It's quite likely that by the time my 11-year-old hits 18, private universities will cost over $100,000 per year (tuition plus fees, housing, and food plan), and public schools will be $25K [EDITED orig. $50K] (plus or minus, depending on state subsidies and other funding such as corporate donations).
While the university experience is undoubtedly a valuable one for the 18-22 age range, with tremendous intellectual and socialization opportunities during this formative period, I wonder whether it's still going to be the best and only pathway to intellectual and social growth.
With MOOCs and other online learning resources flooding the internet, many free or for moderate fees, the focus now has to be on justifying the classroom experience. Are you still best off in a 300-seat lecture hall, scribbling/typing notes while a grad student or adjunct spews information from the lectern, at an arbitrary time of day that if you somehow miss it, you're out of luck? You can't exactly ask the lecturer to pause while you go to the toilet, or "please rewind 10 seconds, I missed something". Maybe they have videoed the lecture and maybe the videographer remembered to zoom in on the powerpoint screen at the right times.
You hope that meeting all those fellow students will lead to a group learning experience -- "Hey, let's meet at the coffeeshop and go over this stuff together!" That's possibly the best way to learn material, to teach it to your colleagues and have them quiz you as well. But is that not reproducible in the online model, e.g. chatrooms, skype, etc.?
In my opinion, the U.S. government should get out of the business of providing and guaranteeing educational loans. It has resulted in a vast, bloated system of exploitation of the students and the loan system, and we are now facing possibly a trillion dollar bubble that may burst in the next few years if all those freshly minted degrees don't lead to good paying jobs to retire those loans.
Universities in the U.S. must be put on notice that the free ride is over, and they have to get costs under control, stop with the billion dollar student centers and bloated administrative offices, and try to get back to basics of providing lecture halls and white boards and reasonably secure jobs for professors to do what universities ought to focus on: teach.
I think the MOOC thing is a game changer, but only for actually learning stuff (as opposed to prestige), and mostly for stuff where it can be proven that you've learned it.
What I mean is you now have a huge variety of ways to learn STEM type stuff. When I was an undergrad, you had some topic like transistors to learn about. You had maybe 3 or 4 books with explanations, not all good. You had a lecturer, and a tutor, and your fellow students. If combined they didn't lead you to understand the secret to transistors, you were buggered.
Nowadays, you have forums like stackexchange where you can get a well informed answer to some pretty obscure questions. You have a whole load of lectures from various universities as well, and you can also get a variety of books delivered wirelessly. So really if you're ignorant about something, it's not because you couldn't have found a good explanation.
The reason I mention provable stuff is that you have certain subjects where, let's face it, it's easy to BS. Sure, there's agreement that some people are better at discussing history or politics than others, but it's just not the same as a STEM subject. There's an xkcd about this.
For those subjects, I reckon no matter how smart you sound, people will give you more credit if you went to a big name school.
I'm still waiting for the MOOCs to have credible exams. I mean in the eyes of the public, of course. Once that happens, and I believe it can happen quickly, there will not be quite so much pressure to do a specific, old fashioned residential college education.
I agree with getting the US Gov out of the loan business, but i think we the market to react, and it has begun to.
For many professions, colleges can be substituted by trade schools. We are already seeing this surge in software, and i think we can expect the trend to move into other verticals. At some point, and for some majors this has already happened, a BS/BA stands to lose you money over a lifetime.
At a point, college is no longer fiscally viable. In these cases, a cheaper, more targeted approach is highly marketable.
If you separate the testing and certification from the education, it isn't quite so important where the knowledge/skill came from, so long as the person has it.
For instance, if you take the rock guitarist certification test, and pass, you should be able to play guitar passably well in a rock band. It doesn't matter if you studied in a music conservatory for a few years, or worked small-time gigs in bars and clubs, or played a guitar-learning video game.
It's not the education that's the bottleneck. It's proving to others that you have the knowledge/skill in an efficient way.
The professional associations for actuaries (SoA, CAS) runs their own testing regime. You can take a university course to prepare for the tests, but you don't have to. That testing and certification process has led to the situation where passing another exam usually triggers a pay increase. And actuaries consistently rate as having very high job satisfaction.
ABMS runs certification tests for specialist physicians.
Lawyers have the bar examinations and board certification for specialists.
The same could happen for other careers. A group with a narrow focus could poach the testing and certification function from the generalist universities. For someone who has no need for external guidance with respect to a general education, and who knows what sort of career they want, they could skip college, and climb the ladder of a testing authority. That would present some risk that the authority itself fails in some way before all the tests are passed, and the career position established.
I've edited it down to $25K. I was thinking of 25 year estimates I've read, rather than 10 year estimates. In-state public 4-year tuition averages $9K or so right now, plus housing. In ten years this number will likely double or at least grow 150%, if the 5% growth rate continues to hold. If the Fed's monetary policy continues to push up interest rates, though, who knows how much more it might increase during that time.
Illinois State, a public university (and my alma mater), is currently citing $28k per year for total expenses (including room/board and personal expenses) for someone who lives on campus.
Tuition by itself is only $14k, but that's not a student's only expense. 16 years ago, tuition was less than $6k per year. If it matched inflation, tuition should be less than $9k right now. $14k is beyond ridiculous.
Why did you edit it? The total cost of attending the University of Washington today is $27k. Virginia is $29k. Texas is $26k. If you're child is going to college in 6 years, $40-50k sounds completely possible.
Cyber Dildonics asked me to back up the $50K figure, and I realized I could not. The current state university tuition rates, from several sources, range from $8K to $14K.
$29K is a sobering number - and thus, $50K in 8 years is quite plausible.
Let's hope something breaks soon, or it's going to be out of reach of all but the moneyed classes and those willing to indenture themselves to 20 years of debt.
While the university experience is undoubtedly a valuable one for the 18-22 age range, with tremendous intellectual and socialization opportunities during this formative period, I wonder whether it's still going to be the best and only pathway to intellectual and social growth.
With MOOCs and other online learning resources flooding the internet, many free or for moderate fees, the focus now has to be on justifying the classroom experience. Are you still best off in a 300-seat lecture hall, scribbling/typing notes while a grad student or adjunct spews information from the lectern, at an arbitrary time of day that if you somehow miss it, you're out of luck? You can't exactly ask the lecturer to pause while you go to the toilet, or "please rewind 10 seconds, I missed something". Maybe they have videoed the lecture and maybe the videographer remembered to zoom in on the powerpoint screen at the right times.
You hope that meeting all those fellow students will lead to a group learning experience -- "Hey, let's meet at the coffeeshop and go over this stuff together!" That's possibly the best way to learn material, to teach it to your colleagues and have them quiz you as well. But is that not reproducible in the online model, e.g. chatrooms, skype, etc.?
In my opinion, the U.S. government should get out of the business of providing and guaranteeing educational loans. It has resulted in a vast, bloated system of exploitation of the students and the loan system, and we are now facing possibly a trillion dollar bubble that may burst in the next few years if all those freshly minted degrees don't lead to good paying jobs to retire those loans.
Universities in the U.S. must be put on notice that the free ride is over, and they have to get costs under control, stop with the billion dollar student centers and bloated administrative offices, and try to get back to basics of providing lecture halls and white boards and reasonably secure jobs for professors to do what universities ought to focus on: teach.