Erik Marshall

According to WSJ a few days ago, Youtube has added a section dedicated to education. It has a lot of lectures organized by “most viewed” or by university. I wonder how the emergence of more sites like these, as well as the rapid growth of online learning environments and services, will affect more traditional, f2f, classroom-style teaching and learning.

These technologies force us to re-examine the role of higher education in our culture. The central question that I think needs to be asked is: what is the value of a traditional four-year degree? I still hold the increasingly quaint notion that there is intrinsic value in learning, and that people should be well-rounded, exposed to various disciplines and modes of thought. In this vein, general ed classes prepare a student not just for upper level classes, but for life. But what does completion of a four-year degree tell employer, besides that the graduate can jump through bureaucratic hoops, and perform the required minimum for whatever GPA she carries? Some studies have shown that college graduates score low in basic literacy and analytical thinking. We can no longer really assume that a college graduate has a particular set of knowledge or skills.

The traditional college system is, in many ways, broke. I’m not going to blame the Youtube (or twitter, or whatever) generation for diluting higher ed. There are a number of  forces at play here. Students are coming to college with a rather low set of skills, which means that colleges have to spend a lot of time teaching remedial skills. So, high schools are not preparing people for college and college is not preparing people for work. As the number of people with bachelor’s degrees has risen over the past several decades, a college education has become the norm. Many see the four-year degree as a ticket to a job and nothing else, but as more people have degrees and the job market shrinks and becomes much more competitive,we will see many more people with degrees and student loans but without jobs.

The attitude that college is job training, and a necesssary evil on the path to a career has created an ancillary market not only for paper mills, but for online instruction, which is still struggling to gain acceptance. Just today, IHE has an article about “outsourcing” adjunct jobs to an online corporation. Traditional college is expensive, and it makes sense that students and colleges want to save money. Some people worry about the quality of education, but the people who lose the most here are instructors, who are increasingly part-time, poorly-paid, and little respected.

I think we have to reexamine the notion that everyone should go to college, and that college is primarily about job training, and not about broader learning. If someone wants job training, there should be ways to gain that without spending so much time and money jumping through administrative hoops. I was pleasantly surprised by a recent episode of This American Life in which Adam Davidson enlists the aid of an economics professor to convince his brother to attend college, only to be contradicted by the professor — Adam’s brother is doing fine without college, she says¹. Maya Frost also has an interesting post about “smarting out” of high school.

Getting back to Youtube Edu, it seems that one can learn just about anything online, and that, if an employer is looking for a specfic set of skills, then maybe we should devise tests for that, and nevermind where the skills came from.

1. sorry, the NPR page does not list the prof’s name [↩]