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Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. More specifically, if a school isn't accredited, you can't get government financial aid to go there
I think that the parent says that while you can learn almost anything from youtube, it is imposible for other people to know that you know something you learned on youtube without a test.
Would be interesting to see MOOCs on daily stuff: cooking, gardening, cleaning & organizing, style, hospitality.
Or MOOCs around hobbies: amateur radio, photography, sketching, watercolor, dance, music. Here there’s potential for the tech to meet users halfway.
Enrollment is tanking! It did disrupted it, just not in very measurable way! Just the fact people are discussing and questioning value of higher education on social networks, means there is so e disruption! And YouTube is far better than bored and underpaid postdoc!
Technology could very well disrupt higher education, but not completely tear it down. Just like Airbnb disrupts hotels but Hotels still exist and are doing better now than ever. What the future of education looks like is a lot more fractured than we can see in the past. We might think of "higher education" as just a college/university, but in reality there are already alternative forms of higher education and those w…
As an Engineer, I have had to explain this to countless people... a mechanic is not a mechanical engineer. An electrician, is not an electrical engineer, and so on and so on.
His other anecdote of lecturer is a straw man also, as no one has done that for centuries. The idea of structured education (college) is to force you to learn ideas you would not normally learn, and have a guide to help you understand (the professor), and have those ideas organized in a pattern that aids the greater idea (e.g. taking maths: calculus, differential equations and linear algebra are not only necessary for much of engineering, but they help you to think in ways of solving problems that engineers come across often). This is one of the key problems with self-teaching, they end up not having the vast maths background to tackle complex mathematical problems, and then end up simplifying and making mistakes. In engineering, these mistakes can be deadly. In software, these mistakes can now be deadly).
Hard to replace traditional education's role as a class differentiator.
You can watch MIT lectures, go to your local library, read blog posts, listen to podcasts, read open source. It's all free. But it won't give you that scarce resource of brand affiliation on your resume no matter how hard you try.
Whatever you learn is only one of the many components of the total package.
You're right, there are certain types of things that you can learn quite a lot about on the internet - this is especially true if there is no prerequisites. It's my favourite thing about the internet, and I'll never stop being grateful for it. I'm a self-taught hack, but I have a very intelligent/fortunate cousin that went to Berkeley (granted for business), and my interpretation is that it's a contacts/prestige thing. The information is mostly available elsewhere.
I'm curious to see where this discussion goes.
Has any country found a better way?
We've already gone through an entire cycle of technology-driven higher education disruption... ever heard of an online degree? Many such online schools have made billions and lost it again by now. Separately, the accreditation scheme upholds a high barrier to entry for disruptors. Specifically, a school must be accredited (gatekept by the US Ed Dept) for matriculating students to be eligible for government financial…
Accreditation doesn't prevent schools from adopting disruptive technologies.
Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired knowledge and other factors. I'll address the knowledge signaling first.
It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is very difficult to verify in a reasonable amount of time whether someone has done this. Thus, people use a degree as a first filter because people have a certain degree of trust that if you have a bachelor's degree, there's a minimum amount of knowledge you probably have. No one in ed-tech has built a tool that gives that confidence. Online universities have no pre-existing weight, and it is trivial to imagine hiring someone to do the work for you (this may now also be possible in university, but until that becomes a widespread notion it won't matter for this problem).
There are then other signals that traditional universities provide. Graduating from Stanford not only implies knowledge, it implies that you are some combination of affluent, disciplined, hard working, and smart due to the exclusivity of the admissions process. Ed-tech cannot presently reproduce this without "climbing the ranks" so to speak, siphoning off students from the same people with a better value proposition (which it does not currently have).