The documentary raises a few interesting questions: what should college be, and how much should it cost? One key problem is that if the price is too high, then students will feel more like consumers than partners in the education process and develop a sense of entitlement. Is that what’s happening?
The producers visit several campuses to look at different perspectives. It covers party schools, commuter schools, and little liberal arts schools. And it covers some very real social class and governance issues.
Two episodes really stuck with me. One was coverage of San Jose State University’s experiment with online classes through Udacity. The idea was that students could take certain required classes online at a low cost in order to speed time to graduation, as campus cutbacks were making it difficult for students to get the classes that they needed. The initial experiment (covered in the movie) was a disaster; it siphoned money away from the campus and led to higher-than-usual failure rates. The program has been redesigned and is more about supplementing classroom activities than replacing traditional classes. After all, students have long had access to the teachings of great minds through their textbooks, but very few are able to pass a class by doing the reading and nothing else.
But the big issue is this: Udacity and other online programs may offer access to big-name professors from big-name universities, but the students at the big-name universities aren’t taking their classes online. My biggest problem with online education has been this “let them watch MOOCs” attitude that seems so pervasive. When Harvard and Stanford students start using MOOCs regularly – and when the parents of Harvard and Stanford students are okay with their tuition going to MOOCs instead of traditional classrooms – then I will be a believer.
The second episode that caught my attention was the story of Cooper Union. For most of its history, that university was free. The fortune left by Peter Cooper was enough to cover tuition from 1859 until this year. What happened? The board made some bad investment decisions, coupled with some usual increases in operating costs and administrative salaries. So who pays? Not the people who thought it was a good idea to borrow $175 million to invest in the stock market and add real estate in 2006.
The students were angry, and I don’t blame them. Cooper Union now charges tuition. The official amount is $39,000, offset with a half-tuition scholarship. It’s cheaper than many of its peer institutions, but it is not the living up to Peter Cooper’s legacy. It isn’t the students’ fault that the school is running a deficit, but they have to pay for it.
That’s just wrong.
A university is a huge institution with a lot of constituencies, but it is all centered around the education of undergraduates. We have to get back to that to make the system work,
