Posted on 01/29/2013 11:41:33 AM PST by Jeff Winston
In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it. The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.
(Excerpt) Read more at the-american-interest.com ...
This has implications for anyone considering future education. As the author says, "...pursuing a Ph.D. in the liberal arts is one of the riskiest career moves one could make today."
I have excerpted only the first paragraph. The entire article is lengthy, but well worth the read.
I always thought it would be cool to create small SPECIFC colleges
For example, I went to a school for a physics degree, but i could have EASILY seen this done with a small group in someones home for 4 years.
That would have been much more cost effective. I would LOVE to start a small conservative- minded college teaching a physics curriculum
lol
so freaking laughable.
Anyone who can find the local library could get a college education for free, and it’s been that was for 100 years or more.
Exactly the opposite will happen. College will be even more important than ever with advanced degrees like Masters and Doctorate becoming the new minimum just as a high school diploma was decades ago and a bachelors is now.
But those degrees will be deliverable (and delivered) online.
That’s the difference.
But they'll charge ten grand for the exams that qualify you for that degree...
Most HS graduates are immature dumbos.
Much as half way houses and probation serves as an intermediate time between Prison on regular life,
Colleges serve much the same purpose as being a half way house between HS adolescence and being an adult.
Hopefully this will help eliminate all the pseudo non-academic disiplines that dominate the liberal arts schools in most universities. Since these degrees have absolutely no social utility I doubt many will work to obtain them if they don’t provide a marketable skill and there is no 4 year edu-vacation to go with them.
The main reason for college for many is to meet a potential spouse from a similar or higher status. A good college culls the herd so to speak and dramatically increases the chance of your child meeting and marrying someone of a similar or higher status. And likely dramatically decreases their chance of hooking up with a loser who's going no where.
I wouldn’t hesitate for even a second to attend your Physics class.
It’s one thing to read a boat load of stuff and quite another to get feed back in an open environment.
Guidance if you will.
The issue is cost and time.
Online learning can only deal with those issues if they are set up in very small groups.
Most of what I know about free online learning is that of a passive consumer of information, like reading but with video and lecture.
I think your idea is fantastic !!!
What’s required, however is a model that pays the provider/Professor for his time given such a small student body. I’m not saying it can’t be done.
If this can happen for Universities, it can happen for High Schools, Middle schools and elementary school. When education becomes modular, down loadable, and open source, then the onus will be on testing or certification.
I see that as a good thing.
One thing is for sure - I’m NOT sending my kids off to have their faith and worldview attacked by some leftist/Marxist college professor.
That's true. But if you just study for yourself, there are problems: how do you know that you've covered all the bases? How do you demonstrate to anyone outside of the library that you know what you say you've studied and are qualified to do the job you want (let's say, as a researcher in particle physics at Batavia)?
You can learn a great deal in a library or online, but the element of interaction is missing. There's a lot to be gained from talking with your professors, taking exams and writing papers to make sure you really know what you think you do, having discussions with classmates, working in a lab, being directed to new authors and materials you hadn't heard of, etc. Just the discipline of knowing that an exam is coming up helps focus the mind.
So while the self-taught method is valid, an online curriculum offers a great deal, too. I've taken some for-credit online classes in a very intimate group (four or five student) and it was great. I learned a lot more than I would have had I just been studying on my own. At least there was someone of whom I could ask questions.
There are very good conservative colleges where that won't happen. Don't worry.
He claimed that the curriculum that had nurtured our Founding Fathers was no longer good enough.
He claimed that the old curriculum did not teach people how to think.
Well, it has all been downhill from there, because our Founders were able to think.
Can't say the same for most graduates using the "New Curriculum."
Our Founders would have easily identified Obama as a complete fraud.
All you have to do is go to places like khanacademy.org to get a glimpse of what is going on. Not to mention the MIT offering mentioned in the article.
MrB,
My daughter has been sent off to a certain extent,and has and continues to have her faith and worldview attacked.
She is at an extremely liberal University with Professors that declare their Marxism. She also has very conservative professors.
She sends my her homework and complains about having to spend soo much time reading “Liberal Swill”, in order to complete an assignment.
Some kids can maintain objectiveness, while others can’t.
And what about the lab courses? How is a chemistry or physics student to do his lab work? How is a professor to evaluate the work of 100,000 students?
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