I recall two interesting economic arguments related to traditional higher ed that emerged from reading the writing of Anya Kamentz (author of DIY-U).
The first, which kicks off the Fast Company article that originally brought Anya to my attention, talks about college as being more like a string quartet than a factory with regard to the role potentially played by efficiency.
For if you measure efficiency by the number of people needed to create a particular product or deliver a particular service, then applying principles that would help generate the same output using fewer “workers” is obviously misapplying the concept since you wouldn’t reduce a quartet to three, two or one player(s) in the name of increased productivity.
The second argument, highlighted in DIY-U, has to do with the contradiction at the heart of a college (prestige or otherwise) claiming to offer a unique and valuable service with regard to the quality education they deliver.
For if the staff and teaching techniques offered at a Harvard or Princeton are indeed so remarkable as to demand hundreds of thousands of dollars in the marketplace, then why shouldn’t those people and techniques work for anyone partaking in such pedagogically powerful programs?
But most prestige colleges and universities don’t offer their allegedly effective products to any and all. Rather, they limit their customer base to only those who have already proven themselves academically, which means their “customers” would likely succeed in any learning environment. Which brings up the question of whether big-name educational institutions with highly discriminating admissions processes are actually “selling” education or discrimination.
Regarding the efficiency argument, if you focus on just the string quartet itself then the notion of increasing productivity by reducing “workers” does indeed seem ridiculous. But if you think about what a musical group actually produces (music listened to by audiences) then advances in recording and distribution technology have indeed created massive efficiency plays.
For example, musical groups can now record at a distance by working from multiple connected recording studios. But more importantly, the music they create can be distributed to magnitudes more listeners via iTunes and musical performances shared with masses via YouTube, meaning performances once enjoyed by handfuls can now reach millions.
This is one of the reasons why I’ve been so attracted to the concept of the MOOC since it represents a similar “efficiency play” with regard to education. For even if only a few thousand people out of the hundred thousand who sign up ever complete their MOOC course, that’s thousands more than could have previously taken the same course when it was bottled up within an institution. And given that there is no barrier to entry (such as a competitive admissions process), then MOOCs represent one of the first instances when the supposedly unique and valuable products an institution has created and/or nurtured can be made available to anyone who wants them.
This brings us back to the college contradiction noted above.
For if a university does indeed offer something special in its classrooms, what better way to prove it than to make that special something available to anyone who wants to try it out (not just a pre-screened elite made up of people who have already demonstrated their abilities)?
Presuming MOOCs don’t hit any of the walls that stand before them (such as money drying up if business models don’t emerge or institutions deciding they no longer want to share), we could reach a point when learning (if not earning) a degree becomes more a matter of personal effort (applied at any point in your life) vs. the ability to successfully navigate a college admissions process that only looks at what you’ve been able to achieve as an adolescent.
Leave a Reply