News that a prestigious university like USC engaged in horrible behavior to harvest students and bilk them of tuition for bad online courses should not be a shock to anyone.
A number of years ago, I remember reading how automation, computers and fast communications (the internet) were increasing labor efficiency by leaps and bounds, but two sectors were immune to this: education and medicine. Medicine has subsequently found a way to use the internet to improve efficiency. When I had Covid pneumonia, I was in a little hospital on Nantucket, but my chest CT scans were read by a radiologist in Boston (I think). The ability to share data quickly has lead to some real improvements in healthcare delivery.
Which leaves education.
Public high schools are struggling with poor working conditions, mediocre salaries and now batshit insane parents and school board members threatening to burn books. But ultimately high school education is "always broken" and always trundling along, doing better than you think but not as good as it should.
Higher education is much worse. Because it's not universal, there is no need to create common requirements and standards. The advent of bloated bureaucracies of administrators has ballooned the budget without necessarily adding to the quality of the educational experience. Adjunct professors - the Uber drivers of academia - are now the standard. A university scrimps on teaching and scholarship, while building expensive new building to sell on the tours to harvest more full-pay students to pay more administrators.
Online "education" has a narrow potential to create a few good graduate level programs with flexible hours and workloads for people who need to keep working while they get an advanced degree. Because a prosperous life is now largely correlated with a BA-or-better degree, colleges can harvest students without actually providing them with a useful education. This isn't a "teaching" problem, it's an institutional problem.
We need national standards for online education, because it is rife with opportunities to scam students.
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