How can be a university education be free? Essay

A alleviate college rearing for each? Thats been the dream of some(prenominal) an idealist. President Obama certainly shargons this goal a year ago he said The single some important thing we stern do is to make sure weve got a populace- twelvemonth education system for constantlyybody. That is a prerequisite for prosperity. State university systems, fussyly in New York and California, argon t enquireed to pull up stakes all students even those of limited meansaccess to higher education. Many, oddly on the political Left, view national support of education as a cornerst unmatchable of a free and prosperous society.Thus the sure economic hard times countenance produced great distress. Both SUNY in New York and the three California introduce systems, along with many others, shoot been forced to dramatically raise tuition. Many states have cut dorsum on supportthe sad and familiar joke being that public institutions have g peerless from being state supported to merely s tate located. Federal funds are also threatened graduate students result no longer receive interest deferments, earmarks (a traditional source of property for higher education) are no longer available, and government grant cash is progressively harder to come by.to a greater extent financial woe looks likely in the near future. On top of this many questions are raised some the apprize of higher education. Is college teaching what students really need to k instantaneously? pass on it really be able to guarantee graduates a place in the middle class as it has done in the past? Do the benefits of college justify the increasingly burdensome student loan debt that our nations youth is now saddled with? higher(prenominal) education, already unaffordable, may no longer be worth the comprise. It all looks pretty grim.And yet I believe we are on the cusp of a new world in higher education a world that mass yield a free (or nearly free) college education for all. The recession has brought higher educations woes into sharp relief, further it has non caused them. Colleges, de sign(a) for the world in the 1960s and 1970s, have non changed with the times. Colleges are cool off campaigning as top-down bureaucracies rather than bottom-up communities. Outside of government, few other organizations hold up this authority. Anybody jakes publish and sell a book at Amazon.com.Google and apple let their customers determine around of their content. Walmart empowers even its most junior employees to lodge products and set determines. Wikipedia allows any reader to write or update an article. Higher eds institutional structures arent like that at all, featuring top-down, inefficient, bureaucratic command management. Maintaining this old-fashioned system is ever to a greater extent high-priced and increasingly impossible. So here are some suggestions for how higher ed atomic number 50 imitate successful organizations, improve quality, and reduce cost even to zero. let declare oneselfs teach classes This isnt simply about saving labor costs (though it is that, too) it is primarily about crowd-sourcing.Just as Amazon, Google, and Wikipedia are able to exploit into the expertise of millions, colleges can do the same by blurring the distinction amidst faculty, student, town, and gown. In an on-line environment in that respect is no limit on the number of classes that can be taught, and no reason to restrict class offerings to alone those taught by compensable employees. Founded in 2009, University of the People leave altogether use volunteer faculty. Indeed, the distinction between faculty and student is dispiritedly blurred in their precedent. As a result they aspire to be a tuition-free university open to any high school grad anyplace in the world. Initially they are offering programs in business memorial tablet and computer science, and are seeking regional ac relianceation. While there is no tuition, there are some fees, but t he total cost for a bachelor-at-armss degree go out likely be a few hundred dollars, depending on where you live. By comparison, Texas initiative to offer bachelors degrees for $10,000 looks like a very modest goal.While UoPeople exists totally on-line, residential colleges can and should take advantage of volunteers. Indeed, classes intended primarily for own(prenominal) enrichment (as opposed to career preparation) are possibly dampen taught by volunteers than paying faculty. Who better to teach Shakespeare than somebody whose primary motivation is a grapple of Shakespeare? Why not empower the waitress down the street (the one with a PhD in English) to teach a class on critical point? Just as with Amazon and Wikipedia, crowd-sourcing results in the best coming forrad and leading the way. The university provide need to establish rules that enable the winnowing and picking process just as Amazon does very successfully with the customer reviews and the best-seller rankingsw ithout in any way depriving others of opportunity.Of course volunteers may not be razing written document. Some of that can be avoided by asking peers, with teacher oversight, to grade papers (as UoPeople will certainly be doing), but that brings us to the second requirement of a (nearly) free education. Automate almost everything In particular, automate grading. There are today few reasons for any humanity being to be grading math or science cookingat least through the sophomore level. Indeed, faculty graders can be unfair and unreliable I speak from experience.Computer grading can be more reliable and certainly a great deal cheaper. Even for the softer subjects computers can be an asset. On-line campuses at minimum run English papers through Turnitin and a grammar- and spell-checker before a grader even sees the paper, eliminating the most tedious labor. But where computerization isnt possible, grading can be out-sourced. Western Governors University hires graders for whom bot h the student and the faculty member remain anonymous, and who are required to calibrate their work against other graders to ensure consistency.This is not free, but it is cheaper than faculty graders and almost certainly better. For some classes it may even be possible to outsource grading to India or the Philippines to further reduce costs. With volunteer faculty and computerized/outsourced grading, the cost of many classes can approach zero. But there are still some classes that need to be professionally taught and for which grading is not a primary expense. Im thinking of the mettle introductions to the disciplines, such as Intro to Psychology, Calculus, or General Chemistry, etc. How can these be taught more cheaply?Let the winner take all If my grandchildren ever decide to take calculus, I want them to have an sensitive instructor. Indeed, Id like them to have the best instructor in the country. In times past that would require attending an elite munificent arts college. Bu t today (or more likely, tomorrow) there are more and better choices. These already exist for wordss.A quirky company called Rosetta muffin has largely put college foreign language instruction out of business. For approximately $200/semester one can learn almost any language one wantsnot quite free, but a great deal cheaper and (apparently) more sound than the college classroom. Rosetta Stone is a good example of winner-take-all it has cornered the market not because of some government license, nor because only their employees know languages, but because they are better and cheaper. Why not do this with calculus, chemistry, psychology and all the rest? This will eventually come on. In each of those disciplines a product (or, hopefully, two or three competing products) will emerge that is manifestly better than anything any soulfulness college can produce in-house. Why has it not already happened? With foreign languages one can either speak the language or nota short conversation will test. Whether or not one gets assurance for the class is completely irrelevant.The Carnegie Units awarded by academic language departments therefore have no value and are unsellable. With general chemistry, on the other hand, it is much harder to know whether or not the student has actually learned anythinga short conversation wont do. Therefore the Carnegie Units are still valued, and a general chemistry class that doesnt come with credit rating will find few takers. What is needed is a recognized way to establish competence independent of Carnegie Units. Once that happens the winner-take-all world quickly follows. A current project at Stanford University offers a path forward. Stanford is teaching a free, on-line class in artificial intelligence. As of August fifteenth news reports indicated that 58,000 people had registered. I have a friend who is signed up, and he reports that now enrollment is over 100,000.Stanford is not awarding credit for this classno Carnegie Units involved. Instead they are doing something much cleverer and much more subversive. Stanford will rank the students in order of how well they do in the class and send them a certificate accordingly. Coming in starting line signal in a class of 100,000 will be quite an executionworth far more than any Carnegie Units. That person (or more likely, universal gravitational constant people) will have a credential they can take to the bank. More generally, the organizations that offer world class instruction in the disciplines can withhold their own records of how well students do. This will serve as a transcript, reading the college transcript and the associated Carnegie Units irrelevant and unmarketable. Carnegie Units are a problem, and that brings us to the final suggestion. disturb the cartel What might be called the Carnegie Cartel survives because it serves the best interest of breathing institutions. Like all good cartels, it reduces competition by raising the cost of entry a nd by fixing prices. It is enforced by accrediting agencies, appropriately run as voluntary associations of existing institutions, dedicated to keeping newcomers out. Acquiring and retaining accreditation is expensive including faculty and staff time along with the opportunity cost, a seven-figure price tag for an accreditation visit is not an unreasonable estimate.This does not include healthy efforts spent on on-going assessment, processes for continuous improvement, and collecting all the other ever more arcane documentation demanded by accreditors. A cartel maintains a grip on the market because it controls an essential resourcefulness that everybody needs. For the Carnegie Cartel this resource is access to state and federal financial aidmoney not available to unaccredited organizations and individuals. But this resource is now threatened by several developments. First, the recession has simply reduced the funds available. Second, many dark for-profit colleges have successful ly gamed the system and are now reaping a disproportionate share of funds, corrupting the entire enterprise. Third, the cartels currencyCarnegie Unitsare no longer a very good proxy for educational achievement.The system is flummoxed by on-line or blended learning, not to computer address on-line short courses taught by volunteers. Accrediting agencies have never heard of crowd-sourcing. Finally, and most important, the advent of free or nearly free education eliminates the value of the cartels franchise. Federal funds are not necessary. No cartel serves the interest of its customers, and the Carnegie Cartel is no exception. It has frozen an over-priced, outmoded and impaired educational system in place. It needs to be broken up. I believe that is gradually happening now.Breaking the cartel will acutely reduce the cost of higher education across the board. A free college education for all? The UoPeople experiment is testing the free education model today. If it is successful, it will spread more or less rapidly, and even if that particular effort fails it will only be a few geezerhood before somebody tries again. So I am not presenting a radical vision for the distant future, but rather describing something that is happening now or very soon. A (nearly) free college education for everybody is not only possible, but likely.But it will be a bare-bones education, and many students will want to pay for something more. What might they pay for? The residential college experience is of import even if the general chemistry class is out-sourced. The college can provide come with laboratory experiences and/or recitation sections. Students need a peer root. Classmates skeletal frame the beginning of a professional network that will last a lifetime. Attending classes and studying together is valuable, even if the classes themselves are free. Peer group facilitators will be in demand. Some classes analytical chemistry comes to estimaterequire expensive equipment a long with a technically trained instructor. This will never be free.College faculty wont get paid much for teaching, but they can still earn a existing as tutors, research mentors, coaches, team-leaders, advisers, counselors. These skills cannot be computerized and students will pay for them. I am in favor of a free college education for all, despite the inescapable dislocation in the higher education community. I hope these changes happen sooner rather than later. But I am not starting a political movement. Activism is not necessarythe die is cast and much of what I predict is already taking place. Not that Im against political activismif you want to do that be my guest. But could I ask you to please wait for a few years until after I retire?