How can be a university education be free? Essay

A free college program line for whole? Thats been the dream of more(prenominal) an idealist. President Obama certainly sh ars this goal a year ago he s embolden The single closely important thing we can do is to make sure weve got a world- phratry education dust for e realbody. That is a prerequisite for prosperity. State university systems, particularly in New York and California, argon tasked to provide all disciples sluice those of limited meansaccess to higher(prenominal) education. M any(prenominal), especially on the political Left, view public livelihood of education as a cornerst whizz of a free and prosperous society.Thus the current economical hard times have produced great distress. Both SUNY in New York and the three California submit systems, along with many separates, have been forced to dramatically raise tuition. Many states have cut dorsum on supportthe sad and familiar joke world that public institutions have gone from being state supported to merely s tate located. Federal funds atomic number 18 also threatened alumnus assimilators leave alone no longer receive interest deferments, earmarks (a traditional source of money for higher education) are no longer available, and government grant money is increasingly harder to come by.More financial hurt looks wantly in the near future. On top of this many questions are raised about the set of higher education. Is college t each(prenominal)ing what educatees really hold to know? Will it really be able to contract graduates a place in the middle human body as it has done in the past? Do the benefits of college justify the increasingly burdensome student loan debt that our nations youth is now attach with? Higher education, already unaffordable, may no longer be worth the cost. It all looks pretty grim.And up to now I turn over we are on the cusp of a new world in higher education a world that can provide a free (or nearly free) college education for all. The receding has b rought higher educations woes into sharp relief, besides it has non caused them. Colleges, designed for the world in the mid-sixties and 1970s, have non changed with the times. Colleges are tranquil run as top-down bureaucracies rather than bottom-up communities. immaterial of government, hardly a(prenominal) other organizations operate this way. Anybody can publish and sell a book at amazon.com.Google and orchard apple tree let their customers determine most of their content. Walmart empowers flat its most junior employees to collection products and set prices. Wikipedia allows any endorser to write or update an article. Higher eds institutional structures arent like that at all, featuring top-down, inefficient, bureaucratic command management. Maintaining this old-fashioned system is ever more valuable and increasingly impossible. So here(predicate) are some suggestions for how higher ed can imitate successful organizations, improve quality, and reduce be even to zero . Let volunteers teach family linees This isnt simply about saving labor costs (though it is that, too) it is in the main about crowd-sourcing.Just as Amazon, Google, and Wikipedia are able to tap into the expertise of millions, colleges can do the aforesaid(prenominal) by blurring the distinction between energy, student, town, and gown. In an on-line(a) environment thither is no limit on the number of classes that can be taught, and no reason to restrict class offerings to scarcely those taught by being employees. Founded in 2009, University of the People willing exclusively use volunteer faculty. Indeed, the distinction between faculty and student is hopelessly blurred in their imitate. As a result they aspire to be a tuition-free university move over to any high school grad anywhere in the world. Initially they are offering programs in business administration and computer science, and are seeking regional accreditation. While there is no tuition, there are some fees, bu t the total cost for a unmarried mans degree will likely be a few hundred dollars, depending on where you live. By comparison, Texas initiative to offer bachelors degrees for $10,000 looks like a very modest goal.While UoPeople exists solely on-line, residential colleges can and should choose advantage of volunteers. Indeed, classes intended primarily for personal enrichment (as opposed to career preparation) are possibly violate taught by volunteers than paid faculty. Who better to teach Shakespeare than somebody whose primary motivation is a love of Shakespeare? Why non empower the waitress down the street (the one with a PhD in English) to teach a class on Hamlet? Just as with Amazon and Wikipedia, crowd-sourcing results in the best coming forward and tip the way. The university will need to establish rules that enable the winnowing and selection process just as Amazon does very successfully with the customer reviews and the best-seller rankingswithout in any way depriving o thers of opportunity.Of course volunteers may non be grading papers. Some of that can be avoided by asking peers, with instructor oversight, to grade papers (as UoPeople will certainly be doing), but that brings us to the second requirement of a (nearly) free education. Automate around everything In particular, automate grading. There are today few reasons for any human being to be grading math or science homeworkat least through the sophomore level. Indeed, faculty graders can be unfair and unreliable I speak from experience.Computer grading can be more reliable and certainly more than cheaper. Even for the softer subjects computers can be an asset. On-line campuses at tokenish run English papers through Turnitin and a grammar- and spell-checker before a grader even sees the paper, eliminating the most tedious labor. But where computerization isnt possible, grading can be out-sourced. Western Governors University hires graders for whom both the student and the faculty member re main anonymous, and who are required to calibrate their work against other graders to ensure consistency.This is not free, but it is cheaper than faculty graders and almost certainly better. For some classes it may even be possible to outsource grading to India or the Philippines to further reduce costs. With volunteer faculty and computerized/outsourced grading, the cost of many classes can blast zero. But there are still some classes that need to be professionally taught and for which grading is not a primary expense. Im thinking of the core introductions to the disciplines, such as Intro to Psychology, Calculus, or General Chemistry, etc. How can these be taught more cheaply?Let the winner ca-ca all If my grandchildren ever decide to take calculus, I want them to have an excellent instructor. Indeed, Id like them to have the best instructor in the country. In times past that would require attending an elite group liberal arts college. But today (or more likely, tomorrow) there are more and better choices. These already exist for languages.A quirky company called Rosetta Stone has largely put college foreign language statement out of business. For approximately $200/semester one can learn almost any language one wantsnot quite free, but much cheaper and (apparently) more effective than the college classroom. Rosetta Stone is a good mannequin of winner-take-all it has cornered the market not because of some government license, nor because only their employees know languages, but because they are better and cheaper. Why not do this with calculus, chemistry, psychology and all the rest? This will eventually happen. In each of those disciplines a product (or, hopefully, two or three competing products) will emerge that is manifestly better than anything any individual college can produce in-house. Why has it not already happened? With foreign languages one can each speak the language or nota short conversation will test. Whether or not one gets credit for t he class is completely irrelevant.The Carnegie Units awarded by academic language departments therefore have no value and are unsellable. With general chemistry, on the other hand, it is much harder to know whether or not the student has actually learned anythinga short conversation wont do. Therefore the Carnegie Units are still valued, and a general chemistry class that doesnt come with credit will find few takers. What is needed is a recognized way to establish competence independent of Carnegie Units. Once that happens the winner-take-all world pronto follows. A current project at Stanford University offers a path forward. Stanford is teaching a free, on-line class in artificial intelligence. As of August 15th news reports indicated that 58,000 people had registered. I have a friend who is signed up, and he reports that now enrollment is over 100,000.Stanford is not awarding credit for this classno Carnegie Units involved. Instead they are doing something much cleverer and much more subversive. Stanford will rank the students in order of how hearty they do in the class and send them a certificate accordingly. Coming in offshoot in a class of 100,000 will be quite an achievementworth far more than any Carnegie Units. That person (or more likely, thousand people) will have a credential they can take to the bank. More generally, the organizations that offer world class instruction in the disciplines can keep their own records of how well students do. This will serve as a transcript, rendering the college transcript and the associated Carnegie Units irrelevant and unmarketable. Carnegie Units are a problem, and that brings us to the final suggestion.Break the cartel What might be called the Carnegie Cartel survives because it serves the best interest of existing institutions. desire all good cartels, it reduces competition by raising the cost of entry and by fixing prices. It is compel by accrediting agencies, appropriately run as voluntary associations o f existing institutions, dedicated to keeping newcomers out. Acquiring and retaining accreditation is expensive including faculty and staff time along with the opportunity cost, a seven-figure price tag for an accreditation visit is not an unreasonable estimate.This does not include considerable efforts spent on on-going assessment, processes for continuous improvement, and collecting all the other ever more arcane documentation demanded by accreditors. A cartel maintains a grip on the market because it controls an essential resource that everybody needs. For the Carnegie Cartel this resource is access to state and federal financial aidmoney not available to unaccredited organizations and individuals. But this resource is now threatened by some(prenominal) developments. First, the recession has simply reduced the funds available. Second, many shady for-profit colleges have successfully gamed the system and are now reaping a disproportionate share of funds, corrupting the entire ent erprise. Third, the cartels currencyCarnegie Unitsare no longer a very good proxy for educational achievement.The system is flummoxed by on-line or blended learning, not to mention on-line short courses taught by volunteers. Accrediting agencies have never hear of crowd-sourcing. Finally, and most important, the advent of free or nearly free education eliminates the value of the cartels franchise. Federal funds are not necessary. No cartel serves the interest of its customers, and the Carnegie Cartel is no exception. It has frozen an over-priced, outmoded and dysfunctional educational system in place. It needs to be broken up. I believe that is gradually happening now.Breaking the cartel will sharply reduce the cost of higher education across the board. A free college education for all? The UoPeople experiment is testing the free education model today. If it is successful, it will spread more or less rapidly, and even if that particular effort fails it will only be a few years befo re somebody tries again. So I am not presenting a radical vision for the distant future, but rather describing something that is happening now or very soon. A (nearly) free college education for everybody is not only possible, but likely.But it will be a bare-bones education, and many students will want to pay for something more. What might they pay for? The residential college experience is valuable even if the general chemistry class is out-sourced. The college can provide accompanying laboratory experiences and/or recitation sections. Students need a peer group. Classmates form the beginning of a professional network that will last a lifetime. Attending classes and studying together is valuable, even if the classes themselves are free. Peer group facilitators will be in demand. Some classes analytical chemistry comes to mindrequire expensive equipment along with a technically happy instructor. This will never be free.College faculty wont get paid much for teaching, but they can still earn a living as tutors, research mentors, coaches, team-leaders, advisers, counselors. These skills cannot be computerized and students will pay for them. I am in favor of a free college education for all, despite the inevitable crack-up in the higher education community. I hope these changes happen sooner rather than later. But I am not starting a political movement. Activism is not necessarythe die is cast and much of what I predict is already taking place. Not that Im against political activismif you want to do that be my guest. But could I ask you to please wait for a few years until aft(prenominal) I retire?