I firmly believe that university is way, way overpriced in a world of free, high quality MOOCs. It just makes zero economic sense and I believe the market will correct this sooner or later. Think about how utterly inefficient it all is: you have hundreds of professors around the world, each mechanically teaching the same subject semester after semester to new students (I know, they do a bit more than that). Some will…
> According to a visualization of MOOC completion rates assembled by Katy Jordan (2013), the 50 investigated MOOCs have generated 50.000 enrollments on average, with the typical completion rate hovering below 10%. Put it somewhere around 7.5%, or 3.700 completions per 50.000 enrollments. Meyer (2012) reported that the dropout rates of MOOCs offered by Stanford, MIT and UC Berkley were 80-95%. For example, only 7% of the 50.000 students completed who took the Coursera-UC-Berkeley course in Software Engineering. There is a similar reported dropout rate in Coursera’s Social Network Analysis class where only 2% of participants earned a basic certificate and 0.17% earned the higher level programming with distinction certificate.
MOOCs are not the solution.
Matter of fact, MOOCs turned out to be the counterfactual that clearly illustrate the depth of problems we have with education - and more importantly re-training.
MOOCs are in so many ways ideal. When Khan academy lectures were first made available online, I had huge hopes for the future of education and therefore humanity.
Education/re-training is a critical lynch pin of the modern model of economic development.
Innovation -> job loss -> retraining -> people return to well paying jobs.
But it turns out, that this was not happening, and that education and training is a lot harder than anticipated.
MOOCs had it all - convenience (always on the net), not time constrained (you can read/watch classes whenever), accessible (taught by the good teachers), high quality (same teacher, able to use visual and other aids) and self-selected by people who wanted to finish the course.
They should have been a massive success.
The self-selected, interested student part should alone, have resulted in large numbers of newly trained students.
It hasn't. Which meant the importance of those factors in educational results was overstated.
This also means, that our current education system, may well be the better state of the art option we have.
OR worse, a large chunk of humanity may not be able to transition to new subjects, and therefore new roles.
This is a huge bloody problem, because that means if coal miners lose jobs, the economy will stall.
This in turn puts huge political pressure to avoid following economics, and instead fight for protectionism, which also doesn't work.
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Side note/silver lining: Perhaps the intransingence of education is a good thing.
If it becomes easier to teach a person how to learn X details, perhaps it can become a lot easier to also indoctrinate a person in Y religion, or belief.
In the end, a technique which has a high success rate in teaching students X subject, could easily be used to teach any subject.
The difficulty in teaching people could well be a natural impediment to mass scale conversion, or invasion of ideas/propaganda.