Posted on 08/05/2013 3:30:02 AM PDT by ClaytonP
Check out this New York Times article on the beginning of the bursting of the higher education bubble. In the 2012-2013 school year enrollment in for-profit and community colleges dropped. Now enrollment in 4 year non-profit colleges has begun dropping too. A Wall Street Journal article makes similar points.
Some colleges will close. Others will shrink. The prestige racket will claim fewer victims.
The number of kids turning 18 has begun to contract. But an even bigger transformation is starting to take shape: the shift toward online learning.
I expect to a substantial shift toward online learning in order to save costs, speed up education, and get far greater convenience. Why go through college in 4+ years starting at age 18? A self-starting high school student can start earning college credits while in high school and during summer between high school school years. Then upon high school graduation they can shift to full time 12 month per year study and get a degree 2 years sooner at far lower cost.
The rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs) will let most students watch higher quality lectures than they can watch at which ever university they attend. The very best lecturers will reach tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of students rather than just dozens or a few hundred students. This ability to watch the best is one of the greatest aspects of online education.
As a homeschooler one of my children had almost thirty credits when she graduated high school.
Priced themselves out of business.
In the 1960’s a Sci-Fi writer ,Mack Davis I think it was, wrote about a time in the early twenty-first century when Education had been completely automated. He assumed it would be factually based with ideologies and personal biases removed from the curriculum, I personally think the opposite would occur.
He also predicted that 80% of the country would be on welfare, Government or Corporate. He also predicted that Bread and circus would be used extensively to keep the mass of people on welfare glued to their TV’s so they weren’t out in the streets rioting and causing other damage through sheer boredom.
I sometimes think he was pretty prescient in his writings.
In the 1960’s a Sci-Fi writer ,Mack Davis I think it was,
Change that to Mack Reynolds.
And Heinlein, and Niven, and Haldeman. Pretty much all of them saw a problem coming with most people automated out of jobs, and with not much to do.
“Priced themselves out of business.”
They did; they also educated the foreigners who will take Americans’ jobs, so there isn’t much incentive for an American to invest the time & money. While I think everybody should learn a skill, there are too many young people today who invested the time & money in college that will be working unskilled jobs for years to come.
There is less room for indoctrination into liberalism online, but it is still evident in some places.
Expect the government to intervene.
If they can teach college classes online, what's to stop them from teaching elementary and high school courses?
Expect a fight. A BIG one.
Build factories for blue collar workers and America will soar to the top overnight.
This is the best thing that could be happening to education right now.
I agree, they also pretty much used the idea of a new frontier as a pressure relief valve. I don’t see that happening, If anything I can see something like ‘soma’ being given to the masses to keep them tranquil and easily controlled.
Online courses limit liberal indoctrination.
I taught at a few colleges over 16 years. I found that most of the stereotypes about liberals were true in the soft science departments where I worked but not true in the hard science programs. What was true for all of the administrators was a total blindness to market forces. Colleges never cut tuition costs and think allowing students to take a ridiculous 33 or so credit hours in a semester is “helping” them. Almost all schools have large endowments but none want to spend anything from it to lower tuitions. Now they are getting their “Ivory Tower noses” rubbed in reality which will eventually hurt us all. The true middle class - the kids who currently go on to be solid contributors- won’t be able to go to college but the affirmative action fakes will be there filling seats they have no right to. Their tuition will be paid by all of us in the form of some new “scholarship” or outright grant. These fakes will be affirmative action-ed into positions they have no real credentials for and will be paid with our tax money. We’re in trouble folks.
“Build factories for blue collar workers and America will soar to the top overnight.”
Those jobs are not in China, they are simply gone.
Take a look at this graph:
http://eh.net/files/graphics/encyclopedia/white.tractors.history.us.figure2.jpg
and replace “horses and mules” with “blue collar workers”, and replace “tractors” with “automation”, and you get the idea.
They already teach elementary and high school courses online. What is stopping them, what is keeping the govt. from intervening, is that parents still want free baby sitters. As long as that is the case, you will have plenty of takers for public schools.
Homeschooling, with parents who have taken control of their children’s education, is what the govt. fears, not online courses.
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