on Oct 4th, 2007Tivo Education Before Universities Bury Its Students in Lifelong Debt
Integrative Biology 131: General Human Anatomy. Fall 2005. Professor Marian Diamond. The functional anatomy of the human body as revealed by gross and microscopic examination.
Finally!! UC Berkeley is beginning to make class lectures available online for free! This is what education is really about. The cost of education today is more about bloated overhead and endless buildings that require too much maintenence. Information itself, especially gut courses, is cheap. The cost of videotaping a professor’s lectures on a subject is cheap. The cost to put it online is cheap. What’s not cheap is the racket set up around accreditation. This is where the university burns students. They sell credits toward a degree at a price that far exceeds the information being provided.
It’s time to end the madness of education and get back to the basics. Teaching gut course on physics, biology, or English has nothing to do with financing some graduate research department filled with “stars” who define the university’s reputation. College is no longer for the privileged few; it’s for anyone and everyone. You don’t need a billion dollar endowment to teach intro psychology. I’m sorry, the core information doesn’t change that much, even though textbook manufacturers would have you believe otherwise.
Education is quickly becoming like health care: too many bottom feeders with a dubious interest in securing a revenue stream off this year’s sucker class. Let’s face it, education is about information and thinking. The cost of producing information, at an undergraduate level, is almost zilch. It was paid for years ago. Universities need to get out of the endowment business and restructure their business model. Undergraduate education should be divorced from graduate research. The assumption that graduate research is required to teach undergraduate courses is pure fiction. It’s an antiquated business model that doesn’t account for one simple fact: the internet.
The ability to disseminate information and provide access to those capable of teaching that information has dropped to zero. I don’t need to spend $150,000 to socialize. I’d rather take two or three years off and travel the world for $50,000 and then pay a nominal amount to acquire the information contained in gut courses online. Wouldn’t I learn more about Greek architecture if I were in Greece looking at the actually architecture during the day and watching a professor lecture about it at night? Education becomes so much more interactive if the material its based on is accessible and relevant at the moment its being consumed.
Education needs to undergo the Tivo revolution. Courses offered when I want them, wherever I want them. Forget cutting deals with banks to entrap future generations into a shitload of credit card and student loan debt at usury rates; colleges should be reinventing education for the 21st Century. Instead they’re clinging to their old business model hoping to rake in even more money. Viva la revolution!