would have been required at a state university), but the average class size for my college was twenty. Occasionally more, but there's also the counter case, where I had an English class with two other students. One had a voracious appetite for skipping, and the other was consistently absent for mock trial.

I found it substantially raises my perceived importance of finishing the required reading when I think there's a 50/50 chance of being the only one there to be questioned about it. :) I had a huge motivation problem end of high school/early college, and I think if I hadn't had the individual attention of a liberal arts college, I surely would have dropped out.

There are several interesting comments on this article that relate to company hiring procedures. With the help of other HN participants, I have gradually compiled references to build a FAQ file on that subject,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543

which seems to be well liked by other participants here. To relate what the research says to what Salman Khan is proposing, it is a widely replicated finding all over the world, for many categories of jobs, that work-sample tests based on actual job tasks do much better at identifying successful workers than higher education credentials. Any employer that doesn't want to be a chump should hire most workers on the basis of a work-sample test.

What an institution of higher education could do to respond to what research says about preparing learners to succeed in finding jobs and doing jobs well is make various work-sample tests part of a graduation comprehensive examination. Currently higher education degrees are based mostly on "seat time" (so that the saying is, "All you need to get a degree is a heartbeat and a check"), rather than on demonstrated competencies for doing any useful form of work.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/18/study_finds_la...

A college or university that says to the world, "Our graduates who obtain our diplomas demonstrate their competence with work-sample tests, the results of which we list on their official academic records" would rapidly gain notice from companies with research-based hiring procedures. (And why would anyone want to work for a company with hiring procedures that are contrary to the best research?)

http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...

http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/prepri...

That could provide the new college or university leverage to gain market share as compared to other colleges and universities. That would be enough for it to thrive as a new institution of higher education.

Yes, there are other reasons to go to college besides getting a job after graduation. But the research shows that many of those purported reasons are poorly achieved by current higher education practice,

http://chronicle.com/article/Academically-Adrift-The/130743/

and a new model of college or university might be able to do some outside-the-box innovation to also achieve better in that regard. Trying something new would not be a bad idea.