
The Future of College? - mikeleeorg
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/08/the-future-of-college/375071/
======
jimhefferon
Very interesting article. I teach at a college and have followed Minerva with
interest.

> But then I remembered what I was like as a teenager headed off to college,
> so ignorant of what college was and what it could be, and so reliant on the
> college itself to provide what I’d need in order to get a good education.

One point not much addressed is that, while this style of education sounds
great for the top five or ten percent of students, that leaves a large number
that I (and I have experience with them) wonder about. There is some bias in
people who went to top schools, and succeeded there, thinking about the way
they would have liked to have been taught.

If a student has not done the reading, or not done the homework, or does not
participate in class, do they get an _F_? Currently you work with people,
trying to bring them along. Changing that would be a very sharp change in the
current practice of education. (Or, will this education method lead to
students doing the reading? That's a wonderful and tantalizing hope.)

That's by no means to put down the innovations, which are exciting. That's
only to observe that often a person's thinking is influenced by who they are,
and their experience.

~~~
nmrm2
OT, but I learned Linear Algebra out of your textbook (if that's who you are).
The "Topics" section on voting paradoxes was my favorite bit. Thanks for
giving it away!

~~~
jimhefferon
Yes, that's me. Thank you for the kind words; you are welcome.

------
brianchu
Big fan of what they're trying to do. I've kept my eye on them for a few
years.

It's remarkable that at a place like UC Berkeley (where I study CS), the
pinnacle of innovation is videotaped lectures and programming assignment
autograders. That, and iClickers during lectures (devices that let you answer
multiple choice questions). Many universities have worse technology than many
Fortune 500 companies - in areas that directly affect students. Apparently
Berkeley's online course enrollment system limits the number of times you can
login because it's based on a legacy telephone system originally designed for
dialing in.

I've been thinking that technical/engineering education is the most ripe to be
disrupted - someone with a CS education needs to rely much less on their
credential/alumni network than someone with, say, a liberal arts degree. We're
already seeing this with the coding schools that are all emerging.

~~~
nmrm2
> someone with a CS education needs to rely much less on their
> credential/alumni network than someone with, say, a liberal arts degree

To the extent this is true, I think it's _only_ as a result of an employee's
market in CS, something which won't always be the case (and hasn't always
been). Also, wrt credentialing, CS is uncommon even among STEM fields; most
engineering jobs _strictly_ require credentials.

Education and mathematics are both liberal arts by most definitions, but in my
experience, graduates in those subjects get jobs by merit rather than network
or credential at least as often as in CS. (edit: in fact, based on what I've
seen, education is far more meritocratic in the hiring process than CS.)

Finally, "liberal arts" can refer to the field, but it can also refer to the
type of institution. So there's such a thing as a "CS liberal arts degree".

~~~
johan_larson
"Education and mathematics ... graduates in those subjects get jobs by merit
rather than network or credential at least as often as in CS"

How could that be, when virtually all education jobs require either a
teachers' certificate or a doctorate (depending on the job), both of which are
credentials?

~~~
barry-cotter
Yeah, I can't imagine a sensible interpretation of the claim on education. You
basically need to get an M.Ed. and all the research on teacher effectiveness
suggests that they have an effect that is close to zero and is probably
actually zero. Subject matter Master's degrees have positive effects on
teacher effectiveness but that's probably a reflection of the kind of people
who get Master's degrees being interested in their field, not having a
Master's making one a better teacher.

~~~
nmrm2
The networking thing is absolutely true. Networking and "buddy hires" are
_way_ more common in CS than in (secondary) Education IME. edit: in fact, in
education, network-hires are basically impossible even if your buddy is all
the way at the top.

> You basically need to get an M.Ed.

Definitely not true.

At the very least, in STEM most high schools would prefer a subject matter
Masters.

Most teachers opt to get an Masters for the pay raise, but it's quite common
to be _hired_ without an MEd, and my comment referred to the hiring process
specifically.

The fact that Education MEds have no/negative effect but subject-matter
masters have a positive effect probably has to do with the salary incentive
and the fact MEds tend to be easier to get than subject-matter masters.

An _intrinsically motivated_ MEd student could probably get as much out of it
as a subject matter masters (esp. in primary education, where increased
subject matter expertise probably isn't so helpful).

Which is to say, MEds aren't intrinsically bad, but because of external
incentives might attract the wrong type of person.

> I can't imagine a sensible interpretation of the claim on education.

The literal interpretation will suffice; it's entirely well-defined even if
you disagree with its truth value :-)

See also my response to the parent.

edit: higher-education is a different beast, but going way back up to the
comment I first responded to, we're talking about education majors, who go on
to secondary and primary education -- NOT higher education.

------
dd367
As stated in the article, I think the hardest barrier for this project will
simply be the lack of branding. College has pretty much boiled down to
institutional prestige and the credential that comes with it.

Gauging "success" within this system seems hard. It's hard to attribute
success to a university when it's prestige ends up determining the calibre of
its student body in the first place. And a clear feedback loop exists here. On
account of the prestige associated with their college, students end up leading
illustrious careers. Their "success" is a combination of their inherent pre-
college skill and their credential, one could say.

Now, given the Minerva project, where the feedback loop doesn't exist and the
quality of students are towards the higher side, how does one begin to test
the efficiency of a new system without any proper control experiment?

Because of this difficulty in assessing the success or failure of this
project, even though I hope and believe it works well, the general opinion
might be that it failed.

~~~
prostoalex
> College has pretty much boiled down to institutional prestige and the
> credential that comes with it.

For top 50 maybe. But outside the first page of US News report there's very
little differentiation. Quick, what's the difference between Minnesota State
University, Mankato and California State University, Fullerton, and which one
is more prestigious?

------
mbesto
> _Those future students will pay about $28,000 a year, including room and
> board, a $30,000 savings over the sticker price of many of the schools—the
> Ivies, plus other hyperselective colleges like Pomona and Williams—with
> which Minerva hopes to compete._

Sorry, but nope. To date, there isn't a single entity that carries more
prestige and influence than getting an "Ivy league" type high education.

> _The Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to
> the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning._

This is sound in principle, but education only won't have the returns that the
Ivies do. Ivies are successful because they are filtering mechanisms, not
because their teachers are substantially better than the rest of the
competition.

If anything, the greatest threat today to established higher education is the
likes of YC.

~~~
7Figures2Commas
> If anything, the greatest threat today to established higher education is
> the likes of YC.

You're joking, right? Y Combinator and accelerators like it are great programs
for certain types of individuals, but they're hardly a threat to the higher
education industrial complex.

Y Combinator has produced some great successes, but despite all the resources
and access Y Combinator provides participants, Y Combinator has not discovered
a recipe for startup success. The numbers make this very clear[1][2].

More importantly, there is only so much room to scale accelerator programs.
Few companies emerge from these programs with cash flow sufficient to fund
their operations, so they depend on the availability of angel and venture
capital to support their portfolio companies. If you significantly expand the
Y Combinators of the world, demand for capital would soon exceed supply, so
you'd see a dramatic increase in the percentage of portfolio companies that
die, and the speed with which they die.

[1] [http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-portfolio-
stats](http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-portfolio-stats)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8043856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8043856)

~~~
mbesto
> _You 're joking, right?_

Not in the slightest.

> _Y Combinator has not discovered a recipe for startup success._

Nor has Harvard university. I think you're looking at the wrong output. YC
(and other successful incubators) are about the alumni network, not the
success of the startup. Just as universities are about the alumni network.

~~~
7Figures2Commas
There is a good deal of research that has concluded attending an elite private
university has a significant impact on career earnings[1][2].

If you are suggesting that the Y Combinator alumni network is of immense
tangible value, what research do you have to back it up? To be fair to you,
there obviously isn't a whole lot of longitudinal data, but as I pointed out,
Y Combinator's portfolio stats look pretty much in line with what you'd expect
in Silicon Valley.

The value of an alumni network is tied to what it can reasonably do for you.
Ivy League alumni networks have been tapped for decades for lucrative
opportunities not easily accessed by outsiders.

[1] [http://www.nyu.edu/classes/jepsen/hoxby-
selective.pdf](http://www.nyu.edu/classes/jepsen/hoxby-selective.pdf)

[2] [http://www.nber.org/papers/w5613](http://www.nber.org/papers/w5613)

------
chrisBob
It is disappointing how few people realize the cost of attending college, and
most families who make >$150k will never know how much other people pay to
attend school. The financial aid system is actually very good at most schools.
Two examples:

1) I currently attend Boston University (as a grad student), and a good
_domestic_ undergrad gets a nice aid package. For families that make
$40k-$80k/yr the middle 50% of aid packages ranges up to $56k per year against
a $60k room and board cost.

2) The horrible Ivy Leagues are often even better. When my wife attended
admission was need blind, and then after filling out your FASA the school gave
the students a grant to cover the part of the cost that is supposed to be
covered by student loans. Do you have two kids that are within 1-2 years of
each other? The additional cost of sending a second kid can be as low as
$0/year because the total contribution that the parents can afford doesn't
change just because you have two kids.

One key to this article that is easy to glance over is that the target market
is mostly foreign students. They do not get the same aid packages and end up
paying full price at most schools.

------
barry-cotter
I wish them luck but the reporter makes it sound like they think merely
providing a better education than 90% of students anywhere get will make them
competitive with the super-elite. What HYPS and the tech equivalent like Cal
Tech or CMU have over the merely excellent schools like Rice or Duke is not
the quality of undergraduate or graduate education. It's the stamp of approval
from getting in, the one that puts "Winner!" on your cv, that makes getting
into McKinsey or Goldman a commonplace rather than an outstanding achievement
in itself.

I'm more optimistic as it's a for profit, so it has real motivation to grow
without end, unlike a "real" liberal arts school but if the main selling point
of your rivals is the selection effect and yours is the treatment effect you
will never, ever reach their prestige.

All that said, this is awesome. It makes me substantially more optimistic that
tertiary education might actually start applying psychological research.
Minerva doesn't need to beat Harvard to change Harvard.

~~~
zodiac
It is mentioned in the article -

"One possibility is that Minerva will fail because a college degree, for all
the high-minded talk of liberal education— of lighting fires and raising
thoughtful citizens—is really just a credential, or an entry point to an old-
boys network that gets you your first job and your first lunch with the
machers at your alumni club."

and I also remember an article about Minerva a few years back where they said
they were aware of this effect.

~~~
nmrm2
One of the problems with existing for-profits is that because of the lack of
tenure and unwillingness to match industry salaries, they have trouble
recruiting and retaining high-quality faculty. Especially in STEM, where non-
research teaching faculty accept well below-average salaries in exchange for
tenure.

If its deans are teaching (not typically the case, but then 4 deans for a
student body in the double digits isn't typical either), then Minerva seems to
have solved this problem.

------
nmrm2
It sounds like the college is residential but courses are online.

Is that accurate? Is this something temporary for their first couple of
cohorts, or is this the intended setup?

Interesting in any case.

It's also worth noting that this is cheaper than private liberal arts
colleges, but actually much more expensive than regional state universities,
and even more expensive than some flagships (assuming in-state tuition and
average scholarship). Which is also interesting. edit: based on the article,
the target demographic seems to be high-quality foreign students. Which,
again, is really interesting because that's a very different target
demographic than most liberal arts colleges.

edit: I'll also be curious to see whether these sorts of institutions can get
students into top PhD programs or MD programs, which tend to require lots of
experiences that are really difficult to provide without physical space and
tenured faculty.

~~~
barry-cotter
Residential college with online courses does seem to be the plan, with the
city of residence changing year to year.

>Each year, according to Minerva’s plan, they’ll attend university in a
different place, so that after four years they’ll have the kind of
international experience that other universities advertise but can rarely
deliver. By 2016, Berlin and Buenos Aires campuses will have opened. Likely
future cities include Mumbai, Hong Kong, New York, and London. Students will
live in dorms with two-person rooms and a communal kitchen. They’ll also take
part in field trips organized by Minerva, such as a tour of Alcatraz with a
prison psychologist. Minerva will maintain almost no facilities other than the
dorm itself—no library, no dining hall, no gym—and students will use city
parks and recreation centers, as well as other local cultural resources, for
their extracurricular activities.

Re: price. They don't intend to compete with state flagships, but with liberal
arts colleges. Which state flagships are impressive without reference to
programme? I'm not American but I do spend far too much time reading American
stuff and my impression would be that the only public universities in the US
that are vaguely comparable to HYPS are U Michigan and UC Berkeley, maybe
Georgia Tech, which is itself very far behind the top four CS schools,
MIT,CMU, Berkeley and Stanford.

Being better than Amherst may be an ambitious goal for Minerva's second decade
but being better than a respectable college with no real national brand seems
doable.

~~~
nmrm2
> no library, no dining hall, no gym—and students will use city parks and
> recreation centers, as well as other local cultural resources, for their
> extracurricular activities.

I commented on another article that this is an interesting solution --
externalizing certain costs of higher ed. It's a very effective strategy, and
even makes sense on the large scale (civilization-wide) for everything except
libraries, probably.

> They don't intend to compete with state flagships, but with liberal arts
> colleges.

Right. That's why I think it's interesting.

They don't compete on price with larger and/or state schools, but do compete
on methodology.

They don't compete on methodology with (most) liberal arts colleges, but do
compete on price.

It's a unique niche -- students who value liberal arts and can afford college
but cannot afford/don't want to pay for a traditional liberal arts education.
I'm not surprised they're initially targeting foreign students, seems like a
pretty small market in the US at the moment. E.g. most students who are
inclined to attend a liberal arts college are also inclined to prefer physical
presence of instructors.

> Which state flagships are impressive without reference to programme?

State universities with a wide range of very strong programs: Illinois, Texas-
Austin, Michigan, Washington, Wisconsin, N Carolina (Chapel Hill), and many
others.

All of these schools out-rank Harvard in CS, for instance.

> but being better than a respectable college with no real national brand
> seems doable.

All of the universities mentioned above have national and international brands
in several areas (I think my list is CS-skewed). I don't think Minerva will
ever _really_ compete with these schools, even if it is widely successful.

WRT regional colleges: I think that physical presence of full-time faculty is
a pretty substantial benefit. You'd need higher-quality, _full time_ faculty
_and_ really good technology to compete with even a mediocre but physically
present tenured faculty member (tenure as a signal for "has experience
teaching" \+ not ad junct/over-worked).

For this reason, I think that online programs which aim to compete on price
without sacrificing quality face a pretty substantial HR problem. Training
isn't enough -- faculty have to be available for office hours, need time to
develop new curricula, etc.. This is probably not possible without hiring
high-quality faculty as full-time employees.

As "coast-snobby" as academics can be (actually, this isn't really true, but
accepting the article's premise...), I don't think anyone would turn down a
tenured position in Nowhere, Indiana in favor of teaching online courses,
especially if the work is contract-based.

That said, it's always possible to compete with larger universities if you
define your scope. You'll see this in the recruiting materials of any
university -- they choose a set of things they're really good at, and say
"we're the best (small print: at the combination of a,b,c,x,y, and z). E.g.
"student travel" is a metric used by Minerva.

~~~
barry-cotter
Point on public universities. I just don't know enough about the US.

>WRT regional colleges: I think that physical presence of full-time faculty is
a pretty substantial benefit. You'd need higher-quality, full time faculty and
really good technology to compete with even a mediocre but physically present
tenured faculty member (tenure as a signal for "has experience teaching" \+
not ad junct/over-worked). For this reason, I think that online programs which
aim to compete on price without sacrificing quality face a pretty substantial
HR problem. Training isn't enough -- faculty have to be available for office
hours, need time to develop new curricula, etc.. This is probably not possible
without hiring high-quality faculty as full-time employees.

Most Physics postdocs don't get faculty jobs. Neither do most Chemistry or
Biology ones. The Arts have an equally massive over supply of wannabe
academics. Math,CS, Economics,Finance,Accounting all of these have lovely
alternatives to teaching but lots of people like teaching as well.

As you pointed out the coast snobbery is bullshit. Academics move anywhere for
tenure or a chance at tenure. But Minerva will take you if you're close enough
to the right timezone and soon they'll all be close enough. WGU has shown that
all online faculty can work though they don't have an all seminar system.

I don't know, it seems close enough to the Oxford/Cambridge tutorial system
that it can work given cheap enough inputs, easily. Live in Thailand, teach
students in Hong Kong, live in Coast Rica, teach in San Francisco. And the
star faculty can't last. But you can get really good adjuncts without being as
attractive locationwise as Minerva. Re:curriculum, office hours, remember,
Minerva can actually tell their staff what to do.

I don't think there's much actual disagreement here,I'm only slightly more
optimistic than you, eh?

~~~
nmrm2
It's not that the raw labor doesn't exist, it's that this labor -- esp in STEM
-- has other job opportunities and doesn't _need_ to teach. Given the choice,
most would leave academia rather than live on scraps once they hit their late
20s/early 30s. And although there isn't coast snobbery, I don't think
expecting teaching faculty to relocate to a cheaper country is a realistic
solution -- especially if there's no tenure and the pay is below industry
average!

> Re:curriculum, office hours, remember, Minerva can actually tell their staff
> what to do.

Right, but (at least ostensibly) they can't compel their staff to do that for
free.

If a staff member is being paid way below what they could make in industry and
isn't even on a tenure track, they have absolutely no incentive to work hard.
Nor should they work hard, at anything other than getting out of an
exploitative relationship with their employer.

It's easier to take advantage of people in the humanities, but then, taking
advantage of instructional staff doesn't exactly create a convivial learning
environment.

> given cheap enough inputs, easily

I guess that's really the thing -- I think for something like Minerva to
really work they need full time, well-paid faculty. And without federal aid,
that means they'll probably have trouble competing with regional state
universities (without sacrificing quality, which kills to whole Minerva
model).

Otherwise high-quality learning environments are impossible to build and
maintain.

> but lots of people like teaching as well.

One model could be finding people who have moved on to industry but still want
to teach a course or two a semester. It might be possible to make this work.

BUT -- that's not a new model! Lots of colleges and universities take this
approach, and it's pretty well-understood by pretty much everyone that this is
a non-optimal situation. Even very bright people fail at the "teach after
work" thing. It's just not possible to go as deeply as you would like without
an hour or two before and after lectures to really prepare for the lecture
itself well and then wind down/self-assess.

Higher Ed needs to come to terms with the fact that great -- or even half-
decent -- instruction is a full-time job.

> I don't think there's much actual disagreement here,I'm only slightly more
> optimistic than you, eh?

No, there's no disagreement at all :-). I'm posing possible problems and
you're suggesting reasons they're not problems or suggesting solutions. It's a
true dialog :-)

------
chrisBob
The engaged learning process is not new, or unique, but is certainly not
common. My undergrad institute called this "The Thayer" method and required
students to do the reading before class and show up ready to discuss. There
were often even homework assignments based on the work that was not covered in
class yet to force pre-reading. Class time was then a productive discussion
and a chance to ask questions. During class students would be asked to "Take
boards" and perform math or chemistry calculations immediately and on their
own so that the teacher can assess the class's progress. This school also
offered chemistry and engineering classes which will never work at Minerva
because of the lab requirements. A liberal arts degree should include a basic
chemistry + lab course, but I don't see this working with the program they
describe.

To me Minerva appears to have a sound business model based on bringing foreign
students in for an education with low overhead. This will take the most
profitable students away from traditional schools, and require tuition to go
up for the types of degrees that can't be offered in this environment.

------
gojomo
Eventually the 'professor' driving the highly-interactive sessions may even be
an AI, trained up on all the other recorded sessions in the university's
archives. Only occasional very anomalous and challenging interactions may
require 'parachuting in' a real instructor of the same caliber as the original
sessions.

 _Young Lady 's Illustrated Primer_, here we come!

------
jeffbr13
Does anyone else find the author rather aloof from financial reality in this
article?

> the education I received was well worth the $16,000 a year my parents paid,
> after scholarships.

> The students all now say they’re confident in Minerva—although of course
> they can leave whenever they like, with little lost but time.

The writer embodies the all-American liberally-educated Ivy League "coastal-
elite" stereotype (writing in the Atlantic, after all), so I shouldn't be
surprised at their reflexive apprehension towards an attempt to undermine the
old institutions which are so tied up with that identity.

------
dba7dba
I wish them success but college without the usual trappings of college exists.
It's called co-working space.

I spent a few months in a co-working space partly to learn new language more
efficiently and partly to get out of the fall-into-lazy-mode-when-in-home mode
when I didn't have a full time job.

As I was sitting there typing away on my Macbook Pro, reading manuals,
watching tutorials on youtube, and feeding off of the intense energy of fellow
'coworkers', it hit me that the ambiance was much like being in a library in
college. It felt much like being in a library when I was in college and even
better, there was no restriction on food/coffee/beverage. I felt like I was in
college again. And I could walk away from my computer without worrying about
someone stealing it during the 5 min I was gone.

And I was paying only $300 a month (although I thought it was a bit over
priced...). I recall I was paying nearly $10,000 a year (many years ago
though) just for tuition. And I don't know about most of you but as a student
of a large public university system, I had barely any useful interaction with
actual professors.

I really think for someone young with enough time, discipline and motivated to
work in the internet/tech industry, having one year membership in co-working
space would do wonders. And it barely costs $3600/year plus your normal living
cost (which would be free if you stayed with parents).

------
naspinski
Am I alone in really enjoying my college experience? I loved going to sporting
events and the ivy colored buildings. Say what you want, but my Fraternity
years were amazing. I would be sad if my kids were not offered this
experience. This just sounds so sterile and robotic to me. Maybe not replace,
but possibly to supplement for those which want the traditional option.

------
ninguem2
I am getting a 404.

------
randyrand
I'm not sure what Betteridge would say about this headline but I don't think
he'd like it.

