Khan Academy Founder Proposes a New Type of College

I suppose working with mentors could help students be better prepared to join the workforce, but students can already do that on their own by getting internships.

Classes could be self-paced, but then likely many students would lose the motivation to learn. People are strongly driven by competition and deadlines, two things schools excel at providing.

There already are internationally recognized assessments -- standardized tests. Though they are typically useless without a degree. It would be difficult to change this, but if you could then you might make colleges obsolete. Many people would not spend 4 years and $50,000 on a college degree if they could study for 6 months, take a test, and get the same job. But I don't think this could work. For example, even though we already have the GMAT, GRE, and MCAT, it's unlikely you will ever convince medical schools to let in students with an MCAT and no undergraduate degree. And if an employer is choosing between someone with a perfect GMAT and no undergrad, and a Stanford graduate with a mediocre GMAT, the choice will likely be in favor of the Stanford grad. I don't think this would change even if you made the test more comprehensive and difficult.

Not being graded: this may increase students' intrinsic motivation to learn, but it also may decrease their motivation, since there would be no penalty for not learning the material. But if you maintain that students must take an internationally recognized test at the end, then test-taking abilities will still be measured, so you're just playing with motivation here and not really changing much.

These ideas are interesting, but even if schools enacted them, what great improvements would they bring to our society?

We do! We're only constrained by the laws of nature.

For the people that work with/for me, I want them to contradict me when I'm wrong. How else can I learn what they know?

And your criticism of his expression of a personal anecdote is unwarranted. Virtually all of the opinions in this thread are going to be based on personal experience. As far as I'm aware, there are no statistics elucidating "the purpose of college." Your last paragraph, for example, is entirely a personal opinion/observation.

"I see universities struggling to be everything to everyone"

was exactly my point. :D

For some people, education is about "jobs," for others its about other things, and as a result universities have dozens of conflicting mandates.

I was rejecting the idea that we've somehow converged, as a society or whatever, on a consensus that education = jobs. That was not my educational experience. That's not the educational experience of people who attended an Ivy League school.

But I grew up poor and rural, so I know the flip side...viscerally. I meant to draw attention to exactly your point, that we've set up a situation where universities are directionless because we've asked them to be everything to everyone.

DBC is not everything to everyone. We hope that DBC will make it easier for universities to stop trying to be everything to everyone, too.

"You claim that, in the US, we have been experimenting for 150 years, but you only provide as an example your own, personal anecdotal experience as someone who has become a co-founding entrepreneur."

Happy to provide resources. :)

I'd start with Diane Ravitch's "Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform"

http://www.amazon.com/Left-Back-Century-Battles-School/dp/07...

A video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T7jpyAG44k

If you want names, I'd read up on the history of post-Civil War sociology, psychology, and philosophy in the US, especially the pragmatist tradition.

Start with John Dewey and William Torrey Harris (for a counterpoint to Dewey).

Here's a William Torrey Harris quote: "The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places ... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world."

Here's John Dewey: "The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences"

Also read up on Booker T. Washington and "industrial education."

Literally every point everyone has been making in this thread -- myself included -- was also being made by educational thinkers 100-150 years ago.

It's more that because we want universities to be everything to everyone, they've lost a sense of purpose. Some universities retain it -- Chicago, MIT, Harvey Mudd, Reed College, etc. -- and have incredibly strong opinions about how to answer "What is an education?"

Most universities can't afford to have a strong opinion, sometimes for legal reasons and sometimes for economic reasons.

By removing those contradictions, I'm hope Dev Bootcamp will help free universities to be universities again, and return to them the luxury of holding a strong opinion about the nature of an education.