Sunday, August 25, 2013

I'm Skeptical of Online Education

Recently, there's been some debate in the blogosphere about the merits of online education. The current hot thing is something called a “massively open online course,” or MOOC for short. According to wikipedia, an MOOC is “an online course aimed at large-scale interactive participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as videos, readings, and problem sets, MOOCs provide interactive user forums that help build a community for the students, professors, and teaching assistants.” The premise behind MOOCs is that they are a way for large numbers of students to take a course online at the same time, lowering the cost per student dramatically. Optimists hope that the technology behind online education will allow universities to serve far more students at far lower prices than traditional education models. This could disrupt the current trend of rapidly rising tuition costs, which are of course accompanied by rapidly rising levels of student debt.

There are two things that I believe will be shown to be true of online education:

1) Online education, once the problems have been worked out of it, will be just as good at teaching most subjects as traditional educational methods. The best approach may or may not be the MOOC, I don't know. But I don't see any compelling reason why you can't teach most courses online.

2) Employers won't care that the students are learning the material just as well online. Online degrees will be treated as second-class long after they have caught up to traditional classes in educational effectiveness.


I think that the real truth behind higher education is that the age-old complaint of, “I'm never going to use this stuff in real life!” is somewhat accurate. Employers don't hire college graduates because they learned tons of valuable skills in their college courses. A pretty recent study showed that only 27 percent of college grads work in an area that is strictly related to their major.

This doesn't mean that the degree is useless. Many employers have job openings that are only available to college graduates, but then don't care very much what the degree is. For employers, a college degree isn't really about the specific job-related skills the employee learned in school (obviously for some jobs, for instance engineering jobs, this is different). Many employers understand that the skills specific to their workplace are things that will have to be learned on the job anyway. Instead, a college degree is a filter, used to quickly separate people with potential from people without potential. So in a very real sense, if everybody has a college degree, employers will stop caring about it.

Why do employers use degrees this way? There are a lot of reasons. First, people with degrees (particularly degrees from prestigious institutions) tend to be from well-off educated families. Since the employer and other workers are all from such families, they are much more comfortable working with someone from a similar background. This reason is pure classism: going to college is something the “right people” do, and people who haven't are not the “right people,” regardless of how effective they might really be.

Also, having a degree from a brick-and-mortar college says a lot about a person. In order to succeed, a student has to learn how to make a schedule and follow it effectively, showing up for classes and doing assignments on time. Online courses treat the inconvenience as a bug and build around it, but for employers who are trying to filter the chaff from the wheat, the inconvenience is actually a feature. It is safe to assume that anyone who emerges successfully from a college experience has at least some skill at managing their time and juggling different responsibilities.

Succeeding in college also requires students to develop some skill in dealing with authority figures. Every student has had to deal with terrible teachers who made pointlessly difficult demands. Part of college is learning how to deal with this. Students also have many opportunities in college to learn how to talk with and impress authority figures. Managing professors is a skill many students develop in their college years, and the skills can apply effectively to many other sorts of authority figures.

College is also a time where students learn to look at the world in a particular “collegey” way (for lack of a better term). This sort of collegey perspective is one that is based on an immersion into college culture. It involves personal interactions with professors and fellow students on a regular basis. It also involves a step away from the world outside college. It is hard to develop a collegey perspective without having a traditional college experience. A college perspective is probably unimportant from a pure skills standpoint. It is, however, terribly important in being able to deal with the college-educated class, because shared experience is an important factor in efficient communication. So a collegey perspective is important because everyone else working in good jobs also has a collegey perspective.

Higher education's primary function right now is NOT to teach useful, employable skills. Its main function right now is to separate the “worthy” or “meritorious” from everyone else. A piece of paper with a degree on it is a signal to employers that you are someone they want to work with because you come from a similar background and share a lot of common values and experiences. Matt Damon has a point in Good Will Hunting when he tells a Harvard student, “ you wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda' got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library.” Everything you can learn in a college course can be found in books that are dramatically cheaper than the courses themselves. Online education is nothing terribly new in this sense; there have always been ways to learn the course material of higher education without paying the premium price.

Of course, the money for Harvard isn't really wasted. Spending $150,000 on an education proves that you're the sort of person who thinks an education is worth $150,000. If you go on a scholarship, it proves that you're smart, determined, and know how to work the system. That is a message that is received loud and clear by employers. College graduates hire other college graduates because its a club of like-minded individuals, and the college experience itself is as much like a long, expensive hazing ritual as it is a devoted educational experience.

No comments:

Post a Comment