I was driving back from Maryland to Pennsylvania on Black Friday when I tuned in to Steve Levitt’s Freakonomics podcast. Typically I don’t associate my mood or the setting with podcasts the way I do with music. But that changed as I listened to Levitt and his guest, Michael D. Smith.
Many thanks, Jill. It does increasingly seem like higher ed is increasingly part of larger economic systems that aren't trending toward equality. Smith is troubled by this, too, but obviously I think his idea of what could turn the tide is seriously misguided.
It made me connect some of your ideas to Ted Goia's The Honest Broker piece about economics of art v. entertainment. Entertainment eats the arts. Distraction eats entertainment. Addiction eats distraction. The emerging model makes for a disturbing vision.
Thank you, Josh. This essay is thoughtful, eloquent, and deeply humane, as your work always is. I might note what for me was always one other element of the mentor (as opposed to superstar) model of higher education at its best: its mutuality. I never taught a class in which I didn't learn from brilliant students like you, who pushed me to go beyond the sometimes-narrow horizons of my training, just as my own mentors did at both the undergraduate and graduate level. The best students in my classes were always an essential part of my continuing professional development--and enduring friendships with them were a wonderful bonus.
Thank you, Stephen. I wonder how much I have contributed to your learning, compared to what I gleaned from you, but I did enjoy the other half of this equation many times as a teacher.
These two students knocked my socks off near the end of my time at Central College. One of them fundamentally changed the way I see Cather's relationship to Czech culture (particularly her use of xenophobic stereotypes about drunk, impulsive, and animalistic Bohemians). That is really saying something, since my whole professional arc was changed by reading "My Ántonia" in your course! I'd been wedding to a romantic idea about Cather as a champion of Czechs for so long that I'd been blinded to some dimensions of her texts. Those kinds of awakenings are what it's all about.
Josh, I think you know already how much I agree with you. Worth noting that Smith is a professor of public policy and management, someone who by profession and disposition is likely to envision education according to the terms he does and not humanistically. The misperception and categorical confusion in post-secondary education, to my mind -- I've focused on this point for a long time -- is the mistaken framing of it as a unitary educational experience. It isn't. That's no revolutionary insight. In various ways at different times, we've understood this in the U.S. It is well understood in many other societies. Agricultural colleges, technical colleges, early junior colleges before they became community colleges, all were expressions of this.
For very significant numbers of people, always or just at a relevant time in their lives, non-liberal arts, technical, career, and STEM education is the goal and does not require the kind of humanistic relationship we prize. It's always a benefit but not necessarily required if the student is self-motivated and capably self-instructed using provided resources. In physical classrooms or remotely as Smith projects current developments into the future, this is a different educational mission than liberal arts education including deep exposure to the humanities -- and the sciences, too, understanding how both contribute to one grand mission of advancing human knowledge.
We're never going to get post-secondary education right again if we can't consistently manifest a clear understanding of the these differently valuable missions. And that is even before, though not necessarily separate from, confusions that come with various commercial conceptions of higher education.
What do civilization's oldest educational paradigms show us? Not just what's learned, but the process of learning it -- and the relationship with the teacher, the mentor, the master.
Beautifully said, Jay. And you're quite right about certain kinds of programs or subjects lending themselves better to a variety of delivery methods. My mother, who graduated from Western Governors University later in life, has seen the impact of degrees like that on employment in rural areas. So those credentials can be difference makers for people, spelling the difference between poverty and security.
I suppose my larger point is that even with expanded access to college or to "top" professors, social mobility remains limited in all the ways it formerly was. The real solution is public education -- giving every child a chance to maximize their potential -- and federal support of an affordable college education, so that opportunity extends beyond K-12. I still get defensive comments on my homeschooling thread from parents who claim their kids are doing better than they would be in school. But homeschooling for many is an expression of privilege, and their talented kids are taken out of the peer group for other less privileged kids. Then the class gap widens further.
I don't think the oldest education paradigm should only be available to the privileged. Smith's anecdote about the guidance counselor pulling a back door favor for his kids at a reach school says everything you need to know.
Your late question in the article on the curation of superstar professor lists hits home.
My intellectual tradition, American philosophy, was colonized by the majority English-speaking tradition, Anglo-American or "Analytic" philosophy decades ago. Now, there are only two majors colleges left in North America that teach the tradition, despite wide recognition of the value and power of the tradition ... because almost everyone else intellectually appropriates from it.
My point is that what determines "superstar" is almost exclusively access to privilege, and worse, that privilege shapes the discourse of what counts as important. Perhaps you're familiar with the social construction of knowledge? Well, in my field the conquerors continually erase their competition and then raise their ideas from the dead through appropriation.
This is something you don't touch on. That is, how prestige shapes what counts as knowledge, and how turbo-charging that ... well ... I suspect that you know all this, but just haven't touched on it.
Yes, I used Helen Longino's "Science as Social Knowledge" in my dissertation :).
You're quite right about prestige shaping what "counts." Some of this is implied in my skepticism about who curates the top professor list and in my footnote about scarcity. I ran out of space to include this anecdote, but Smith cites an example from the University of Chicago, where Steve Levitt apparently drew a huge class one year (300 students) and then was "arbitrarily" capped at 80 the next year. Smith claims the ego of Levitt's colleagues was to blame -- they were jealous and didn't like the competition. But that example is a microcosm of what you're describing in the field more generally. Levitt's book and podcast make him a celebrity, so students gravitate to him. But that doesn't make his ideas 100X more superior than his colleagues' -- the institution has every right to think about a more moderate enrollment model, which privileges the expertise offered by all of its faculty, not just one superstar. That itself represents a potential diversity problem -- fewer "top" voices, rather than a more bustling marketplace of ideas, means actually inferior knowledge in the end.
I might have drifted afield of your point a bit. But as I say in my reply to David, I'm struggling with this in a lot of spaces: as an academic coach, as an independent writer, as a small business owner. Because I can't trade on a Harvard PhD, certain coaching spaces are closed off to me (see Admyssion). No one will be impressed by where I got my degrees, so I only recruit clients based on the proof of concept they see in my own writing. There is a lot of outsized influence among top professors that allows ideas to spread without real competition, because the competition has been shut out long ago as irrelevant.
Pedigree Insanity: Every day in Athens, GA I drive past a house that has an sign in front of it promising relief from smoking and other addictions. The selling point: the person doing the counseling/etc. in that house brags on the sign that they are "Harvard-trained." Does one really need a Harvard-trained expert to help them break the nicotine addiction? What in the hell does a Hahvahd pedigree have to do with this particular outcome? I laugh every time I go past that sign.
That addiction expert is just leveraging scarcity! I envision a world where more Harvard-trained experts are available online to more people struggling with addiction...
That kind of crass marketing does feel rather like overcompensating for something.
Levitt and Smith discuss an antidote to pedigree filtering in skills-based hiring. Putting someone through a series of tests or challenges to see what they can do, rather than vetting them based on where they got their degree seems like a step in the right direction.
I agree that certain skills are not "scalable" to reach mass audiences, and being a learned teacher, e.g., a PhD is one of those skills. The tip of pyramids in many fields seems to be getting smaller and the bases getting wider (angles more obtuse or more acute? I was always bad at geometry!)
And I'm not sure what can stop that continuing to happen in academia. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about what can be done.
Thank you, David. I'm not an economist, and so it's hard for me to propose models for "the system." But I think the way it once worked was with substantial state and federal support. Pell Grants, Stafford Loans, and other programs made it possible for me to attend college without life-crushing debt. And this in turn made it possible for teachers like Stephen to make a decent living (although not fully adequate to what he gave, he did teach during a time when faculty salaries even at small college kept up with the cost of living).
I believe the older system also had a more collective philosophy. Departments like English that never graduated the most majors per faculty member were understood to provide a broader service to the university through a core curriculum. There might have been some grumbling about "when am I ever going to use this," but there was a general institutional consensus about shared values, including exposure to a range of disciplines. Now the institutions themselves are willing to throw their own faculty under the bus, either by replacing the courses they teach with transfer credit, by abolishing the distributional core, or by allocating funding for faculty lines purely based on enrollment.
So I think both of those things have to be in place: public support and institutional buy-in. The world that Smith describes is much more like the world of college athletics, where players put their NIL deals and the perpetual allure of the transfer portal ahead of the team. The more course content becomes uncoupled from institutional affiliation, the more professors with substantial name recognition and influence can cash in. But a teacher who is not a celebrity or some kind of bestselling author or podcaster, but who might offer an unforgettable classroom experience, is going to be left behind or shoved to the middle or bottom of the pyramid.
I'm seeing this even in the academic coaching space, where people can trade on their degree for advising students on their admissions process. Admyssion is one of these sites where faculty can earn hundreds of dollars per hour advising prospective students. But only if they teach at one of the approved schools (mostly Ivies, but some selective publics). So the rich get richer, and the handshakes stay in-house. It's pretty frustrating!
"Imagine a world in which ten of the country’s top history professors made their lectures and exams available online for a fee that didn’t require exclusive matriculation at a single university."
That already exists. The Great Courses is a company that offers high-quality video lectures on a wide range of subjects. They are expertly produced, much better than almost anything that brick-and-mortar institutions can offer, and if you wait for the sales (which are frequent) you can get a 12-hour course for about $60, which is way below what any college or university will charge. The variety of courses is enormous, and you can pick and choose the topics that interest you. This isn't an advertisement for the company, and I have no relation with them other than I've spent literally thousands of dollars on their products and it's always been well worth it. But it is astonishing to read a statement like Smith's which reveals a complete lack of understanding.
Great point, Theodore. I think Smith is suggesting something rather different, but you help me make my point. While it's true that The Great Courses prefers professors with elite credentials, I don't think they make any claim to offering material by the "top" professors. Of course, I see any rankings of that sort as somewhat arbitrary. Oates is a major American writer, but who decides the metric that establishes her as one of the greats? How does one determine who the "top" professors are in History? Can someone teach at a land grant university and still claim that status?
The other claim that Smith makes, which The Great Courses model does not even pretend to offer, is a kind of social leveling. Somehow if you can take a Yale professor's online course, Smith feels, the scarcity of admission to Yale is removed. Except that if you're paying a discount rate for content, everyone knows that it's not the same as what a Yale student receives, in which case all the class dividers and gates of access remain firmly in place.
I don't know your background, but it sounds like you have completed Great Courses for your own personal enrichment, not in pursuit of a credential. Nor would you show your transcript from The Great Courses to anyone in hopes that it might open career opportunities formerly closed to you. And if all of that is true, then your experience illustrates my skepticism about Smith's dream that virtual education would usher in a more democratic model for higher ed.
This is exactly the kind of experience I had in mind. What a great opportunity for these two young scholars--not least of all to know that they helped to deepen your thinking about what has long been a seminal text for you!
One other thought: doesn't this all come back down to the great unanswered question of higher education: *what is its purpose*? For those who define it in terms of knowledge or skills acquisition--everyone from the economists to the STEM education research community--then efficiencies driven by technology are indeed possible. For those who define it in terms of maturity, humanity, or soul-making, then technology-driven efficiencies are not only harder to attain, but those efficiencies actually gut the whole purpose of the system. I side with the latter, because I don't think that our nation's or world's problems derive primarily in a lack of knowledge or skills, but instead result from a lack of humanity among those with the knowledge, skills, and/or position to be able to make a difference.
Good points -- some disciplines lend themselves better than others to virtual delivery and the kinds of "check-ins" or assessments that can measure mastery in that form. I know of no shortcuts to teaching writing, because you can't isolate parts from the whole very well. Same for the discussion of literature. I've thought about creating on-demand or synchronous versions of my most popular courses, such as Personal Essay and Illness and Health in Literature, to see if I could tap into some demand in the creator economy. But those were popular courses because of in-person dynamics (relationship building) that can't be easily uncoupled from the content. The trust required for real growth in a creative writing class is much more difficult to build online.
The other point, John, is that I think our academic institutions can't afford to answer that question about higher ed's purpose in any way other than "both/and." If STEM folks want to rejigger the whole system because it makes sense for their content and allow humanities and social sciences to wither on the vine, that's not a collective win.
And I might say that neursocience doesn't support the efficacy of disembodied learning through tech. Embodied understanding through the guidance of a mentor matters just as much in STEM as it does in the humanities. I don't know of a single brain scientist who would disagree.
The Shamification of Higher Ed.... We can see some elements of the sham already, if we have been in or still are part of academia, but this book (which I have not read) sounds like it's a bit off-base, to say the very least. The adjuncts who sign on to online-only degree mills should be solicited for comment, btw. Those I am familiar with allow very little teaching by their adjuncts, replacing the autonomy and intellectual work with templates, benchmarks, constructed learning-management shells, rigid assessment of how adjuncts are marking (are they keeping to the required templates?), how often adjuncts are communicating with students, etc. These adjuncts are typically paid for a ceiling of hours (10/12 per week for each course, maybe a couple more hours if enrollment is over, say, 15).
It somehow still amazes me that instead of suggesting some overhauls to bogus capitalism and capitalism-driven modes, learned professors will instead just suggest more Taylorism and false 'equity' in order to extend our collective shamification, McDonaldization, and mechanization. [Sorry for all my professorial concepts.]
Ah, I first read "shamification" as "shame." Here's Josh again, crying for shame, higher ed, for shame! 😂
But, yes, "degree mills" is a good term. McDonaldization and such.
I don't think the solution is terribly complicated in theory. Robust public education and federal subsidies for college would move the needle considerably more than free market solutions, which will end up being opportunistic and will only hasten the class divides.
"He did a postdoc at Los Alamos and has held a variety of adjunct faculty positions, but his full-time role is Physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. I don’t pretend to understand much about his work, which often seems Matrix-like, but we both came of age in Montana and we represent the past success and enduring promise of public education."
NIST being compared to The Matrix is a little funny. It is more like a very elaborate place where scales are developed, sometimes using lasers and weights to measure the minutest amounts of matter to calibrate instruments, so they can measure other instruments and things. It's like the Matrix for atoms, I guess, since they probably use quantum computers for atomic clocks, but not WHOLE PEOPLE ;)
Haha -- yes, that was meant to be self-deprecating. Josh P has been quite patient with my scientific ignorance over the years. "It's like the Matrix for atoms" -- I love that! Though part of me likes the image of my friend as the man behind the curtain, shaping the reality we all take for granted. There's more than a grain of truth in that.
Important story. Beautifully written. Belongs in the New Yorker.
Thank you, Bob -- that means a lot coming from a discerning reader like you.
Thanks for giving voice to so many of my own concerns regarding the direction of higher education.
Many thanks, Jill. It does increasingly seem like higher ed is increasingly part of larger economic systems that aren't trending toward equality. Smith is troubled by this, too, but obviously I think his idea of what could turn the tide is seriously misguided.
It made me connect some of your ideas to Ted Goia's The Honest Broker piece about economics of art v. entertainment. Entertainment eats the arts. Distraction eats entertainment. Addiction eats distraction. The emerging model makes for a disturbing vision.
Thank you, Josh. This essay is thoughtful, eloquent, and deeply humane, as your work always is. I might note what for me was always one other element of the mentor (as opposed to superstar) model of higher education at its best: its mutuality. I never taught a class in which I didn't learn from brilliant students like you, who pushed me to go beyond the sometimes-narrow horizons of my training, just as my own mentors did at both the undergraduate and graduate level. The best students in my classes were always an essential part of my continuing professional development--and enduring friendships with them were a wonderful bonus.
Thank you, Stephen. I wonder how much I have contributed to your learning, compared to what I gleaned from you, but I did enjoy the other half of this equation many times as a teacher.
These two students knocked my socks off near the end of my time at Central College. One of them fundamentally changed the way I see Cather's relationship to Czech culture (particularly her use of xenophobic stereotypes about drunk, impulsive, and animalistic Bohemians). That is really saying something, since my whole professional arc was changed by reading "My Ántonia" in your course! I'd been wedding to a romantic idea about Cather as a champion of Czechs for so long that I'd been blinded to some dimensions of her texts. Those kinds of awakenings are what it's all about.
https://news.central.edu/2019/07/central-professor-and-alumnae-present-at-willa-cather-seminar/
Josh, I think you know already how much I agree with you. Worth noting that Smith is a professor of public policy and management, someone who by profession and disposition is likely to envision education according to the terms he does and not humanistically. The misperception and categorical confusion in post-secondary education, to my mind -- I've focused on this point for a long time -- is the mistaken framing of it as a unitary educational experience. It isn't. That's no revolutionary insight. In various ways at different times, we've understood this in the U.S. It is well understood in many other societies. Agricultural colleges, technical colleges, early junior colleges before they became community colleges, all were expressions of this.
For very significant numbers of people, always or just at a relevant time in their lives, non-liberal arts, technical, career, and STEM education is the goal and does not require the kind of humanistic relationship we prize. It's always a benefit but not necessarily required if the student is self-motivated and capably self-instructed using provided resources. In physical classrooms or remotely as Smith projects current developments into the future, this is a different educational mission than liberal arts education including deep exposure to the humanities -- and the sciences, too, understanding how both contribute to one grand mission of advancing human knowledge.
We're never going to get post-secondary education right again if we can't consistently manifest a clear understanding of the these differently valuable missions. And that is even before, though not necessarily separate from, confusions that come with various commercial conceptions of higher education.
What do civilization's oldest educational paradigms show us? Not just what's learned, but the process of learning it -- and the relationship with the teacher, the mentor, the master.
Beautifully said, Jay. And you're quite right about certain kinds of programs or subjects lending themselves better to a variety of delivery methods. My mother, who graduated from Western Governors University later in life, has seen the impact of degrees like that on employment in rural areas. So those credentials can be difference makers for people, spelling the difference between poverty and security.
I suppose my larger point is that even with expanded access to college or to "top" professors, social mobility remains limited in all the ways it formerly was. The real solution is public education -- giving every child a chance to maximize their potential -- and federal support of an affordable college education, so that opportunity extends beyond K-12. I still get defensive comments on my homeschooling thread from parents who claim their kids are doing better than they would be in school. But homeschooling for many is an expression of privilege, and their talented kids are taken out of the peer group for other less privileged kids. Then the class gap widens further.
I don't think the oldest education paradigm should only be available to the privileged. Smith's anecdote about the guidance counselor pulling a back door favor for his kids at a reach school says everything you need to know.
Josh,
Your late question in the article on the curation of superstar professor lists hits home.
My intellectual tradition, American philosophy, was colonized by the majority English-speaking tradition, Anglo-American or "Analytic" philosophy decades ago. Now, there are only two majors colleges left in North America that teach the tradition, despite wide recognition of the value and power of the tradition ... because almost everyone else intellectually appropriates from it.
My point is that what determines "superstar" is almost exclusively access to privilege, and worse, that privilege shapes the discourse of what counts as important. Perhaps you're familiar with the social construction of knowledge? Well, in my field the conquerors continually erase their competition and then raise their ideas from the dead through appropriation.
This is something you don't touch on. That is, how prestige shapes what counts as knowledge, and how turbo-charging that ... well ... I suspect that you know all this, but just haven't touched on it.
Yes, I used Helen Longino's "Science as Social Knowledge" in my dissertation :).
You're quite right about prestige shaping what "counts." Some of this is implied in my skepticism about who curates the top professor list and in my footnote about scarcity. I ran out of space to include this anecdote, but Smith cites an example from the University of Chicago, where Steve Levitt apparently drew a huge class one year (300 students) and then was "arbitrarily" capped at 80 the next year. Smith claims the ego of Levitt's colleagues was to blame -- they were jealous and didn't like the competition. But that example is a microcosm of what you're describing in the field more generally. Levitt's book and podcast make him a celebrity, so students gravitate to him. But that doesn't make his ideas 100X more superior than his colleagues' -- the institution has every right to think about a more moderate enrollment model, which privileges the expertise offered by all of its faculty, not just one superstar. That itself represents a potential diversity problem -- fewer "top" voices, rather than a more bustling marketplace of ideas, means actually inferior knowledge in the end.
I might have drifted afield of your point a bit. But as I say in my reply to David, I'm struggling with this in a lot of spaces: as an academic coach, as an independent writer, as a small business owner. Because I can't trade on a Harvard PhD, certain coaching spaces are closed off to me (see Admyssion). No one will be impressed by where I got my degrees, so I only recruit clients based on the proof of concept they see in my own writing. There is a lot of outsized influence among top professors that allows ideas to spread without real competition, because the competition has been shut out long ago as irrelevant.
Pedigree Insanity: Every day in Athens, GA I drive past a house that has an sign in front of it promising relief from smoking and other addictions. The selling point: the person doing the counseling/etc. in that house brags on the sign that they are "Harvard-trained." Does one really need a Harvard-trained expert to help them break the nicotine addiction? What in the hell does a Hahvahd pedigree have to do with this particular outcome? I laugh every time I go past that sign.
That addiction expert is just leveraging scarcity! I envision a world where more Harvard-trained experts are available online to more people struggling with addiction...
That kind of crass marketing does feel rather like overcompensating for something.
Levitt and Smith discuss an antidote to pedigree filtering in skills-based hiring. Putting someone through a series of tests or challenges to see what they can do, rather than vetting them based on where they got their degree seems like a step in the right direction.
Josh,
I agree that certain skills are not "scalable" to reach mass audiences, and being a learned teacher, e.g., a PhD is one of those skills. The tip of pyramids in many fields seems to be getting smaller and the bases getting wider (angles more obtuse or more acute? I was always bad at geometry!)
And I'm not sure what can stop that continuing to happen in academia. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about what can be done.
Best,
David
Thank you, David. I'm not an economist, and so it's hard for me to propose models for "the system." But I think the way it once worked was with substantial state and federal support. Pell Grants, Stafford Loans, and other programs made it possible for me to attend college without life-crushing debt. And this in turn made it possible for teachers like Stephen to make a decent living (although not fully adequate to what he gave, he did teach during a time when faculty salaries even at small college kept up with the cost of living).
I believe the older system also had a more collective philosophy. Departments like English that never graduated the most majors per faculty member were understood to provide a broader service to the university through a core curriculum. There might have been some grumbling about "when am I ever going to use this," but there was a general institutional consensus about shared values, including exposure to a range of disciplines. Now the institutions themselves are willing to throw their own faculty under the bus, either by replacing the courses they teach with transfer credit, by abolishing the distributional core, or by allocating funding for faculty lines purely based on enrollment.
So I think both of those things have to be in place: public support and institutional buy-in. The world that Smith describes is much more like the world of college athletics, where players put their NIL deals and the perpetual allure of the transfer portal ahead of the team. The more course content becomes uncoupled from institutional affiliation, the more professors with substantial name recognition and influence can cash in. But a teacher who is not a celebrity or some kind of bestselling author or podcaster, but who might offer an unforgettable classroom experience, is going to be left behind or shoved to the middle or bottom of the pyramid.
I'm seeing this even in the academic coaching space, where people can trade on their degree for advising students on their admissions process. Admyssion is one of these sites where faculty can earn hundreds of dollars per hour advising prospective students. But only if they teach at one of the approved schools (mostly Ivies, but some selective publics). So the rich get richer, and the handshakes stay in-house. It's pretty frustrating!
https://www.admyssion.com/professor-registration/
"Imagine a world in which ten of the country’s top history professors made their lectures and exams available online for a fee that didn’t require exclusive matriculation at a single university."
That already exists. The Great Courses is a company that offers high-quality video lectures on a wide range of subjects. They are expertly produced, much better than almost anything that brick-and-mortar institutions can offer, and if you wait for the sales (which are frequent) you can get a 12-hour course for about $60, which is way below what any college or university will charge. The variety of courses is enormous, and you can pick and choose the topics that interest you. This isn't an advertisement for the company, and I have no relation with them other than I've spent literally thousands of dollars on their products and it's always been well worth it. But it is astonishing to read a statement like Smith's which reveals a complete lack of understanding.
Great point, Theodore. I think Smith is suggesting something rather different, but you help me make my point. While it's true that The Great Courses prefers professors with elite credentials, I don't think they make any claim to offering material by the "top" professors. Of course, I see any rankings of that sort as somewhat arbitrary. Oates is a major American writer, but who decides the metric that establishes her as one of the greats? How does one determine who the "top" professors are in History? Can someone teach at a land grant university and still claim that status?
The other claim that Smith makes, which The Great Courses model does not even pretend to offer, is a kind of social leveling. Somehow if you can take a Yale professor's online course, Smith feels, the scarcity of admission to Yale is removed. Except that if you're paying a discount rate for content, everyone knows that it's not the same as what a Yale student receives, in which case all the class dividers and gates of access remain firmly in place.
I don't know your background, but it sounds like you have completed Great Courses for your own personal enrichment, not in pursuit of a credential. Nor would you show your transcript from The Great Courses to anyone in hopes that it might open career opportunities formerly closed to you. And if all of that is true, then your experience illustrates my skepticism about Smith's dream that virtual education would usher in a more democratic model for higher ed.
This is exactly the kind of experience I had in mind. What a great opportunity for these two young scholars--not least of all to know that they helped to deepen your thinking about what has long been a seminal text for you!
One other thought: doesn't this all come back down to the great unanswered question of higher education: *what is its purpose*? For those who define it in terms of knowledge or skills acquisition--everyone from the economists to the STEM education research community--then efficiencies driven by technology are indeed possible. For those who define it in terms of maturity, humanity, or soul-making, then technology-driven efficiencies are not only harder to attain, but those efficiencies actually gut the whole purpose of the system. I side with the latter, because I don't think that our nation's or world's problems derive primarily in a lack of knowledge or skills, but instead result from a lack of humanity among those with the knowledge, skills, and/or position to be able to make a difference.
Good points -- some disciplines lend themselves better than others to virtual delivery and the kinds of "check-ins" or assessments that can measure mastery in that form. I know of no shortcuts to teaching writing, because you can't isolate parts from the whole very well. Same for the discussion of literature. I've thought about creating on-demand or synchronous versions of my most popular courses, such as Personal Essay and Illness and Health in Literature, to see if I could tap into some demand in the creator economy. But those were popular courses because of in-person dynamics (relationship building) that can't be easily uncoupled from the content. The trust required for real growth in a creative writing class is much more difficult to build online.
The other point, John, is that I think our academic institutions can't afford to answer that question about higher ed's purpose in any way other than "both/and." If STEM folks want to rejigger the whole system because it makes sense for their content and allow humanities and social sciences to wither on the vine, that's not a collective win.
And I might say that neursocience doesn't support the efficacy of disembodied learning through tech. Embodied understanding through the guidance of a mentor matters just as much in STEM as it does in the humanities. I don't know of a single brain scientist who would disagree.
The Shamification of Higher Ed.... We can see some elements of the sham already, if we have been in or still are part of academia, but this book (which I have not read) sounds like it's a bit off-base, to say the very least. The adjuncts who sign on to online-only degree mills should be solicited for comment, btw. Those I am familiar with allow very little teaching by their adjuncts, replacing the autonomy and intellectual work with templates, benchmarks, constructed learning-management shells, rigid assessment of how adjuncts are marking (are they keeping to the required templates?), how often adjuncts are communicating with students, etc. These adjuncts are typically paid for a ceiling of hours (10/12 per week for each course, maybe a couple more hours if enrollment is over, say, 15).
It somehow still amazes me that instead of suggesting some overhauls to bogus capitalism and capitalism-driven modes, learned professors will instead just suggest more Taylorism and false 'equity' in order to extend our collective shamification, McDonaldization, and mechanization. [Sorry for all my professorial concepts.]
Ah, I first read "shamification" as "shame." Here's Josh again, crying for shame, higher ed, for shame! 😂
But, yes, "degree mills" is a good term. McDonaldization and such.
I don't think the solution is terribly complicated in theory. Robust public education and federal subsidies for college would move the needle considerably more than free market solutions, which will end up being opportunistic and will only hasten the class divides.
"He did a postdoc at Los Alamos and has held a variety of adjunct faculty positions, but his full-time role is Physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. I don’t pretend to understand much about his work, which often seems Matrix-like, but we both came of age in Montana and we represent the past success and enduring promise of public education."
NIST being compared to The Matrix is a little funny. It is more like a very elaborate place where scales are developed, sometimes using lasers and weights to measure the minutest amounts of matter to calibrate instruments, so they can measure other instruments and things. It's like the Matrix for atoms, I guess, since they probably use quantum computers for atomic clocks, but not WHOLE PEOPLE ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCyU97MoHFM
Haha -- yes, that was meant to be self-deprecating. Josh P has been quite patient with my scientific ignorance over the years. "It's like the Matrix for atoms" -- I love that! Though part of me likes the image of my friend as the man behind the curtain, shaping the reality we all take for granted. There's more than a grain of truth in that.