My fall semester teaching was assigned to be online even before Covid-19 came along. The enrollment for that class – Principles of Economics – will be much larger, with hundreds more students, but with some assistance, I expect to handle it.
Suppose that none of the top tier colleges can have on-campus learning in the fall. If a lot of students are taking courses on line, then they should be able to choose courses from colleges other than the one in which they are enrolled. As an online student, your best approach might be to take econ with Tyler, engineering from someone at Carnegie-Mellon, journalism from someone at Northwestern, etc.
The online course market could end up looking like the textbook market. The per-student cost should fall to about the cost of a textbook. The market structure will tend toward winners-take most. If Tyler is one of the winners, he could have a few hundred thousand students.
In the online environment, having a good traditional brand, like “Mankiw,” will not matter much. Your competitors have been focused on the online product and persistently iterating and improving it.
With on-location college, the school can foist on you an inexperienced teaching assistant who can barely speak comprehensible English and charge your parents a fortune for the privilege. I don’t think that model will be viable if colleges go on line.
[UPDATE: Read Scott Galloway’s take, which is somewhat different from mine, but is still based on the view that online education scales differently from in-person education.
In ten years, it’s feasible to think that MIT doesn’t welcome 1,000 freshmen to campus; it welcomes 10,000. What that means is the top-20 universities globally are going to become even stronger. What it also means is that universities Nos. 20 to 50 are fine. But Nos. 50 to 1,000 go out of business or become a shadow of themselves.
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Another well-expressed opportunity, capitalizing on the beneficial side effects of the pandemic, to break the stranglehold of entrenched interests. While the statist ratchet slowly and continuously works its way in ordinary times, it is in extraordinary times that the gear lever can at times be arrested, perhaps even released, and a few notches gained in reverse, i.e., toward free markets.
If a lot of students are taking courses on line, then they should be able to choose courses from colleges other than the one in which they are enrolled.
“Should” perhaps but hardly “would”. I think of cars. All modern cars have chips that monitor the engine and save lots of data. For years, the auto companies said, “Only people we certify can have access to the program that makes sense of that data.” This meant that a lot of maintenance and repair could only be done (or only done as well) at dealerships, who were generally significantly more expensive than independent shops. The independents then fought for “right to repair” laws. The auto companies and the dealers opposed that, arguing that only dealerships had technologists specially trained on that model of car–plus years of experience with those cars. At the dealership, you would get skill and honesty that you couldn’t count on at an independent, thus justifying the higher price. Limiting access to the program to dealerships was actually a consumer protection measure!
I see colleges doing the same thing.
As far as I know, most state now have some sort of “right to repair” law. But who would lobby for a “right to extramural learn” law.
Hopefully, my “tiger law” course will scale: https://priorprobability.com/2020/04/30/summer-syllabus/
Looks great!
Are the lectures publicly available?
Would the ala carte method lead to a status-infusing magic parchment? The goal of school is not real learning, but rather to get good grades (see Paul Graham, ‘Lessons to Unlearn’). Good grades are what bring immediate rewards and accolades regardless of what was retained. And those grades are accumulated to get the credential conferred, again regardless of what knowledge is retained from any one class. Going outside the coursework during the semester can often lead to poorer grades by making the student too nuanced to pick the right answer on the test, or by interfering with work needed to get the good grade in the other classes.
A few students will seek knowledge. They will benefit from having access to multiple lectures from different people on the topic. Refined videos will decrease the pitfalls of the live improv lecture, where professor misstatements often go uncorrected. Recorded lectures will allow a confused student to dig down to find out whether their understanding was wrong or the teacher misspoke in the moment. No longer will one professor have to try in the one-shot lecture to accommodate the different learning paths, such as historical, strict mathematical, intuitive, etc. for a particular bit of material. (Dr. Feynman commented on this regarding his teaching).
But a shift toward real assimilation may become more and more important if this from the Econtalk with Ed Leamer dominates:
“But, I want to go to the other end of the spectrum, which is intellectual services. It used to be, if you wave your Bachelor’s degree, you’re going to get a great job. When I graduated from college, it was a sure thing that you’d get a great job. And, in college, you’d basically learned artificial intelligence, meaning, you carried out the instructions that the faculty member gave you. You memorized the lectures, and you were tested on your memory in the exams. That’s what a computer does. It basically memorizes what you tell it to do.
“But now, with a computer doing all those mundane, repetitive intellectual tasks, if you’re expecting to do well in the job market, you have to bring, you have to have real education. Real education means to solve problems that the faculty who teach don’t really know how to solve.
“And that takes talent as well as education.
“So, my view is we’ve got to change education from a kind of a big Xerox machine where the lectures are memorized and then tested, into one which is more experienced-based to prepare a workforce for the reality of the 20th century. You’ve got to recognize that just because you had an experience with, say, issues in accounting, doesn’t mean that you have the ability to innovate and take care of customers who have problems that cannot be coded.”
Being able to use knowledge dynamically to solve new problems is behind the current splitting of the college returns.
The promise of online classes is huge. Past results from MOOCs have disappointed, but arguably, they didn’t do it right.
The potential Kling describes sounds quite amazing. Admission becomes much less relevant: mostly there is no admission. Anyone who wants to purchase enrollment is free to do so.
There is a very, very mundane reason why school is largely “a big Xerox machine where the lectures are memorized and then tested”. Such a sequence is straightforward. Students know what they will be tested on. Professors know that they know. It makes presentation, testing, and grading “easy”.
But trying to prepare students for “things we don’t know” and then trying to test them on that is very, very, very difficult–and the grading will be a b*tch.
Fortunately for the existing model, the ability to be a Xerox machine generally correlates with intelligence, which generally correlates with the ability to solve new problems.
There are two strong countervailing mechanisms, and a weaker one. Let me focus on selective colleges.
a) Most students at selective colleges want to inhabit a Petri dish with talented peers. They learn more from one another than from Faculty. They value intense (live) interaction with peers more than any kind of hierarchical instruction. They seek communities in which well-roundedness confers status, and in which prowess has a range of dimensions, enabling most individuals to find a place to shine—academics, athletics, organizational leadership, community service, sociability. They embrace a contrived, efficient setting for ‘making a good match’ in romance (aka ‘assortative mating by educational attainment’). In a word, they value the social dimensions of residential college.
b) Students (and their parents) value college because it is an ambiguous mix of an investment good (a ticket to a good job) and a consumer good. It is crucial that the consumer good may plausibly be camouflaged as an investment. This puts youths and parents on the same page. Camouflage is easier if the educational credential is a signal of raw talent (smarts, work ethic, ability to intuit expectations and follow authority), rather than proof of expertise. Michael Spence and Bryan Caplan have made the case that employers mainly seek the signal of raw talent (ability to learn on the job), rather than ready expertise. The consumer-good component is closely bound with the social (usually residential) nature of traditional college in the USA.
The weaker countervailing mechanism (human-capital formation):
Seminars enable students to acquire skills in public speaking and small-group persuasion. These are transferable skills, highly useful in many careers. (A lawyer at trial might have 20 minutes to persuade a jury of a person’s guilt or innocence. Or an investor in a real-world version of shark tank might say say, “My time is precious, you have 10 minutes, persuade me.”) Skill-formation in public speaking and in persuasion doesn’t scale well with online courses. It must be acknowledged, however, that genuine seminars are uncommon even at small residential colleges.
Whether these countervailing mechanisms outweigh the tantalizing possibilities of online courses, I hesitate to say.
a) Most students at selective colleges want to inhabit a Petri dish with talented peers. They learn more from one another than from Faculty. They value intense (live) interaction with peers more than any kind of hierarchical instruction. They seek communities in which well-roundedness confers status, and in which prowess has a range of dimensions, enabling most individuals to find a place to shine—academics, athletics, organizational leadership, community service, sociability. They embrace a contrived, efficient setting for ‘making a good match’ in romance (aka ‘assortative mating by educational attainment’). In a word, they value the social dimensions of residential college
This seems like a naively old-fashioned view of elite schools. I understand that upper-class women once viewed college as a place to find a promising husband (this was referred to as getting her “MRS” degree) but now few of these highly educated women will marry below the age of 30, and college “romance” is more about no-strings-attached hookups and casual dating than serious courtship.
Now the culture of elite colleges is dominated by social-justice politics to the extent that once-valued symbols of well-roundedness like fraternities and sororities are being banned from campuses. Yale recently canceled its Art History course because too many artists featured were white males. Also, many university libraries are being purged of works deemed problematic by activists. It isn’t an accident; leftist professors and administrators have, for decades, promoted this sort of culture on university campuses.
Lots of different people want lots of different things.
I’d like to see the best, noble facet of higher ed, the job skill training for the masses, improved and enhanced.
As for the rest, and all the other facets of higher ed, that’s complicated. I’d like to focus on the biggest improvements.
Great post.
1) “With on-location college, the school can foist on you an inexperienced teaching assistant who can barely speak comprehensible English and charge your parents a fortune for the privilege. I don’t think that model will be viable if colleges go on line.”
I had multiple of these at University of Toronto: intro to Calculus (a Chinese prof), 3rd year econ of capital markets (Iranian lecturer) – I won’t name them but what a joke at Canada’s ‘top school’.
2) Note Jordan Peterson was doing this with his courses long before he was ‘(in)famous’. I audited his “Maps of Meaning” ‘U of Toronto course 2016 online – very interesting (and very different from his later emerged persona and some of the views – or at least he didn’t express them in class).
Ironically I attended U of Toronto without ever hearing of Peterson 2003-2008.
3) IMO in the top 5 or so courses I have ever taken (undergrad, MA and MOOCs), at least 3 of them free online: Melanie Mitchel’s Intro to Complexity (Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Explorer) being the most influential. Perry Merhling’s Money and Banking MOOC is excellent (in its niche field – not life shattering).