The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age

The university is a kind of "eternal adolescence" which promised to provide dysfunctional high-IQs without the trappings of such obligations.

With the marketization of education, academics find themselves obligated to their students (how undignified!) and for the first time needing to justify their worth (how are they meant to do that?!).

These are, of course, things that everyone else has been doing for the past two centuries -- now, finally, The University is getting a shock to its system.

I was a person who, for the longest time, associated such pseduo-Nobel attitudes with "being educated". Now, I think the whole place is infatalizing and infantalized.

It is a very bad place for one's ideological health: it inculcates a kind of outrage that any one should be obligated to do anything; a stort of pathological Utopianism artificially sustained by state funding.

I think it's a large part of where extreme student activism comes from: a kind of rage that the circumstances of our life are constrained at all. Shouldn't there just be infinite money and infinite time? Shouldn't the whole world just be a campus?

this platform could even have stuff like spaced repetition build in!

In speaking with many students and colleagues, one thing has struck me, which is that many of the current undergrads are enrolled because they want to get away from home. They want some true transition to adulthood, where they live on their own and develop into an independent adult with a vocation and adult identity. This is maybe what I've heard articulated here and elsewhere about being exposed to new ideas, etc. but maybe isn't quite the same. It's something I never really quite appreciated the importance of until recently, but looms large in their minds. Many of them, even though they're taking courses "off-campus" and online, are still in their college town living in their apartment, and so forth. They didn't go home, they just stayed put.

The analogy with books and music is telling because for awhile there too there was a lot of hype about how the internet would lead to some radical reorganization and disruption of those industries. And in many ways it did. But many of the power inequities, the monopolies, and so forth are the same, and the fundamentals are the same. We've migrated a lot from radio and physical media to streaming services, but the players are still there. I suspect something similar will happen with universities; we'll just see a lot more diversity in what form an undergraduate education actually looks like. For some it will involve 4 years in a dorm / on-campus setting. For others it might be more eclectic. There are also some things that just can't really be duplicated at home: an undergrad isn't going to go out and purchase a mass spectrometer for the most part, or PCR equipment, or have storage room full of embalmed anatomy specimens to dissect.

One thing that's important to be mindful of is that this on-campus experience many of us remember is in many ways evaporating anyway. I don't mean to say that's ok, or acceptable, or whatever, but sometimes we talk about the experience of being on campus and discussing things with others in person, forgetting that a major societal issue right now is how that that used to be the norm for everything and is increasingly not. So we have these chats online, on HN comment sections, or over IM, or videoconferencing anyway, even if you're not in college. Whatever might be lost from the on-campus experience is being lost everywhere to some extent; I point this out only to suggest that if we're ok with it in some domains, why should college be special? Or is college the canary that we should be paying closer attention to?

I agree with the perspective of the author of the article that something fundamental needs to change, but my guess is 10 years from now everything will look very different and the same at the same time. I also think there's many problems with universities and higher education that have nothing to do with the cost-benefit calculus in some abstracted sense, but rather to do with how it should be paid for, whether universities are funded well enough, whether they're getting those funds from the right places, whether administration is too top-heavy, whether employers and society abuse interpretation of degrees, and so forth and so on.

Agreed, but a university education reveals those people to me in a way that other evaluation criteria I have will not. I have lots of tools to evaluate whether a person has basic skills, but relatively fewer to determine whether they can do that other stuff. This is especially true as the reference and employment verification process is more limited than it used to be. Most companies I call can't tell me "don't hire this person" like they did 15 years ago.

It doesn't help that, working for the government, I have limited options once I do hire someone. I am under pressure to make the right decision the first time since unmaking that decision is a great deal of painful time and effort. I suspect a number of mid-level managers like myself are in that position, which is why the degree continues to carry so much weight.

* You get lectures and assignments.

* You get schedules and deadlines that discourage procrastination, if you're the sort of person who leaves things until the last minute.

* You (hopefully) get detailed feedback on assignments from a real human.

* You get big manicured lawns and marble pillars.

* You get health insurance.

* You get in-person small-group discussions (at least in some subjects) of advanced topics.

* You get a bunch of people of your age and social background, all uprooted from home and looking to make new friends at the same time.

* You get subsidised gyms and sports clubs and interest clubs.

* You get to network and meet people.

* You get buildings full of academics with office hours where you can basically just walk in and they'll explain almost anything to you.

* You get parties full of drunk young people, of all genders, some looking for relationships, others for casual sex.

* You get access to journals and databases and software that usually costs $$$$$ (and computer labs with it all already set up)

* You get a weird 'future middle class' social status where you can drink and party and not get a job and go into debt - yet be treated as someone successful.

* You get a easily understood explanation for that gap in your resume.

* You get internship opportunities - where you can get your foot in the door at big employers, while being paid and taught how they do things.

* You get loans for your living costs, despite having no income or credit history.

* You get access to a library with more (serious, intellectual) books than you could read in a lifetime.

* You get to leave home, but with training wheels if you're not ready to cook and clean and laundry and pay bills all at once.

* You get supply control, from 'weed out classes' and limited numbers of student places.

* You get in-person exams that are at least moderately difficult to cheat on.

* And yes, you (hopefully) get a credential at the end of it. Maybe even with a good 'brand'.

Online courses can certainly deliver lectures at a much lower price than the ruinous cost of US universities. But I think part of the reason the likes of Coursera aren't on their way to replacing conventional colleges is because they're missing so much else from the bundle.