| > An education should not cost that much. This is true, but it is not the root cause of the problem - and it is a distraction from the issue because it places the blame on providers. In the past, there was no significant incentive for the cost of higher education to increase at the pace we've seen for the last 20-30 years. The big mistake was pushing for individual loans for each student to pay for college rather than subsidizing the system. This created distorted incentives where schools needed to spend money on "extra" things to attract students who had money to spend, rather than trying to push down the cost of providing quality education to each student. Schools that didn't invest would not attract paying customers. Providing the level of service & extra amenities students expect is expensive, and carries a lot of overhead support cost from administrative staff. > making the process of educating less costly by using technology Technology is not a silver bullet. The cost of delivering education at scale is not where the waste is. Much like the healthcare sector, there is a huge administrative infrastructure at every school dedicated to facilitating a complex system of loans, grants, scholarships, individual payments, etc., for accounting. These jobs are unlikely to be eliminated with automation. The best answer is to make them unnecessary outright. > if a degree was about what you know, not just a credential A degree has never been about what you know, otherwise we'd award them to everyone who has equivalent work and life experience. But it's also not just a credential. The value of college is not limited to the academic requirements. A society benefits from an informed and educated populace, and from the personal growth that happens when smart folks learn together. That isn't to say that the country club lifestyle of American colleges today is providing services worth the cost... |
Personally I want there to be more coop learning. Combining democratic resources like wikibooks / open courseware and like minded individuals that want to learn the same things, plus a potential volunteer veteran or two, and for a lot of people that can produce a much better education than an overpriced book and lecture seminar with standardized testing ever could. For others, apprenticeship may be optimal. Or fully automated programs like Code Academy or Khan's Academy might be best for some, where they learn best through self-enforcement and learn-at-your-own-pace self pacing.
One of the largest takeaways from the past twenty years should be that trying to push a generation through traditional lecture-based coursework in classical university settings is not a one size fits all solution to education, and that it did not work - this article presents plenty of statistics denoting the failure of that model.
Edit: Side note, I think Stack Overflow is a great model for tutelage in the future. That is basically what it already is for the entire software community, and they have expanded the model into many other disciplines - that kind of ask a question, the community decides on the best answer, and once solved is locked / memorialized for others to easily find when they themselves encounter the same question is immensely valuable. It would be revolutionary to get most people answering their own questions through resources like that.