“The reports of the death of higher education are greatly exaggerated.”
A recent article in New York Magazine predicting the demise of higher education is causing a great deal of anxiety in the professoriate, and for good reason. The author is making some pretty audacious prognostications, and none of them bode well for our profession…
- enrollments will crater
- hundreds of colleges will go out of business
- only a few “elite cyborg universities” will remain standing
- most instruction will go online
- colleges will be forced to partner with big tech corporations to remain viable
- schools will fire thousands of faculty members in a last ditch effort to cut costs
- tuition will be reduced for online classes, offering a rare silver lining: a college education will become more affordable for the masses
We’ve been seeing versions of this “doom & gloom” prediction about higher education for years–ever since the birth of the Internet, various sages have been predicting the death of our current system of higher education. And with powerful friends in Washington, like Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, we would be foolish to ignore their ideas.
But this prediction is predicated on a particular and very limited way of thinking about higher education as a business, and the only metric worth considering being money/profit. It’s a way of thinking about education as a commodity, and of students and parents as customers. It’s a belief that the “value”, such as it may be, in education, has to do with information–and it relies on a “banking model” of learning that treats knowledge as bits and bytes of content that can be “deposited” in a student’s “brain account”. A simple transaction between teacher and learner; a transaction that can be accomplished just as easily via Zoom as in an ivy-covered building on a CONTINUE READING: "The reports of the death of higher education are greatly exaggerated." | Eclectablog