Creating Passionate Users

College matters... sometimes

Whew -- I did not expect this level of response to the "Does College Matter" question, so I decided to make a new post rather than try to address it in comments. First, thank-you so much to everyone. I'm definitely NOT advocating 100% learning on your own, for anything. As I made clear in my recent "Ten Tips for Trainers" post, I sure don't want my bain surgeon to be self-taught. Or my architect. And I'm really hoping those air traffic control folks and nuclear power plant controllers had a lot of "official" coursework.

But putting Skyler's scenario aside, what does "going to college" actually mean today? Shel, from everything I've been learning and seeing -- college is not what it used to be, at least for the 3000 or so US colleges and universities that aren't in the top tier. You and your fellow students also came from a dramatically different K-12 system than the one out that kids are graduating from today. You of all people know how much the world has changed, yet schools and education delivery
has been the same for nearly a century.

Does the traditional four-year undergrad degree thing still makes sense? Does it make sense as the default for all high-school grads? It feels so old-fashioned to me in the face of so many other changes and the impact of Moore's law and internet time. We live in a wildly different world from the one that inspired the current program we still all accept largely without question. Can there be more creative options? Look how many of the best schools offer nearly all their courses in some non-local manner. The idea that MIT now has virtually open-sourced their courseware! Self-learners have access to at least a part of one of the best educations available. For many years, Stanford has been in the position of having to justify to their board why they still need a physical campus.

For every benefit of college, we should at least consider that there might be other ways to get at least some of those benefits. And some of those other ways might be better (not just cheaper).

More options for life-credit.
More options for distance learning.
More online forums and video chats.
Programs with that offer more creative combinations of some on-campus and some distance programs.
Faster programs.
Programs that perhaps go back and forth between learning and working.

How many of you who went to college as I did--right out of high school--have wished you could go back to school now... now that you could appreciate it in a way that you never could at the time you actually went...

Maybe there should be third-party "learning designers" who you pay to plan and choose the best options and put together a perfectly tailored custom program from a variety of learning vendors (instead of throwing all your learning eggs into one school basket) that still includes some general education, but in the way that makes the most sense for that particular student, and uses both online, distance, and *some* face-to-face learning. If a parent (and more importantly, the student) thinks that leaving home is important, that can be a component as well (although I'm still voting for the crash-course with a backpack and a rail pass thing). The students could go to a kind of "advanced learning camp" that could be anything from an off-campus dorm (complete with cafeteria), or something more primitive.

Just about every time someone justifies college -- many (not all) of the things they point to could be met in other ways. Do you really need four--or usually five--years of sitting in classrooms listening to lectures (weak - weak - weak)? Think very seriously about how many of your teachers and classes really were exceptional? How many do you really remember? It'll be hard to convince me that there's no other way for a young person to gain an appreciation for thinking.

There's still a huge problem with employers (and hiring HR people) who look only at the piece of paper for hiring and promotions and pay raises. Many of you have pointed out just how ridiculous that still is. But that's a whole different issue...

For me, after teaching myself programming, I did take computer science courses at UCLA, because I was deeply interested in advanced artificial intelligence, and couldn't find books at that level that I felt would be enough for me to truly understand it. I didn't have mentors in that field at the time, so taking night classes while I worked was a great option. They were only $300 each. Later, I taught classes at UCLA Extension, and one of the perks was that you could take classes, so I took more.

So this isn't a college vs. no college argument; one can certainly *take college courses* without going for the full monty degree thing. I wouldn't trade quite a few of my college courses for anything (including a few when I was in real college on the four-year degree path). BUT... and this is the big one... I can say that about only a handful. I will never get the rest of those years back.

Roger Schank, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, founder of Institute for Learning Science at Northwestern, and former Chairman of the Computer Science department at Yale, knows a lot more about this than I do:

"Whenever I teach a class, I ask students why there are in college. They tell me things like, "It's a four-year vacation," "The parties are good,", "It will get me a good job later," "It's what everyone does, so I never thought about an alternative," and so on. The issue of learning never comes up. No student has ever mentioned it in class, although I ask the question quite often. Why is that? As I said earlier, school isn't really about learning at all. It's about certification. College students today attend school to get a degree that they hope will get them something they want...
... we never ask a student if he learned a lot, we ask how well he or she did. Evaluation is based on the judgement of others when it comes to "official" learning. Students feel they did well when others say they did well. It is the rare student who says that he or she learned a great deal and thus was very happy with the educational experience."

He points out the irony when he asked that all cognitive science professors commit to never giving multiple choice tests:

"Now, every cognitive scientist knows that there is no value in such tests; nevertheless the faculty objected. "Who will grade all the papers that students turn in?" they asked. "We don't have the money for more teaching assistants, and I want to do my research."

And...
"School isn't really about learning; it's about short-term memorization of meaningless information that never comes up later in life. It is intended to satisfy observers that knowledge is being acquired... Our major universities--the ones which parents dream about their children attending--were originally created to produce theologians... the idea has persisted into the present that school should provide a "general education".
I was on the faculty at Yale for fifteen years... Other department heads talked grandly about how they would broaden students worldview and create well-rounded young men and women... People tell me that philosophy or some other course taught them, "how to think." Didn't they know how to think before they took philosophy? A good deal of cognitive dissonance is at work here. Because people labored so diligently at school for so many years, they convince themselves that there must have been a lot of learning going on."

If someone hands you a test from all but a small handfull of the courses you took in college, how many questions could you answer correctly? And before you protest, "That's not the POINT!" think carefully about what the point really is, and more importantly--could at least some aspects of that point be satisfied in some other more applicable, less expensive, more effective way?

Again, wow, thanks so much for all the thoughtful comments, and especially for the encouragement about what Skyler's doing. I'm just glad that Dori's going to be posting what her son is up to, though, so I can still get a little vicarious parent-of-the-college-kid experience. Dori, would you ask Sean if he'd like one of those pink faux velvet bean bag chairs?