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Thursday, May 1, 2014

My Morning with Higher Education "Hackers"

These [traditional colleges and universities] are organizations that were essentially designed in the 19th century under conditions of resource scarcity that simply do not exist today. And they are in a profound state of denial about all of this. To start, they grossly underestimate how much of the education they currently provide is already wholly replaceable by a simple broadcast model. Every aspect of the standard lower division lecture course…can now be perfectly replicated online today and distributed at no marginal cost.
[…]
Now, if you can get colleges to admit this, which is hard, they will then sort of fall back on assertions that are rooted in the intangible, the ineffable, the unprovable, and the ‘you just kind of have to be here to understand.’ …whatever the benefits of things like being on the campus and interpersonal interactions with professors may be—and to be clear, those are real benefits that people have—colleges have absolutely no evidence that would meet their own standards of scholarship credibly estimating or quantifying the size of those benefits. None. If you don’t believe me, try asking them sometime.
-Kevin Carey, Director of the Education Policy Program, New America Foundation

As I listened to these claims, I cocked my head to the side and furrowed my eye brows. No evidence whatsoever that being on campus and interacting with professors is measurably beneficial, you say? My heart began to race and my palms became sweaty. I wanted to immediately raise my hand and politely yet firmly declare: “Excuse me?” Saying nothing, I waited until a more appropriate moment to challenge the speaker—a moment that never arrived. As a higher education scholar, I knew that there is a massive body of literature demonstrating the various positive effects of the residential college on student learning. In fact, there is an entire field of study predicated upon the analysis of the relationship between various experiences in college and student development. My sense of outrage was boiling, and it was just 9:30 in the morning. This was just the beginning of a planned three-hour event titled “Hacking the University: Will Tech Fix Higher Education?” co-sponsored by Slate and Arizona State University. It was going to be a long three hours.

The event was structured like many others that regularly take place in our nation’s capital. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the think tank and policy center circus, let me provide a brief overview of how these events work. Typically, you arrive to a nondescript office building on a lettered street and enter the lobby. You are asked by a security officer to sign in and present identification, after which you proceed to whichever floor the organization occupies. There is usually a room is set up to film the event and, like the much maligned lecture, broadcast it over the web at no marginal cost. In the front of the room is frequently—and ironically—a podium and stage on which the sages sit, usually in front of a screen or wallpaper with the organization’s name plastered all over it. We should wonder why these organizations are so wild about MOOCs. They've been doing this for years. You enter the room, perhaps partake in the free refreshments and take note of the largely white audience starring at their cell phones and iPads. You get the sense very quickly that this is not a space designed for dialogue, and you wonder whether you have any right to be there.

After the first speaker, whose job was to explain why higher education is broken, Robert Wright, a Princeton professor and Future Tense Fellow at the New America Foundation described his experience teaching a MOOC for the first time. He then moderated a panel on technological advances related to the delivery of higher education. One of the panelists, Jeff Selingo, author of College (Un)bound and frequent speaker at events like this, argued that higher education is a one-size-fits-all system trying to accommodate an ever more diverse population of students. There was the standard debate about MOOCs and the obligatory nod to Clayton Christensen. After all, you can’t have a legitimate higher education reform panel without at least one reference to “disruptive innovation.” Perhaps the most intriguing comments came from Robin Goldberg, Chief Marketing Officer for the Minerva Project. Although the Minerva Project seems to be designed to educate a cohort of elite, global cosmopolitans and not affordably educate millions of Americans, I wanted to hear more about the institution’s heavy investment in faculty and curricula development. At this point in the day, nearing 10:30AM, my heart had returned to resting pace. My sense of indignation slowly dissolved. It was like hearing a story told by your grandfather for the umpteenth time. We get it, pop. Technology will rescue us from this apocalypse.

In the short time between the panel and the next speaker, I moseyed to the refreshments. Since I’m still an underpaid graduate student for a few months, I had a larger than average share of free coffee, leaving me dangerously caffeinated when the next speaker walked to the podium. Bryan Caplan, professor of economics at George Mason University, was tasked with presenting the first “hack.” Even as a young person, the notion of “hack” was somewhat unfamiliar. I associated it with breaking into a secure database or doing something that would result in permanent exile to Russia. Sheepishly, I did quick Wikipedia search, just to make sure I was on the same page as the speaker. I was disappointed to learn that “hack” did not, in fact, refer to a method of training young falcons. Instead, it seemingly means solving a problem. Thus, we begin with the assumption that higher education is a terribly expensive and ineffective monstrosity that, despite educating nearly everyone in the room, needs to be altered so that future generations can’t participate in the wasteful, non-vocational experiences that the rest of us did. And how does Dr. Caplan believe higher education should be fixed? Naturally, cut government funding and make it more expensive to attend. Recommence indignation.

Dr. Caplan’s contention is that we need to scrutinize the true function of higher education. Doing so reveals that higher education is basically a signaling mechanism. Echoing a theme that repeated throughout the event, there is no actual learning that takes place in colleges and universities. People simply attend to signal social normalness and a baseline level of intelligence to get a job. Because more people are attending college, the credentials needed to secure employment are escalating, such that we are obtaining degrees for jobs whose responsibilities do not truly require additional education. His proposal was that, due to the fact that higher education is socially wasteful, the government should stop funding it. This is perhaps unsurprising since Caplan is affiliated with the Mercatus Center, which labels itself “the world’s premier university source for market-oriented ideas.” It’s unclear where this center would be housed if, as Caplan argues, the government stopped funding public universities like George Mason. Once again, my experience as a higher education scholar made Caplan’s argument difficult to stomach. There is a large quantity of scholarship showing the positive externalities of a college-educated citizenry. In other words, we have quite a lot of empirical findings to support the idea that higher education is not socially wasteful. Heck, there is even good evidence of the economic returns to government investment in higher education. I’m not even talking about individual returns on investment. Communities prosper economically when there is a thriving anchor institution like an accessible public university nearby. This is an idea that sparks debate, but it clearly has disastrous public policy ramifications. So much so that we should wonder why this "hack" is considered at all.  

At this point in the morning, I was angry. I couldn't wait to roast Dr. Caplan and drop knowledge bombs. I started formulating questions and comments in my mind. I started to get nervous because I wanted so badly to persuade the audience that what they were hearing was one-sided hogwash. Alas, the feelings were left to fester, as there would be no time for questions until after the next “hack” was presented. Amy Laitinen, Deputy Director of the Education Policy Program, offered reasons why the credit hour was a poor measure of student learning. I actually found this “hack” compelling and learned interesting facts about the historical origins of the credit hour. Apparently, it was devised as a way to delimit faculty workloads and was never designed to serve as a proxy for student learning. By this point, however, I was heavily distracted by my burning need to say something. My chance came after a short panel discussion that effectively made the point that a degree is increasingly irrelevant in the “tech economy.” The main proponent of this view was Michael Gibson, Vice President for Grants at the Thiel Foundation. This is the foundation, you might recall, that gives money to high school students if they forego college and work on projects or startups instead. I set aside my complaints that the “tech economy” is a poor reflection of the true economy and, in any case, may be more discourse than structural reality. Finally, the floor was opened to questions and my hand shot up.

My question and subsequent comment fell out, uncontrollably, like groceries through a wet paper bag. My voice shook ever so slightly. I felt so convinced of what I was saying, but its ineloquence left me rattled. Did I just blow my opportunity? My question and comment were partially answered, then the panelists pivoted to other topics. And that was it; the world kept turning. I spaced out during the remainder of the event. There was another “hack” related to math education, and a halfhearted effort to reconcile the continued conflicts between technology and educational disparities.

I was principally consumed by a single question. Why did I care so much? Why was asserting my rightness and their wrongness such an enveloping priority? I began to reflect upon what brought me to this event in the first place and what role I should play as an academic. For the most part, I came to sate my curiosity and begin tracing the ideas circulating within higher education’s reform-industrial complex. However, I also wanted to engage in the conversation, publicly, and to affirm that higher education scholars have a place at the table. That our knowledge is valuable and should be informing the conversation.

Walking away from the event, I felt helpless and defeated. There is a war raging in the world of higher education policy over the future of colleges and universities. My aim was to fight the good fight, but I learned a valuable lesson: choose your battles wisely. Engagement comes in many shapes and sizes, and my greatest contributions to challenging the faulty claims I heard is likely not through raising my hand or allowing every talking head to infuriate me. It is instead through careful thought, provocative writing, empirical research, and good teaching. If I can do that, I wish the machines the best of luck in replacing me.

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