Online college courses: Outsourcing education | The Economist

LECTURE halls can seat only so many students, but it's easy enough to broadcast lectures online to tens of thousands. Ventures such as EdX, a non-profit consortium involving a dozen universities, and Coursera, a for-profit business, are now focused on making courses taught by outstanding instructors available to millions of students. Some universities are using these so-called MOOCs, short for "massively open online courses", to supplement their standard curriculum, and the possibility that these offerings may in time replace flesh and blood university professors has become a source of distress among academics.

The philosophy faculty of San Jose State University (SJSU) recently broke with university administrators by refusing to offer a "blended" course, which would combine outsourced online lectures with classroom discussion, based on Michael Sandel's famous Harvard lecture series on justice. In an open letter to Mr Sandel, the philosophers of SJSU worry about the effectiveness of prepackaged, one-size-fits-all courses, the hazards of a homogenised curriculum dominated by a handful of superstar professors, and air a number of other sensible concerns. When they get right down to it, though, they admit they're protecting their turf.?

Arguing that the university's move toward online and blended courses is "financially driven and involves a compromise of quality", the SJSU philosophy department cited a comment from Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor of California, at the announcement of the state's deal with EdX. "The old education financing model, frankly, is no longer sustainable", Mr Newsom said. "This is the crux of the problem", the philosophers submit. "With prepackaged MOOCs and blended courses, faculty are ultimately not needed".

They are not wrong to see trouble on the horizon. California legislators are considering a new law that would require state universities to offer college credit for approved online courses. However, the threat is rather more general. John Hechinger and Michael McDonald of Bloomberg report:

Faculty are rightly concerned because the Internet is likely to reduce the number of professors and colleges over time, said Michael Horn, executive director of education for the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, a San Mateo, California-based nonprofit research organization.

Christensen, a Harvard business school professor, has predicted that in 15 years, half of all universities will be out of business because higher education, with its skyrocketing costs, is ripe for technological upheaval.

Scary stuff for the professoriate! However, before we rush, for thrift's sake,?to technologically upheave, it's worth asking why?costs are "skyrocketing". It's not because classrooms and professors have become so much more expensive. Rather, it's the metastatic growth of university administration. As the Wall Street Journal reported in December:

Across U.S. higher education, nonclassroom costs have ballooned, administrative payrolls being a prime example. The number of employees hired by colleges and universities to manage or administer people, programs and regulations increased 50% faster than the number of instructors between 2001 and 2011, the U.S. Department of Education says. It's part of the reason that tuition, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has risen even faster than health-care costs.

That is to say, students have faced rapidly rising tuition costs not due to large increases in the cost of instruction, but mostly due to the dramatic, rapid growth of the university bureaucratic class, which offers nothing of obvious worth to the education of their universities' increasingly cash-strapped and indebted students.?

According to a 2010 study on administrative bloat from the libertarian Goldwater Institute,?tuition tripled from 1993 to 2007 at my own school, the University of Houston. Over that period, instructional spending per student changed not at all, while administrative spending per pupil nearly doubled. This is fairly representative of the national pattern. This seems to me to suggest that state university systems might first seek savings in leaner management before outsourcing instruction to glorified versions of YouTube. Public-university systems might take a page from Sweden, a paradisaical Scandinavian social democracy, which outsources to private companies the management of some of its public hospitals,?as Schumpeter discusses, and recommends. In any case, it's outrageous that students should be made to pay ever more to support assistants to assistant deans, in exchange for the right to earn a degree filling in worksheets and ignoring videotapes from home.?

Of course, it's hard to imagine fat and happy university bureaucracies falling on their swords. It will be up to others to start carving the cruft out of university administration. Why not the soon-to-be "disrupted" professoriate? Because, I'm afraid, the instructional class just loves big government too much, and is therefore disinclined to see unnecessary and/or overpaid public employees as a real problem, even when it's about to get them replaced by a screen. That's why the philosophy department at San Jose State is bitching to Michael Sandel when it ought to be baying for the blood of California deans.

(Photo credit: AFP)

Source: http://64.14.173.20/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/05/online-college-courses

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