Posted on 11/25/2005 6:02:35 AM PST by billorites
The modern university is a relic that will disappear in a few decades. That prediction was made by Peter Drucker, the management genius who just died at 95 and usually got things right.
His words brought an uncharitable smile to my face as I recently strolled across the ivied campus of Brown University, in Providence, R.I. At the time, maintenance crews were busy removing leaves. Campus officials were still dealing with the aftermath of an especially drunken Saturday night. And most everyone was excited that the football team had taken the Ivy League championship.
No doubt, some education was going on, but the question nagged: Is this an efficient setup for improving young minds? Not very, according to Drucker. "Today's buildings are hopelessly unsuited and totally unneeded," he said. Satellites and the Internet can easily make classrooms obsolete.
We now read that professors at Purdue, Stanford, Duke and other universities are recording their lectures. Students download the talks on their iPods and listen to them whenever. The "whenever" can be while driving, lifting weights or between songs by Black Eyed Peas and the Pussycat Dolls.
The profs say that letting students hear the lectures on their own frees classroom time for penetrating discussions. The same conversations, however, could be held over the Internet -- or, for that matter, in a room at the public library.
Furthermore, the professors could let non-students download their lectures and charge them royalties, just like the Black Eyed Peas. Ordinary folks already buy courses on tape or CD. For example, The Teaching Company is now selling a virtual major in American history -- 84 lectures on 42 audiotapes -- at the bargain price of $109.95. It covers everything from "before Columbus" to Bill Clinton, and the lecturers are top-drawer. Some of them teach at Columbia University, where a single history course runs you $3,207.
Herman Melville said that "a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard." Melville didn't need college to write "Moby Dick." He needed to read and spend time in the world. Before sailing out on a whaler in 1841, he had already worked on his uncle's farm and as a cabin boy on a ship to England.
Peter Drucker urged high-school graduates to do likewise: Work for at least five years. If they went on to college, it would be as grown-ups.
You wonder whether colleges, stripped of their education function, wouldn't find other lives as spas, professional-sports franchises or perhaps lightly supervised halfway houses for post-adolescents. The infrastructure is already in place.
Over at Kenyon College, in Ohio, the students have a new $60 million athletic center. The highlights include a 12,500-square-foot workout area and an indoor track with eight lanes just for sprinting. The pool has 20 short-course and nine long-course lanes. And, like any upscale health club, this one has a cafe.
Speaking of sports, colleges spend huge numbers of "education dollars" on keeping their football coaches happy. For example, the University of Texas is giving Mack Brown a compensation package this year totaling $3.6 million. UT's highest-paid academic, Steven Weinberg, earns about $400,000, and he has a Nobel Prize in physics.
The universities claim that popular football and basketball teams are profit centers that help pay for learning. In truth, few produce a surplus even for their schools' sports programs. Athletics pay their own way at only about 10 colleges, according to Andrew Zimbalist, an economist at Smith College who specializes in sports.
And with all due respect to the Texas Longhorns, if they were such a fabulous cash machine, there would be no need for the Longhorn Foundation. The foundation, which raises money for UT athletics, notes on its website that revenues from ticket sales, television and ads cover less than half the operating expenses of the university's sports program.
University presidents, meanwhile, are working on their own pay packages. Several already make more than $1 million, which has become the new goalpost. Most justify their incomes by their ability to raise money for new buildings.
Of course, these are the buildings that will soon be relics, according to Peter Drucker. Look at these shining new facilities and think: What fine condos they will someday make.
Our society has seemed to have lost the ability to make intelligent adjustments to changing realities. Many problems, such as these mentioned in this article, can only be solved by crashing the status quo straight into a brick wall at warp speed.
So be it, hit the accelerator - and bring on that brick wall.
It goes without saying that you are very smart.
And, so is the lovely mrsbourbon.
Not only did you two have a wonderful, tuition-free education.
But, you gained a fantastic wife, and she a wonderful husband.
Being debt-free (except for a mortgage) is priceless at ANY age.
"We're homeschooling our daughter in high school, and the Community College is a great place to get those Science courses that require labs. It's almost impossible, as an individual, to get the kind of supplies that are sold to schools."
Hmmmm, sounds like a business opportunity to me.
While information can certainly be transferred via internet, one point that strikes me as needing to be addressed here is testing and degree giving. I for one will be surprised if society is evenly remotely ready to give the same sort of recognition to internet degrees as it currently does to brick and mortar ones.
Maybe that will come, though, I know that there are quite a few relatively informal classes being held via the internet already. But while very large classes can surely be held on the internet as easily as in an auditorium, I think there is not much doubt that a human professor makes lots of difference in classes where there is personal interaction. Perhaps the right way to do it is to combine some brick and mortar schooling with the internet. For instance, well paid professors could travel, meeting periodically with internet students over quite large areas of the country, personally checking their work and testing, etc. Something like this clearly seems a good idea for non degree classes that would be of interest, if for no other reason that it would be a revenue raiser. And if it would work for non degree classes, why not for degree as well? So I guess I am saying that the universities themselves would likely be pioneers in internet curricula. Which would in turn open things up to potential competitors.
On a side note, it seems to me like the art departments of the two local universities, UM and FSU, are already disappearing. But, considering that art departments (in the cause of not stifling "creativity") have consciously avoided teaching their students any skills, how to draw, paint, or sculpt, for 30 some years now (which means that today's crop of art professors don't actually know how to do those things very well either), it's not surprising that the departments themselves are disappearing. After all, one can stay home and avoid learning how to do those things just as easily, and much more cheaply, than going to university. At some point, the shallowness of the degree has to become apparent.
Other university departments often take a parallel course, rather than keeping alive and educating about the traditons of Western Civilization, they can be more concerned with the destruction of those traditions.
If modern universities are more concerned with tearing down than with building, at some point there very likely will be a replacement for them. Although IMO, it's really unpredictable what form the replacement will take, or where it will come from.
It was great. I got all the same information that those attending got, plus I was able to watch it several times, as well as go back over parts I was having trouble with.
And before you ask, at the end of the DVD was an email address of the instructor in case there were questions. I wrote and got a reply within a few hours.
I would much prefer taking these type of classes at my own pace as well as have them available for reference.
I am looking forward to more such classes.
This is actually a simple answer, the the system is already in place. There are already thousands of testing centers in the United States (acutally world wide).
Now even when I go to my company's training courses, the test are administered by an outside company. I don't see why college exams could not be also administered by these centers.
There are several issues that have been raised here. One is testing. I am contemplating such an online course in Art Appreciation and I think I would use take-home essay exams. (Timed exams online are another option.) Then there is always the question of who really wrote the exam. Of course, you can have that question even in regular classrooms. But if you know the personality of the students (i.e. through discussion groups on line etc.) you can tell if they have indeed written the exam. I'm not sure that I know too many professors with the energy to travel to meet students and grade work there.
I think it would be hard to have studio art classes on line. At an advanced level, students can work on their own and meet periodically with the professor. But at all levels you need to see the real work in order to have an intelligent group critique. And at the basic levels, the professor needs to be there to correct perspective flaws, etc.
But I think there will always be a need for brick and mortar classrooms; that's where the best interaction and discussions will happen between professors and students.
But it will be interesting to see how new technology will change some classes. I think the ipod is an interesting idea, but for art history it really helps to be in class to see the works discussed.
There are actually some attempts being made to teach studio art online. They involve digital images of the work being sent in for critique and analysis. How successful they will be, I don't know. OTOH, many RL college art programs, though they have live professors and group critiques, are actually not making much effort to teach studio art.
I don't think a professor could both travel and teach regular classes. Maybe the prof could teach online from an office or studio, with students from within say a 100 mile diameter traveling periodically to the prof.
My son is finishing his degree through Washington State Univ's online program. There are similar programs at Univ of Maryland and several other 'real' universities. There is no difference on the diploma between the online degree and the in-class degree.
These schools all offer financial aid, too, which is nice if your employer doesn't have education benefits.
Could be a good idea. It means that if a person knew the stuff and could pass the test, a college experience would be superfluous.
I like it!
Universities used to be permanently dedicated to higher learning, where the intellectually elite had a 'haven' away from political and economic pressures to study, either the severities of the sciences or the accumulated wisdom of the past. In addition, both "old money" and the "well to do" would tend to send their children their, either for networking or for learning the Western Canon.
Over time, with the advent of mechanization, and the increase in intellectual labor, colleges and universities took on the additional functions of becoming training grounds for the edcated labor force.
Overlapping with the second trend, the Marxists (see Gramsci!) began to subvert the centers of higher learning, resulting int he Marxist drivel, and all of the post-modernist womyn's studies (why isn't there a MAN studies?) claptrap.
And finally, the throngs of learners (typically in the engineering and sciences) from foreign lands, providing cheap TA's and graduate assistants.
But the big bucks come from preparing workers for industry. The middle classes still have to find jobs and to support their lifestyle; and not everyone has the verve to start their own business.
So I agree that the Universities will change from their current form, as the find themselves outliving their usefulness. But the biggest issue is what has come up, they at least on paper, aside from womyn's studies and the like, are supposed to provide something of a "brand", or a guarantee that their graduates will be more or less successful workers.
Cheers!
Many of the chemicals and solutions are closely held, especially since 9/11 because of the concern of terrorism, I guess. They just flat won't sell them to individuals, homeschooling or not.
Our local public library proctors exams given by online schools that require it. There is no charge by the library, either.
A lot like being the best yodeler in Compton.
As a computer guy, I would have to say that the college degree has been largely used as a barrier to entry. Everybody knows the best computer people are the geeks who skip school to sit in their basement and hack. But I had to get my degree to get an entree into the first tier of the computer ranks, not being a creative genius myself.
However, I do think my thought life is different from many of those who didn't go to college, I feel I can tell a difference. And I remember much more than I thought I would when I was going through it.
I liked the idea about podcasting the lectures. Then you could have discussion groups meet and dissect what was said. THAT would make you remember.
Never happen. Because once the lecture was recorded, what would you need the instructor for except to update it once in a while? It doesn't change that much. Much as they hate teaching, without it there wouldn't be a need for nearly as many of them. Podcasted lectures. I think its a fine idea.
Ping.
My understanding is that it is a general rule of economics that whatever does not become more efficient to produce becomes more expensive. It is difficult to get any productivity gains out of the ancient college teaching model.
Everyone else lives in a world in which increased productivity has paid for a better lifestyle, more "things". Colleges must buy these things and also pay their professors salaries comparable to others in this more efficient world.
BTW I have never even taken a course in economics but I ran this theory by an economics professor from an Ivy league college and he agreed that it was true.
You gotta be kiddin me. You can't cram Engineering programs into a 2-year trade school. Engineering doesn't fit in a four-year program (most undergrad programs are at least 5) because you essentially have to master the underlying science of the area, and then learn about the application of it to new problems. Engineers have to learn the basic principles as well as an ever expanding body of new technology, so that they can continue to expand it in their own careers.
Doctors do too, but they don't call building bridges "practice." Nobody is surprised if some of a doctor's patients die, but expect to see a Discovery Channel hour long special if an engineer's bridge falls down or any plane ever crashes.
Failure is not likewise tolerated in engineering.
And lawyering is the biggest joke profession there is! Think about it! What other profession could you enter where you could lose every single case you worked on and still be considered good in your field (such as a public defense lawyer for death row.) In every court, it is expected that at least one out of the two counsel present will lose! How long would you be in marketing if HALF of your products failed?!?!! LOL!
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