That deep rumble you feel is the sound of foundations cracking and giving way.
The education system as we’ve known it is undergoing a deep change because it can not be financially sustained into the far future. There are too many factors affecting the relevancy of it’s ‘form’ – class sizes limited by the size of housing stock; the standard length of 4 years to earn a bachelor’s degree; required classes per major; unionization of faculty at some universities that enforces professional duties based on job descriptions; the financial aid structure; changing research funding sources; rapidly changing research priorities. Feel free to add about thirty others.
Now once again, MIT is leading the way by admitting that fundamental changes must be made to the undergraduate education provided there in order to maintain fiscal solvency long term.
I’ve been waiting for the elite universities to ‘fess up to this situation, so kudos to MIT.
Even with deep endowments, they are susceptible to the same economic forces that smaller colleges and large state systems have been confronting for a decade. No one is immune now.
This is not trivial. Knowledge is being created at a faster-than-logarithmic pace (what’s faster than that?), when, according to Google’s Eric Schmidt, the entire human knowledge set doubles every two days. Holy sh*t! Imagine Lucy on that iconic chocolate faculty assembly line. Humans can’t possibly keep up with it all. This includes university faculty whose job is to pass the knowledge torch along to the next generation. No surprise that most schools’ faculties are teaching information that has long since changed. It often takes a generation for new knowledge to work its way into college curricula. Think quantum physics and epigenetics, for example.
Like with most crises, this is the perfect opportunity for the Big ReThink of education. What should college students be taught now? What is relevant? How long should it take to teach it and what form would that take?
What should a first college degree actually mean? What’s its ROI?
We know that college rarely prepares students for specific jobs. It’s supposed to prepare them for a changing employment scenario by teaching resourcefulness and critical thinking.
So how will tenured faculty who are their own CEOs be pressured to change their ways? What’s the incentive for them to drink from that fire hose of new knowledge and decide what must be taught now? Will department heads and Provosts be strong enough to demand the highly focused teaching of relevant material in order to shrink that standard 4 years for a BS/BA to 3 without creating the illusion of a watered-down curriculum? Because that’s what it will take to create an affordable residence-based college experience by decade’s end.
How does a university break the Gordian Knot of the modern era?
It’s a moment for real ingenuity and MIT is all that. Fingers crossed for them to get this right for the rest.