The Future of Higher Education

Last year, I published a thread with thoughts on higher education, under the broad umbrella thesis that higher education has been built around the needs of the universities and of the admin staff, not of the students. While most of the thoughts are valid, the conclusion was a bit simplistic and was missing some important roles of universities. It’s time to dig deeper.

These were the thoughts I published (some of which I still fully agree with, some of which I have some reservations now, and some of which I think they only applied to limited cases):

On degrees

1. Most bachelor/masters have the same duration regardless of the complexity of the underlying field.
2. College students earn more because college selects smart kids, not because it makes them smarter (Nassim Taleb’s “lecturing birds how to fly”).
3. We confuse “growing up because of university” with “growing up while at university”. If university took place between the ages of 25-28, we would associate most of the benefits of university to whatever we did between 18 and 22.
4. Universities should not average data about future income of their students. More granular data, with controls, is needed.
5. The fact that in many countries most college courses can be attended for free (only the exams & diplomas require fees) but no one does, is a great indicator of why people join the university & of the value it adds.
6. The opportunity cost of universities is huge. Just check how well most 4th year language studies students speak a foreign language compared to people who spent one year living abroad.
7. Universities need Skin In The Game of their students. This includes forfeiting at least part of their tuition in exchange for a share of the future income of their students and/or recruiting fees from companies (example: Lambda School’s Income Share Agreement).
8. Student loans must be limited in amount. Otherwise, they will only lead to higher fees & more student debt, till the inevitable default. The Fence Paradox applied to student debt.
9. Attendance to courses with limited employment possibilities should be limited. Otherwise, we’re wasting time and money to pass useless skills.
10. “Top-down teaching” (aka “I write on the blackboard and you copy it”) only works in fields where the future success of someone working in it can be predicted; ie survivorship bias is absent. In other fields, other kinds of instruction are more appropriate.
11. Experience is learnt, not taught. Universities should become places of experimentation, or should abdicate to spaces of experimentation. Students should be exposed to feedback from reality, not protected from it. I graduated in automotive engineering from the top automotive engineering school in Europe without ever touching the inside of a car.
12. Papers produced by universities receiving public money should be available to the wide public for free, not hidden behind paywalls.
13. Academy is, in a measure, a ponzi scheme for certification & prestige.
14. Some certifications are zero-sum games.
15. School essay format guidelines only make texts more readable for readers of tons of mostly-similar texts (i.e. teachers), not for legitimately interested people (ht @Apoth30sis).
16. Teaching positions are becoming more precarious, but administrative positions are becoming better paid.
17. A common misconception: education costs went down, not up. Education on the Internet is free now. Experts are at a tweet’s distance. It’s only university – the top part of the “educational pyramid” – which got more expensive.
18. MBA students always dive into whatever was the hot thing 10 years ago.  Always disappointed a decade later. (ht Ari Paul)
19. I’m becoming more and more convinced that a first-order reason that a lot of firms prefer college graduates over other workers is the power dynamic that student loans create. – Matt Parlmer

On teachers

1. Teachers should be hired on the basis of how good they are to teach, not on how good they are at writing papers or at passing standardized tests.
2. As apparently it’s ok to give teachers targets on the number of papers published, universities should give them targets that actually matter to students: employment of their pupils, for example.
3. Universities don’t need to employ teachers who know their field immensely better than what their students are expected to at the end of the course. Universities need teachers who know their field a bit better than their students but are incredibly good at teaching it.

“Who is university for?” – Seth Godin

Most of the points above are not inherently wrong. The problem is not what some colleges and degrees became – it’s that they pretend to be something else. It is that they get people to sign up with expectations which cannot be met.

The most important matter, is honesty about “who is university for”. There is not a single answer. Probably, there should be many types of universities and degrees, one for each answer. But each type of university and degree should be fully transparent about who it is for.

Different people have different needs, and a potential to be unlocked in different ways. A “one-fits-all” approach does not make sense.

Scale

One of the largest problems with the current higher education system is scale. In many ways:

1. The more students we want to educate, the more teachers we need. And there are just that many great teachers available to work in teaching jobs. If too many teachers are needed, the average quality will have to go down.
2. The more teachers we need, the more we will need “standardized hiring systems” which tend to select worse teachers (because they measure other skills than teaching; for example, publishing papers or answering quizzes).
3. The more students we want to educate, the larger will the admin staff have to be.
4. I strongly suspect that the larger the admin staff, the higher the cost per student – “efficiencies of scale” get dwarfed by “inefficiencies of scale” and “more prestigious role → exponentially higher salary demand”.
5. As Conrad Bastable noted, the more universities are built, the more expensive do top universities become (because they receive more applications → they refuse more of them → they become more exclusive).

The five points above show that wanting to provide college for many students has its costs.

I fully understand the desire to provide higher education for all, but higher education is largely zero-sum. Whereas it is easy to argue that lower education (up to adult age) is positive-sum, because necessary skills are needed, it is not clear that a larger population with college degree is of benefit for the country. 

Yes, there are jobs which require a long post-high-school standardized training: medicine, for example.

But for most cases, degrees, instead of pushing up those who attend it, push down those who are left without a degree.

On the other hand, I’m fully aware that saying to people “you can’t get a degree, we limited the number of places” would not be nice and would result, probably, in inequality and many other problems.

Thankfully, there is a (partial) solution.

Technology

Today, thanks to the internet and online courses / videoconferencing, it is possible to have every student interested in a given topic to study from the best teacher in the world.

Technology will allow us to provide to education most of the benefits of scale without most of its costs.

However, acquiring know-how is only one of the functions of university. A second function is to provide a “stamp of approval” on the student, certifying that he was one of the best out of college and that he had the diligence to follow a long course.

This is why I make the following predictions regarding university-level education in, say, 30 years.

• Some universities, especially the most prestigious ones, will largely be unchanged.
• We will have online universities, with drastically lower costs.
• Some of these universities will still have a limited number of attendees or will offer some courses with a limited number of attendees – to keep providing the “stamp of approval” function.
• People suffering from this shift will be teachers (except the top 20%), administrative staff (except that at the most prestigious offline universities), and students who went to college only for college life (and don’t get to the few prestigious offline universities). People winning from this shift will be students who went to college to acquire know-how or certifications.
• YouTube courses will be viable for professions where building a portfolio is possible (eg computer science) but not for most office jobs – where the “stamp of approval” is still desired.