What do you think?
Rate this book
The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere
From a renowned education writer comes a paradigm-shifting examination of the rapidly changing world of college that every parent, student, educator, and investor needs to understand.Over the span of just nine months in 2011 and 2012, the world’s most famous universities and high-powered technology entrepreneurs began a race to revolutionize higher education. College courses that had been kept for centuries from all but an elite few were released to millions of students throughout the world—for free.Exploding college prices and a flagging global economy, combined with the derring-do of a few intrepid innovators, have created a dynamic climate for a total rethinking of an industry that has remained virtually unchanged for a hundred years. In The End of College, Kevin Carey, an education researcher and writer, draws on years of in-depth reporting and cutting-edge research to paint a vivid and surprising portrait of the future of education. Carey explains how two trends—the skyrocketing cost of college and the revolution in information technology—are converging in ways that will radically alter the college experience, upend the traditional meritocracy, and emancipate hundreds of millions of people around the world. Insightful, innovative, and accessible, The End of College is a must-read, and an important contribution to the developing conversation about education in this country.
290 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 3, 2015
56 people are currently reading
1270 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 88 reviews
June 21, 2018
Kevin Carey is an education writer for the New York Times who produces policy oriented columns on higher education. This book appears to be a cumulative effort at tying together his columns. His focus in this book is on "the university of everywhere" (is this trademarked?) and he is highly critical of traditional university education. His principal bogeyman is the "hybrid" university, by which he appears to refer to the vision of the modern university espoused by Cardinal Newman that splits up universities into teaching, research, and service functions. The hybrid university focuses on research, even while it take tuition dollars from students and parents in the expectation of receiving instruction and guidance that research faculty are unprepared and unwilling to provide. This basic critical perspective is accompanied by a host of issues raised by other academic observers for the last two decades (the "academically adrift" study as an example). All this is happening as the pace of societal and technological change has placed an ever growing premium on obtaining a college degree - employing some of the Goldin/Katz arguments.
What is society to do? How can parents ensure their kids' education in the midst of such change? How could we ever remedy such a sorry system? Never fear, the Internet is here, powered by leading computer scientists at MIT and Stanford and funded by the Venture Capitalists. This Internet is coming to education and because of that everything will be different and the old educational institution of the university will be forced to change and adapt..... and this will all make wonderful economic sense.
I was greatly disappointed by this book. While I have at times disagreed with some of Mr. Carey's columns, I had thought that I might be missing his larger narrative. As it turns out, I wasn't missing it. There isn't one. This book is about how the Internet revolution, assisted ably by "big data", will disrupt education and change everything. I don't really mind a short trade book engineered to push some product. In some areas of business and technical writing, that is nearly all that is available. However, "The End of College" so reads as a constructed effort to link faddish and stereotypical types of argument that I was at a loss to find any new ideas in the book at all. It is as if it was written by an AI program.
Ok, so I disagree with Mr. Carey. Is that it? I don't think so. There are numerous problems here that are beyond argument points. For example, "university" and "college" are terms that apply to a huge range of institutions, ranging from the Ivies to some junior colleges. When it suits Mr. Carey, all of these institutions are limped together and tarred with the same brush of international test comparisons, while at other times, the elite schools are singled out, while little attention is given to the large state schools, and very little attention goes to proprietary colleges - even though the proprietaries are fraught with problems pushing basic legality in some cases. Is it really reasonable to lump all of these together? It strikes me as sloppy to waffle on your terms to suit the argument you are making at the time.
Mr. Carey's chapter on GW University, which was recently reprinted in the NY Times magazine is also annoying. Now I will admit to not liking the pricing policies that the elite non-ivies have adopted in the last few decades. Depending on the institution, activities such as at GWU are cringeworthy or worse. Having said that, the tone of the chapter virtually presumes that the students and parents of GWU students are stupid or inattentive at best. I have found that people think very hard about what they are spending when they drop a quarter million dollars on their child's education. Mr. Carey's background, even though he had an academic for a Dad, is far from sufficient to grant him the high ground relative to informed customers.
Mr. Carey's chapter on "Massive Open Online Courses" (MOOCS) is bordering on being advertising copy for some vendor. It would be nice if he reported on more of the research regarding MOOCs, which has prompted reduced expectations for these activities. For example, MOOCs appear to be very good at providing easier learning for individuals who already know how to learn -- college graduates, for example. Whatever they will become eventually, it is unlikely that MOOCs will massify elite university education. Mr. Carey talks a lot about data but only when it is convenient and without presenting much analysis. The book often drops a lot of academic terms around, often in ways that make matters more rather than less complex. For example, while there is an economic logic associated with universities, throwing around terms like scale economies, first mover advantages, and network economies is not helpful unless one clarifies how these sometimes related terms differ from each other in the context of universities. The book moves to sociological arguments when inertia and imitation rather than efficiency are focal points, leaving the reader to figure out for themselves how the forces of sociological order coexist with the disruptive forces of Internet entrepreneurship and venture funding. When the book considers technological disruption as a motive force for sectoral change, the Christensen arguments come across as simplistic at best and possibly erroneous. Not all technologies are disruptive and not all industries and sectors need to cannabalize themselves to survive. None of this is new and I was looking to Mr. Carey for some effort at putting these different strands of issues together. That did not occur in the book. He cites all the gurus, but I was more interested in understanding what Mr. Carey was arguing. I can read Christensen''s arguments on my own.
Mr. Carey also makes much of how traditional universities have not done a good job on their undergraduate teaching mission - a complaint with which I agree. Having said that, I was startled to see how little was said about teaching and how to promote high quality teaching in the university. There have always been superstar teachers and there is work in cognitive science and psychology that has implications for teaching. Even so, there is little in the book about how to make undergraduate teaching better at the undergraduate level. For someone who spends much time in the book talking about Herbert Simon, there is also little about how to get large universities to change. The end of the book reads almost as if educational experiments will just accumulate and eventually change the world. It is hard to see how that can occur without the institution of the university changing too.
The book was OK and made me think about the issues. I was unconvinced by the arguments, however, and found key parts of the argument to be sloppy.
What is society to do? How can parents ensure their kids' education in the midst of such change? How could we ever remedy such a sorry system? Never fear, the Internet is here, powered by leading computer scientists at MIT and Stanford and funded by the Venture Capitalists. This Internet is coming to education and because of that everything will be different and the old educational institution of the university will be forced to change and adapt..... and this will all make wonderful economic sense.
I was greatly disappointed by this book. While I have at times disagreed with some of Mr. Carey's columns, I had thought that I might be missing his larger narrative. As it turns out, I wasn't missing it. There isn't one. This book is about how the Internet revolution, assisted ably by "big data", will disrupt education and change everything. I don't really mind a short trade book engineered to push some product. In some areas of business and technical writing, that is nearly all that is available. However, "The End of College" so reads as a constructed effort to link faddish and stereotypical types of argument that I was at a loss to find any new ideas in the book at all. It is as if it was written by an AI program.
Ok, so I disagree with Mr. Carey. Is that it? I don't think so. There are numerous problems here that are beyond argument points. For example, "university" and "college" are terms that apply to a huge range of institutions, ranging from the Ivies to some junior colleges. When it suits Mr. Carey, all of these institutions are limped together and tarred with the same brush of international test comparisons, while at other times, the elite schools are singled out, while little attention is given to the large state schools, and very little attention goes to proprietary colleges - even though the proprietaries are fraught with problems pushing basic legality in some cases. Is it really reasonable to lump all of these together? It strikes me as sloppy to waffle on your terms to suit the argument you are making at the time.
Mr. Carey's chapter on GW University, which was recently reprinted in the NY Times magazine is also annoying. Now I will admit to not liking the pricing policies that the elite non-ivies have adopted in the last few decades. Depending on the institution, activities such as at GWU are cringeworthy or worse. Having said that, the tone of the chapter virtually presumes that the students and parents of GWU students are stupid or inattentive at best. I have found that people think very hard about what they are spending when they drop a quarter million dollars on their child's education. Mr. Carey's background, even though he had an academic for a Dad, is far from sufficient to grant him the high ground relative to informed customers.
Mr. Carey's chapter on "Massive Open Online Courses" (MOOCS) is bordering on being advertising copy for some vendor. It would be nice if he reported on more of the research regarding MOOCs, which has prompted reduced expectations for these activities. For example, MOOCs appear to be very good at providing easier learning for individuals who already know how to learn -- college graduates, for example. Whatever they will become eventually, it is unlikely that MOOCs will massify elite university education. Mr. Carey talks a lot about data but only when it is convenient and without presenting much analysis. The book often drops a lot of academic terms around, often in ways that make matters more rather than less complex. For example, while there is an economic logic associated with universities, throwing around terms like scale economies, first mover advantages, and network economies is not helpful unless one clarifies how these sometimes related terms differ from each other in the context of universities. The book moves to sociological arguments when inertia and imitation rather than efficiency are focal points, leaving the reader to figure out for themselves how the forces of sociological order coexist with the disruptive forces of Internet entrepreneurship and venture funding. When the book considers technological disruption as a motive force for sectoral change, the Christensen arguments come across as simplistic at best and possibly erroneous. Not all technologies are disruptive and not all industries and sectors need to cannabalize themselves to survive. None of this is new and I was looking to Mr. Carey for some effort at putting these different strands of issues together. That did not occur in the book. He cites all the gurus, but I was more interested in understanding what Mr. Carey was arguing. I can read Christensen''s arguments on my own.
Mr. Carey also makes much of how traditional universities have not done a good job on their undergraduate teaching mission - a complaint with which I agree. Having said that, I was startled to see how little was said about teaching and how to promote high quality teaching in the university. There have always been superstar teachers and there is work in cognitive science and psychology that has implications for teaching. Even so, there is little in the book about how to make undergraduate teaching better at the undergraduate level. For someone who spends much time in the book talking about Herbert Simon, there is also little about how to get large universities to change. The end of the book reads almost as if educational experiments will just accumulate and eventually change the world. It is hard to see how that can occur without the institution of the university changing too.
The book was OK and made me think about the issues. I was unconvinced by the arguments, however, and found key parts of the argument to be sloppy.
March 29, 2015
I went to a state college in the early 1990's that had a four year cost of $12,000. The cost of that same college today is over $40,000. That's bullshit, my friends. I paid for much of my own college by working a part time job. That isn't feasible today and now I'm wondering how I will manage to send two kids to college? We aren't looking at Ivy League schools or elite private colleges. We are looking at public colleges right down the road.
The author does a good job of discussing the history of college, the good intentions, and the money making decisions that have taken over. A spa-like experience appears to be more important than preparing for a future career. Mr. Carey points out that very few people can afford expensive educations, which widens the inequality in the job market. He cites an example of China and India starting a surge to educate their millions and bring them out of poverty - our competition.
Our country has lost its focus with education, however the new idea of the online University of Everywhere is exciting and just beginning. The author took a course through www.edX.com. I looked it up - there are many courses that are very easy to start, but are extremely challenging. Hooray for this new path. Education is for every person.
The author does a good job of discussing the history of college, the good intentions, and the money making decisions that have taken over. A spa-like experience appears to be more important than preparing for a future career. Mr. Carey points out that very few people can afford expensive educations, which widens the inequality in the job market. He cites an example of China and India starting a surge to educate their millions and bring them out of poverty - our competition.
Our country has lost its focus with education, however the new idea of the online University of Everywhere is exciting and just beginning. The author took a course through www.edX.com. I looked it up - there are many courses that are very easy to start, but are extremely challenging. Hooray for this new path. Education is for every person.
April 11, 2017
I won a free copy of this as part of a Goodreads First-reads giveaway. I am offering my honest review.
I teetered on the brink of giving Carey’s book three stars because I felt uncomfortable saying, “I really liked it.” However, when I looked at everything that the book offers in a systematic way, I realized that my discomfort did not come from the book, but was a result of the topic itself. As someone who enjoyed college, felt as though I learned a lot from it, and managed to escape without a massive load of debt, an attack on college felt like an attack on my very self. I think that this very realization is what makes The End of College a necessary book; our colleges won’t change for the better because we’re too invested in keeping them the same.
Carey outlines the history and development of the modern American university as an ill-functioning hybrid of the liberal arts college, the research institute, and the trade school. This hybridization has made the American university an institution that costs too much, teaches too little, and is ready to be replaced – or at least radically changed.
Carey does a good job of explaining why colleges are the way that they are and why they are resistant to change. He also offers some examples of technologies that could probably or possibly replace or enhance the modern educational format. While he occasionally indulges in some “science and technology will fix everything” thinking, he does not overstate his claims or make a case he can’t support.
The reason the book did not merit a five-star rating has mostly to do with the organization and writing style. He loosely frames the book around an online class he takes with MIT. It is an interesting case study, but it doesn’t seem to line up with every topic he wants to address. Carey has a similar way of introducing a player on the stage of educational technology and giving a detailed back-story of their entire life and education before explaining their contributions or ideas. I believe the book could have been shorter and clearer had the information not relevant to his claims been reduced. I felt like a couple areas would have benefitted from more explanation or more support, namely the idea of “badges” replacing the transcript or diploma as evidence of knowledge. I also would have liked for Carey to consider or acknowledge what possible goods would be lost from a transition to a larger, more global, university of everywhere (loss of local culture, loss of community, greater political or economic interference with freedom of thought). Rarely has technology been a total panacea.
This book is a must-read for those closely involved with American colleges, and an interesting read for those on the fringes too.
I teetered on the brink of giving Carey’s book three stars because I felt uncomfortable saying, “I really liked it.” However, when I looked at everything that the book offers in a systematic way, I realized that my discomfort did not come from the book, but was a result of the topic itself. As someone who enjoyed college, felt as though I learned a lot from it, and managed to escape without a massive load of debt, an attack on college felt like an attack on my very self. I think that this very realization is what makes The End of College a necessary book; our colleges won’t change for the better because we’re too invested in keeping them the same.
Carey outlines the history and development of the modern American university as an ill-functioning hybrid of the liberal arts college, the research institute, and the trade school. This hybridization has made the American university an institution that costs too much, teaches too little, and is ready to be replaced – or at least radically changed.
Carey does a good job of explaining why colleges are the way that they are and why they are resistant to change. He also offers some examples of technologies that could probably or possibly replace or enhance the modern educational format. While he occasionally indulges in some “science and technology will fix everything” thinking, he does not overstate his claims or make a case he can’t support.
The reason the book did not merit a five-star rating has mostly to do with the organization and writing style. He loosely frames the book around an online class he takes with MIT. It is an interesting case study, but it doesn’t seem to line up with every topic he wants to address. Carey has a similar way of introducing a player on the stage of educational technology and giving a detailed back-story of their entire life and education before explaining their contributions or ideas. I believe the book could have been shorter and clearer had the information not relevant to his claims been reduced. I felt like a couple areas would have benefitted from more explanation or more support, namely the idea of “badges” replacing the transcript or diploma as evidence of knowledge. I also would have liked for Carey to consider or acknowledge what possible goods would be lost from a transition to a larger, more global, university of everywhere (loss of local culture, loss of community, greater political or economic interference with freedom of thought). Rarely has technology been a total panacea.
This book is a must-read for those closely involved with American colleges, and an interesting read for those on the fringes too.
August 25, 2016
I'm recommending this to everyone. I've been teaching at a very large public university for 17 years, and this book exposed me to a lot of challenging and very feasible ideas about higher education and the current U.S. system.
In chapter 2, Carey explains the origins of the university, and in particular, the American university. I knew Bologna had the first university, around 1088, and that Harvard was America's first university, founded for religious motives. What I did not know or appreciate was how three very different concepts drove universities until the (crazy?) Americans rolled them all into one. These are: (1) skills training for careers, centered on the Land Grant ideals and education for agriculture and industry; (2) performing original research, an idea that came from Germany and put scholars and their research at "the center of the institution," without any real concern for undergraduates; (3) the liberal arts, the study of which would broaden the students' world-view and make them "more human."
There's also a fine explanation of the system of degrees. By making a bachelor's degree a requirement for graduate education, the demand for undergraduate education was driven up. It's a fine business model. Then, by requiring scholars to have an earned Ph.D. before they can teach at a university, the university system increased demand for another product that only it can provide.
Another clever invention: electives. By changing what was once a fixed system of courses where all students took the same subjects, universities opened the doors to a wide variety of scholars who can teach courses in anything they fancy.
Last but far from least, chapter 2 baldly states this fact: the quality of teaching in universities has never been a priority. This fact is reiterated often in chapter 3.
Chapter 3 covers the expansion of the American university system after World War II, including the growth of community colleges, and how tuitions have gone up and up. In 1960, less than 10 percent of the population had a bachelor's degree. Today, more than 33 percent do. The wage gap (college degree vs. not) has also increased, from 40% in 1977 to 80% in 2005 (difference in hourly earnings). All the while tuition has been jacked higher and higher, resulting in more student debt.
Chapter 4: Over the past 60 years or so, we've learned a lot about how the brain works. During that same time, technology has developed in ways that enable us to combine the two: use technology to cater to exactly how we learn (which isn't the same for everyone, of course).
Previous technologies for extending education (e.g. courses by mail) could reach more people, but the big difference in using computer systems for education is that they can be programmed to analyze how each person learns and then adapt to that person's needs. For example, the system can give you extra problems to solve for a type of problem you're failing with, or even give you remedial work. There's a lot of neat stuff in chapter 5.
Much of chapter 6 is about how Silicon Valley came to be, and I already knew most of that story. But finally the author starts talking about the startup companies that are disrupting (or promise to disrupt) traditional university system of education, and there's some great food for thought here (pages 132-142).
Chapter 7: The concept of platforms such as Amazon, Netflix, Craigslist: They enable you to get things done. Who will build/control the platform that gets online education done (well)? Stanford's Sebastian Thrun and CS221, the first course he put online (with Peter Norvig). Salman Khan and his Khan Academy. Stanford's refusal to let Thrun offer course credit drove him to leave and create Udacity, a new online learning venture. The founding of Coursera, backed by deep venture-capital pockets. All in the 2011-2012 time frame. This is stuff I was paying very close attention to as it was unfolding, and even so, this chapter was very interesting to me.
MOOCs start getting a lot of publicity around this time. However, most people who started MOOCs did not finish. Idea: The importance of "flexibility, sharing, and collaboration married to sophisticated AI built around the latest theories of cognition and learning" (p. 156). Interesting fact: "one-third of all the course credits earned by people with bachelor's degrees in America come in just 30 courses" (p. 157).
In chapter 8, Carey compares MIT and Harvard, pointing out that Harvard's caché rests on "wealth, status, and celebrity," while MIT's foundation is understanding reality and making things work, a celebration of "hacks." Thus MIT created MITx, providing free online courses (late in 2011). By mid-2012 Harvard threw its lot in with MIT and they created EdX, headed by Anant Agarwal, with the goal of eventually creating 5,000 courses. Unlike Coursera, which seems to be focused on profits, EdX "appears to be genuinely focused on the quality" of its courses.
Robert Lue, who teaches at Harvard, talked with the author about continual assessment of "the pace and progress of student learning" as the key to online courses actually enabling students to learn. Unlike Clay Christensen (of "disruption" fame), Lue sees higher education as an organism rather than a system. An organism must evolve, or face extinction. Yes ...
Chapter 9: The importance of a college degree in today's society and in career success. What a degree actually means is that you stuck it out for four years. No one can tell what you learned or how well from your degree. Yet lacking that credential, your chances of socio-economic advancement are much impaired. Where that credential comes from can be more important than anything you did to earn it.
This is not necessarily the best system for identifying talented, smart people who can help make the world a better place! So the idea of how a credential can be verified emerges. Carey refers to your political identity (citizenship) and financial identity (credit rating, net worth) and observes that without an official college degree, we have no markers for educational identity.
Chapter 10: My favorite chapter! Not sure it would resonate without reading all that went before, but the idea of reliable certifications that can't be counterfeited is the missing link — for so many reasons. Carey has shown clearly how a four-year college diploma serves as a requirement for so much in life and yet has no real meaning in terms of skills or expertise in a field or discipline. Building on the previous chapter, here we see how our "educational identity" could be made as verifiable as our financial or political identity already are — and in less vague and broad terms than "has a four-year degree in X." The "open badge" idea (related to open-source software) also solves the problem of an arbitrary length of time, e.g. four years or 125 credit-hours to get a bachelor's degree. Badges can increase motivation to learn (some badges can be earned for effort, for "streaks," for improvement). They could also serve as a far better indicator of talent for college admissions decisions than the current tests and scores. If a high-school kid in Mongolia completed an MIT online computer science course, MIT might give her a scholarship to come to Cambridge.
"Educational identities will become deep, discoverable, mobile, and secure" (p. 219).
In chapter 11, Carey discusses how having tons of data about a single course, taught a single way, to thousands or hundreds of thousands of students makes possible a deep analysis of what works and what doesn't. He doesn't say "A/B testing," but he essentially says educational methods and everything about the course could be A/B tested, tweaked, and improved in ways that simply aren't possible with the usual college way of assigning courses to numerous instructors with (often) smallish numbers of students and the luxury of academic freedom to teach any way they like. By using data and analysis on very large courses, the effectiveness of those courses could be improved immensely. He's talking especially about foundation courses, like Physics 101, that are taught again and again all around the world with a wide range of failure and success.
He also notes that as poverty declines around the world (it has declined, and is declining), the demand for higher education grows and grows. We aren't just talking about North America. One thing he doesn't mention is languages. He could have gone into some discussion about English as the language of instruction, but he didn't.
The idea of spending $10 million to develop a very effective intro course in biology isn't crazy if you know that a million people will be able to take that course and be reliably certified as having completed the work.
In the final chapter, Carey addresses the concerns that parents of very young children might have after reading this book. He talks about "not getting ripped off" by a school that puts more emphasis on facilities and sports programs than on ensuring that its undergrads actually learn things. (Good luck with that.) It's not so much a summary of the book as it is an invitation to apply the ideas laid out in all the preceding chapters. Then it veers away from parents and addresses the rest of us, touching on lifelong learning and noting that a true liberal arts education requires way more than four short years.
In chapter 2, Carey explains the origins of the university, and in particular, the American university. I knew Bologna had the first university, around 1088, and that Harvard was America's first university, founded for religious motives. What I did not know or appreciate was how three very different concepts drove universities until the (crazy?) Americans rolled them all into one. These are: (1) skills training for careers, centered on the Land Grant ideals and education for agriculture and industry; (2) performing original research, an idea that came from Germany and put scholars and their research at "the center of the institution," without any real concern for undergraduates; (3) the liberal arts, the study of which would broaden the students' world-view and make them "more human."
There's also a fine explanation of the system of degrees. By making a bachelor's degree a requirement for graduate education, the demand for undergraduate education was driven up. It's a fine business model. Then, by requiring scholars to have an earned Ph.D. before they can teach at a university, the university system increased demand for another product that only it can provide.
Another clever invention: electives. By changing what was once a fixed system of courses where all students took the same subjects, universities opened the doors to a wide variety of scholars who can teach courses in anything they fancy.
Last but far from least, chapter 2 baldly states this fact: the quality of teaching in universities has never been a priority. This fact is reiterated often in chapter 3.
Chapter 3 covers the expansion of the American university system after World War II, including the growth of community colleges, and how tuitions have gone up and up. In 1960, less than 10 percent of the population had a bachelor's degree. Today, more than 33 percent do. The wage gap (college degree vs. not) has also increased, from 40% in 1977 to 80% in 2005 (difference in hourly earnings). All the while tuition has been jacked higher and higher, resulting in more student debt.
Chapter 4: Over the past 60 years or so, we've learned a lot about how the brain works. During that same time, technology has developed in ways that enable us to combine the two: use technology to cater to exactly how we learn (which isn't the same for everyone, of course).
Previous technologies for extending education (e.g. courses by mail) could reach more people, but the big difference in using computer systems for education is that they can be programmed to analyze how each person learns and then adapt to that person's needs. For example, the system can give you extra problems to solve for a type of problem you're failing with, or even give you remedial work. There's a lot of neat stuff in chapter 5.
Much of chapter 6 is about how Silicon Valley came to be, and I already knew most of that story. But finally the author starts talking about the startup companies that are disrupting (or promise to disrupt) traditional university system of education, and there's some great food for thought here (pages 132-142).
Chapter 7: The concept of platforms such as Amazon, Netflix, Craigslist: They enable you to get things done. Who will build/control the platform that gets online education done (well)? Stanford's Sebastian Thrun and CS221, the first course he put online (with Peter Norvig). Salman Khan and his Khan Academy. Stanford's refusal to let Thrun offer course credit drove him to leave and create Udacity, a new online learning venture. The founding of Coursera, backed by deep venture-capital pockets. All in the 2011-2012 time frame. This is stuff I was paying very close attention to as it was unfolding, and even so, this chapter was very interesting to me.
MOOCs start getting a lot of publicity around this time. However, most people who started MOOCs did not finish. Idea: The importance of "flexibility, sharing, and collaboration married to sophisticated AI built around the latest theories of cognition and learning" (p. 156). Interesting fact: "one-third of all the course credits earned by people with bachelor's degrees in America come in just 30 courses" (p. 157).
In chapter 8, Carey compares MIT and Harvard, pointing out that Harvard's caché rests on "wealth, status, and celebrity," while MIT's foundation is understanding reality and making things work, a celebration of "hacks." Thus MIT created MITx, providing free online courses (late in 2011). By mid-2012 Harvard threw its lot in with MIT and they created EdX, headed by Anant Agarwal, with the goal of eventually creating 5,000 courses. Unlike Coursera, which seems to be focused on profits, EdX "appears to be genuinely focused on the quality" of its courses.
Robert Lue, who teaches at Harvard, talked with the author about continual assessment of "the pace and progress of student learning" as the key to online courses actually enabling students to learn. Unlike Clay Christensen (of "disruption" fame), Lue sees higher education as an organism rather than a system. An organism must evolve, or face extinction. Yes ...
Chapter 9: The importance of a college degree in today's society and in career success. What a degree actually means is that you stuck it out for four years. No one can tell what you learned or how well from your degree. Yet lacking that credential, your chances of socio-economic advancement are much impaired. Where that credential comes from can be more important than anything you did to earn it.
This is not necessarily the best system for identifying talented, smart people who can help make the world a better place! So the idea of how a credential can be verified emerges. Carey refers to your political identity (citizenship) and financial identity (credit rating, net worth) and observes that without an official college degree, we have no markers for educational identity.
Chapter 10: My favorite chapter! Not sure it would resonate without reading all that went before, but the idea of reliable certifications that can't be counterfeited is the missing link — for so many reasons. Carey has shown clearly how a four-year college diploma serves as a requirement for so much in life and yet has no real meaning in terms of skills or expertise in a field or discipline. Building on the previous chapter, here we see how our "educational identity" could be made as verifiable as our financial or political identity already are — and in less vague and broad terms than "has a four-year degree in X." The "open badge" idea (related to open-source software) also solves the problem of an arbitrary length of time, e.g. four years or 125 credit-hours to get a bachelor's degree. Badges can increase motivation to learn (some badges can be earned for effort, for "streaks," for improvement). They could also serve as a far better indicator of talent for college admissions decisions than the current tests and scores. If a high-school kid in Mongolia completed an MIT online computer science course, MIT might give her a scholarship to come to Cambridge.
"Educational identities will become deep, discoverable, mobile, and secure" (p. 219).
In chapter 11, Carey discusses how having tons of data about a single course, taught a single way, to thousands or hundreds of thousands of students makes possible a deep analysis of what works and what doesn't. He doesn't say "A/B testing," but he essentially says educational methods and everything about the course could be A/B tested, tweaked, and improved in ways that simply aren't possible with the usual college way of assigning courses to numerous instructors with (often) smallish numbers of students and the luxury of academic freedom to teach any way they like. By using data and analysis on very large courses, the effectiveness of those courses could be improved immensely. He's talking especially about foundation courses, like Physics 101, that are taught again and again all around the world with a wide range of failure and success.
He also notes that as poverty declines around the world (it has declined, and is declining), the demand for higher education grows and grows. We aren't just talking about North America. One thing he doesn't mention is languages. He could have gone into some discussion about English as the language of instruction, but he didn't.
The idea of spending $10 million to develop a very effective intro course in biology isn't crazy if you know that a million people will be able to take that course and be reliably certified as having completed the work.
In the final chapter, Carey addresses the concerns that parents of very young children might have after reading this book. He talks about "not getting ripped off" by a school that puts more emphasis on facilities and sports programs than on ensuring that its undergrads actually learn things. (Good luck with that.) It's not so much a summary of the book as it is an invitation to apply the ideas laid out in all the preceding chapters. Then it veers away from parents and addresses the rest of us, touching on lifelong learning and noting that a true liberal arts education requires way more than four short years.
November 11, 2016
Much as "The End of College" is the thoroughly researched and passionately written "labor of love" of first-time book author (and distinguished NYT columnist) Kevin Carey, its scope is narrower than you'd think if you were to browse through it for a minute or two at the bookstore.
It does not take aim at the higher education system in Europe, for example, where a college degree is not a prerequisite for the vocational training that leads into the much-prized legal and medical professions, where vocational training for less-demanding jobs starts in high school and where the funding for research (as part of all educational funding) is chiefly provided by government.
This is, rather, an attack at the 20th century phenomenon that is the US Bachelor's degree, and includes a very thorough history of how it came to be, how the US universities were built around it and made it their cash cow, why it no longer serves anybody very well (except for tenured researchers and college administrators) and why now is the time that it will all unravel. The author builds his expose of what the future holds, based on
1. An account of his experience of the future as previewed by a biology course he attended via MITx
2. An invitation to ride with him on a whirlwind tour of tens of new tech enterprises that aim to disrupt the educational system
The origins of college as we know it today are established via a visit to Bologna, where the first university was founded in pre-Gutenberg 1088 (hello, lectures and lecture notes), followed by a visit to Harvard Yard, where we are treated to a (rather gratuitous, if you ask me) caricature of the "privilege" a bachelor's degree is meant to bestow on its owner and then, a quick ride down Mass Ave, to a tour of the much more rational MIT campus where buildings have numbers rather than names and students are given the tools to learn, the way the author sees it. From there, he takes us to the founding myth of college as we know it today. In the mid 19th century, Charles Eliot, a prominent academic, realised that the educational system had a threefold purpose:
* First to teach to the American masses the necessary knowledge, provide the necessary tools and practical education to cope with the industrial revolution, along the lines described by the Morrill-Grant act whose explicit aim was to provide "mechanical arts and practical education for the industrial classes."
* Second, to conduct research, of the type that would expand human knowledge, much as was practiced at the research universities that were springing across Germany at the time.
* Third, to teach the Liberal Arts, with the ultimate goal of "raising the intellectual tone of the society, cultivating the public mind, purifying the national taste, ... , facilitating the exercise of political power and refining the intercourse of private life."
Eliot was offered to run Harvard based on the premise that he could build an institution that would accomplish all three at the same time. And this is, in author Kevin Carey's opinion, the foundation of today's American educational impasse. The way Eliot skirted around this compromise was by establishing completely autonomous departments. One for Math, one for English, one for Philosophy, one for Natural Sciences etc. These departments sought to hire the best possible researchers, with the implicit (and eventually explicit) promise that they would be well-paid to do research rather than teach. And that's where an escalation started that could only ever spiral one way:
The best researchers don't just conduct research, their usefulness to the college is that they advertise the excellence of the school, much as the average student might never come in contact with the average Nobel-prize winner. And if he ever does, it will most likely be in some abstruse elective the top researcher will deign to teach. Which brings us to the electives system. According to the author (and my personal experience, as I did my undergrad in the US and hold two graduate degrees from the UK) the electives system is there chiefly to serve the purposes of the autonomous departments that strive to maximize their size as they compete with (i) the equivalent departments of other research universities for academic status and (ii) other departments within their university for power, though obviously the admissions department also likes to brag about the multitude of courses on offer, when in reality the students in their vast majority only ever register for a hyper-limited number of mega-classes and would benefit most if those classes were taught well. And funnily enough the mega-classes are taught from massive, hyper-expensive textbooks authored by a professor from the university's faculty. Moreover, students often simply do not pick the classes they need to pick. I graduated with an Applied Math degree, magna cum laude, from Harvard and could not tell you what the definition of a group is.
So colleges teach poorly, are run in the interest of research departments and compete on measures that don't matter much to students, like the number of stars in the faculty and the number of electives that nobody will take. And that's only the start. Along the same lines, colleges compete in sports, which started as part of the general spirit of the all-roundedness that comes from having a liberal arts education but have within less than a century evolved to the point where the Supreme Court is having to adjudicate on the pay of the professional athletes that are now harboured by the alleged learning institutions they play for.
And the students who are urged to choose among colleges on the basis of the star professors and star athletes might want to visit the school, where they will of course judge the college on the size of the library and the number of books it houses, the size of the athletic facilities and the luxury of the dormitories.
So before you know it, it costs a bomb to attend college, because somebody has to pay for all this. And what do you get for your money? You learn how to drink, mainly. Not really worth it. Except somewhere along the way, college became the necessary passport not only to law school and med school and the school of design (to say nothing of divinity school, the original purpose of Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard!!!), but it also became the passport to the upper class, to the job on Wall Street and the good life.
What is to be done?
The author is very optimistic on this front. The way he thinks about it, college as we know it is lucky to be alive. It only really survived till 2015 because of three major historical accidents: first, the GI bill sent millions of servicemen into education from 1948 into the early fifties. The idea was chiefly to keep them out of unemployment (to avoid the experience of malaise that followed demobilisation after WWI) but the only institutions that were set up to collect the government's largesse were the colleges and they truly thrived. Next, came the massive post-Sputnik spending via the ONR etc. that rained billions and billions on American universities' research departments to invest in the new technologies that would help fight the Cold War (and which you can find today on your iPhone). Finally, the decimation that visited the employment status of the blue-collar worker between 1970 and 2000 drilled it into the head of the American that while a college degree is not a panacea, not having one is an unmitigated disaster.
But that was then and this is now and a college degree today comes hand-in-hand with a hundred thousand dollar loan that could signal indentured employment with whoever deigns to offer you your first job, a delay in climbing the housing ladder and starting a family and potentially total ruin at the hands of the college-loan loansharks if you get ill or unlucky.
The beauty of it, however, is that not only does there seem to be a cheaper alternative, it's also a better alternative. Using modern technology, you can "Learn like Alexander" who was tutored by Aristotle himself. The author registered with MITx and learned the secrets of biology form Professor Lander, the very same man who untangled the human genome. If the lecture was going too fast, he could pause and go back, a luxury he did not have when he went as part of his investigation and sat in the audience one day. He was given problem sets to ponder and he had them graded. He was given learning resources that were unimaginable a few years ago: he watched populations of flies grow on a computer model that would take years to evolve in real life, he toyed with molecules to see how their properties would change and he conferred with classmates from across the world. FOR FREE. For less than a thousand dollars, MIT will sell you the same seven classes that constitute its core programming course. It has to be the future, no?
There's lots to be done still, of course. Point is, people are working hard at doing it. Motivated by the enormous potential profits, a full industry has materialized that has the potential to democratize education and achieve the trichotomy that Charles Eliot refused to countenance: Some are putting together the campuses where you can meet, for much cheaper (spare us the million volume book library) the like-minded students you seek. Others are putting together the electronic accreditation services that you will carry around in your electronic wallet (rather than having to write to your college to get your transcript). Others again are designing the classes. The author really takes you door-to-door to all the entrepreneurs who are effecting this change. This is in my view the most fun part of the book.
Most importantly, the top schools have thrown in the towel and are joining the fray. Perhaps because it has another 16 schools to draw income from, perhaps because it's sitting on a multi-billion dollar endowment and perhaps because it's seen the future and it recognizes it for what it is, Harvard is now on the side of the innovators and it's not alone. Carnegie Mellon has been there from very early (it never really succumbed to the temptation of being all things to all people according to the author), MIT, Stanford, everybody is in on the revolution.
Revolutions have many false starts, of course, but I really hope Kevin Carey (and the host of innovators/disrupters he presents us in this book) is not jumping over the parapet too early. This is a citadel that deserves to be stormed.
It does not take aim at the higher education system in Europe, for example, where a college degree is not a prerequisite for the vocational training that leads into the much-prized legal and medical professions, where vocational training for less-demanding jobs starts in high school and where the funding for research (as part of all educational funding) is chiefly provided by government.
This is, rather, an attack at the 20th century phenomenon that is the US Bachelor's degree, and includes a very thorough history of how it came to be, how the US universities were built around it and made it their cash cow, why it no longer serves anybody very well (except for tenured researchers and college administrators) and why now is the time that it will all unravel. The author builds his expose of what the future holds, based on
1. An account of his experience of the future as previewed by a biology course he attended via MITx
2. An invitation to ride with him on a whirlwind tour of tens of new tech enterprises that aim to disrupt the educational system
The origins of college as we know it today are established via a visit to Bologna, where the first university was founded in pre-Gutenberg 1088 (hello, lectures and lecture notes), followed by a visit to Harvard Yard, where we are treated to a (rather gratuitous, if you ask me) caricature of the "privilege" a bachelor's degree is meant to bestow on its owner and then, a quick ride down Mass Ave, to a tour of the much more rational MIT campus where buildings have numbers rather than names and students are given the tools to learn, the way the author sees it. From there, he takes us to the founding myth of college as we know it today. In the mid 19th century, Charles Eliot, a prominent academic, realised that the educational system had a threefold purpose:
* First to teach to the American masses the necessary knowledge, provide the necessary tools and practical education to cope with the industrial revolution, along the lines described by the Morrill-Grant act whose explicit aim was to provide "mechanical arts and practical education for the industrial classes."
* Second, to conduct research, of the type that would expand human knowledge, much as was practiced at the research universities that were springing across Germany at the time.
* Third, to teach the Liberal Arts, with the ultimate goal of "raising the intellectual tone of the society, cultivating the public mind, purifying the national taste, ... , facilitating the exercise of political power and refining the intercourse of private life."
Eliot was offered to run Harvard based on the premise that he could build an institution that would accomplish all three at the same time. And this is, in author Kevin Carey's opinion, the foundation of today's American educational impasse. The way Eliot skirted around this compromise was by establishing completely autonomous departments. One for Math, one for English, one for Philosophy, one for Natural Sciences etc. These departments sought to hire the best possible researchers, with the implicit (and eventually explicit) promise that they would be well-paid to do research rather than teach. And that's where an escalation started that could only ever spiral one way:
The best researchers don't just conduct research, their usefulness to the college is that they advertise the excellence of the school, much as the average student might never come in contact with the average Nobel-prize winner. And if he ever does, it will most likely be in some abstruse elective the top researcher will deign to teach. Which brings us to the electives system. According to the author (and my personal experience, as I did my undergrad in the US and hold two graduate degrees from the UK) the electives system is there chiefly to serve the purposes of the autonomous departments that strive to maximize their size as they compete with (i) the equivalent departments of other research universities for academic status and (ii) other departments within their university for power, though obviously the admissions department also likes to brag about the multitude of courses on offer, when in reality the students in their vast majority only ever register for a hyper-limited number of mega-classes and would benefit most if those classes were taught well. And funnily enough the mega-classes are taught from massive, hyper-expensive textbooks authored by a professor from the university's faculty. Moreover, students often simply do not pick the classes they need to pick. I graduated with an Applied Math degree, magna cum laude, from Harvard and could not tell you what the definition of a group is.
So colleges teach poorly, are run in the interest of research departments and compete on measures that don't matter much to students, like the number of stars in the faculty and the number of electives that nobody will take. And that's only the start. Along the same lines, colleges compete in sports, which started as part of the general spirit of the all-roundedness that comes from having a liberal arts education but have within less than a century evolved to the point where the Supreme Court is having to adjudicate on the pay of the professional athletes that are now harboured by the alleged learning institutions they play for.
And the students who are urged to choose among colleges on the basis of the star professors and star athletes might want to visit the school, where they will of course judge the college on the size of the library and the number of books it houses, the size of the athletic facilities and the luxury of the dormitories.
So before you know it, it costs a bomb to attend college, because somebody has to pay for all this. And what do you get for your money? You learn how to drink, mainly. Not really worth it. Except somewhere along the way, college became the necessary passport not only to law school and med school and the school of design (to say nothing of divinity school, the original purpose of Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard!!!), but it also became the passport to the upper class, to the job on Wall Street and the good life.
What is to be done?
The author is very optimistic on this front. The way he thinks about it, college as we know it is lucky to be alive. It only really survived till 2015 because of three major historical accidents: first, the GI bill sent millions of servicemen into education from 1948 into the early fifties. The idea was chiefly to keep them out of unemployment (to avoid the experience of malaise that followed demobilisation after WWI) but the only institutions that were set up to collect the government's largesse were the colleges and they truly thrived. Next, came the massive post-Sputnik spending via the ONR etc. that rained billions and billions on American universities' research departments to invest in the new technologies that would help fight the Cold War (and which you can find today on your iPhone). Finally, the decimation that visited the employment status of the blue-collar worker between 1970 and 2000 drilled it into the head of the American that while a college degree is not a panacea, not having one is an unmitigated disaster.
But that was then and this is now and a college degree today comes hand-in-hand with a hundred thousand dollar loan that could signal indentured employment with whoever deigns to offer you your first job, a delay in climbing the housing ladder and starting a family and potentially total ruin at the hands of the college-loan loansharks if you get ill or unlucky.
The beauty of it, however, is that not only does there seem to be a cheaper alternative, it's also a better alternative. Using modern technology, you can "Learn like Alexander" who was tutored by Aristotle himself. The author registered with MITx and learned the secrets of biology form Professor Lander, the very same man who untangled the human genome. If the lecture was going too fast, he could pause and go back, a luxury he did not have when he went as part of his investigation and sat in the audience one day. He was given problem sets to ponder and he had them graded. He was given learning resources that were unimaginable a few years ago: he watched populations of flies grow on a computer model that would take years to evolve in real life, he toyed with molecules to see how their properties would change and he conferred with classmates from across the world. FOR FREE. For less than a thousand dollars, MIT will sell you the same seven classes that constitute its core programming course. It has to be the future, no?
There's lots to be done still, of course. Point is, people are working hard at doing it. Motivated by the enormous potential profits, a full industry has materialized that has the potential to democratize education and achieve the trichotomy that Charles Eliot refused to countenance: Some are putting together the campuses where you can meet, for much cheaper (spare us the million volume book library) the like-minded students you seek. Others are putting together the electronic accreditation services that you will carry around in your electronic wallet (rather than having to write to your college to get your transcript). Others again are designing the classes. The author really takes you door-to-door to all the entrepreneurs who are effecting this change. This is in my view the most fun part of the book.
Most importantly, the top schools have thrown in the towel and are joining the fray. Perhaps because it has another 16 schools to draw income from, perhaps because it's sitting on a multi-billion dollar endowment and perhaps because it's seen the future and it recognizes it for what it is, Harvard is now on the side of the innovators and it's not alone. Carnegie Mellon has been there from very early (it never really succumbed to the temptation of being all things to all people according to the author), MIT, Stanford, everybody is in on the revolution.
Revolutions have many false starts, of course, but I really hope Kevin Carey (and the host of innovators/disrupters he presents us in this book) is not jumping over the parapet too early. This is a citadel that deserves to be stormed.
June 27, 2016
The central thesis of this book is that traditional college education will, at some point in the not too distant future, be replaced by internet education with online certification "badges". This book runs over 250 pages, but this central thesis could probably be argued just as well in a 20-page essay. Carey tries to write an engaging book with biographical details of various characters and historical depth in explaining his topic, in the popular style of, say, Simon Winchester, or Mark Kurlansky, but that aspect is in this case not very engaging. Little of the educational history, or the interwoven details of the online course that the author took, or stories about his father the computer science professor, is really all that pertinent to the central story he is trying to tell. They are eddies, and not especially interesting ones. It would be better as a pamphlet essay.
Will his prediction be validated? Perhaps, but I don't find his arguments compelling. I don't come away from this book convinced that his prognostication will bear out. When you boil all his arguments down the basic drivers of this educational change that he offers are (1) the technology has become available, relatively recently, and is getting even better; (2) traditional college costs an arm-and-a-leg while online education can be very affordable; (3) modern college education is of very unreliable and difficult-to-measure quality -- there is a shout out pretty early on to Richard Arum's Academically Adrift, and Carey makes a pretty good case in his own right that the US college education model, a hybrid of professional training program, liberal arts college, and research university, does not work well -- while online education can be measured in quantified terms; (4) college basically offers one broad credential, the diploma, whereas online education can be divided into many, more precise credentials via electronic badges in the style of many computer games; (5) by being incremental it can be worked into a regular and continuing life schedule rather than involve a traditional four-year block of dedicated time as is typical with most colleges, and (6) this combination of factors is going to make online education competitively attractive both to students/workers and potential employers such that once it hits some kind of critical mass, our society will transition fairly quickly from traditional college to online education.
These are not trivial factors. Certainly it COULD happen. But will it? Are there perhaps other factors that Carey has given little consideration that might push things in a different direction? One thing Carey does talk about a little is how, for at least some college students, what they are buying is not really an education but rather a credential that is something like club-membership, but he doesn't give much consideration for what this might mean for his thesis. To the extent that it may be middle- or upper-class club-membership rather than education that employers and students are seeking, wouldn't they be inclined to stick with colleges rather than online education and badges, precisely because the latter would undercut the club aspect and emphasis the educational?
Will this form of education work generally? Nearly all of Carey's examples involve jobs in the physical sciences and/or technology fields. These, emphasizing incremental, easy-t0-specify skills with non-sentient objects may be the ones where the educational badges model works best, but can you build a computer certification for artistic ability, or social or managerial skills? Can you build this kind of education for fields in which "right answers" are uncommon?
If a cheaper, better education is available it is relatively easy to imagine why students might prefer it, IF employers would accept it in lieu of the more expensive option, and it is easy to see why employers hiring for jobs that required the online-certified skills would like to use that credential, but since employers do not generally pay the costs of college -- at least not directly -- what is the motive for employers to cease to value college diplomas? Instead of replacing one with the other, what is to stop them from desiring BOTH? Perhaps they will create a compound credential system where they expect both a college degree AND online education badges.
As Carey himself shows, classic economic theory does not explain the college market which sometimes operates opposite the way one might expect. That presently being the case, why should we assumed that classic economic motives, e.g. reducing educational costs, as Carey does, will necessarily cause a transition from traditional colleges to online education?
Will his prediction be validated? Perhaps, but I don't find his arguments compelling. I don't come away from this book convinced that his prognostication will bear out. When you boil all his arguments down the basic drivers of this educational change that he offers are (1) the technology has become available, relatively recently, and is getting even better; (2) traditional college costs an arm-and-a-leg while online education can be very affordable; (3) modern college education is of very unreliable and difficult-to-measure quality -- there is a shout out pretty early on to Richard Arum's Academically Adrift, and Carey makes a pretty good case in his own right that the US college education model, a hybrid of professional training program, liberal arts college, and research university, does not work well -- while online education can be measured in quantified terms; (4) college basically offers one broad credential, the diploma, whereas online education can be divided into many, more precise credentials via electronic badges in the style of many computer games; (5) by being incremental it can be worked into a regular and continuing life schedule rather than involve a traditional four-year block of dedicated time as is typical with most colleges, and (6) this combination of factors is going to make online education competitively attractive both to students/workers and potential employers such that once it hits some kind of critical mass, our society will transition fairly quickly from traditional college to online education.
These are not trivial factors. Certainly it COULD happen. But will it? Are there perhaps other factors that Carey has given little consideration that might push things in a different direction? One thing Carey does talk about a little is how, for at least some college students, what they are buying is not really an education but rather a credential that is something like club-membership, but he doesn't give much consideration for what this might mean for his thesis. To the extent that it may be middle- or upper-class club-membership rather than education that employers and students are seeking, wouldn't they be inclined to stick with colleges rather than online education and badges, precisely because the latter would undercut the club aspect and emphasis the educational?
Will this form of education work generally? Nearly all of Carey's examples involve jobs in the physical sciences and/or technology fields. These, emphasizing incremental, easy-t0-specify skills with non-sentient objects may be the ones where the educational badges model works best, but can you build a computer certification for artistic ability, or social or managerial skills? Can you build this kind of education for fields in which "right answers" are uncommon?
If a cheaper, better education is available it is relatively easy to imagine why students might prefer it, IF employers would accept it in lieu of the more expensive option, and it is easy to see why employers hiring for jobs that required the online-certified skills would like to use that credential, but since employers do not generally pay the costs of college -- at least not directly -- what is the motive for employers to cease to value college diplomas? Instead of replacing one with the other, what is to stop them from desiring BOTH? Perhaps they will create a compound credential system where they expect both a college degree AND online education badges.
As Carey himself shows, classic economic theory does not explain the college market which sometimes operates opposite the way one might expect. That presently being the case, why should we assumed that classic economic motives, e.g. reducing educational costs, as Carey does, will necessarily cause a transition from traditional colleges to online education?
August 2, 2017
Rollicking account and prediction of the "brick-and-mortar" colleges which, the author feels, will yield to online, individualized learning -- basically a whole democratization. Attention is given to MOOCs, their benefits and drawbacks, and the ability of these websites (i.e. Coursera, Kahn) to connect learners from all over the globe. The ramifications are exciting. People can engage more closely with a professor via website instead of space out in a lecture hall.
Since I am not an educator, I would not know how to challenge the author. However, I do see viability in the old-fashioned buildings, which offer physical structure and socialization. Online learning requires a lot of internal focus and discipline. The attrition rates are quite high. Most likely these online courses will serve better as either complementary curriculum or academic enrichment. My guess? The future lies in hybridization -- combining regular classrooms with online lectures or tutorials.
In spite of its upbeat message, I couldn't help wondering about the future of college, period -- its necessity for most people as far as finding employment. The author doesn't really discuss community colleges or trade schools. Ironically those kind of physical places will never go out of style.
Since I am not an educator, I would not know how to challenge the author. However, I do see viability in the old-fashioned buildings, which offer physical structure and socialization. Online learning requires a lot of internal focus and discipline. The attrition rates are quite high. Most likely these online courses will serve better as either complementary curriculum or academic enrichment. My guess? The future lies in hybridization -- combining regular classrooms with online lectures or tutorials.
In spite of its upbeat message, I couldn't help wondering about the future of college, period -- its necessity for most people as far as finding employment. The author doesn't really discuss community colleges or trade schools. Ironically those kind of physical places will never go out of style.
April 18, 2019
The book did a good job of going over the history of how universities became hybrid Teaching / Researching institutions; these institutions are not thriving in teaching students as they are in a rat-race of trying to attract high-paying students by competing in the US News and World Report rankings.
My take-aways are that online education is getting better, but at this time isn't in good enough shape to provide the credentials people need to succeed.
Also, the badges and certificates one might compile to impress future employers that they learned something online; these new credentials will have to include a portfolio of work -- much like that of source projects on github or a peer reviewed journal article.
Maybe in the future, one could forego an official time-credit based diploma (which no-one actually reads anymore), for a badge from works derived online apprenticeship based open and public contributions.
My take-aways are that online education is getting better, but at this time isn't in good enough shape to provide the credentials people need to succeed.
Also, the badges and certificates one might compile to impress future employers that they learned something online; these new credentials will have to include a portfolio of work -- much like that of source projects on github or a peer reviewed journal article.
Maybe in the future, one could forego an official time-credit based diploma (which no-one actually reads anymore), for a badge from works derived online apprenticeship based open and public contributions.
March 8, 2023
The End of College is about the American higher education system. The book gives a historical overview of how the author sees the development of the American Universities and its flaws. The way Carey goes into detail about the topics he talks about; for example, when he talks about edX and how it's more efficient, "But Lander's lectures were engrossing". Also the way he gives examples of technology and how it could improve students learning and how they intake information, "science and technology will fix everything". I give the book 4 stars mainly due to the fact I'm only half way through with it, although it's really well written and it has many great points. Overall I'm really enjoying the book so far and I agree with most of the points Carey is making.
June 28, 2017
A great books to understand the foundation of the place called university. Never realized how flawed it was until you're in the workforce.
February 21, 2016
Carey writes about the evolution of education from the medieval origins in Bologna through the modern era. The bulk of the work argues at the inefficiency of higher education ca. 2016. I agree with his criticisms, but I disagree with his projections. Carey's credentials as a writer for the NY Times on higher education gives him solid credentials and a strong soap box to make his pitch, but I do not think his pitch is selling much.
If you read the book, or are thinking about reading it, you probably already have the idea that traditional American higher education costs way more than it delivers. Carey appeals to conventional wisdom when he says that universities continually raise costs and lower standards both for admitting students and awarding degrees. The increased tuition instead goes to fund lazy rivers and fancy gymnasiums. Into this gloomy picture, he showcases George Washington University that went from being a commuter school in Washington to become the most expensive university to attend within two decades under the only villain in the book - the former president of the institution, who proudly told Carey that all he did to justify the huge tuition hikes was to change the brand of the university from commuter to luxury in the same way Gucci justifies thousand-dollar purses.
I never attended GW; but I suspect there is more to it than creating a luxury brand. Besides, Carey displays considerable bias throughout the book - hostility to traditional education, and open arms to for-profit companies. I may be harsh on Carey; but the model he rolls out to readers says that the brilliance of "rock star faculty" combined with Silicon Valley technology and venture capitalists will totally uproot traditional higher education. I am always nervous when venture capitalists enter the field. As Carey said, they expect a 20% return on investment. They only way to do that, according to Carey, is to sell the company or make an IPO. Either way means huge financial investment and huge financial risk. Only at the end of the book does Carey admit that creating these new programs runs a price tag of $100,000s. He expects that sheer numbers will make them profitable.
The idea of interactive learning is great. I remember a GRE exam that adjusted questions to how many I answered correctly. Carey expects similar technology to replace the general education required courses. After all, teenagers work well on Grand Theft Auto V, why would they not take BIOL 101 just as seriously? Reluctantly, I agree with Carey that those same teenagers are just as short-changed in the huge lecture halls. However, I did notice that Carey includes conspicuously little research into MOOCs or other assessments of for-profit education. Studies have shown that as many as 90% of people enrolled in MOOCs do not finish them. Undergrads have not fared much better in MOOcs (if at all) than in the large lecture halls. Carey does argue against such doubters; but he does not offer any citations or references.
Finally, I had a problem with the organization of the book. I expected better from a NY Times columnist. This book was repetitive and disorganized. I thought his first conclusion chapter was a good introduction. I thought his last conclusion introduced a whole new dimension to the subject - the attitudes of American teenagers. I assumed that in the rock star/ ivy league courses he is taking online, Carey would know not to introduce new material in his conclusion. Ultimately, I thought there was too much fluff in the book. In fact, now that I think about it, the fluff buries his central argument - that Wall Street IPOs will take over higher education. Maybe that is not the central argument. Good-hearted benefactors (the villainous brick n' mortar universities) will spend small fortunes making education freely available to everyone. That does not sound as logical either. Tech-savvy geniuses will make education free for everyone because they do not expect much profit? Hmmm. Maybe there is not a central argument here except that traditional universities are bad.
Overall, Carey introduces some of the current companies involved in MOOCs. He has not shown how they diverge too greatly from the Great Courses that folks could obtain from libraries across the country - rock star faculty presenting information since the 1970s. But he does show that American cannot sustain the grotesque tuition hikes that are increasingly common. He is calling for change. In this sense, he is not adding too much to the literature. His columns are clear, concise, and informative. This book is not.
If you read the book, or are thinking about reading it, you probably already have the idea that traditional American higher education costs way more than it delivers. Carey appeals to conventional wisdom when he says that universities continually raise costs and lower standards both for admitting students and awarding degrees. The increased tuition instead goes to fund lazy rivers and fancy gymnasiums. Into this gloomy picture, he showcases George Washington University that went from being a commuter school in Washington to become the most expensive university to attend within two decades under the only villain in the book - the former president of the institution, who proudly told Carey that all he did to justify the huge tuition hikes was to change the brand of the university from commuter to luxury in the same way Gucci justifies thousand-dollar purses.
I never attended GW; but I suspect there is more to it than creating a luxury brand. Besides, Carey displays considerable bias throughout the book - hostility to traditional education, and open arms to for-profit companies. I may be harsh on Carey; but the model he rolls out to readers says that the brilliance of "rock star faculty" combined with Silicon Valley technology and venture capitalists will totally uproot traditional higher education. I am always nervous when venture capitalists enter the field. As Carey said, they expect a 20% return on investment. They only way to do that, according to Carey, is to sell the company or make an IPO. Either way means huge financial investment and huge financial risk. Only at the end of the book does Carey admit that creating these new programs runs a price tag of $100,000s. He expects that sheer numbers will make them profitable.
The idea of interactive learning is great. I remember a GRE exam that adjusted questions to how many I answered correctly. Carey expects similar technology to replace the general education required courses. After all, teenagers work well on Grand Theft Auto V, why would they not take BIOL 101 just as seriously? Reluctantly, I agree with Carey that those same teenagers are just as short-changed in the huge lecture halls. However, I did notice that Carey includes conspicuously little research into MOOCs or other assessments of for-profit education. Studies have shown that as many as 90% of people enrolled in MOOCs do not finish them. Undergrads have not fared much better in MOOcs (if at all) than in the large lecture halls. Carey does argue against such doubters; but he does not offer any citations or references.
Finally, I had a problem with the organization of the book. I expected better from a NY Times columnist. This book was repetitive and disorganized. I thought his first conclusion chapter was a good introduction. I thought his last conclusion introduced a whole new dimension to the subject - the attitudes of American teenagers. I assumed that in the rock star/ ivy league courses he is taking online, Carey would know not to introduce new material in his conclusion. Ultimately, I thought there was too much fluff in the book. In fact, now that I think about it, the fluff buries his central argument - that Wall Street IPOs will take over higher education. Maybe that is not the central argument. Good-hearted benefactors (the villainous brick n' mortar universities) will spend small fortunes making education freely available to everyone. That does not sound as logical either. Tech-savvy geniuses will make education free for everyone because they do not expect much profit? Hmmm. Maybe there is not a central argument here except that traditional universities are bad.
Overall, Carey introduces some of the current companies involved in MOOCs. He has not shown how they diverge too greatly from the Great Courses that folks could obtain from libraries across the country - rock star faculty presenting information since the 1970s. But he does show that American cannot sustain the grotesque tuition hikes that are increasingly common. He is calling for change. In this sense, he is not adding too much to the literature. His columns are clear, concise, and informative. This book is not.
April 24, 2015
Kevin Carey is a good writer and I found this book easy to read and get into. The pace is good and the language is accessible. Unfortunately, despite all that, I just didn't buy his premise.
I agree that that modern research university does a disservice to its students. Universities of this type are designed around the research and students are something of an annoyance that gets in the way of the research, albeit a necessary annoyance since their tuition pays the bills.
But his idea that students will soon begin avoiding traditional colleges for the range of massive online educational opportunities just doesn't seem likely.
One of his arguments is that it's more cost effective to design, say, a biology course and share the teaching and content online with thousands of students at one time instead of 100 or 150. He almost seems to suggest that we only need ONE such course, or just a few. But do we all want the exact same education? Isn't this the problem with chain restaurants and banks buying banks: less choice?
In his promotion of MOOCs and similar large-scale online ventures, he completely ignores the college seminar. He seems to suggest that all courses can be taught on a large scale. But you would never get in a digital course for thousands the same kind of critical give and take that you get in a seminar consisting of 8, 10, or 12 students. That is an essential element of college, in my opinion.
I also do not buy the fact that employers will suddenly forgo the need for recognized, accredited degrees; that badges and certificates earned online will replace degrees from familiar universities.
He points out a lot of flaws in our current higher ed system, the skyrocketing costs being one of them. I don't disagree with most of what he shares, but I don't think MOOCs and other online options will replace physical colleges and universities. Higher ed institutions need to change, they need to move with the times and be more open to digital methods of teaching. They need disruption. We may even lose some colleges and universities in this process, but it's not the same sort of change as when the car replaced the horse and carriage. We aren't going to abandon brick and mortar schools for online ones.
He also does not address the transitional role that colleges play for students. He makes a lot about wild fraternities, drinking, etc., but for all the headlines colleges provide a lot more, especially today when so many (too many) parents helicopter their kids and don't let them grow up. Kids often need that transitional space.
One last thing. He seems to feel that most if not nearly all colleges and universities provide terrible education and that As are given out like candy. That was not my experience and I don't think it's the experience of most students today. And I certainly don't see online education becoming MORE rigorous than brick and mortar schools. Transitioning to a largely online method of higher ed would be disastrous to many students who need that physical, face-to-face support to keep them motivated and engaged. Social media is no replacement for physical community. Online learning WILL play a role in our educational future. It just won't play THE ONLY role in our educational future.
I agree that that modern research university does a disservice to its students. Universities of this type are designed around the research and students are something of an annoyance that gets in the way of the research, albeit a necessary annoyance since their tuition pays the bills.
But his idea that students will soon begin avoiding traditional colleges for the range of massive online educational opportunities just doesn't seem likely.
One of his arguments is that it's more cost effective to design, say, a biology course and share the teaching and content online with thousands of students at one time instead of 100 or 150. He almost seems to suggest that we only need ONE such course, or just a few. But do we all want the exact same education? Isn't this the problem with chain restaurants and banks buying banks: less choice?
In his promotion of MOOCs and similar large-scale online ventures, he completely ignores the college seminar. He seems to suggest that all courses can be taught on a large scale. But you would never get in a digital course for thousands the same kind of critical give and take that you get in a seminar consisting of 8, 10, or 12 students. That is an essential element of college, in my opinion.
I also do not buy the fact that employers will suddenly forgo the need for recognized, accredited degrees; that badges and certificates earned online will replace degrees from familiar universities.
He points out a lot of flaws in our current higher ed system, the skyrocketing costs being one of them. I don't disagree with most of what he shares, but I don't think MOOCs and other online options will replace physical colleges and universities. Higher ed institutions need to change, they need to move with the times and be more open to digital methods of teaching. They need disruption. We may even lose some colleges and universities in this process, but it's not the same sort of change as when the car replaced the horse and carriage. We aren't going to abandon brick and mortar schools for online ones.
He also does not address the transitional role that colleges play for students. He makes a lot about wild fraternities, drinking, etc., but for all the headlines colleges provide a lot more, especially today when so many (too many) parents helicopter their kids and don't let them grow up. Kids often need that transitional space.
One last thing. He seems to feel that most if not nearly all colleges and universities provide terrible education and that As are given out like candy. That was not my experience and I don't think it's the experience of most students today. And I certainly don't see online education becoming MORE rigorous than brick and mortar schools. Transitioning to a largely online method of higher ed would be disastrous to many students who need that physical, face-to-face support to keep them motivated and engaged. Social media is no replacement for physical community. Online learning WILL play a role in our educational future. It just won't play THE ONLY role in our educational future.
November 19, 2024
Time travel. That’s what I think of when I think of this book. The first half is a journey into the past. The second half is a journey into the future. As you might imagine, exploring the past was incredibly easier and far less troublesome than trying to wrap my mind around the future.
During the first half of the book, the author neatly traces the history of what he calls the “hybrid university.” It’s a good story: under the auspices of the university, we house financially backed research, teaching of students paid for by tuition, taxes, and charitable gifts, trade and professional schools (law and medicine, for example), and innumerable extracurricular distractions: professional-level sports teams, fraternities and social organizations often dedicated to meaningless social traditions and meaningful partying, drinking, and drugs.
The hybrid university, as described by Carey, is fraught with difficulties and contradictions, not the least of which being that some of the brightest researchers with PhDs are not talented teachers in any way. There is no correlation between the aptitude for research and an aptitude for teaching.
Other problems with the hybrid university include where to find the best students, how to make education affordable to everyone, how to provide education to the most talented and worthy students when some of them are located in places like Mongolia and simply cannot get to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and how to sift through the differences between educations received in various colleges. How can a single piece of paper, a diploma from university A, communicate anything similar to a paper from university B?
The answers to these questions will be provided by the internet.
Thus, the second half of the book. Carey argues that the hybrid university (which is what we all think of today as simply any regular university) will be destroyed by the chaos and disruption created by the internet.
STEP ONE: Universities will record their best professors and make lectures available online for free. This many schools are already doing. But at present, no one is too interested because universities do not also provide free diplomas.
In STEP TWO: Universities will use the web to locate incredibly gifted students from all over the world. Carey provides an example of a child in Mongolia who proved to have an incredible gifts. In the future, the “university of everywhere” will be able to locate and educate these kids, wherever they may be found.
Finally, STEP THREE: Universities will agree to a universal set of “badges” or something similar that will signify an agreed set of competencies. A single badge will cover a small enough set of skills/knowledge that all the schools and employers can agree to them. Perhaps a four-year degree would require hundreds of these badges. These can then be viewed and sorted by A.I. or some type of machine learning that will allow employers to track down the most qualified job candidates. The result will be that students can no longer coast along and feel guaranteed to receive a degree. Instead, their actual learning and mastery will be tracked in a specific way. Employers will know EXACTLY what students have learned.
I found Carey’s tone and attitude about the hybrid university to be cynical. He would probably describe himself as “realistic,” and that might be fair. I, on the other hand, am a bit of an idealist.
Why? Because I hated school so much. I was miserable—absolutely miserable—until my junior or senior year of high school. At that time, I decided to take ownership of my education and to trust the system. By working extremely hard, I secured an excellent education that has endured.
On the other hand, having taught high school (seven years) and college (ten years and counting), I know that the current university model is not demanding enough or secure enough to truly demand a powerful education. Students, with rare exceptions, are not being pushed hard enough. Carey addresses that, arguing that future technology will force students to work much harder, lest they be eclipsed by their peers from around the world:
“The future of education involves substantially more academic work. This reality is easy to miss in the hazy utopian thinking that often surrounds promises of technological progress. Technology will make education better, but not EASIER. Students working in personalized learning environments will experience less of the frustration that comes from incompetent, homogenous educational design. But they also will have fewer opportunities to float along a river of mediocrity and low expectations. They will be less able to rely on the inherited privilege of being born into the right family and social class to move ahead. Rational education will be unforgiving in many ways. The academic standards that emerge from global learning communities will rise to the achievement of the most capable and dedicated students in the world. There won’t be any room to hide or slack off.”
I particularly enjoyed reading this book as I began teaching college about the same time that I began the book. That was fascinating—particularly the early chapters detailing the history of the university system.
But I remain a lover and an endorser of the university system. My college required a liberal arts background, and I LOVED IT. Years later, I wrote about how to be successful in college, or as Carey calls it, the "hybrid college." (HOW TO MAKE A'S: MY JOURNEY FROM FLUNKY TO COLLEGE PROFESSOR AND WHAT I LEARNED ALONG THE WAY.)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
But then it took me EIGHT YEARS to complete this book! That’s not to say it was boring; I was totally into it—and then something came along and distracted me. I must have read two dozen books in between.
During the first half of the book, the author neatly traces the history of what he calls the “hybrid university.” It’s a good story: under the auspices of the university, we house financially backed research, teaching of students paid for by tuition, taxes, and charitable gifts, trade and professional schools (law and medicine, for example), and innumerable extracurricular distractions: professional-level sports teams, fraternities and social organizations often dedicated to meaningless social traditions and meaningful partying, drinking, and drugs.
The hybrid university, as described by Carey, is fraught with difficulties and contradictions, not the least of which being that some of the brightest researchers with PhDs are not talented teachers in any way. There is no correlation between the aptitude for research and an aptitude for teaching.
Other problems with the hybrid university include where to find the best students, how to make education affordable to everyone, how to provide education to the most talented and worthy students when some of them are located in places like Mongolia and simply cannot get to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and how to sift through the differences between educations received in various colleges. How can a single piece of paper, a diploma from university A, communicate anything similar to a paper from university B?
The answers to these questions will be provided by the internet.
Thus, the second half of the book. Carey argues that the hybrid university (which is what we all think of today as simply any regular university) will be destroyed by the chaos and disruption created by the internet.
STEP ONE: Universities will record their best professors and make lectures available online for free. This many schools are already doing. But at present, no one is too interested because universities do not also provide free diplomas.
In STEP TWO: Universities will use the web to locate incredibly gifted students from all over the world. Carey provides an example of a child in Mongolia who proved to have an incredible gifts. In the future, the “university of everywhere” will be able to locate and educate these kids, wherever they may be found.
Finally, STEP THREE: Universities will agree to a universal set of “badges” or something similar that will signify an agreed set of competencies. A single badge will cover a small enough set of skills/knowledge that all the schools and employers can agree to them. Perhaps a four-year degree would require hundreds of these badges. These can then be viewed and sorted by A.I. or some type of machine learning that will allow employers to track down the most qualified job candidates. The result will be that students can no longer coast along and feel guaranteed to receive a degree. Instead, their actual learning and mastery will be tracked in a specific way. Employers will know EXACTLY what students have learned.
I found Carey’s tone and attitude about the hybrid university to be cynical. He would probably describe himself as “realistic,” and that might be fair. I, on the other hand, am a bit of an idealist.
Why? Because I hated school so much. I was miserable—absolutely miserable—until my junior or senior year of high school. At that time, I decided to take ownership of my education and to trust the system. By working extremely hard, I secured an excellent education that has endured.
On the other hand, having taught high school (seven years) and college (ten years and counting), I know that the current university model is not demanding enough or secure enough to truly demand a powerful education. Students, with rare exceptions, are not being pushed hard enough. Carey addresses that, arguing that future technology will force students to work much harder, lest they be eclipsed by their peers from around the world:
“The future of education involves substantially more academic work. This reality is easy to miss in the hazy utopian thinking that often surrounds promises of technological progress. Technology will make education better, but not EASIER. Students working in personalized learning environments will experience less of the frustration that comes from incompetent, homogenous educational design. But they also will have fewer opportunities to float along a river of mediocrity and low expectations. They will be less able to rely on the inherited privilege of being born into the right family and social class to move ahead. Rational education will be unforgiving in many ways. The academic standards that emerge from global learning communities will rise to the achievement of the most capable and dedicated students in the world. There won’t be any room to hide or slack off.”
I particularly enjoyed reading this book as I began teaching college about the same time that I began the book. That was fascinating—particularly the early chapters detailing the history of the university system.
But I remain a lover and an endorser of the university system. My college required a liberal arts background, and I LOVED IT. Years later, I wrote about how to be successful in college, or as Carey calls it, the "hybrid college." (HOW TO MAKE A'S: MY JOURNEY FROM FLUNKY TO COLLEGE PROFESSOR AND WHAT I LEARNED ALONG THE WAY.)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
But then it took me EIGHT YEARS to complete this book! That’s not to say it was boring; I was totally into it—and then something came along and distracted me. I must have read two dozen books in between.
November 18, 2016
Um livro atual e muito bem pensado para falar sobre o futuro da educação. O Kevin Carey dá uma perspectiva histórica sobre várias tecnologias que iriam revolucionar a educação (rádio, TV, correio) e acabaram não fazendo isso. Para em seguida comentar sobre como a internet é diferente e o que está mudando com o Coursera, edX e iniciativas do tipo.
O melhor é que não fica só na parte histórica/disruptiva do que estão desenvolvendo, mas fala também sobre como entendemos que o ensino funciona e o que precisa ser abordado para termos de fato algo novo. Recomendo a qualquer professor que quiser se preparar para o que vem pela frente.
O melhor é que não fica só na parte histórica/disruptiva do que estão desenvolvendo, mas fala também sobre como entendemos que o ensino funciona e o que precisa ser abordado para termos de fato algo novo. Recomendo a qualquer professor que quiser se preparar para o que vem pela frente.
October 20, 2016
Kevin Carey's book is superb. It is entirely coherent in its overall structure and its detailed arguments, and very engaging.
Students, parents, and anyone contemplating further education should read this book. First, to be excited by the amazing potential for free or inexpensive, high-quality learning online and in many institutions that will adapt to the technologies and opportunities. Second, to be immunized against the predictably strident marketing that institutions that don't change will use to promote their traditions, lifestyle advantages, and their football teams, when only learning counts.
Students, parents, and anyone contemplating further education should read this book. First, to be excited by the amazing potential for free or inexpensive, high-quality learning online and in many institutions that will adapt to the technologies and opportunities. Second, to be immunized against the predictably strident marketing that institutions that don't change will use to promote their traditions, lifestyle advantages, and their football teams, when only learning counts.
March 26, 2015
A decent brief summary of a few of the current weakness of US colleges, although I'm not convinced that colleges are going away. After the first few chapters things get repetitive and it is time to skim like mad.
April 22, 2015
I usually think of "the end of college" as being similar to the end of the world: often prophesied, occurring more for some (those already disempowered) than others, and seldom realized at the predicted scale. While this book was more convincing -- or at least provided more interesting food for thought -- than other material I've read on this topic, it still misses a great deal. Carey assumes, for instance, that the intended and actual purpose and function of college is to improve cognitive skills and processing. It is not: college is as much about class enculturation as it is about cognitive skills. And this has been well documented in works such as How College Affects Students, by Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini, as well as Mentoring At-Risk Students Through the Hidden Curriculum of Higher Education, by Buffy Smith; and Inside the College Gates: How Class and Culture Matter in Higher Education, by Jenny M. Stuber.
Carey explicitly focuses on 4-year colleges, rather than the 2-year colleges that enroll more than half of US college students each year. Carey describes the 4-year pattern as a "hybrid university" model that combines research, practical training, undergraduate education, and quasi-professional sports, a set of objectives that produce inherent tensions among themselves. At the same time, strange economic forces were at work: "Graduate programs churned out many more PhDs than the academy could hire, creating a brutal job market for academic labor" (60), leading to a situation in which almost half the professoriate labors with neither contract nor benefits. I absolutely identified with this. One reason I decided not to continue my post-graduate education is that it became clear that, even with a PhD in the humanities from an Ivy League school, I would likely find myself forced to live wherever in the country I could find a job and/or to piece together a partial salary with no benefits with adjunct work at several institutions.
The hybrid model worked for elite institutions because the undergraduates who studied at those institutions were well-prepared and would have succeeded no matter how they were taught (Carey ignores the possibility that what they “learned” neither needed nor intended to be cognitive, but instead had to do with developing and reinforcing social networks and socioeconomic behaviors/assumptions). At less-elite colleges, though, there were no “old boy network” benefits to tap into, so cognitive learning was actually important. However, “States made matters worse by giving two-year community colleges much less public money per student than four-year institutions. On average, public research universities spend 79 percent more per student on education -- not research -- than community colleges" (60). This dovetailed for me with a comment in The Smartest Kids in the World, in which Amanda Ripley notes that the US is the only developed nation where the poorest students, those with the fewest advantages overall, also receive the least per pupil in education spending due to localized property tax structures. (As The Economist summarizes Ripley’s point: ” For example, unlike the schools in Finland, which channel more resources to the neediest kids, America funds its schools through property taxes, ensuring the most disadvantaged students are warehoused together in the worst schools” (http://www.economist.com/news/books-a...). In the words of Gail O. Mellow and Cynthia M. Heelan in Minding the Dream: The Process and Practice of the American Community College, “Polarization by race and ethnicity in the nation’s postsecondary system has become the capstone for K-12 inequality and the complex economic and social mechanisms that create it. The postsecondary system mimics and magnifies the racial, ethnic, and class inequality in educational preparation it inherits from the K-12 system and then projects this inequality into the labor market (x-xi).”
Carey outlines how George Washington University and BU increased their status and endowments simply by increasing tuition. They realized that college is about a *brand,* not about learning outcomes, such that perceived and actual market value of a degree is a direct function of cost – or at least cost layered on top of top-notch teaching and research: "An expensive degree 'serves as a trophy, a symbol,' [Trachtenburg] told one interviewer. For the buyer, 'it's a sort of token of who they think they are'" (63).
Given this – that colleges are not mostly about undergraduate learning, that costs are increasing exponentially, already beyond the means of many, and that they have not integrated advances in our understanding of how learning happens, Carey argues that college as we know it is going away. He quotes Mark Kamlet, provost at Carnegie Mellon, “We’re on the razor’s edge here:” he believes only 15-50 of the colleges and universities that have appeared in the US in the 20th century will survive in the near future (72).
What does Carey argue will replace it? That has to do with emerging understandings of the neuroscience of learning coupled with technology. About the science and experience of learning in an online course he took through MIT, Carey writes, “The p-sets were designed for the 9 percent of top high school applicants who are accepted by MIT. As the course progressed, I could feel a new part of my brain being partitioned off to hold all the new ideas and information. Accessing the partition was always a struggle; every time I sat down in the evening to watch a new lecture or work on a p-set it was like slowly pushing open a heavy set of doors.
“The biological nature of this process - -the complex interaction of sensory information with neural networks and mental constructs – was a mystery to the founders of traditional colleges. So were many modern ideas about how people think and learn. Those discoveries were made over the course of the twentieth century, often at hybrid universities that made phenomenal contributions to the understanding of human cognition even as they steadfastly refused to apply those insights to their own philosophies and practices of teaching” (71).
He expounds on this further by citing Piaget, who believed that “learning happens when students actively engage with the world around them, building knowledge and meaning by applying schemas to challenges and experience.
“Neuroscience would eventually underscore the wisdom of Vygotsky, Piaget, and others like them. The brain doesn’t get information just from the five senses. It also gets information from itself, through the product of abstract thought, active learning , and higher-order cognition. There are connections from the temporal lobe back to the parts of the brain that process and interpret new information, an unending loop of neural pattern making in continuous formation.
“That, ultimately, is why the problem sets are such an important part of the MIT core curriculum. As a novice student of genetics and molecular biology, I didn’t have well-established patterns of scientific theory with which to efficiently process new information. I had to build those patterns, piece by piece, in my mind. The problem sets forced me to take various newly introduced facts and ideas and connect them to one another in the right way. That feeling of pushing open a heavy door every night was physical and neurological: After spending the day in the comfort zone of my expertise in education policy, I had to light up new, often fragile neural constructs of biological science that required far more effort to strengthen and expand.
“Designing courses and problem sets that stimulate that kind of work isn’t easy. Neither is motivating students to persist and persevere. But that’s the difference between an encyclopedia and a college – or Wikipedia and the University of Everywhere” (85).
Paradoxically, as outlined in Academically Adrift, “College students from impoverished backgrounds were given less challenging work to do – fewer opportunities to actively engage in learning – and learned much less as a result” (85). I absolutely observed this when teaching at community colleges compared to a small private liberal arts college: at the liberal arts college, I could ask students to read something, and then we could discuss the ideas and their implications. At the community college, I first had to help students engage with the material – what it was saying – what it wasn’t saying – what the author’s argument was and what points were being made – before we could begin to make sense of what it meant and how it related to what we’d learned before. And it was clear that this was something they were absolutely not accustomed to doing in their courses – probably because it was time-consuming to do both steps in class.
That kind of deep learning, persistent over time, is important: “human learning tends to proceed along a logarithmic scale, with the first rounds of practice producing meager results that eventually accelerate and result in gains that are orders of magnitude more powerful. This, too, is crucial for education, because it means that people who successfully get to the end of a process of learning have far more knowledge and skill than those who quit halfway. It’s like compound interest on an investment, where you make most of your money in the last few years” (102).
But even the problems sets from MIT do not embody the kind of revolutionary potential to capitalize on technology and brain science that Carey sees as the basis for the future of learning. What Carey experienced in the MIT courses was essentially a traditional course delivered online. As www.nosignificantdifference.org has demonstrated through extensive bibliographies, no research has demonstrated a significant difference in student learning between online and in-person modes of delivery (99).
The future of education, for Carey, therefore lies not in traditional formats delivered in a new mode, but in new organizational structures, complemented by new software that will “diagnose my particular strengths and weaknesses [and] offer . . . specific, personalized educational experience in response. It [will] overcome the basic dilemma of mass higher education: how to give individuals with unique experiences and neural patterns exactly what they need” (89). Carey provides a fascinating overview of the work of Patrick Suppes at Standford in the 1950s. Suppes brought rigorous scientific investigation to the study of how children learn mathematics and used it to develop a computer-delivered, adaptive learning curriculum grounded in the need for deliberate practice. “Learning is work -- a deliberate process of strengthening neural connections to the point where they operate automatically, creating a framework for understanding new information and freeing up mental capacity for learning more. The challenge, then, was giving each individual student the right kind of practice, work that would help him move from where he was to where he needed to be” (92).
Even though students learn at different rates, teachers’ time and attention has traditionally been the expensive part of education. So colleges “hold the amount of learning time constant at three instructional hours per week over a standard fifteen-week semester. Different students got the same educational experience over the same amount of time, while their learning was allowed to vary” (111). With technology, though (such as an automated theorem prover designed to correct students’ proofs for a logic course), students’ learning time can vary greatly according to their needs (humanities students taking logic tended to spend ten times as long on the proofs using the automated theorem prover as the science and math students did) – but they all learned the material in the end.
Online education – in the sense of education delivered online as a delivery method – has not been a disruptive innovation for a number of reasons:
1. It confused knowledge with education, as if education is simply information projected in a variety of ways. “Education is structured, interactive, and lengthy . . . it involves sustained, organized interaction with the educational designs of experts, either in person or as represented in words and computer code. Fathom described itself as a ‘global e-learning company’ that ‘works with leading educational and cultural institutions to project their teaching and research to an international audience,’ as if both teaching and research could be flung along the information superhighway in the same way” (116).
2. They were blind to the economic and political forces that protect higher education from disruption.
a. Teaching decisions reside with individual professors. If faculty use pre-determined materials, including on-line tools, there’s little reason to employ them. “When it comes to teaching, colleges and universities do not want to be more productive” (117) [Ooh, ooh, what if we standardized learning in courses where that is possible (the 30 basic intro courses that make up 1/3 of all credits earned in US and redeploy the creative and pedagogical efforts needed to deliver those courses to (a) more advanced/time intensive/context sensitive integrative learning experiences and (b) high-touch intrusive personal advising and mentoring.
b. Higher ed receives hundreds of billions of government dollars every year in the form of “direct appropriations, tax preferences [i.e., tax-free endowment earnings], and subsidies for their customers in the form of government scholarships and guaranteed student loans” (117).
c. Colleges hold a “monopoly over the sale of recognized credits and credentials [which allowed them to] ignore the possibilities of technology-based efficiency and continue to increase prices without mercy. The first wave of higher-education technology companies completely failed to understand this. A Columbia diploma signifies a number of things, including ‘I earned passing grades in the Columbia curriculum,’ I lived with a bunch of smart people in Morningside Heights for four years,’ and ‘When I was seventeen years old, I was smart enough to be admitted to Columbia.’ [Since Fathom.com couldn’t certify the second and third items, it “inadvertently conducted an experiment to determine the market price of online Columbia courses based only on their educational value. The answer turned out to be: almost nothing” (118).
Carey outlines how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs think (in terms of Blue Ocean Strategy – i.e. – “finding and creating markets that, like open water, stretch to the horizon and are devoid of competitor boats” (130)). He argues that every industry, no matter how protected by policy and tradition, can be disrupted. For example, software and eCommerce are enormous markets that are almost completely converted to digital; media and entertainment are about half converted. Therefore, there is tremendous opportunity: Market size: “Venture capital investment in education technology companies increased from less than $200 million in 2008 to over $1.2 billion in 2013” (131). Companies that are already taking on various aspects of the higher education experience that used to be bundled together include:
• Chegg: rents college textbooks through the mail
• Rafter: textbooks reconceived as software: “flexible, interactive, and responsive to individual students (132).
• Piazza: online study rooms to support students in online courses
• Inside Track: coaching services
• USEED: fundraising solicitations by individual students for their own experiential learning
• Quizlet, created by a high school student, users create and share flash cards and learning games for free
• Developing alternate ways for students to signal knowledge and skill
• Job training
• Minerva (teaching): Students spend a year together in SF taking one course in each of the four core areas (social science, humanities, science, and math), and then spend six semesters in global cities taking courses with classmates located in other cities. Courses centered around problems delivered online that provide data about what students know, allow faculty to iterate to improve learning.
• Dev Bootcamp: Nine week course that provides students with minimum viable skills needed to start a new job (on the assumption that complex jobs are best learned by doing).
• UnCollege: Founded by Dale Stephens, with his Thiel Fellows money ($100K from an entrepreneur to skip college). His idea is that “most of the important things young people learn in college have nothing to do with time spent in the
• classroom. Instead, it’s the shared experience of growth with peers, the internships that provide real-world experience, travel abroad, and the larger process of transformation into adulthood . . . Gap Year students spend three months living together in San Francisco, taking seminars and workshops; three months living in a foreign country where they don’t speak the native language; three months in an internship; and three months working on an independent project” (141). (Interesting that he builds on findings of those like Pascarella and Terenzini with a practical alternative).
• Udacity: suite of free, online courses, catalyzed by Sebastian Thrun’s online CS221 course
• Coursera: get elite universities to build course content – though it uses little AI and instead simply delivers traditional lectures online, for the most part.
• Accredible: allows you to create ”certs” into which you can upload evidence documenting/supporting what you’ve learned. Carey uploaded his 63 pages of notes from Secret of Life, photos of his exams w/ his scores. Could upload videos of himself taking a test along w/ keystroke tracking. If this were also linked into the National Student Clearinghouse college electronic transcript fulfillment service, so that colleges could send transcripts directly to Accredible and students couldn’t alter them, that would be a great way to have transcripts in the cloud and return them to those who own them. Peers can upload references. (LinkedIn should totally buy this company).
• Saylor.org: http://www.saylor.org/about/mission/:
• Oercommons.org: open source learning platform
• Carnegie Mellon OLI: http://oli.cmu.edu/the-herb-simon-con... For example, re: their online statistics course, it was “developed by a team composed of statistics faculty from Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, learning researchers and designers, software engineers, and human computer interaction experts from Carnegie Mellon. The course has been through multiple iterations based on the student data we have collected and feedback from faculty at multiple institutions who have been using and evaluating the course in support of their teaching” (retrieved 4.19.2015). When OLI wanted to refine the course for use at community colleges, they “reviewed the data collected from the 10 institutions that piloted the original course in fall 2009 and identified several major focus areas” for improvement based on student data. “The course continues to be used, evaluated and continuously improved with the involvement of faculty from colleges and universities across the country.”
• University of Minnesota Rochester: 2006, rented cheap space in an abandoned food court in a mall, leased nearby apartments for students to live in, got memberships at YMCA. Recreated room with comfy chairs and wifi access from library, but didn’t recreate library. Offers two degree programs. “Students take a defined curriculum for the first two years. [Couldn't include my whole review -- too long:()]
Carey explicitly focuses on 4-year colleges, rather than the 2-year colleges that enroll more than half of US college students each year. Carey describes the 4-year pattern as a "hybrid university" model that combines research, practical training, undergraduate education, and quasi-professional sports, a set of objectives that produce inherent tensions among themselves. At the same time, strange economic forces were at work: "Graduate programs churned out many more PhDs than the academy could hire, creating a brutal job market for academic labor" (60), leading to a situation in which almost half the professoriate labors with neither contract nor benefits. I absolutely identified with this. One reason I decided not to continue my post-graduate education is that it became clear that, even with a PhD in the humanities from an Ivy League school, I would likely find myself forced to live wherever in the country I could find a job and/or to piece together a partial salary with no benefits with adjunct work at several institutions.
The hybrid model worked for elite institutions because the undergraduates who studied at those institutions were well-prepared and would have succeeded no matter how they were taught (Carey ignores the possibility that what they “learned” neither needed nor intended to be cognitive, but instead had to do with developing and reinforcing social networks and socioeconomic behaviors/assumptions). At less-elite colleges, though, there were no “old boy network” benefits to tap into, so cognitive learning was actually important. However, “States made matters worse by giving two-year community colleges much less public money per student than four-year institutions. On average, public research universities spend 79 percent more per student on education -- not research -- than community colleges" (60). This dovetailed for me with a comment in The Smartest Kids in the World, in which Amanda Ripley notes that the US is the only developed nation where the poorest students, those with the fewest advantages overall, also receive the least per pupil in education spending due to localized property tax structures. (As The Economist summarizes Ripley’s point: ” For example, unlike the schools in Finland, which channel more resources to the neediest kids, America funds its schools through property taxes, ensuring the most disadvantaged students are warehoused together in the worst schools” (http://www.economist.com/news/books-a...). In the words of Gail O. Mellow and Cynthia M. Heelan in Minding the Dream: The Process and Practice of the American Community College, “Polarization by race and ethnicity in the nation’s postsecondary system has become the capstone for K-12 inequality and the complex economic and social mechanisms that create it. The postsecondary system mimics and magnifies the racial, ethnic, and class inequality in educational preparation it inherits from the K-12 system and then projects this inequality into the labor market (x-xi).”
Carey outlines how George Washington University and BU increased their status and endowments simply by increasing tuition. They realized that college is about a *brand,* not about learning outcomes, such that perceived and actual market value of a degree is a direct function of cost – or at least cost layered on top of top-notch teaching and research: "An expensive degree 'serves as a trophy, a symbol,' [Trachtenburg] told one interviewer. For the buyer, 'it's a sort of token of who they think they are'" (63).
Given this – that colleges are not mostly about undergraduate learning, that costs are increasing exponentially, already beyond the means of many, and that they have not integrated advances in our understanding of how learning happens, Carey argues that college as we know it is going away. He quotes Mark Kamlet, provost at Carnegie Mellon, “We’re on the razor’s edge here:” he believes only 15-50 of the colleges and universities that have appeared in the US in the 20th century will survive in the near future (72).
What does Carey argue will replace it? That has to do with emerging understandings of the neuroscience of learning coupled with technology. About the science and experience of learning in an online course he took through MIT, Carey writes, “The p-sets were designed for the 9 percent of top high school applicants who are accepted by MIT. As the course progressed, I could feel a new part of my brain being partitioned off to hold all the new ideas and information. Accessing the partition was always a struggle; every time I sat down in the evening to watch a new lecture or work on a p-set it was like slowly pushing open a heavy set of doors.
“The biological nature of this process - -the complex interaction of sensory information with neural networks and mental constructs – was a mystery to the founders of traditional colleges. So were many modern ideas about how people think and learn. Those discoveries were made over the course of the twentieth century, often at hybrid universities that made phenomenal contributions to the understanding of human cognition even as they steadfastly refused to apply those insights to their own philosophies and practices of teaching” (71).
He expounds on this further by citing Piaget, who believed that “learning happens when students actively engage with the world around them, building knowledge and meaning by applying schemas to challenges and experience.
“Neuroscience would eventually underscore the wisdom of Vygotsky, Piaget, and others like them. The brain doesn’t get information just from the five senses. It also gets information from itself, through the product of abstract thought, active learning , and higher-order cognition. There are connections from the temporal lobe back to the parts of the brain that process and interpret new information, an unending loop of neural pattern making in continuous formation.
“That, ultimately, is why the problem sets are such an important part of the MIT core curriculum. As a novice student of genetics and molecular biology, I didn’t have well-established patterns of scientific theory with which to efficiently process new information. I had to build those patterns, piece by piece, in my mind. The problem sets forced me to take various newly introduced facts and ideas and connect them to one another in the right way. That feeling of pushing open a heavy door every night was physical and neurological: After spending the day in the comfort zone of my expertise in education policy, I had to light up new, often fragile neural constructs of biological science that required far more effort to strengthen and expand.
“Designing courses and problem sets that stimulate that kind of work isn’t easy. Neither is motivating students to persist and persevere. But that’s the difference between an encyclopedia and a college – or Wikipedia and the University of Everywhere” (85).
Paradoxically, as outlined in Academically Adrift, “College students from impoverished backgrounds were given less challenging work to do – fewer opportunities to actively engage in learning – and learned much less as a result” (85). I absolutely observed this when teaching at community colleges compared to a small private liberal arts college: at the liberal arts college, I could ask students to read something, and then we could discuss the ideas and their implications. At the community college, I first had to help students engage with the material – what it was saying – what it wasn’t saying – what the author’s argument was and what points were being made – before we could begin to make sense of what it meant and how it related to what we’d learned before. And it was clear that this was something they were absolutely not accustomed to doing in their courses – probably because it was time-consuming to do both steps in class.
That kind of deep learning, persistent over time, is important: “human learning tends to proceed along a logarithmic scale, with the first rounds of practice producing meager results that eventually accelerate and result in gains that are orders of magnitude more powerful. This, too, is crucial for education, because it means that people who successfully get to the end of a process of learning have far more knowledge and skill than those who quit halfway. It’s like compound interest on an investment, where you make most of your money in the last few years” (102).
But even the problems sets from MIT do not embody the kind of revolutionary potential to capitalize on technology and brain science that Carey sees as the basis for the future of learning. What Carey experienced in the MIT courses was essentially a traditional course delivered online. As www.nosignificantdifference.org has demonstrated through extensive bibliographies, no research has demonstrated a significant difference in student learning between online and in-person modes of delivery (99).
The future of education, for Carey, therefore lies not in traditional formats delivered in a new mode, but in new organizational structures, complemented by new software that will “diagnose my particular strengths and weaknesses [and] offer . . . specific, personalized educational experience in response. It [will] overcome the basic dilemma of mass higher education: how to give individuals with unique experiences and neural patterns exactly what they need” (89). Carey provides a fascinating overview of the work of Patrick Suppes at Standford in the 1950s. Suppes brought rigorous scientific investigation to the study of how children learn mathematics and used it to develop a computer-delivered, adaptive learning curriculum grounded in the need for deliberate practice. “Learning is work -- a deliberate process of strengthening neural connections to the point where they operate automatically, creating a framework for understanding new information and freeing up mental capacity for learning more. The challenge, then, was giving each individual student the right kind of practice, work that would help him move from where he was to where he needed to be” (92).
Even though students learn at different rates, teachers’ time and attention has traditionally been the expensive part of education. So colleges “hold the amount of learning time constant at three instructional hours per week over a standard fifteen-week semester. Different students got the same educational experience over the same amount of time, while their learning was allowed to vary” (111). With technology, though (such as an automated theorem prover designed to correct students’ proofs for a logic course), students’ learning time can vary greatly according to their needs (humanities students taking logic tended to spend ten times as long on the proofs using the automated theorem prover as the science and math students did) – but they all learned the material in the end.
Online education – in the sense of education delivered online as a delivery method – has not been a disruptive innovation for a number of reasons:
1. It confused knowledge with education, as if education is simply information projected in a variety of ways. “Education is structured, interactive, and lengthy . . . it involves sustained, organized interaction with the educational designs of experts, either in person or as represented in words and computer code. Fathom described itself as a ‘global e-learning company’ that ‘works with leading educational and cultural institutions to project their teaching and research to an international audience,’ as if both teaching and research could be flung along the information superhighway in the same way” (116).
2. They were blind to the economic and political forces that protect higher education from disruption.
a. Teaching decisions reside with individual professors. If faculty use pre-determined materials, including on-line tools, there’s little reason to employ them. “When it comes to teaching, colleges and universities do not want to be more productive” (117) [Ooh, ooh, what if we standardized learning in courses where that is possible (the 30 basic intro courses that make up 1/3 of all credits earned in US and redeploy the creative and pedagogical efforts needed to deliver those courses to (a) more advanced/time intensive/context sensitive integrative learning experiences and (b) high-touch intrusive personal advising and mentoring.
b. Higher ed receives hundreds of billions of government dollars every year in the form of “direct appropriations, tax preferences [i.e., tax-free endowment earnings], and subsidies for their customers in the form of government scholarships and guaranteed student loans” (117).
c. Colleges hold a “monopoly over the sale of recognized credits and credentials [which allowed them to] ignore the possibilities of technology-based efficiency and continue to increase prices without mercy. The first wave of higher-education technology companies completely failed to understand this. A Columbia diploma signifies a number of things, including ‘I earned passing grades in the Columbia curriculum,’ I lived with a bunch of smart people in Morningside Heights for four years,’ and ‘When I was seventeen years old, I was smart enough to be admitted to Columbia.’ [Since Fathom.com couldn’t certify the second and third items, it “inadvertently conducted an experiment to determine the market price of online Columbia courses based only on their educational value. The answer turned out to be: almost nothing” (118).
Carey outlines how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs think (in terms of Blue Ocean Strategy – i.e. – “finding and creating markets that, like open water, stretch to the horizon and are devoid of competitor boats” (130)). He argues that every industry, no matter how protected by policy and tradition, can be disrupted. For example, software and eCommerce are enormous markets that are almost completely converted to digital; media and entertainment are about half converted. Therefore, there is tremendous opportunity: Market size: “Venture capital investment in education technology companies increased from less than $200 million in 2008 to over $1.2 billion in 2013” (131). Companies that are already taking on various aspects of the higher education experience that used to be bundled together include:
• Chegg: rents college textbooks through the mail
• Rafter: textbooks reconceived as software: “flexible, interactive, and responsive to individual students (132).
• Piazza: online study rooms to support students in online courses
• Inside Track: coaching services
• USEED: fundraising solicitations by individual students for their own experiential learning
• Quizlet, created by a high school student, users create and share flash cards and learning games for free
• Developing alternate ways for students to signal knowledge and skill
• Job training
• Minerva (teaching): Students spend a year together in SF taking one course in each of the four core areas (social science, humanities, science, and math), and then spend six semesters in global cities taking courses with classmates located in other cities. Courses centered around problems delivered online that provide data about what students know, allow faculty to iterate to improve learning.
• Dev Bootcamp: Nine week course that provides students with minimum viable skills needed to start a new job (on the assumption that complex jobs are best learned by doing).
• UnCollege: Founded by Dale Stephens, with his Thiel Fellows money ($100K from an entrepreneur to skip college). His idea is that “most of the important things young people learn in college have nothing to do with time spent in the
• classroom. Instead, it’s the shared experience of growth with peers, the internships that provide real-world experience, travel abroad, and the larger process of transformation into adulthood . . . Gap Year students spend three months living together in San Francisco, taking seminars and workshops; three months living in a foreign country where they don’t speak the native language; three months in an internship; and three months working on an independent project” (141). (Interesting that he builds on findings of those like Pascarella and Terenzini with a practical alternative).
• Udacity: suite of free, online courses, catalyzed by Sebastian Thrun’s online CS221 course
• Coursera: get elite universities to build course content – though it uses little AI and instead simply delivers traditional lectures online, for the most part.
• Accredible: allows you to create ”certs” into which you can upload evidence documenting/supporting what you’ve learned. Carey uploaded his 63 pages of notes from Secret of Life, photos of his exams w/ his scores. Could upload videos of himself taking a test along w/ keystroke tracking. If this were also linked into the National Student Clearinghouse college electronic transcript fulfillment service, so that colleges could send transcripts directly to Accredible and students couldn’t alter them, that would be a great way to have transcripts in the cloud and return them to those who own them. Peers can upload references. (LinkedIn should totally buy this company).
• Saylor.org: http://www.saylor.org/about/mission/:
• Oercommons.org: open source learning platform
• Carnegie Mellon OLI: http://oli.cmu.edu/the-herb-simon-con... For example, re: their online statistics course, it was “developed by a team composed of statistics faculty from Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, learning researchers and designers, software engineers, and human computer interaction experts from Carnegie Mellon. The course has been through multiple iterations based on the student data we have collected and feedback from faculty at multiple institutions who have been using and evaluating the course in support of their teaching” (retrieved 4.19.2015). When OLI wanted to refine the course for use at community colleges, they “reviewed the data collected from the 10 institutions that piloted the original course in fall 2009 and identified several major focus areas” for improvement based on student data. “The course continues to be used, evaluated and continuously improved with the involvement of faculty from colleges and universities across the country.”
• University of Minnesota Rochester: 2006, rented cheap space in an abandoned food court in a mall, leased nearby apartments for students to live in, got memberships at YMCA. Recreated room with comfy chairs and wifi access from library, but didn’t recreate library. Offers two degree programs. “Students take a defined curriculum for the first two years. [Couldn't include my whole review -- too long:()]
September 30, 2023
Well, the pandemic came and went, everyone had to take their classes online and surely the great new dawn of a digital tomorrow was upon us. Except it turns out that those pesky old legacy institutions (corrupt to the core in Carey's overwrought telling) knew something Carey apparently didn't: it turns out people like to learn together, face to face, in community. There is one good idea at the center of this text and loads of bad ones. The good idea has to do with the fact that college teachers are not nearly well-trained enough in the work of educating young people. It's flat out a fact. But like so many, many critics of education today, Carey sees that truth and leaps to a host of mistaken conclusions. Most of these 'findings' have to do with digital, online education and the notion that people learn best at their own pace and can bypass the irritating incompetence of tenured idiots unconcerned with their welfare. (It always seems to escape critics like Carey that the folks setting up the online classes he so worships are themselves part of the tenured corrupterati.) Once the new digital tomorrow arrives, we can stop sending kids to brick and mortar towers of learning because they can acquire electronic certifications much more cheaply. This leaves out the fact that many students come to universities (especially post-pandemic) precisely for the social elements Carey turns his nose up at. Indeed, they are happy to pay the premium, it seems. It also ignores the fact that for such students, what universities provide is a widely accepted signal about competence and intelligence (never mind if the signal is a good one). He assumes that Fortune 500 companies are just champing at the bit to start hiring kids with digital certificates of competence. But why should this be? The very companies who benefit most from outsourcing the work of signaling to universities are themselves complicit in and occasionally connive at the financial chicanery so impoverishing recent generations of students in pursuit of the signal. It would be utopia indeed if everyone could simultaneously agree to stop this game but there is precious little evidence that any of the parties (colleges, students or companies) are remotely interested in this prospect. There was a good idea at the center of this book: teaching isn't nearly up to standard at universities, for a host of reasons. Instead of leaping to all kinds other conclusions, why not simply face that fact and remediate it? Probably because the work of making teaching central to college education and doing the even harder work of improving it doesn't bend to sexy, quick fix solutions. Sure, technology can be a part of the mode of improving teaching, but in the end, it comes down to people in a room with each other and thinking through how to make that work involves slow, unsexy, careful inculcation of the techne of teaching, one graduate student at a time. You can't MOOC your way to that. This book is useful only a clearinghouse of misguided current thinking about what's wrong with colleges today. As a predictor of the future, it's already outdated. The university of everywhere, as Carey conceives it, is farther off than ever.
January 3, 2019
“The difference between watching a lecture live or on film is like the difference between reading Anna Karenina in two different fonts.”
I think this quote perfectly summarizes the entire book. Either you completely disagree with this statement or you wholeheartedly agree with it. I disagree with this. I think attending a lecture live and watching in online offer two completely different experiences, but I understand from an objective perspective it does not make any sense. The best argument I can offer is the difference between listening to a recorded song or going to a live concert. The recorded song will actually give you the best, most precise listening experience, yet going to a concert provides a communal, corporeal experience. The same can be said about watching a football game on television or sitting in the stadium. At home, you get better views, more information, and the ability to pause the game, but when you attend you feel a part of something bigger.
Now the irony, I would rather stream a song than attend a concert, but in most cases, I would rather attend a lecture than watch online. I had a traditional undergraduate experience and I learned a lot. I did a mix of in person and online for graduate school and the online features did not engage me. The online class made everything feel cold. I tried a MOOC in the past but I never finished.
College is way too expensive and (according to some research) is educationally ineffective. The author spends the whole book promoting the concept of the free, accessible college courses. Over and over again he shares stories of startups throwing millions and millions of dollars into resources online that can be available for free to absolutely anyone with an internet connection. He does make a lot of good observations, but I think there is a lot missing.
He talks about hundreds of millions of dollars coming from venture capitalists from Silicon Valley or from the endowments of the established elite college of Harvard, MIT, and so forth but the author also complains about how much education costs. Yes, it costs a lot to develop these programs but once they are up and running the maintenance costs are minimal.
I agree a college degree is incredibly expensive, but when you break down the budgets I don’t believe there is a lot of fat. Sure, you can get rid of the football or art history, but then you alienate students and donors who want those programs. College is expensive because of its expensive workforce. Can you streamline things? Sure, but there is always a risk to that. Consumers like inexpensive products but they love quality. This is where the author and I differ. I believe massive open online courses can offer an inferior product. He does not believe so.
I could go on and on about how I think this book misses the point, but I do think his arguments are valid though perhaps one-sided.
And of course, no book that is critical about higher education costs is complete without a reference to a rock climbing wall. You will find that references on page 47 of the paperback version.
I think this quote perfectly summarizes the entire book. Either you completely disagree with this statement or you wholeheartedly agree with it. I disagree with this. I think attending a lecture live and watching in online offer two completely different experiences, but I understand from an objective perspective it does not make any sense. The best argument I can offer is the difference between listening to a recorded song or going to a live concert. The recorded song will actually give you the best, most precise listening experience, yet going to a concert provides a communal, corporeal experience. The same can be said about watching a football game on television or sitting in the stadium. At home, you get better views, more information, and the ability to pause the game, but when you attend you feel a part of something bigger.
Now the irony, I would rather stream a song than attend a concert, but in most cases, I would rather attend a lecture than watch online. I had a traditional undergraduate experience and I learned a lot. I did a mix of in person and online for graduate school and the online features did not engage me. The online class made everything feel cold. I tried a MOOC in the past but I never finished.
College is way too expensive and (according to some research) is educationally ineffective. The author spends the whole book promoting the concept of the free, accessible college courses. Over and over again he shares stories of startups throwing millions and millions of dollars into resources online that can be available for free to absolutely anyone with an internet connection. He does make a lot of good observations, but I think there is a lot missing.
He talks about hundreds of millions of dollars coming from venture capitalists from Silicon Valley or from the endowments of the established elite college of Harvard, MIT, and so forth but the author also complains about how much education costs. Yes, it costs a lot to develop these programs but once they are up and running the maintenance costs are minimal.
I agree a college degree is incredibly expensive, but when you break down the budgets I don’t believe there is a lot of fat. Sure, you can get rid of the football or art history, but then you alienate students and donors who want those programs. College is expensive because of its expensive workforce. Can you streamline things? Sure, but there is always a risk to that. Consumers like inexpensive products but they love quality. This is where the author and I differ. I believe massive open online courses can offer an inferior product. He does not believe so.
I could go on and on about how I think this book misses the point, but I do think his arguments are valid though perhaps one-sided.
And of course, no book that is critical about higher education costs is complete without a reference to a rock climbing wall. You will find that references on page 47 of the paperback version.
June 3, 2018
Kevin Carey does a quality job pointing out the innovation happening in higher education stemming from the advent of technology, through online courses on platforms like edX and Coursera. We're rapidly coming across a more decentralized and inexpensive form of higher education, and traditional, "hybrid" universities will have to adapt to those changes.
Carey makes the case that universities will have to become more specialized, embracing what they're good at. An example would be the University of Illinois becoming a school that specialized in engineering. Community colleges can serve as the platform for the trades, for the general education courses, and as a cheap alternative to universities. Online MOOC's will provide the majority of those general education courses from prestigious universities for a fraction of the cost.
Universiites will become digital and actual communities, not having a defined time that you attend, and being more personalized in the time it takes to complete your education. Law degrees and web design will take drastically different amounts of time. In addition to these facts, individual skills will usurp traditional degrees, through a platform like Mozilla's Open Badges. These digital badges will signify the individual skills a student or worker possesses.
Overall, Carey lays out an intriguing vision for the future of higher education. I do think that he understates the desire for the community and experience that many students want when attending college. Traditional college campuses won't lose their luster, and the author seems to signify that they will, showing some misunderstanding about the desire to have a good college experience. Otherwise, the book is very informative and helpful to understanding where the higher education landscape is headed.
What is most interesting is an academic flexibility that is surely going to be the future. Being accessible to the poor and to those who are working is important, and nuanced in the acquisition and recognition of skills. Online courses allow for targeted education, and online job sites allow for a direct connection to employers, who can view potential candidates through a more selective lens. Knowing exactly what they excel at will allow for a more broad and accurate hiring process, opening up thousands of jobs for those who couldn't finish college, or have to deal with a broad degree that isn't indicative of their foundational skills.
These innovations will help control the runaway costs of higher education, and broaden the accessibility of these institutions. Making the existing higher education institutions specialized, embracing MOOC's, and embracing nuanced skills-based resumes should be the focus of those who seek to redesign an antiquated system of higher education in America.
Carey makes the case that universities will have to become more specialized, embracing what they're good at. An example would be the University of Illinois becoming a school that specialized in engineering. Community colleges can serve as the platform for the trades, for the general education courses, and as a cheap alternative to universities. Online MOOC's will provide the majority of those general education courses from prestigious universities for a fraction of the cost.
Universiites will become digital and actual communities, not having a defined time that you attend, and being more personalized in the time it takes to complete your education. Law degrees and web design will take drastically different amounts of time. In addition to these facts, individual skills will usurp traditional degrees, through a platform like Mozilla's Open Badges. These digital badges will signify the individual skills a student or worker possesses.
Overall, Carey lays out an intriguing vision for the future of higher education. I do think that he understates the desire for the community and experience that many students want when attending college. Traditional college campuses won't lose their luster, and the author seems to signify that they will, showing some misunderstanding about the desire to have a good college experience. Otherwise, the book is very informative and helpful to understanding where the higher education landscape is headed.
What is most interesting is an academic flexibility that is surely going to be the future. Being accessible to the poor and to those who are working is important, and nuanced in the acquisition and recognition of skills. Online courses allow for targeted education, and online job sites allow for a direct connection to employers, who can view potential candidates through a more selective lens. Knowing exactly what they excel at will allow for a more broad and accurate hiring process, opening up thousands of jobs for those who couldn't finish college, or have to deal with a broad degree that isn't indicative of their foundational skills.
These innovations will help control the runaway costs of higher education, and broaden the accessibility of these institutions. Making the existing higher education institutions specialized, embracing MOOC's, and embracing nuanced skills-based resumes should be the focus of those who seek to redesign an antiquated system of higher education in America.
August 26, 2019
I recommend this book for future educators at the university level, and for those who wonder what the future of education and work will look like.
For the past ten or so years, the internet is beginning to take over the educational system where those who soley seek knowledge are expanding themselves beyond what a modern university can offer. The hybridization of liberal education, technical/practical training and research-based institutions has created an pernicious hierarchy between indentured students and research professor's with little teaching skills, along with a business and status-hungry competition between universities where arbitrary testing standards and amusement-park distractions are creating the illusion of competency for both educators and students.
The book briefly describes the history of education in the west, making the point that our educational system has evolved over the centuries, especially highlighting 19th century innovator Charles William Eliot, who gave birth to the idea of combining three contradictive education models, the consequences of which we are still dealing with today. The internet is arguably the next frontier of education but there is no certainty that the disparity between elite-intellectuals and the indentured middle-class is going away. The question is, how can we legitimately provide credidation through the internet? Khan Academy already provides some degress, and YouTube is a promising medium for credentialed-education, but the future is still open-ended and it's an issue that we the people have to make ourselves before the 1% beat us to it.
For the past ten or so years, the internet is beginning to take over the educational system where those who soley seek knowledge are expanding themselves beyond what a modern university can offer. The hybridization of liberal education, technical/practical training and research-based institutions has created an pernicious hierarchy between indentured students and research professor's with little teaching skills, along with a business and status-hungry competition between universities where arbitrary testing standards and amusement-park distractions are creating the illusion of competency for both educators and students.
The book briefly describes the history of education in the west, making the point that our educational system has evolved over the centuries, especially highlighting 19th century innovator Charles William Eliot, who gave birth to the idea of combining three contradictive education models, the consequences of which we are still dealing with today. The internet is arguably the next frontier of education but there is no certainty that the disparity between elite-intellectuals and the indentured middle-class is going away. The question is, how can we legitimately provide credidation through the internet? Khan Academy already provides some degress, and YouTube is a promising medium for credentialed-education, but the future is still open-ended and it's an issue that we the people have to make ourselves before the 1% beat us to it.
June 26, 2019
The book should have been called the university of MIT, Harvard, and Stanford, not college in general. While the tidbits like a history of college education and the business side of digital badging was interesting, overall this book was written in a journalistic manner that never really answered the question of whether online education would be the future. Carey really didn't get to the point. The grand and sweeping declarations about education were unnecessarily cyclical and as I continued to read seemed borderline bitter. He made assumptions that were simply erroneous, and contradicted himself with his own examples. For example, he said that all profs don't care about teaching undergrads and have never been taught to teach (I have a doctorate in curriculum and instruction and am currently a prof...so, false, and false). He then talks about how the prof at MIT was engaging. Ironic. His "scathing indictment" of education came off as uneducated (ironic again) and uninformed. Some pieces of the book were eye-roll-inducing and misogynistic (young, beautiful women and yachts? Really?) with no point other than to point out that he rubbed shoulders with the filthy rich and irritate his female readership. Other statements like that business and education are the easiest majors compared to liberal arts education are spoken like a true ignoramus who clearly hasn't walked into a teaching college in a while. Please, I implore you, come and sit down in my preservice teacher classroom, Carey. Let's see how you'd spin that. Ugh.
May 8, 2020
What a breath of fresh air! In this covid19 age, the stress parents are facing regarding implementation of distance learning, this book provides welcome relief and perspective. I enjoyed the profile of MIT's free OpenCourseWare so much that I will try it personally. The book has a charming, light-handed tone-- for example, from page 99:
"The difference between watching a lecture live or on film is like the difference between reading Anna Karenina in two different fonts. You may prefer Garamond to Times New Roman, but either way, all families are alike and Anna jumps in front of the train."
I do have some doubts about the book's critique of community colleges-- namely that too many community college students in the end fail to receive a bachelor's degree. I know for a fact that many people attending community colleges aren't really interested in receiving a bachelor's degree. They just take classes that are fun or interesting or an opportunity to meet others in the community. To the extent that there are folks that start at a community college with the goal to eventually get a bachelor's degree, it isn't surprising that many may find that an associate's degree is actually all they need. Or they realize they can't afford a bachelor's degree.
But overall, this is really an excellent book to read and helps parents like myself feel more confident about the possibilities of distance learning.
"The difference between watching a lecture live or on film is like the difference between reading Anna Karenina in two different fonts. You may prefer Garamond to Times New Roman, but either way, all families are alike and Anna jumps in front of the train."
I do have some doubts about the book's critique of community colleges-- namely that too many community college students in the end fail to receive a bachelor's degree. I know for a fact that many people attending community colleges aren't really interested in receiving a bachelor's degree. They just take classes that are fun or interesting or an opportunity to meet others in the community. To the extent that there are folks that start at a community college with the goal to eventually get a bachelor's degree, it isn't surprising that many may find that an associate's degree is actually all they need. Or they realize they can't afford a bachelor's degree.
But overall, this is really an excellent book to read and helps parents like myself feel more confident about the possibilities of distance learning.
February 21, 2021
A Thought Provoking Read
I was not able to put this book down. Carey explores the history and current state of the hybrid university in the US. He shows how undergraduate students have been short changed in the teaching they receive in universities whose key focus is research. He points to the disruptive changes that education will have to deal with as online IT empowered teaching systems take over. The current cost of an undergraduate education can be dramatically cut while the quality of learning outcomes increase.
This is a must read book for those interested in the democratisation of education.
I was not able to put this book down. Carey explores the history and current state of the hybrid university in the US. He shows how undergraduate students have been short changed in the teaching they receive in universities whose key focus is research. He points to the disruptive changes that education will have to deal with as online IT empowered teaching systems take over. The current cost of an undergraduate education can be dramatically cut while the quality of learning outcomes increase.
This is a must read book for those interested in the democratisation of education.
June 24, 2017
It introduces the remodeling of higher education, where people do not bear with exorbitant tuition fees to join a university solely for the prestige of a degree.
This book introduces another model of university where learning rather than degrees can be attained Through the use of the improvements in information and communications technology, learning can be provided to people at increasingly lower costs and learning at university is no exception.
It proposes a shift for universities to be learner-centric rather than research-centric
This book introduces another model of university where learning rather than degrees can be attained Through the use of the improvements in information and communications technology, learning can be provided to people at increasingly lower costs and learning at university is no exception.
It proposes a shift for universities to be learner-centric rather than research-centric
June 16, 2019
This guy must have really disliked college because he’s gunning for it ostentatiously in this book. I read this for a work-related group and I thought it was fairly well written, but quite repetitive. It’s main point is that college will be replaced over time with some sort of lifetime learning sequence that occurs in venues across the world. It’s a bit “Battlestar Galactica” in that it’s a clunky sort of vision of the future. Also, the author just seems like he’s on some sort of mission based on personal vengeance. Some professor really pissed him off.
March 29, 2019
Super interesting concept, but the book draaaaaaaaggggggged on for a while. He didn't do a very good job of using the first couple chapters to roadmap out his overall argument, and things felt very disjointed (the only real core uniting idea was frequently referencing "The University of Everywhere")
November 8, 2023
This book was precisely what I had in mind and then some. It provides a comprehensive account of the origins of the current post-secondary education system, the problems it has created, its contribution to producing questionable expertise, and the path forward. I someone who has lost faith in the current education system I am so optimistic about the world ahead for my kids.
June 30, 2017
Was more interested in the future of 'The University of Everywhere' than why colleges are failing. I already know that. History is a _little_ interesting, but no where near as interesting as how the future could play out.
November 24, 2017
The book gives a pretty decent account of how the whole idea of a College from its inception in Europe to its current form in America. I particularly enjoyed the exploration of MOOCs and how they could change the college experience as we know it in the next couple of decades.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 88 reviews