How
does Silicon Valley feel about college? Here’s a taste: Seven words in a
tweet provoked by a conversation about education started by Silicon
Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreeseen.
Arrogance? Check. Supreme confidence? Check. Oblivious to the value actually provided by a college education? Check.
But how? The question becomes more pertinent every day — and it’s one that Silicon Valley would dearly like to answer.
The
robots are coming for our jobs, relentlessly working their way up the
value chain. Anything that can be automated will be automated. The
obvious — and perhaps the only — answer to this threat is a vastly
improved educational system. We’ve got to leverage our human
intelligence to stay ahead of robotic A.I.! And right now, everyone
agrees, the system is not meeting the challenge. The cost of a
traditional four-year college education has far outpaced inflation.
Student loan debt is a national tragedy. Actually achieving a college
degree still bequeaths better job prospects than the alternative, but
for many students, the cost-benefit ratio is completely out of whack.
No
problem, says the tech industry. Like a snake eating its own tail,
Silicon Valley has the perfect solution for the social inequities caused
by technologically induced “disruption.” More disruption!
Universities
are a hopelessly obsolete way to go about getting an education when
we’ve got the Internet, the argument goes. Just as Airbnb is
disemboweling the hotel industry and Uber is annihilating the taxi
industry, companies such as Coursera and Udacity will leverage
technology and access to venture capital in order to crush the incumbent
education industry, supposedly offering high-quality educational
opportunities for a fraction of the cost of a four-year college.
There
is an elegant logic to this argument. We’ll use the Internet to stay
ahead of the Internet. Awesome tools are at our disposal. In MOOCs —
“Massive Open Online Courses” — hundreds of thousands of students will
imbibe the wisdom of Ivy League “superprofessors” via pre-recorded
lectures piped down to your smartphone. No need even for overworked
graduate student teaching assistants. Intelligent software will take
care of the grading. (That’s right — we’ll use robots to meet the robot
threat!) The market, in other words, will provide the solution to the
problem that the market has caused. It’s a wonderful libertarian dream.
But
there’s a flaw in the logic. Early returns on MOOCs have confirmed what
just about any teacher could have told you before Silicon Valley
started believing it could “fix” education. Real human interaction and
engagement are hugely important to delivering a quality education. Most
crucially, hands-on interaction with teachers is vital for the students
who are in most desperate need for an education — those with the least
financial resources and the most challenging backgrounds.
Of
course, it costs money to provide greater human interaction. You need
bodies — ideally, bodies with some mastery of the subject material. But
when you raise costs, you destroy the primary attraction of Silicon
Valley’s “disruptive” model. The big tech success stories are all about
avoiding the
costs faced by the incumbents. Airbnb owns no hotels. Uber owns no
taxis. The selling point of Coursera and Udacity is that they need own
no universities.
But education is different than running a hotel.
There’s a reason why governments have historically considered providing
education a public good. When you start throwing bodies into the fray to
teach people who can’t afford a traditional private education you end
up disastrously chipping away at the profits that the venture
capitalists backing Coursera and Udacity demand.
And that’s a tail that the snake can’t swallow.
* * *
The New York Times famously dubbed 2012
“The Year of the MOOC.” Coursera
and Udacity (both started by Stanford professors) and an MIT-Harvard
collaboration called EdX exploded into the popular imagination. But the
hype ebbed almost as quickly as it had flowed. In 2013, after a
disastrous pilot experiment in which Udacity and San Jose State
collaborated to deliver three courses, MOOCs were promptly declared dead
— with the harshest schadenfreude coming from academics who saw the
rush to MOOCs as an educational travesty.
At the end of 2013, the New York Times had changed its tune:
“After Setbacks, Online Courses are Rethought.”
But MOOC supporters have never wavered. In May, Clayton Christensen, the
high priest of “disruption” theory, scoffed
at the unbelievers: ”[T]heir
potential to disrupt — on price, technology, even pedagogy — in a
long-stagnant industry,” wrote Christensen, ” is only just beginning to
be seen.”
At the end of June, the Economist followed suit with a package of stories
touting the
inevitable “creative destruction” threatened by MOOCs: “[A] revolution
has begun thanks to three forces: rising costs, changing demand and
disruptive technology. The result will be the reinvention of the
university …” It’s 2012 all over again!
Sure, there have been
speed bumps along the way. But as Christensen explained, the same is
true for any would-be disruptive start-up. Failures are bound to happen.
What makes Silicon Valley so special is its ability to learn from
mistakes, tweak its biz model and try something new. It’s called
“iteration.”
There is, of course, great merit to the iterative
process. And it would be foolish to claim that new technology won’t have
an impact on the educational process. If there’s one thing that the
Internet and smartphones are insanely good at, it is
providing access to information. A
teenager with a phone in Uganda has opportunities for learning that
most of the world never had through the entire course of human history.
That’s great.
But there’s a crucial difference between “access to
information” and “education” that explains why the university isn’t
about to become obsolete, and why we can’t depend —
as Marc Andreessen tells us — on the magic elixir of innovation plus the free market to solve our education quandary.
Nothing better illustrates this point than a closer look at the Udacity-San Jose State collaboration.
* * *
When
Gov. Jerry Brown announced the collaboration between Udacity, founded
by the Stanford computer science Sebastian Thrun and San Jose State, a
publicly funded university in the heart of Silicon Valley, in January
2013, the match seemed perfect. Where else would you want to test out
the future of education? The plan was to focus on three courses:
elementary statistics, remedial math and college algebra. The target
student demographic was notoriously ill-served by the university system:
“Students were drawn from a lower-income high school and the
underperforming ranks of SJSU’s student body,”
reported Fast Company.
The results of the pilot, conducted in the spring of 2013, were a disaster, reported Fast Company:
Among
those pupils who took remedial math during the pilot program, just 25
percent passed. And when the online class was compared with the
in-person variety, the numbers were even more discouraging. A student
taking college algebra in person was 52 percent more likely to pass than
one taking a Udacity class, making the $150 price tag–roughly one-third
the normal in-state tuition–seem like something less than a bargain.
A
second attempt during the summer achieved better results, but with a
much less disadvantaged student body; and, even more crucially, with
considerably greater resources put into
human interaction and oversight. For example, San Jose State reported that the summer courses were improved by “checking in with students more often.”
But the prime takeaway was stark. Inside Higher Education reported that
a research report conducted
by San Jose State on the experiment concluded that “it may be difficult
for the university to deliver online education in this format to the
students who need it most.”
In an iterative world, San Jose State
and Udacity would have learned from their mistakes. The next version of
their collaboration would have incorporated the increased human
resources necessary to make it work, to be sure that students didn’t
fall through the cracks. But the lesson that Udacity learned from the
collaboration turned out be something different: There isn’t going to be
much profit to be made attempting to apply the principles of MOOCs to
students from a disadvantaged background.
Thrun set off
a firestorm of commentary when he told Fast Company’s Max Chafkin this:
“These
were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to
computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives,” he says.
“It’s a group for which this medium is not a good fit….”
“I’d aspired to give people a profound education–to teach them something substantial… But the data was at odds with this idea.”
Henceforth, Udacity would “pivot” to focusing on vocational training funded by direct corporate support.
Thrun later claimed that his comments were misinterpreted by Fast Company. And in his
May Op-Ed Christensen argued that Udacity’s pivot was a boon!
Udacity,
for its part, should be applauded for not burning through all of its
money in pursuit of the wrong strategy. The company realized — and
publicly acknowledged — that its future lay on a different path than it
had originally anticipated. Indeed, Udacity’s pivot may have even
prevented a MOOC bubble from bursting.
Educating the disadvantaged via MOOCs is the wrong strategy? That’s not a pivot — it’s an abject surrender.
The
Economist, meanwhile, brushed off the San Jose State episode by noting
that “online learning has its pitfalls.” But the Economist also
published a revealing observation: “In some ways MOOCs will reinforce
inequality … among students (the talented will be much more comfortable
than the weaker outside the structured university environment) …”
But
isn’t that exactly the the problem? No one can deny that the access to
information facilitated by the Internet is a fantastic thing for
talented students — and particularly so for those with secure economic
backgrounds and fast Internet connections. But such people are most
likely to succeed in a world full of smart robots
anyway. The
challenge posed by technological transformation and disruption is that
the jobs that are being automated away first are the ones that are most
suited to the less talented or advantaged. In other words, the
population that MOOCs are least suited to serving is the population that
technology is putting in the most vulnerable position.
Innovation
and the free market aren’t going to fix this problem, for the very
simple reason that there is no money in it. There’s no profit to be
mined in educating people who not only can’t pay for an education, but
also require greater human resources to be educated.
This is why we have public education
in the first place.
“College
is a public good,” says Jonathan Rees, a professor at Colorado State
University who has been critical of MOOCs. “It’s what industrialized
democratic society should be providing for students.”
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