I think in part the higher education funding crisis and the LLM-teaching crisis actually strike at the same problem, which is that education doesn't work without a broad, society-wide sense that the *actual content* of education - not the credential - is valuable.
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MOOC was touted as the future of higher ed as one instructor would "teach" millions & they'd attend for free.
Turns out it was like watching TV: info disseminated in one direction w/no accountability for the so-called student.
Universities abandoned them because they don't make money, & because they undermined their role as a credential mill
Posting high quality lectures for everyone is a great idea!
(try this playlist! it's awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo-YL-lv3RY&list=PLh9mgdi4rNeyuvTEbD-Ei0JdMUujXfyWi )
for like two years around about 2012 universities seemed to agree
(except, notably, MIT; i think they're still putting out great stuff! but i can't really speak to the computer science content they favor to judge it fairly)
But I see no reason other than the cynical justifications I offered why universities shouldn't record their lectures & make them available. There were so many great ones to come out of Yale, eg...
Gee thanks I'm sure you really believe in the mission of an educated public Yale
The "outsourced hiring committee for future employers" aspect of higher education is just utterly toxic for the actual teaching part
https://bsky.app/profile/csteinbach.bsky.social/post/3lp6bheaobc2b
the perfect populace is illiterate with no knowledge of Reconstruction, germ theory, or carbon dioxide
The actual content is valuable.
That has to get paid for somehow. If you're suggesting public funding, I'm open to that, but talk to the voters maybe.
Also administrators, and stuff like title IX compliance
The expensive part is having content explained and then someone you can ask questions to about the explanation.
Y'know, teachers.
Teachers and fellow learners are both very important.
Teachers facilitate that by providing direction and making the demands on self-discipline easier to bear, through structure.
Articulating abstraction---compressing thoughts into semantics and syntax---requires a skill all its own; works valuable mind muscles that otherwise atrophy.
Teachers are essential. But bloated $$$ campus infrastructure? Not so much.
Even within a field there are going to be parts you dislike and topics that you think will be uninteresting until you try them.
But going deep into a topic also requires the ability to think within the relevant framework.
You win not by sinking, but by frustrating the Other Guy in their quest to accomplish their goals.
At every education level there needs to be lessons on how to parse information, find good sources etc. College could be good for that except for inaccessibility $$ wise.
But there were powerful social norms against doing so at the wrong place or the wrong time... Submarining is an unforgiving business.
Students who only spend two, three years in college get a proportionate earnings boost—it’s not just the credential!
Some of the 60's versions of these schools like Simon's Rock are already beginning to close.
But without a sense of collective responsibility, it's hard to make that case.
Why accept “they’re in it for the money so of course they cheat”—that makes no sense!
In Brazil it is pretty much the same - education is seen as a means to an end, a formality, not an end in itself.
Appealing on the grounds of inherent value is pretty hard at those prices (or astronomical loan balances after).
The academy lives on a cloud sometimes.
Everyone wants to believe “it’s just a piece of paper” and not the learning—what if that’s just not true?
But it should be said this was mostly in the context of entry level jobs--demonstrating why (say) a Romance language poetry degree is still an honest signal of utility in monolingual prosaic industries.
but also say "people shouldn't borrow money to major in useless ones like [insert humanities here] if they want a job"
Ironically, people with email jobs say this the most. Like, buddy, your time in college was a finishing school for white collar norms and manners. Your education is related to your job.
Why would anyone hire people from university field, which teach nothing useful?
Wouldnt it be easier just to hire people with right kind of education?
We should look forward to the incoming ITSs and new ways to build a classroom more creatively and efficiently 😉
But we didn’t say they could count if they handed it back to us, or parroted from recent memory. We know how to teach thinking.
But the classes taught me a more empathetic way of looking at the world, and I wouldn't trade that for a job no matter how well it paid.
Which if you have a specific goal hopefully you’d know before you graduate