Education on the Internet?

The recent article on education from Washington Monthly has gotten me thinking about the nature of education. The article asks if a company called StraighterLine, which offers courses through the Internet, might not be the future of higher education. If education is defined as X amount of information memorized and confirmed through tests, then a college education could be completed much more quickly than it is now. With the Internet and its ability to stream video and facilitate interaction at a distance, it’s not hard to imagine scenarios that would allow for a less expensive education as well.

This is a tempting path to imagine, but it ignores several things delivered by a traditional university. First, and most obviously, is a chance to stew in college culture. This admittedly has little to do with the information gained from attendance at a university, but college has become a site of national socialization. If one were to interview students here at Lawrence University, for example, I’m sure that extra-curricular groups and causes would rank high in their experience of college. That’s one thing a college education in the US offers: the chance to think through matters of values and identity. This can take the form of association with political or social causes, or for many it is the experience of being part of a fraternity or sorority.  It’s also true that at any good college in America a student will encounter diversity in ethnicity, sexuality, and political outlook. Students at these schools constantly define themselves and try on identities. Some people may not see this as the proper mission of higher education, but it’s happening, and I don’t see a ready replacement for this aspect of college experience. Today the experience of college is important as a formative experience.

A second issue is the nature of knowledge. It’s significant that the article spotlights as a success story a woman who takes a series of math courses:

She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual—hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month.

If one could imagine this model of education working, it would be easiest in a subject like math where there are right/wrong answers. If that is what education is—that is, information—then yes, we can deliver that more cheaply. But as soon as one moves deeply into the humanities this stops working. Having read a lot of novels doesn’t make one an English major. What a student gains from class time (hopefully!) is a framework for critical reading.. a set of questions that can be applied to texts. Students don’t always get this, and it’s easier for them to think in terms of information (reading x number of important books), but in class they hear ideas take off and sometimes sail, other times crash.. and this starts to build a sense of the “rules of engagement” for intellectual debate. That’s not something one gets from books alone, because those books cannot discipline or shape an answer; in fact, books often assume that kind of informal sense of intellectual discussion. This is what professors offer in the classroom. Surprisingly often, the result is pretty obvious at the end of four years: a student who has a decent range of facts, but more crucially circumspection and complexity in his or her thought.

This would seem to lock students into the current model of higher education. The problem is that this model is extremely expensive.. even obscenely so. But at the same time the return on this education is impossible to deny. Several good graphs have been floating around the Internet on the subject of employment and level of education. Here’s one from Calclated Risk:

from Calculated Risk

The lowest purple line is the unemployment for individuals with a college degree or better.. and the numbers look even better if you are white and have that degree. So there’s no doubt that college pays, but this results not just from the acquisition of pure knowledge, but also from the social interactions and intellectual modeling that go on in college.

The idea that an Internet company could serve up everything offered by higher education is as naive as taking a lively coffee house and thinking that if people had their own coffee makers they could get all the advantages of the coffee house for less money. But the coffee house is more than coffee.. it’s also a social institution. Any ideas about changing higher education should take seriously the social role of the university.