Burn Baby Burn
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Note there is additional new material at the end of this column — Bob
I am old — so old that when I was a college freshman there were dormitories filled with men and others filled with women but no dormitories at all filled with both men and women, at least not where I went to school. The women had it so bad that there was literally a time clock for signing-in and -out under the stern gaze of an old biddy tending the front desk — a desk she was determined that I, in particular, would NEVER get past.
And yet I did.
There was a public room for meeting visitors at the entrance of the women’s dorm, there was the front desk, and behind it the hated time clock with about a hundred paper cards — one for each resident — for punching in and out. Women had to be in their dorms (I am not making this up) by 10PM, after which the front desk closed and anyone coming-in later than that presumably went straight to jail — or to Hell — it was never made clear which.
Then one night I stole all the time cards. The biddy was gone from her post for just a moment, I vaulted the swinging gate, gathered-up all the time cards, and ran outside with my haul, which I later burned.
The cards were never replaced.
Sometimes change requires a catalyst and 39 years ago at a little college in Ohio I was that catalyst. Social mores were changing, even in Amish country, and it was only a matter of time before these same-sex barriers would fall. But still something has to happen to MAKE them fall.
I sense something similar coming for higher education in America, but this time it is likely to be the embrace of virtuality and what will go away could be the school, itself.
MIT has all its lectures available for viewing for free over the Internet. Why hasn’t some entrepreneur yet leveraged this amazing act of generosity? Some little school could outsource its entire physics department, for example, using MIT lectures and a single professor in-house. My physics department had only 2.5 professors (the .5 was the department chair who drove a cab on the side) and we didn’t have the benefit of MIT video.
There is enough good material available for free online right now that it would be easy to create a virtual university (WikiVersity?) with the only thing missing being the granting of degrees. It’s that whole “degree from MIT” thing that allows that school not to worry about sharing its lecture bounty, because in the education system lectures are viewed as worthless unless they lead to a degree.
Why is that?
My friend Richard Miller (he designed the Atari Jaguar video game console eons ago) is one of the smartest engineers I’ve ever met yet he doesn’t have a degree in engineering. Apple II designer Steve Wozniak got his degree from UC Berkeley only after leaving Apple in the early 1980s. In both cases their employers couldn’t have cared less.
What drives the education industry is producing degrees while what drives the computer industry is producing products and services.
When was the last time any employer asked to see your academic transcript? Have they ever?
What’s missing here is the higher education equivalent of a GED. Someone will come up with one, or they should, because all the other parts of the system are ready to go.
Cushing Academy, a tony prep school in western Massachusetts, is right now replacing its 20,000-volume library with a “learning center” containing 18 eBook readers, three giant TV screens, and a $12,000 espresso machine. I wonder why they need a building or even a room at all; wouldn’t it be cheaper just to give each kid an eBook reader and a Starbuck’s gift card?
We’re on the cusp of a new era where the marginal cost of insight is low enough to create new kinds of virtual education institutions. The important concept here is insight, which means more than fact, more than knowledge. It is the link between facts and knowledge, a true act of understanding that enables thinking people to create something completely new. Without insight you don’t know jack. But insight generally comes through personal connections — connections that to this point we’ve typically had to create campuses and pay $50,000 per year to enjoy.
That no longer makes sense.
Education, which — along with health care — seems to exist in an alternate economic universe, ought to be subject to the same economic realities as anything else. We should have a marketplace for insight. Take a variety of experts (both professors and lay specialists) and make them available over the Internet by video conference. Each expert charges by the minute with those charges adjusting over time until a real market value is reached. The whole setup would run like iTunes and sessions would be recorded for later review.
Remember, all lectures are also available online for free. What costs is the personal touch.
Say a particularly good professor wants to make $200,000 per year by working no more than 20 hours per week or about 1000 hours per year. That gives them a billing rate of $200 per hour.
Now look back at your university career. How much one-on-one time did you actually get with the professors who really influenced your life? I did the calculation and came up with about two hours per week, max. Imagine a four-year undergraduate career running 30 weeks per year — 120 total weeks of school — times two hours of insight per week for a total of 240 hours. At $200 per hour the cost comes to $48,000 or $12,000 per year.
That’s a huge savings compared to the $200,000+ an MIT-level education would cost today (remember the MIT online degree — there is one — costs the same as if you were attending in Cambridge). And ideally the pool of insightful experts would be far greater than any one university could ever employ. And that’s the point of this exercise; it can’t be an emulation of a traditional university, because that would inevitably disappoint — it has to be in at least one way clearly, obviously, stupendously BETTER than what’s available now.
This could happen tomorrow, the pieces are all there ready to be put together. Ironically it leverages one of the great red herrings of the Internet era — micropayments. So much could happen, we’ve all said, if only we could build a micropayment system that would actually work. Well we can, and what makes it work is that the payments at $200 per hour aren’t so micro. But they are micro enough.
It’s time to vault the gate and burn those cards… again.
Here’s an update as of Sunday night, September 6th — Bob
A number of readers have cited a feature story from Washington Monthly about an online university they see as very similar to the one I proposed above, charging only $99 per month. The story is here and the school in question is called Straighterline and I found something of a critique of the program here in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which may have an axe of its own to grind.
Straighterline is interesting and cost-effective, but it isn’t exactly what I proposed. Straighterline is more like online junior college with mainly introductory courses. this is not to say that it couldn’t become more in time and I hope it does. But to do so the company will have to take a somewhat different approach.
Straighterline has a problem with accreditation — they can’t get it. So they cut deals with no-name schools to effectively launder their credits, passing them on to third-party schools. I see nothing wrong with this but in time Straighterline or schools like it will have to take a more direct approach to the problem of gaining acceptance. The University of Phoenix did that through the simple expedient of offering real classes all over the place AND charging a lot more than $99 per month for all-you-can-learn. Exciting as that price is, it is precisely what scares the crap out of many established colleges.
If I were running Straighterline, then, I’d get ready to file a big restraint of trade lawsuit against some big vulnerable school caught up in, say, an NCAA athletic recruiting scandal. ”Pick your targets carefully,” Pa Cringely always said.
The other thing I would strongly recommend is that Straighterline put some big bucks into recruiting its own stellar faculty. Spend whatever it takes to get the top people in some discipline to start. Hire academics if you can and lay practitioners if you can’t. Most academic contracts don’t prohibit teaching part-time elsewhere and if they do try to stop the practice, well that’s just a further example of restraint of trade.
As for the traditional schools with their red brick overhead, they remind me of a crowd I spoke to years ago in Minneapolis when I tried to explain the Internet to the people who run America’s many state lotteries.
Lotteries, it turns out, are actually run by folks who used to be at the Department of Motor Vehicles. They have a monopoly in their states on gambling and are determined to pursue it as a form of sin tax. The idea that I presented in 1998 that Internet gambling could eventually hurt them was laughable: didn’t those Internet folks know the lotteries had a monopoly in their states?
Yeah, right.
My recommendation was to take their games to the Internet and appeal to potential customers outside of Illinois or Iowa, maybe grab some of that easy money from Abu Dhabi. They looked at me like I had two heads, but history has shown I was correct.
And it will be the same way with my proposed online university or with Straighterline Pro, if that ever comes to be. Education is a talent business and anyone who can gather the best talent will offer the best service and have the greatest success. This doesn’t mean that Stanford and MIT will die, far from it. But it means that some lesser institutions WILL die, while hybrid operations that are entirely new and different may well thrive.
Imagine the various higher education equivalents of drivers schools for people working-off their traffic tickets (remember Comedy Traffic School?). With a solid curriculum available online to any institution, one point of differentiation can become location (Hawaii, California, France, on ship, etc.) or ambiance (health spa, sports, luxury, religious, etc.). The classes are identical, but where do you want to drink beer, and with whom?
Maybe this seems silly, but it is also one likely future of higher education.
I am a 47 year old college drop out & autodidact. I have been working as a technician & subsequently engineer developing medical diagnostic devices for 23 years and as of June I am unemployed. To land a job doing what I was doing before I essentially need a Master’s degree. To get any sort of degree I would be required to begin exactly like an incoming 17 year old freshman student. But I am not 17 years old, I am not completely inexperienced, and I am not completely unknowing of those things taught in university for the first couple of years. Worse this process would require nearly 8 years of school, nearly putting me at retirement age at graduation.
I would welcome some sort of educational experience like this. No. I am desperate for such a thing.
[...] I, Cringely » Burn Baby Burn. Sounds like a good idea to me. [...]
You’re missing a piece I think. If I’m a, say, chemistry major, it’s not just listening to lectures, It’s doing lab work. That requires a bunch of expensive equipment and chemicals with very specific regulations and safety requirements.
I don’t think you can require every EE major to buy a fancy logic analyzer, either.
This is true for lots of disciplines. How would you handle that?
Tom (comment 2 or 3) is right.
I am a chemist, and a virtual chemistry lab, though it exists (http://www.chemcollective.org/applets/vlab.php), probably won’t have the same effect on the student as the act of making and purifying something.
It might in the future. In the meantime, we ought to consider whether we would want to eat drugs made by virtually trained chemists, fly in airplanes designed by virtually trained structural engineers and eat at restaurants operated by virtually trained chefs. It just doesn’t fly.
The model John proposes could only work for fields where the ideas are the product: software, hardware design(!), literature, history, etc.
But, the argument falls flat when one considers the fact that virtually every single one of the autodidact pioneers ultimately educated him/herself with books, ideas and lectures produced by highly qualified, degreed people. Everyone in the Manhattan project had a PhD. Wozniak was working with materials, techniques and logic developed by academics.
It’s disingenuous to use a few outliers to make the case for the larger population.
Statistically speaking, it is an insane thing to do.
Bob said … “If I were running Straighterline, then, I’d get ready to file a big restraint of trade lawsuit against some big vulnerable school caught up in, say, an NCAA athletic recruiting scandal.”
The problem with this is that it’s the (Regional) Accreditation that is imposing the “restraint of trade” and not any individual university. I’ve done a bit of research on accreditation and it’s not easy; they impose many artificial barriers in today’s world.
The Distance Education and Training Council is probably the place to start. They also have a few things that may prove to be “barriers” (i.e. they do not accredit doctoral programs); however, they would probably be more flexible. The real problem here is that many schools will not accept credits for transfer unless they come from a Regional Accrediting Agency — but that has (and will be) litigated in the courts.
Hi Bob,
While I have been a long time listener and reader, this is the first time I am sharing my knowledge with you.. There is already just such a system and has been in effect for years. From ex-pat GIs to prisoners working toward their law degrees, it is very possible to get a college degree and even an MBA without stepping foot on campus or taking a single class. (See http://www.bain4weeks.com/)
Nearly every college course has the GED equivalent that allows a student to test out of taking the class.
The material is usually covered in the syllabus and the tests are offered by a variety of testing centers and schools for about $90 for a 3 credit course. That is $30 per credit and just about $3600 for a college degree.
You can confirm the details directly with the colleges and schools mentioned and the degrees have been accepted for higher learning at most institutions.
Best regards,
Elan
Elan,
I couldn’t find the http://www.bain4week.com web site. Do you know the name of the on-line school?
Thanks, Fred
The link is bad. (There’s an extra ) that needs to be deleted. Make sure it only says bain4weeks.com and you should be fine.
Cris E
Gary North posted a similar argument last month (http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north748.html) well worth reading.
My take away: The marginal cost of insight. Insight as understanding. Understanding as acceptance of a new cognitive structure. Acceptance as facilitated by relationship with someone who can serve as an adult guarantor or guide.
Your comments about who are our teachers in this sense leads me to realize that (a) our teachers are everywhere and (b) that they can provide this guidance and acceptance through writing. I remember bumping into the works of Mary Midgley, the British humanist philosopher, when my son brought her books home from college. One of her titles, appropriate for this discussion is Wisdom, Information and Wonder. Mary pours brilliance and humor into her arguments. And just the fact I use her first name says a lot about the “thou” in my relationship to her books.
I wonder if, in the golden future of online universities, it won’t be writing that dominates the vetting process. In other words, those who can’t write first rate English (US) won’t make the cut.
Great article. Nice one Bob.
What about http://www.wgu.edu ?
Western Governors University is a fully accredited online university that allows even testing out many IT certifications as finals tests for their related classes.
Further they have a fully accredited teaching program. From what I understand they’re one of the better online schools and only cost about $6000 per year. Plus books of course…
WGU Rocks…challenging courses and flexible schedule..the cost is mor in line with the costs of a traditional university.
The College-Level Examination Program® (CLEP) gives you the opportunity to receive college credit for what you already know by earning qualifying scores on any of 34 examinations. Earn credit for knowledge you’ve acquired through independent study, prior course work, on-the-job training, professional development, cultural pursuits, or internships.
http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/clep/about.html
[...] I, Cringely: Information technology reporter Robert X. Cringely asks why academic education hasn’t faced the price drops other industries connected to IT have faced: MIT has all its lectures available for viewing for free over the Internet. Why hasn’t some entrepreneur yet leveraged this amazing act of generosity? Some little school could outsource its entire physics theory department, for example, using MIT lectures and a single professor in-house. My physics theory department had only 2.5 professors (the .5 was the department chair who drove a cab on the side) and we didn’t have the benefit of MIT video. [...]
Overall, I think Cringley has misread the higher education system.
First, there’s a tendency in this country to gloss over social interactions in the name of “merit.” We like to think as Americans that everything depends on just how good you are, so if you can just pass that test, then success will arrive at your door. This is simply not true. A good deal of success comes from knowing the right people, and by going to Harvard or MIT (which getting into is to a good degree merit based), you are exposed to those people and gain a good deal of recognition in those types of circles by being part of that network. People forget that Steve Jobs was working for Atari when he set off to start Apple, and without those contacts he probably wouldn’t have been as successful. Sure, smart people without degrees have done a lot, but you ignore the networks they were in at the time.
Second, on the research front, “graduate schools” are first and foremost schools. What the professors are teaching when not lecturing undergrads is how to do research. In science and engineering fields, undergraduate work gives you the basic technical education and prepares you to learn more either in practice or in research. Graduate school picks up from there and teaches you how to be a scientist (i.e., formulating problems and applying the scientific method). And in doing the research, knowledge is created, which is then taught to students, etc. So, deep down, knowledge creation is just as much a part of the university as knowledge teaching.
Lastly, speaking as a former TA, it annoys me to see the usual “interaction with professors” thrown about as if interaction with TAs is worthless. Students get a TON of one-on-one interaction from TAs in the form of office hours and recitations. To imply that two hours a week of face time with a professor could substitute for that (for how many courses, four?) is off the mark considerably. And who are those TAs? Other high quality students at the high quality universities. And the classmates helping each other with homework? Also high quality students. There’s no guarantee of that at totally open enrollment online universities.
What OCW and the similar materials provide is greater access to materials and teaching methods to allow outsiders to improve their teaching, but by no means is it nearly a replacement for the interaction of a campus.
Scott: My physics TA at Pitt in 1983 couldn’t speak English, so how did that contribute to my education? He was great at writing the math down, but past that we were on our own in that lab.
Phil: Well, I’d guess no other experience has had quite the same effect on your bias regarding all those foreign heathen physicists who are stealing our best research jobs.
-Wang-Lo.
[...] and these texts would be right at the start of the course. Jane (I think) pointed me to Bob Cringely’s scorching warning to the education industry. I don’t think Cringely is quite right about most of what he says, but [...]
I think you are looking at the problem from the wrong angle. A university education is expensive because of the high cost structure of almost all universities. They have large physical plants with large non-academic staffs and do many non-academic activities (such as sports.) Cut out these expenses and the cost per year with even excellent teachers would be $10,000 per year.
Full disclosure first: I work at a major, traditionally-formed, land-grant American university.
But before you flip the “Biased, cluelessly mired in the past” bozo bit, consider one thing: Bob talks about student-professor interaction as if it can be distilled down to the imparting of insight, and sold in concentrated form in a sort of vending machine.
I’m here to tell you it doesn’t work that way. Yes, two brilliant people can encounter each other and have a light-bulb moment in five minutes’ talk. But these are outliers, not the mode, nor even the upper quartile. Let’s not even consider variations in intelligence, prior knowledge, and social skills among the students for now, other than to point out that concentrating the access to professors would only exacerbate the disadvantages for those who’re lacking in one or more of those.
What about those insights, the “aha” moments? Can you distill your interaction with a professor down to just the good stuff? I submit that you cannot — the insights come as a result of a relationship, not a transaction. It’s a human process, messy and inefficient at its best. Expecting that students can hit a teacher for ten minutes’ high-octane interaction on demand, without spending previous time together, is like hoping you can streamline software development by only writing the GOOD code — “Don’t waste any time writing bugs or tests or talking to people about requirements, ‘K thx bye.”
That said…we sure streamlined code writing a ton in the past ten years. I sure hope we can make do with less classroom time, because from the way swine flu is hitting this campus, we’re gonna be launching a little distance learning experiment this fall willy-nilly, ready or not.
What about National University in San Diego? Fully accredited and most of their content is online. Their cost to complete a degree, at less than $15,000 per year, is only a little higher than you suggested.
[...] the enormous potential for new modes of learning was recently discussed by Anna Kamenetz and Bob Cringely. Not everyone needs, or can afford, a college education that comes repleat with sport teams, [...]
“When was the last time any employer asked to see your academic transcript? Have they ever?” Bob, I love just about everything you do, but Google does ask for your academic transcript. At least they used to
.
Don Smith: I interviewed at Google two years ago and they never asked for my academic transcript. Nor has anyone. Ever.
From my college experience (at least as an undergrad) I learned almost as much from fellow students as from professors. (In fact, with one particularly useless thermodynamics professor, I learned everything from a fellow student.) Obviously it isn’t necessary to shell out thousands of dollars a year to meet other brilliant people, but I wonder how to get that same peer learning effect in a virtual school.
[...] – http://www.cringely.com/2009/09/burn-baby-burn/ [...]
[...] http://www.cringely.com/2009/09/burn-baby-burn/ [...]
[...] Source: I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Burn Baby Burn – Cringely on Technology [...]
[...] Cringely hops on the higher-education-is-screwed meme in Burn Baby Burn [via]: Education, which — along with health care — seems to exist in an alternate economic [...]
[...] The education sector is facing a hurdle similar to the newspaper industry, where the available distribution technology wasn’t taken seriously until they were already lagging behind. The future to act is now, but [...]
[...] The education sector is facing a hurdle similar to the newspaper industry, where the available distribution technology wasn’t taken seriously until they were already lagging behind. The future to act is now, but [...]
[...] Robert Cringley joins other prophets in predicting the downfall of post-2ndary education…great quote: “What drives the education industry is producing degrees while what drives the computer industry is producing products and services.” Substitute “computer” for any industry and you got cause for concern. [...]
I think despite the credit laundering aspects of online schools, distance learning would be the way to progress in academics for many students. While current emphasis is on accreditation of a given course or even a department, I am sure the model will achieve maturity in the fullness of time to include more metrics for validation.
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You’re missing a piece I think. If I’m a, say, chemistry major, it’s not just listening to lectures, It’s doing lab work. That requires a bunch of expensive equipment and chemicals with very specific regulations and safety requirements.
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I don’t think you can require every EE major to buy a fancy logic analyzer, either.
This is true for lots of disciplines. How would you handle that?
You know, I gotta tell you, I genuinely relish this website and the great insight. I find it to be energizing and very educational. I wish there were more blogs like it. Anyway, I felt it was about time I posted a comment on I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Burn Baby Burn – Cringely on technology – I just wanted to say that you did a great job on this. Cheers mate!
You know, I have to tell you, I really enjoy this site and the informative insight. I find it to be energizing and very educational. I wish there were more blogs like it. Anyhow, I finally decided to write a comment on I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Burn Baby Burn – Cringely on technology – I just wanna tell you that you did a great job on this. Cheers mate!
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