Apple’s digital textbook venture, launched yesterday in New York, is just the latest attempt to bridge a yawning gulf between technology and learning. It’s still the beginning. The gulf is so large, it will take decades and thousands of experiments to cross. But we’ve begun, and things will move fast.
Student loan debt now stands around $1 trillion. Education is often a great investment – but the proposition is more in question every day. Higher education prices increased 440% over the last 25 years – four times the rate of inflation, and twice as bad as health care. Elementary and secondary ed prices have skyrocketed, too, with not even adequate outcomes.
On the other side of the ledger is the Moore’s law ecosystem, the most ruthless force in technology and the world economy. Last quarter Netflixstreamed two billion hours worth of video – or 228,000 years worth in three months. In just the last week of December, smartphone and tablet owners gobbled up 1.2 billion apps – 43% by Americans. Twenty years ago, a terabyte hard drive, if such a thing had existed, might have cost $5 million. Today, you can pick one up for $69.
The price of information plummets. Yet the price of education soars. These two trends cannot both continue. Guess which will crack first.
In the month of December, Salman Khan’s Khan Academy had four million unique visitors. This one-man free online school has now delivered 111,228,761 Internet lessons – brilliantly concise explanations of differential equations, organic chemistry, simple addition, and everything in between.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is expanding its free Open Courseware initiative into a full-blown MITx online program that may soon grant degrees. Enjoy the entire curriculum for free – if you like, pay a modest fee for certification that you’ve mastered the material.
The original university model was based on the geography of information. Knowledge was housed in a physical library. Students needed physical proximity to professors, and professors proximity to each other. The Internet’s chief attribute is shrinking the geography of information, and thus expanding its reach. The less the space, the more the room.
No, college campuses aren’t going away. But not all of them will survive. There’s far too much administrative and facility overhead. Some will adapt. There will be hybrid schools. Some fields require physical proximity more than others. New models will emerge. Including the idea of not going to college. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel is paying high schoolers $100,000 to skip higher ed for real ed – in the entrepreneurial business world.
But the technological forces that lead Thiel to steer youngsters away from college and which allow Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg to drop out and succeed don’t necessarily mean game over for educators. The Internet is a general purpose platform on which enterprising professors and teachers can recreate the academic world – both at the broadest global scale and in the tiniest niches of custom learning. The Internet may replace some educators, but for many more it should expand their powers and allow them to specialize, increasing their value. Ebay entrepreneurs, independent iPhone app developers, and Sal Khan have shown the way.
Because the current model is so old and obese, it is difficult to know what the other side of the education-information chasm looks like. We need a huge number of new experiments to find out what value is to students, parents, employers, educators, and society. We need experiments in curricula, delivery media, teaching methods, teacher types, and school organization, all at varying price points – ideally without massive subsidies from government to inflate prices and muck up feedback loops.
The shift will not happen overnight. Our culture has come to believe certain things about PhDs, BAs from particular schools, and high school graduates.
Culture takes time. As we cross this education-information chasm, many questions will emerge, and, in time, be answered. Do employers merely value skills? Do they still want four-year degrees? How much are we willing to pay for status versus learning? What kinds of credentials matter? Do students and parents want pure academics, or do we want the “college experience”? What can we afford?
And more: Are too many students going to college? What’s up with American boys? Hooray for girls, but what does it say that they are almost 60% of college students? Are modern boys, raised on video games, defective in some way? Are we failing young boys academically and morally? Or is the drop in male college success a leading indicator of a higher ed bubble? After all, even in our egalitarian society, it’s still the case that men must work for a living, where women have more choices. Perhaps the male retreat just demonstrates college is no longer a good deal for many.
Education is not solely information. But the information content of education is high enough that the digital revolution will impart twisting, wrenching, and yes, wonderful change on the sector – and the American economy.
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