Is a college education really like a string quartet? Back in 1966,
that was the assertion of economists William Bowen, later president of
Princeton, and William Baumol. In a seminal study, Bowen and Baumol
used the analogy to show why universities can't easily improve
efficiency.
If you want to perform a proper string quartet, they noted, you
can't cut out the cellist nor can you squeeze in more performances by
playing the music faster. But that was then -- before MP3s and iPods
proved just how freely music could flow. Before Google scanned and
digitized 7 million books and Wikipedia users created the world's
largest encyclopedia. Before YouTube Edu and iTunes U made video and
audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for
free, and before college students built Facebook into the world's
largest social network, changing the way we all share information.
Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using
online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before.
But higher education remains, on the whole, a string quartet. MIT's
courseware may be free, yet an MIT degree still costs upward of
$189,000. College tuition has gone up more than any other good or
service since 1990, and our nation's students and graduates hold a
staggering $714 billion in outstanding student-loan debt. Once the
world's most educated country, the United States today ranks 10th
globally in the percentage of young people with postsecondary degrees.
"Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a
general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies,"
says Jim Groom, an "instructional technologist" at Virginia's
University of Mary Washington and a prominent voice in the blogosphere
for blowing up college as we know it. Groom, a chain-smoker with an
ever-present five days' growth of beard, coined the term "edupunk" to
describe the growing movement toward high-tech do-it-yourself
education. "Edupunk," he tells me in the opening notes of his first
email, "is about the utter irresponsibility and lethargy of educational
institutions and the means by which they are financially cannibalizing
their own mission."
The edupunks are on the march. From VC-funded startups to the ivied
walls of Harvard, new experiments and business models are springing up
from entrepreneurs, professors, and students alike. Want a class that's
structured like a role-playing game? An accredited bachelor's degree
for a few thousand dollars? A free, peer-to-peer Wiki university? These
all exist today, the overture to a complete educational remix.
The architects of education 2.0 predict that traditional universities
that cling to the string-quartet model will find themselves on the
wrong side of history, alongside newspaper chains and record stores.
"If universities can't find the will to innovate and adapt to changes
in the world around them," professor David Wiley of Brigham Young
University has written, "universities will be irrelevant by 2020."
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