// essays //
February 26, 2015
The Death of College?
Winston Mann
College, as we know it, won’t exist in twenty years. Too many key aspects of the university system are quickly becoming irrelevant, eclipsed by advanced education technologies that are faster, cheaper, and more democratic. As these technologies become more widespread and accepted as valid educational surrogates, it is highly unlikely that students will continue to shell out tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for traditional schooling. This pressure, put on the education system by simple capitalism, will in fact improve education overall; it will force the higher education system to become something far more accessible, effective, and useful than it is today.
The modern student, rewired as he is for a world of smartphones and instant updates, rarely benefits from the current lecture format. Many students favor free, online resources like YouTube and the Khan Academy to learn what they technically should have been taught in lecture—free alternatives that in many cases are actually better than the regular lecture format. These online formats allow for rewinding—for understanding the material at one’s own pace—a feature lacking in live lectures, which often mystify the subject material with academic jargon. All that remains for this new medium to become more ubiquitous is the removal of the rather expensive middleman. But what exactly will these technologies look like, and how will they affect this kind of change on an institution that has remained largely unchanged for thousands of years?
One important internet-era innovation that is changing the way we participate in the educational process is Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. These programs have proven enormously popular: one AI class taught through Stanford’s Udacity program, for example, enrolled over 160,000 students (more than twenty times the size of Columbia’s entire undergraduate student body). This is an enormous leap forward for society, allowing us to educate as many people as possible instead of limiting the spread of knowledge to an elite few with good SAT scores and even better sob stories. In a world where free education is absolutely feasible, it is only sensible that there be a formal structure in place for its dissemination.
These courses, which often utilize Artificial Intelligence (AI) grading algorithms to evaluate thousands of students instead of the hundreds allowed for by human graders, have been demonstrated to teach the material just as well as, if not better than, their more spatiotemporally-limited counterparts. As these intelligent automatic grading schemes become smarter, and better at accurately evaluating a student’s performance in a particular course, the grades that students earn in these courses will eventually be looked at no differently than a grade in a standard class. Novel online educational paradigms also allow educators to try various prototypes for learning, based on findings about how we learn from neuroscience and psychology. For example, short, ten-minute videos interspersed with quizzes have been shown to be a highly effective model based on the human attention span. But the traditional educational paradigm has proven highly resistant to these changes: a standard lecture generally consists of an hour or so of a professor explaining a series of concepts, which we know from experience is too long and monotonous to be truly effective. As students tend to either succeed or fail in these various prototype systems, huge volumes of data are simultaneously being produced and analyzed that elucidate which of these new ideas are the most successful.
But the challenges presented to the traditional education format may be even more complicated than what has been outlined so far. Some technologies will likely impact what subjects are considered worthy of being taught at all, which may lead certain disciplines to virtually disappear. In other words: as computer-human interfaces become more intimate, education may become more and more subliminal, and certain kinds of education may become, in fact, irrelevant. For example, contact lenses that can translate a foreign language in real time and provide subtitles may eventually replace translators. Strong AI with the ability to formulate mathematical proofs or analyze data may replace mathematicians and financial analysts. Virtual doctors and diagnostics AI may even reduce the need of general practitioners in the medical field, or at least reduce their workload. In fact, we probably don’t even know what the most impactful of these technologies may look like: as computational paradigms like neuromorphic and quantum computing chips begin to more closely resemble human learning and processing capabilities, the applications of AI will probably become even more widespread and profound than those predicted here.
These radical possibilities demand an institutional overhaul on a scale that many of us may not be prepared to imagine. Indeed, much of it may sound, at first glance, like a bad thing—especially for those of us who are college students now. We harbor a certain nostalgia for the way that college is today, and an atmosphere where college is considered an integral part of growing up and an indispensable transitional period between youth and adulthood. But if this aspect is actually something worth preserving, then more dynamic online learning programs could possibly be combined with a college model, retaining the cultural and interpersonal aspects of college while lowering tuition and avoiding the issues prevalent in static grading systems. Tuition, after all, is the largest source of student debt, and eliminating that cost while developing a collaborative educational environment with classes taught virtually might be the future of the education system.
We can envision the campus of the future as an extremely flexible hub of learning and collaboration. Such a campus could exist as long as needed for a particular course or program, and could be created and dismantled with relative ease, since the teaching and materials would exist in the cloud. Future students would need only Internet access and a willingness to learn, and evaluation, as stated, could be done effectively with AI algorithms or a few tenured faculty. This means that a village in the middle of the Gobi desert could have an educational institution of equivalent quality to the very best already established schools, made even more feasible as internet access spreads worldwide with projects like Google’s Loon. Students could learn together as they do now, but could do so anywhere, without the archaic limitations imposed by enormous tuition overhead and arbitrary admission standards. These changes will likely begin to occur in addition to traditional campus environments, but as degrees and certificates attained in these new education formats become more ubiquitous and respected, it is likely (the glamour of brand name schools notwithstanding) that many students will forgo the traditional institutions altogether, saving themselves from the often lifelong burden of student loan debt.
The benefits of these changes would include, chiefly, the opportunity for everyone to learn from a select few top of the line educators, instead of bored tenured professors rambling through yet another lecture so that they can get back to their research. In fact, professors and experts in their field, no longer burdened by the tedium of teaching and grading, could instead focus mainly on their research, and research opportunities could, therefore, be made more plentiful in this kind of hybrid campus environment. Classes could also be more individualized, allowing for students to completely master the subject material instead of barely passing an examination and then moving on to more difficult aspects of a course. In such a set-up, a student who does not do well in a particular area of the course could review the relevant lecture material, and take another automatically generated examination that targets their weak areas to guarantee their understanding of the aspect of the course they did poorly in. Additionally, this kind of system would put more pressure on schools to develop the best curricula possible. Instead of students competing for admission, institutions offering virtual courses will compete to attract the best students, leading to an improvement in the quality of education overall.
It is inevitable at this point that the college bubble will burst. With average student loan debt climbing to absolutely ludicrous heights, employers and students alike will realize that the education system needs a serious overhaul. The four-year system as it currently exists in most countries around the world is simply not able to keep up with an increasingly dynamic world. STEM majors in particular must be constantly learning, adapting to new technologies as they become available. It would be very easy, given the rate at which the use of technology and the Internet is expanding, to develop a formal system to permit anyone in the world access to a free education. We simply can’t afford to not do this. After all, the cure for cancer or solution to the global energy crisis could be locked away in the mind of a child who can never hope to afford the kind of education that they would need to see their genius fully realized, and this is unacceptable in the modern, technically advanced society in which we live. The Internet has democratized information: it has done so with music and movies and will do the same with education. Thus, the university system will have to evolve, or it will not survive.
The modern student, rewired as he is for a world of smartphones and instant updates, rarely benefits from the current lecture format. Many students favor free, online resources like YouTube and the Khan Academy to learn what they technically should have been taught in lecture—free alternatives that in many cases are actually better than the regular lecture format. These online formats allow for rewinding—for understanding the material at one’s own pace—a feature lacking in live lectures, which often mystify the subject material with academic jargon. All that remains for this new medium to become more ubiquitous is the removal of the rather expensive middleman. But what exactly will these technologies look like, and how will they affect this kind of change on an institution that has remained largely unchanged for thousands of years?
One important internet-era innovation that is changing the way we participate in the educational process is Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. These programs have proven enormously popular: one AI class taught through Stanford’s Udacity program, for example, enrolled over 160,000 students (more than twenty times the size of Columbia’s entire undergraduate student body). This is an enormous leap forward for society, allowing us to educate as many people as possible instead of limiting the spread of knowledge to an elite few with good SAT scores and even better sob stories. In a world where free education is absolutely feasible, it is only sensible that there be a formal structure in place for its dissemination.
These courses, which often utilize Artificial Intelligence (AI) grading algorithms to evaluate thousands of students instead of the hundreds allowed for by human graders, have been demonstrated to teach the material just as well as, if not better than, their more spatiotemporally-limited counterparts. As these intelligent automatic grading schemes become smarter, and better at accurately evaluating a student’s performance in a particular course, the grades that students earn in these courses will eventually be looked at no differently than a grade in a standard class. Novel online educational paradigms also allow educators to try various prototypes for learning, based on findings about how we learn from neuroscience and psychology. For example, short, ten-minute videos interspersed with quizzes have been shown to be a highly effective model based on the human attention span. But the traditional educational paradigm has proven highly resistant to these changes: a standard lecture generally consists of an hour or so of a professor explaining a series of concepts, which we know from experience is too long and monotonous to be truly effective. As students tend to either succeed or fail in these various prototype systems, huge volumes of data are simultaneously being produced and analyzed that elucidate which of these new ideas are the most successful.
But the challenges presented to the traditional education format may be even more complicated than what has been outlined so far. Some technologies will likely impact what subjects are considered worthy of being taught at all, which may lead certain disciplines to virtually disappear. In other words: as computer-human interfaces become more intimate, education may become more and more subliminal, and certain kinds of education may become, in fact, irrelevant. For example, contact lenses that can translate a foreign language in real time and provide subtitles may eventually replace translators. Strong AI with the ability to formulate mathematical proofs or analyze data may replace mathematicians and financial analysts. Virtual doctors and diagnostics AI may even reduce the need of general practitioners in the medical field, or at least reduce their workload. In fact, we probably don’t even know what the most impactful of these technologies may look like: as computational paradigms like neuromorphic and quantum computing chips begin to more closely resemble human learning and processing capabilities, the applications of AI will probably become even more widespread and profound than those predicted here.
These radical possibilities demand an institutional overhaul on a scale that many of us may not be prepared to imagine. Indeed, much of it may sound, at first glance, like a bad thing—especially for those of us who are college students now. We harbor a certain nostalgia for the way that college is today, and an atmosphere where college is considered an integral part of growing up and an indispensable transitional period between youth and adulthood. But if this aspect is actually something worth preserving, then more dynamic online learning programs could possibly be combined with a college model, retaining the cultural and interpersonal aspects of college while lowering tuition and avoiding the issues prevalent in static grading systems. Tuition, after all, is the largest source of student debt, and eliminating that cost while developing a collaborative educational environment with classes taught virtually might be the future of the education system.
We can envision the campus of the future as an extremely flexible hub of learning and collaboration. Such a campus could exist as long as needed for a particular course or program, and could be created and dismantled with relative ease, since the teaching and materials would exist in the cloud. Future students would need only Internet access and a willingness to learn, and evaluation, as stated, could be done effectively with AI algorithms or a few tenured faculty. This means that a village in the middle of the Gobi desert could have an educational institution of equivalent quality to the very best already established schools, made even more feasible as internet access spreads worldwide with projects like Google’s Loon. Students could learn together as they do now, but could do so anywhere, without the archaic limitations imposed by enormous tuition overhead and arbitrary admission standards. These changes will likely begin to occur in addition to traditional campus environments, but as degrees and certificates attained in these new education formats become more ubiquitous and respected, it is likely (the glamour of brand name schools notwithstanding) that many students will forgo the traditional institutions altogether, saving themselves from the often lifelong burden of student loan debt.
The benefits of these changes would include, chiefly, the opportunity for everyone to learn from a select few top of the line educators, instead of bored tenured professors rambling through yet another lecture so that they can get back to their research. In fact, professors and experts in their field, no longer burdened by the tedium of teaching and grading, could instead focus mainly on their research, and research opportunities could, therefore, be made more plentiful in this kind of hybrid campus environment. Classes could also be more individualized, allowing for students to completely master the subject material instead of barely passing an examination and then moving on to more difficult aspects of a course. In such a set-up, a student who does not do well in a particular area of the course could review the relevant lecture material, and take another automatically generated examination that targets their weak areas to guarantee their understanding of the aspect of the course they did poorly in. Additionally, this kind of system would put more pressure on schools to develop the best curricula possible. Instead of students competing for admission, institutions offering virtual courses will compete to attract the best students, leading to an improvement in the quality of education overall.
It is inevitable at this point that the college bubble will burst. With average student loan debt climbing to absolutely ludicrous heights, employers and students alike will realize that the education system needs a serious overhaul. The four-year system as it currently exists in most countries around the world is simply not able to keep up with an increasingly dynamic world. STEM majors in particular must be constantly learning, adapting to new technologies as they become available. It would be very easy, given the rate at which the use of technology and the Internet is expanding, to develop a formal system to permit anyone in the world access to a free education. We simply can’t afford to not do this. After all, the cure for cancer or solution to the global energy crisis could be locked away in the mind of a child who can never hope to afford the kind of education that they would need to see their genius fully realized, and this is unacceptable in the modern, technically advanced society in which we live. The Internet has democratized information: it has done so with music and movies and will do the same with education. Thus, the university system will have to evolve, or it will not survive.
// WINSTON MANN is a graduate student in SEAS and a Staff Writer for The Current. He can be reached at [email protected]. Photo courtesy of cuit.columbia.edu.