The future grows out of today

MIT's curriculum is on line. There are big changes coming for higher education. They won't all be good, but they're coming.

Education is labor intensive. American colleges and universities deliver it via very highly trained and hence very expensive professors. They have already responded to this expense by adding an exploited middle tier of Ph.D. instructors who have no chance at tenure, no job security, and low pay for arduous hours - pretty much the condition of the rest of the American labor market in these days when every worker is expected to tolerate a much greater degree of risk than was true in the four decades after WWII.

Information delivery is a critical part of education. Those nostalgic for the allegedly golden age of McGuffey's Reader may think that's all there is to it, but there's also the more important aspect of learning how to use that information. Even in the humanities, it's not enough to memorize what the dead white guys said and wrote. It's also important to reason about that, to assess other voices, to compare and contrast, and then to generate the next set of questions and proposed answers.

Both these rough categories are communication, and telepresence technology more and more permits them to be done without sharing physical space. Most large corporations use telepresence every day, even if they do try to accomplish it on the cheap with commodity facilities such as phone conferences, video conferences, and desktop sharing.

Here are some possibilities:

• Many more low-residency programs - What's good for MFA programs in writing will work for the sciences as network bandwidth permits better sharing of virtual spaces.
• Exploitation of economies of scale - A lot more people can go to elite institutions if they don't need dorms or classrooms. This of course would mean a brutal shakeout of lesser institutions and the usual attendant reduction of variety.
• The further mean marketization of the academic life - If you want a career in education that can't be done remotely, and you're not sure you're among the intellectual elite, I'd recommend K-12 teaching or college tutoring that fills the gaps left by distance learning.
• More Internet instruction with an Indian accent - Phoenix University is working out the paradigm domestically, but there's no reason it can't be extended overseas. A population of a billion produces a lot of smart people, even if my experience with engineers educated in India suggests over-reliance on memorization and authority to the detriment of some aspects of critical thinking.
• Narrowly targeted training - Republican and business interests will try to exploit the economics to kill the independence and freedom of the academy.