Journey vs. Destination

Going to college is expensive, really hideously expensive. And the price keeps rising. Student mortgage themselves in hopes of future income. And if they choose a major that doesn’t pay off, well, too bad, you still have to pay the loans

I don’t think this trend can continue. I’m excited (amazed, thrilled) by the online universities. Some of these are traditional universities offering their course material for free, often without a grade. Standford’s Machine Learning course by Professor Ng was awesome, I think every week I learned something that I applied to my job’s gnarly data analysis problem. And last fall, Stanford opened its Artificial Intelligence class for free to all comers. More than a hundred thousand people took them up on it. A hundred thousand people taking an upper level CS course. Wow!

The professor (Sebastian Thrun) touched all those minds. Amazing. And apparently addictive as he went off to co-found a startup to teach the masses. Udacity offers courses free to anyone and they range from intro to CS (no programming required) to building a robotic car. And the now-almost-legendary AI course is there. They even give you a grade (well, certificate with different levels of distinction).

Udacity isn’t alone. ITunes U has just a slew of videos and course materials on every topic under the sun. The photography ones are worth watching just for the pictures. And  Courseara has partnered with Stanford, Princeton, Penn and U of Michigan to offer an amazing selection.

See, every time someone makes a better course on topic X, you could watch that one instead. You could get the best education money can buy (and never have a boring, droning professor whose lecture leaves the material all in a muddle in your head). And it would be free.

Hey, I’m flabbergasted by that. I remember the day I paid off my student loans, what huge weight it was off my shoulders. Why would you pay to go to college when you could just suck this all down for free? For free!!!!!!!!!

How can it stay free? Well, I heard Udacity’s strategy yesterday (but I don’t know if it was said in confidence so you can search online to find it out yourself). It was interesting. I don’t know if it was viable but close enough that, yes, they can probably stay free to the student. Which is awesome (amazing, thrilling, exciting).

Grading become a problem but everyone is working on that. At Udacity, they build courses that have exams and homework that can be automatically graded (with some teaching assistant involvement). For many of the sciences, points can be based on the right answer (though it leaves style and partial credit to be solved).

Let’s say they fix that; natural language processing is getting better. Computers can read essays already, they don’t have too far to go to grade them. And multiple choice is evil but easy to grade.

Once you have grades, the next step is accreditation. Colleges already have it so they know how to do it. Some places may not go down that road, instead offering non-accredited transcripts. As long as they maintain an excellent reputation, it will work. For awhile. And then they’ll get accredited though maybe not by the body that does it now.

So, sweeping aside the problems that University of Phoenix has already surmounted, let’s think about where we go from here. Online colleges don’t have to turn anyone away to keep class sizes small. They can scale. Infinitely.

But what about labs? Physically doing the work in science? And then there is the issue that one of the main points to college is meeting everyone else in your college. The people I met in college are still my best friends, the people I trust to “get me” when no one else does. And I’ve heard the main point of business school is making contacts to help you work in business.

(Note: wild prognostication ahead.)

I think that college will go mostly online as the only affordable choice. And then students will realize they need each other, beyond the forums, in person. So they’ll co-locate. But not to an expensive university town, instead to an apartment in some cheap place where they can find part time jobs. And then, when four people are living nearby, a few more will come because is makes sense. And then a few more, until the whole building is mostly college students, studying together, helping each other, sharing physical space and physical materials.

Their degree will be from Accredited Online University  with a note that the student was from Apartment Building 12. Some of the apartments will be frat houses. Some will have chem labs in the basement. (Oh, save us from those that are both.) And some people won’t have that, they won’t afford the apartment or won’t get in (will you have to send your SAT scores so you can live with these people?). That’s ok, though it may be like going to a lower tier college so they’ll need to get good marks. Or maybe the students will take online courses from a dormitory at a traditional college as they augment that degree with courses that aren’t taught locally (or at the time needed or are taught poorly).

One of the tenets of society right now is that information wants to be free. If you are older than 35, can you imagine having Wikipedia in high school? I’m constantly stunned by the depth and breadth of what I can find online. Adding courses, designed to help people learn, well, now we are getting somewhere awesome. It isn’t just information, it is education.

Another tenet is that of self organization. Flash mobs are amusing; SOPA legislation squashing was more amazing. They used to call it grassroots. Now they call it the internet.

So, I think the universities of the future will be partially self organized. Where the senior, getting ready for a job, tells his sophomore neighbor that if she takes Penn’s archaeology course before Stanford’s paleobiology, it will make more sense. Since her transcript is going to be a set of courses and grades, well, her “degree” comes from when she’s ready to get a job or pass a certification exam. He does this because he wants his apartment building to stay ranked and maybe because he gets some “mentoring score”.

I don’t have it all planned out. But if I start buying apartment buildings, well, you’ll know why.