This tuition bill is really outrageous! Especially given my GPA.
Families and taxpayers can’t just keep paying more and more and more into an undisciplined system where costs just keep on going up and up and up. We’ll never have enough loan money, we’ll never have enough grant money to keep up with costs that are going up five, six, seven percent a year. We’ve got to get more out of what we pay for.
Obama pledged to unveil most of the details in a subsequent speech. Some elements will probably involve executive action, including encouraging colleges to take steps on their own. (Obama promised to “call college presidents.”) The ultimate solution is probably going to require some kind of legislation, and David Wessel previews some good ideas along these lines.
But this agenda is also likely to create even deeper fissures within the Democratic agenda than cost control did. After all, there isn’t a much more loyal Democratic constituency than people who work in higher education.
Jonathan Rees’s polemic in Slate against MOOCs today is an important preview of the coming fight within the Democratic base. MOOC stands for “massive open online course,” which is a super-cheap way to provide college instruction. It’s one of the tools Obama referenced as a solution to the tuition crisis. The concept is extremely new, and the trick is to develop it in such a way that you can weed out cheating, and ensure that students really learn. If you can do that, then prestigious universities can start providing degrees for their online courses, and you would have a powerful, extremely affordable new path for cash-strapped kids to obtain the benefits of a college degree.
But, uh – are we sure the only way to teach people what to do with facts is face-to-face? This seems like something that could at least conceivably be taught to more than one person at once. I can remember lots of professors teaching me what to do with facts via lectures in extremely large auditoriums, which is not that different than a lecture you watch online. Nobody claims that the technical barrier has been solved, but it’s amazing that Rees is already declaring it unsolvable.
That is sad. College professors are good people, and nobody wants to hurt them. At the same time, designing a higher education system around maintaining living standards for college professors is an insane idea. The goal of the system ought to be making higher education effective and affordable for students. Rees waxes poetic about the joys of in-person liberal education, and I greatly enjoyed my classic college experience, with the gorgeous campus green and intramural basketball and watching campus protestors say interestingly crazy stuff at rallies. But insisting that’s the only way a student ought to be able to get a degree, in an economy where a college degree is necessary for a middle-class life, is to doom the children of non-affluent families to crushing college debt, or to lock them out of upward mobility altogether.
Rees urges his fellow academics: “It’s time for us non-superprofessors to forcefully explain to our newly famous colleagues how their MOOCs are already adversely affecting the terms and conditions of our employment.” Forcefully! Perhaps some of the students who can’t afford to get a college degree should forcefully explain their plight to him.