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On the one hand, I like the idea of a “federal online education system” that “would provide a high-quality alternative to the thousands of English composition and American history survey courses of varying caliber that are currently available.”
I like this idea because as the author of a book, The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing, suitable for use in so-called English 101, my work would have a centralized marketplace in which to be sold. Honestly, I like my chances. By design the book’s experiences are adaptable to all different levels of student and can even be completed through self-study. You could set up a dozen or so (at least) different versions of English 101 with just my book, providing a variety of paths through the material.
It’s a good book. Students who have used the book seem to be pleased. Instructors who have adopted the book write to me and tell me it’s been helpful. It’s also distributed by the country’s largest publisher (Penguin Random House), which I have to think would put some muscle behind the marketing with the promise of tens or hundreds of thousands of sales per semester.
Picture me like Scrooge McDuck, dollar signs dancing in my blown-out pupils. I’d be rich, I tell you! Rich!
On the other hand, I do not like the idea of a federal online education system because it is a terrible idea that will not work, as we have seen with its incredibly close cousin, the MOOC.
It is also a bad idea because as we are experiencing in the age of the coronavirus, the things students most need and most miss is contact. If education was merely a matter of progressing through a series of assignments that can be assessed and certified, heck, just buy every college freshman a copy of The Writer’s Practice and have them go to town. It retails for a mere $16, and I’m guessing the feds could use their muscle to get a bulk discount.
But education is not just doing the assignments. In fact, research such as the Gallup-Purdue survey on postgraduate well-being shows that the most meaningful experiences are those that bring students and faculty together in collaboration. This can and does happen online. It cannot and will not happen with what Suzanne Kahn of the “progressive” (I know, right?) Roosevelt Institute is proposing.
As the MarketWatch article by Jillian Berman discussing this idea notes, “the notion has been batted around in at least one book and in magazine articles for a few years.” It is not new, but the exigencies of the pandemic and the “forced reckoning on college business models” are making it appear more attractive.
I want to try to make something clear. Colleges do not have a shaky business model. They have a funding problem. As Matt Reed notes in his discussion of a report from the Center for American Progress on the disparities in funding between institutions, the funding problem is particularly acute for the sorts of schools that educate the most students and whose students most benefit from high contact instruction.
We are at the end of the road of treating colleges like businesses and asking them to compete with each other. This has proved costly, inefficient and damaging to educational quality. It harms students, faculty and the institution itself. It has proven itself to be unsustainable, long before the pandemic hit.
If the progressive response is to throw in the towel and devolve into mass production of credentials handed out by the feds, we may as well just give up on a brighter tomorrow. I’m gobsmacked that a progressive institution that claims providing free education as one of their goals is going to do it through a mechanism that would result in a markedly inferior product.
The think tankers who propose these things do so because they do not appear to understand much of anything about how teaching and learning actually works, and yes, I’m a little hot under the collar about it. I’m bone tired of having people who do not know anything about teaching and learning craft these proposals for “rescuing” higher education that would in fact destroy whatever is good and meaningful about education. Why aren’t they talking to anyone who actually teaches English 101 before they issue these proposals?
Seriously, I’m easy to find.
If anything, the first two years of a student’s undergraduate career are when they most benefit from working closely with faculty. This is when they are acculturated to the ways of college as they transition from high school. All available research shows that what happens to a student in their first semester has a disproportionate effect on their ultimate chances of graduation, and even a productive and happy life after graduation. This is why schools invest lots of money into first-year experiences and replacing those with bare-bones online credential farms is cockamamie in the extreme.
If anything, the online courses should be for later in a student’s career, when they are more experienced and accomplished learners, more likely to be able to handle the kind of independent learning this proposal would require.
These proposals embrace a world where the type of education that was once routinely experienced -- close contact with quality faculty, meaningful learning, personal growth -- will be available only to the wealthy and the lucky few who matriculate to universities primarily populated by the wealthy.
These proposals ignore a significant pedagogical hurdle that has yet to be cleared -- centralized, en masse instruction -- despite many millions of dollars being thrown at it. The assumption that this is just a matter of finding “the best course” is patently absurd to anyone who knows anything about teaching and learning.
Meanwhile, we have a perfectly ready workforce of qualified instructors already teaching these courses a federal online education system would replace, often under conditions of scarcity and precarity. Imagine what could happen if we actually funded the work we all agree is so important.
Lastly, I’m trying to figure out why we’re trying to put so many people through college if we’re going to do away with the jobs that necessitate college degrees, like, say … college instructor of English 101.
Prior to the pandemic-induced recession, the United States was wealthier than it had ever been. It wasn’t lack of money that kept us from investing in public higher education then, but a cramped notion of what is actually possible if we live our values. Progressives especially should know this.
There’s a different path forward. I wrote a whole book about how to start walking it.
Things are more difficult now, but this is why it’s even more important to fight to preserve the things that most matter, lest they be lost forever.
