The End of the University as We Know ItNATHAN HARDEN.docx

1、The End of the University as We Know ItNATHAN HARDENThe End of the University as We Know ItNATHAN HARDENThe higher ed revolution is coming. Just a few decades hence, half the colleges and universities in the United States will have disappeared, but schools like Harvard will have millions of students

2、.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

3、 free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelors degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.Weve all heard plenty about the “college bu

4、bble” in recent years. Student loan debt is at an all-time highan average of more than $23,000 per graduate by some countsand tuition costs continue to rise at a rate far outpacing inflation, as they have for decades. Credential inflation is devaluing the college degree, making graduate degrees, and

5、 the greater debt required to pay for them, increasingly necessary for many people to maintain the standard of living they experienced growing up in their parents homes. Students are defaulting on their loans at an unprecedented rate, too, partly a function of an economy short on entry-level profess

6、ional positions. Yet, as with all bubbles, theres a persistent public belief in the value of something, and that faith in the college degree has kept demand high.The figures are alarming, the anecdotes downright depressing. But the real story of the American higher-education bubble has little to do

7、with individual students and their debts or employment problems. The most important part of the college bubble storythe one we will soon be hearing much more aboutconcerns the impending financial collapse of numerous private colleges and universities and the likely shrinkage of many public ones. And

8、 when that bubble bursts, it will end a system of higher education that, for all of its history, has been steeped in a culture of exclusivity. Then well see the birth of something entirely new as we accept one central and unavoidable fact: The college classroom is about to go virtual.We are all awar

9、e that the IT revolution is having an impact on education, but we tend to appreciate the changes in isolation, and at the margins. Very few have been able to exercise their imaginations to the point that they can perceive the systemic and structural changes ahead, and what they portend for the busin

10、ess models and social scripts that sustain the status quo. That is partly because the changes are threatening to many vested interests, but also partly because the human mind resists surrender to upheaval and the anxiety that tends to go with it. But resist or not, major change is coming. The live l

11、ecture will be replaced by streaming video. The administration of exams and exchange of coursework over the internet will become the norm. The push and pull of academic exchange will take place mainly in interactive online spaces, occupied by a new generation of tablet-toting, hyper-connected youth

12、who already spend much of their lives online. Universities will extend their reach to students around the world, unbounded by geography or even by time zones. All of this will be on offer, too, at a fraction of the cost of a traditional college education.How do I know this will happen? Because recen

13、t history shows us that the internet is a great destroyer of any traditional business that relies on the sale of information. The internet destroyed the livelihoods of traditional stock brokers and bonds salesmen by throwing open to everyone access to the proprietary information they used to sell. T

14、he same technology enabled bankers and financiers to develop new products and methods, but, as it turned out, the experience necessary to manage it all did not keep up. Prior to the Wall Street meltdown, it seemed absurd to think that storied financial institutions like Bear Stearns and Lehman Broth

15、ers could disappear seemingly overnight. Until it happened, almost no one believed such a thing was possible. Well, get ready to see the same thing happen to a university near you, and not for entirely dissimilar reasons.The higher-ed business is in for a lot of pain as a new era of creative destruc

16、tion produces a merciless shakeout of those institutions that adapt and prosper from those that stall and die. Meanwhile, students themselves are in for a golden age, characterized by near-universal access to the highest quality teaching and scholarship at a minimal cost. The changes ahead will ulti

17、mately bring about the most beneficial, most efficient and most equitable access to education that the world has ever seen. There is much to be gained. We may lose the gothic arches, the bespectacled lecturers, dusty books lining the walls of labyrinthine librarieswonderful images from higher educat

18、ions past. But nostalgia wont stop the unsentimental beast of progress from wreaking havoc on old ways of doing things. If a faster, cheaper way of sharing information emerges, history shows us that it will quickly supplant what came before. People will not continue to pay tens of thousands of dolla

19、rs for what technology allows them to get for free.Technology will also bring future students an array of new choices about how to build and customize their educations. Power is shifting away from selective university admissions officers into the hands of educational consumers, who will soon have th

20、eir choice of attending virtually any university in the world online. This will dramatically increase competition among universities. Prestigious institutions, especially those few extremely well-endowed ones with money to buffer and finance change, will be in a position to dominate this virtual, gl

21、obal educational marketplace. The bottom feedersthe for-profit colleges and low-level public and non-profit collegeswill disappear or turn into the equivalent of vocational training institutes. Universities of all ranks below the very top will engage each other in an all-out war of survival. In this

22、 war, big-budget universities carrying large transactional costs stand to lose the most. Smaller, more nimble institutions with sound leadership will do best.This past spring, Harvard and MIT got the attention of everyone in the higher ed business when they announced a new online education venture c

23、alled edX. The new venture will make online versions of the universities courses available to a virtually unlimited number of enrollees around the world. Think of the ramifications: Now anyone in the world with an internet connection can access the kind of high-level teaching and scholarship previou

24、sly available only to a select group of the best and most privileged students. Its all part of a new breed of online courses known as “massive open online courses” (MOOCs), which are poised to forever change the way students learn and universities teach.One of the biggest barriers to the mainstreami

25、ng of online education is the common assumption that students dont learn as well with computer-based instruction as they do with in-person instruction. Theres nothing like the personal touch of being in a classroom with an actual professor, says the conventional wisdom, and thats true to some extent

26、. Clearly, online education cant be superior in all respects to the in-person experience. Nor is there any point pretending that information is the same as knowledge, and that access to information is the same as the teaching function instrumental to turning the former into the latter. But researche

27、rs at Carnegie Mellons Open Learning Initiative, whove been experimenting with computer-based learning for years, have found that when machine-guided learning is combined with traditional classroom instruction, students can learn material in half the time. Researchers at Ithaka S+R studied two group

28、s of studentsone group that received all instruction in person, and another group that received a mixture of traditional and computer-based instruction. The two groups did equally well on tests, but those who received the computer instruction were able to learn the same amount of material in 25 perc

29、ent less time.The real value of MOOCs is their scalability. Andrew Ng, a Stanford computer science professor and co-founder of an open-source web platform called Coursera (a for-profit version of edX), got into the MOOC business after he discovered that thousands of people were following his free St

30、anford courses online. He wanted to capitalize on the intense demand for high-quality, open-source online courses. A normal class Ng teaches at Stanford might enroll, at most, several hundred students. But in the fall of 2011 his online course in machine learning enrolled 100,000. “To reach that man

31、y students before”, Ng explained to Thomas Friedman of theNew York Times, “I would have had to teach my normal Stanford class for 250 years.”Based on the popularity of the MOOC offerings online so far, we know that open-source courses at elite universities have the potential to serve enormous “class

32、es.” An early MIT online course called “Circuits and Electronics” has attracted 120,000 registrants. Top schools like Yale, MIT and Stanford have been making streaming videos and podcasts of their courses available online for years, but MOOCs go beyond this to offer a full-blown interactive experien

33、ce. Students can intermingle with faculty and with each other over a kind of higher-ed social network. Streaming lectures may be accompanied by short auto-graded quizzes. Students can post questions about course material to discuss with other students. These discussions unfold across time zones, 24 hours a day. In extremely large courses, s