This is a frankly dystopian take on the future of higher education. The subject being interviewed is - in fairness to him - not describing his preferred model, but rather what he anticipates the future looking like. As he notes, there is the experiential part of college and the certification part of college. Kids at Arizona State and Harvard both get some of the experiential part of college, but the Harvard certification part is much, much better.
His prediction that higher ed will go to a hybrid online/offline mix is based on some business practices, but also on the trends in wealth consolidation. What is NOT being prioritized is the actual education. He mentions large lecture classes as being templates for online learning, but he also notes that Zoom is a terrible way to educate people. I'm about to have a Zoom session, and I couldn't agree more. The experiential part is not simply the experience of living away from home and doing keg stands and learning about Botswana from the kid across the hall. It also happens in the physical space of the classroom.
We had Wesleyan president Michael Roth speak to us after we read his book on higher education. He tried to teach a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). It worked pretty well for the handful of people who cared about the subject. Most people dropped out. It simply did not engage or interest them. As I have told my students, I'm not teaching online. I'm monitoring independent tutorials in a group.
There are no doubt pedagogical tricks I can learn to try and make Zoom classes work, but everything will be a weak approximation of actual teaching. Class time is simply a different emotional and intellectual environment and there is no way (that I have seen so far) that can replicate that online.
Yes, certification is part of a college education, but it is arguably the least important part.
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