Higher edupayment
I blogged previously about Stanford on iTunes, and I'm proud that I covered it before Slashdot and Macrumors. The Slashdot post notes an interesting detail that I didn't fully discuss - the iTunes U service is being used by Standford to give away recordings of lectures for free.
There are 31 weeks of classes in Stanford's academic calendar (excluding the summer quarter). With a tuition cost of $31,200, and an average lecture load of 8-10 per week, this means Stanford students pay about $100 to $126 per lecture, if their tuition is to be understood as payment for instruction.
MIT, another prestigious and expensive institution, similarly gives away instruction, through its OpenCourseWare program (though they seem too cheap to provide us with spaces in the name). That both of these schools are willing to freely give their instruction to anyone interested and online may be a good sign for the more equitable access to education, but it belies a reality that many in higher education may be less proud of:
When you pay the high tuition of an elite school, all you're really buying are grades and a fancy degree.
Some might question this, posing the benefits of classroom interaction as a great deal more important than lecture materials, and as a real thing of value for which tuition is compensation. Fair as this argument is on its face, a growing answer to it lies in the fact that the MIT program allows students to comment and discuss the material online; while not equal to real-time, physical classroom presence, I suspect technology will improve the remote educational experience, especially as more universities move into the market of online degrees.
The question for the future, then, is whether we will sustain our class-defined and class-perpetuating system of employment-through-degree as conferred by expensive educational institutions, or if instead the real ability of anyone to share in the education ostensibly guaranteed by such degrees make them less necessary. Could there exist a world in which everyone had an MIT-educated understanding of physics, for instance, but only those with resources sufficient to pay for a degree get recognized for that education? I suspect not, and that free access to education may have destabilizing effects on our weighted meritocracy, if we let it.
There are 31 weeks of classes in Stanford's academic calendar (excluding the summer quarter). With a tuition cost of $31,200, and an average lecture load of 8-10 per week, this means Stanford students pay about $100 to $126 per lecture, if their tuition is to be understood as payment for instruction.
MIT, another prestigious and expensive institution, similarly gives away instruction, through its OpenCourseWare program (though they seem too cheap to provide us with spaces in the name). That both of these schools are willing to freely give their instruction to anyone interested and online may be a good sign for the more equitable access to education, but it belies a reality that many in higher education may be less proud of:
When you pay the high tuition of an elite school, all you're really buying are grades and a fancy degree.
Some might question this, posing the benefits of classroom interaction as a great deal more important than lecture materials, and as a real thing of value for which tuition is compensation. Fair as this argument is on its face, a growing answer to it lies in the fact that the MIT program allows students to comment and discuss the material online; while not equal to real-time, physical classroom presence, I suspect technology will improve the remote educational experience, especially as more universities move into the market of online degrees.
The question for the future, then, is whether we will sustain our class-defined and class-perpetuating system of employment-through-degree as conferred by expensive educational institutions, or if instead the real ability of anyone to share in the education ostensibly guaranteed by such degrees make them less necessary. Could there exist a world in which everyone had an MIT-educated understanding of physics, for instance, but only those with resources sufficient to pay for a degree get recognized for that education? I suspect not, and that free access to education may have destabilizing effects on our weighted meritocracy, if we let it.
posted by onlooker at 1:00 PM
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