Three years ago, technology was going to transform higher education. What happened?
Over
the course of a few months in early 2012, leading scientists from
Harvard, Stanford and M.I.T. started three companies to provide Massive
Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, to anyone in the world with an Internet
connection. The courses were free. Millions of students signed up.
Pundits called it a revolution.
But
today, enrollment in traditional colleges remains robust, and
undergraduates are paying higher tuition and taking out larger loans
than ever before. Universities do not seem poised to join travel agents
and video stores on the ash heap of history — at least, not yet.
The
failure of MOOCs to disrupt higher education has nothing to do with the
quality of the courses themselves, many of which are quite good and
getting better. Colleges are holding technology at bay because the only
thing MOOCs provide is access to world-class professors at an unbeatable
price. What they don’t offer are official college degrees, the kind
that can get you a job. And that, it turns out, is mostly what college
students are paying for.
Now
information technology is poised to transform college degrees. When
that happens, the economic foundations beneath the academy will truly
begin to tremble.
Traditional
college degrees represent several different kinds of information. Elite
universities run admissions tournaments as a way of identifying the
best and the brightest. That, in itself, is valuable data. It’s why
“Harvard dropout” and “Harvard graduate” tell the job market almost
exactly the same thing: “This person was good enough to get into
Harvard.”
Degrees
give meaning and structure to collections of college courses. A
bachelor’s degree signifies more than just 120 college credits. To
graduate, students need a certain number of upper- and lower-division
credits, a major and perhaps a sprinkling of courses in the sciences and
humanities.
College
degrees are also required to get graduate degrees. It didn’t used to be
that way. Back in the 19th century, people interested in practicing law
could enroll directly in law school. When Charles Eliot became
president of Harvard in 1869, he set to work making bachelor’s degrees a
prerequisite for admission to Harvard’s graduate and professional
schools. Other colleges followed suit, and by the turn of the century a
large and captive market for their educational services had been
created.
Most
important, traditional college degrees are deeply embedded in
government regulation and standard human resources practice. It doesn’t
matter how good a teacher you are — if you don’t have a bachelor’s
degree, it’s illegal for a public school to hire you. Private-sector
employers often use college degrees as a cheap and easy way to select
for certain basic attributes, mostly the discipline and wherewithal
necessary to earn 120 college credits.
Free
online courses won’t revolutionize education until there is a parallel
system of free or low-fee credentials, not controlled by traditional
colleges, that leads to jobs. Now technological innovators are working
on that, too.
The
Mozilla Foundation, which brought the world the Firefox web browser,
has spent the last few years creating what it calls the Open Badges
project. Badges are electronic credentials that any organization,
collegiate or otherwise, can issue. Badges indicate specific skills and
knowledge, backed by links to electronic evidence of how and why,
exactly, the badge was earned.
Traditional
institutions, including Michigan State and the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, are experimenting with issuing badges. But so are
organizations like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
4-H, the Smithsonian, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Y.M.C.A. of
Greater New York.
The
most important thing about badges is that they aren’t limited to what
people learn in college. Nor are they controlled by colleges
exclusively. People learn throughout their lives, at work, at home, in
church, among their communities. The fact that colleges currently have a
near-monopoly on degrees that lead to jobs goes a long way toward
explaining how they can continue raising prices every year.
The
MOOC providers themselves are also moving in this direction. They’ve
always offered credentials. In 2013, I completed a semester-long M.I.T.
course in genetics through a nonprofit organization run by Harvard and
M.I.T., called edX. You can see the proof of my credentials here and here.
Coursera,
a for-profit MOOC platform, offers sequences of courses akin to college
majors, followed by a so-called capstone project in which students
demonstrate their skills and receive a verified certificate, for a fee
of $470. The Coursera Data Science sequence
is taught by Johns Hopkins University and includes nine four-week
courses like exploratory data analysis, regression models and machine
learning. The capstone project requires students to build a data model
and create visualizations to communicate their analysis. The certificate
is officially endorsed by both Coursera and Johns Hopkins. EdX has
similar programs.
Inevitably,
there will be a lag between the creation of such new credentials and
their widespread acceptance by employers and government regulators. H.R.
departments know what a bachelor’s degree is. “Verified certificates”
are something new. But employers have a powerful incentive to move in
this direction: Traditional college degrees are deeply inadequate tools
for communicating information.
The standard diploma has roughly the same amount of information that prisoners of war are required to divulge under the Geneva Conventions.
College transcripts are a nightmare of departmental abbreviations,
course numbers of indeterminate meaning, and grades whose value has been
steadily eroded by their inflation.
This
has the effect of reinforcing class biases that are already built into
college admissions. A large and relatively open-access traditional
public university might graduate the same overall number of great job
candidates as a small, exclusive, private university — say, 200 each.
But the public 200 may graduate alongside 3,000 other students, while
the private 200 may have only 300 peers. Because diplomas and
transcripts provide few means of reliably distinguishing the great from
the rest, employers give a leg up to private college graduates who
probably had some legs up to begin with.
The
new digital credentials can solve this problem by providing
exponentially more information. Think about all the work you did in
college. Unless you’re a recent college graduate, how much of it was
saved and archived in a way that you can access now? What about the
skills you acquired in various jobs? Digital learning environments can
save and organize almost everything. Here,
in the “unlabeled” folder, are all of my notes, tests, homework,
syllabus and grades from the edX genetics course. My “real” college
courses, by contrast, are lost to history, with only an inscrutable
abbreviation on a paper transcript suggesting that they ever happened at
all.
Open
credentialing systems allow people to control information about
themselves — what they learned in college, and what they learned
everywhere else — and present that data directly to employers. In a
world where people increasingly interact over distances, electronically,
the ability to control your online educational identity is crucial.
This
does present a new challenge for employers, who will have to sift
through all this additional information. College degrees, for all of
their faults, are quick and easy to digest. Of course, processing large
amounts of information is exactly what computers are good for.
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University are designing open badges that
are “machine discoverable,” meaning that they are designed to be found
by employers using search algorithms to locate people with specific
skills.
Protecting
private, personal information is a big part of navigating the digital
era. But people want certain kinds of information to be as public as
possible — for example, that they are very good at specific jobs and
would like to find an employer looking for such people. Companies such
as LinkedIn are steadily building new tools for people to describe their
employable selves. College degrees, by contrast, say little and never
change.
In
the long run, MOOCs will most likely be seen as a crucial step forward
in the reformation of higher education. But their true impact won’t be
felt until students and learners of all kinds have access to digital
credentials that are also built for the modern world. Then they’ll be
able to acquire skills and get jobs for a fraction of what colleges cost
today.
This essay was adapted from
“The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University
of Everywhere,” published by Riverhead Books on Tuesday. Kevin Carey
directs the education policy program at the New America Foundation. You
can follow him on Twitter at @kevincarey1.
The Upshot provides news, analysis and graphics about politics, policy and everyday life. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our weekly newsletter.