I really want to talk about technology in higher education, but if you will permit me a brief aside on manufacturing, I think it will help make my fundamental point clearer. As everyone knows, manufacturing within the United States is in decline, but like most things that everyone knows, it is not exactly true. In the beginning, manufacturing was a labor intensive enterprise, and required thousands of hands to person the assembly lines. Most of those jobs, the un-skilled and semi-skilled labor that made up the bulk of line employment, has indeed been shipped overseas where labor costs are a fraction of what they were in the United States. We could bemoan that trend, but it strikes me as inevitable. The intervention of labor unions, of course, drove the price of labor up and secured what were, essentially, middle-class lives for those un-skilled and semi-skilled workers. Today, we can wax nostalgic about our grandfather's work on the factory floor -- the sort of "Made in the USA" nostalgia that permeates a movie like Gran Torino -- but we need to remember that the middle-class children of those factory workers, many of them college educated, had no desire to follow their parents into the factory. The work was demeaning, dirty, and often dangerous, and one suspects that, had the jobs not been exported, we would need to import labor (illegally) to meet the demand, just as we do in the more site specific construction and agricultural sectors.
There is talk of late about bringing manufacturing back, but manufacturing will come back transformed from a labor intensive operation to a technology intensive operation. The mantra goes something like this -- if a procedure or process can be automated, it will be automated -- in part because the machines today, controlled through digital technologies, are more accurate, faster, and smarter than their human counterparts of yore. I say "smarter," of course, with a caveat. The machines reflect the cumulative intelligence of the engineers who designed and programmed them, and I say "cumulative intelligence" because the design and programming itself has been subjected to advanced, technology-infused management technique, captured under the euphemism of "continuous quality improvement." The manufacturing that comes back will no longer require the un-skilled and semi-skilled worker, but rather a handful of skilled technicians to maintain the machines, and engineers to design and program them. At least part of the anxious educational imperatives surrounding the so-called STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) is to have in place a work-force not only appropriate to the research and development efforts that engender new product, but the transformed manufacturing that will be required to produce those products.
This detour through manufacturing provides a tighter analogy to education than we might like to admit. Although I can hear the objections from my colleagues in the humanities now, the current structure of higher education, particularly within the United States, reflects 19th century industrial thinking. We complain about the agrarian calendar of higher education, as if the whole enterprise were a throw back to the 16th and 17th centuries, but the so-called agrarian calendar reflects other social realities as well, not least that July is a better time to have time off to play than February. Regardless, I am not talking about the calendar, but the structure of higher education, its processes, and there the student is input to an assembly line process of course treatments that results in a graduate, who, as the product, is subsequently subjected to the vicissitudes of the market, the job market. That the input raw material is a human being, rather than wood or plastic, complicates the assembly line process of course treatments, insofar as we expect the raw material to assist in the effort of their transformation in ways that we would not expect wood or plastic to participate, but in the end, it is all about moving through a specified number of stations in a specified amount of time, the specification of which is reflected in the right number of the right credit hours.
The whole education manufacturing paradigm is, of course, being challenged on any number of levels, and technology has contributed to those challenges. The typical higher education response to any sort of challenge is to absorb it as a program of study and crank up the assembly line. There are any number of programs in technology studies. In my own college, we have a whole division dedicated to digital technologies, and these assembly lines, these programs of study, ostensibly produce graduates with the knowledge and skills necessary to be a competitive product in a competitive job market. I say "ostensibly," because the effectiveness of the assembly line process itself is being challenged. Academically Adrift is one such challenge that has received wide attention, but it is a paean dedicated principally to the purpose of rescuing the current structures by improving the processes -- by insisting that the assembly line workers within each of the requisite stations do what they are being paid to do -- on the assumption that, should they do so, the results will be better. There are, however, other more insidious challenges. You have those like Peter Wood, for example, writing about the higher education bubble. He quotes the conservative columnist George Will's definition of the bubble as "what happens 'when parents and the children they send to college are paying rapidly rising prices for something of declining quality.'" In truth, the actual costs have not been rising, but as state subsidies for education have declined, the students' and parents' share of costs have been rising, but there is some uncomfortable truth in Wood's assertion that "tuition paying parents are buying prestige, atmosphere, identification with a community [and football team] and a conception of what it means to be an alumnus of a particular college more than they are buying what the college actually teaches. That's why so many colleges get away with teaching hot-buttered nonsense for $40,000 or $50,000 a year." The assumption behind Wood's assertion is that "quality" and "curriculum" are aligned, but that is like assuming that "quality" and "reliable transportation" are aligned in the production of automobiles, and that consumers are only, or are principally, concerned to purchase reliable transportation. They are, as a minimum standard, but we also know that automobile purchasing consumers, not unlike tuition-paying parents, are purchasing what they can afford -- a Caddy or a Chevy -- a Harvard or a community college. If neither the Caddy version or the Chevy version of higher education provide "reliable transportation" to educational outcomes, as Academically Adrift portends, then he status differentiation makes little or no difference and the bubble may well pop because the process itself is untenable.
Enter technology. Unlike manufacturing, we did not outsource education, though I suspect we could have. At one point in my career, while traveling in India seeking international partners, one private, for-profit provider of instruction assumed that we were there seeking ways to circumvent high labor costs (those pesky faculty unions). Their product was a set of highly mediated, highly automated instructional program in digital technologies. Students moved through well designed modules, were assessed both formatively and summatively, and setting aside concerns around the "college experience," it provided "reliable transportation" to a set of instructional outcomes well aligned with employer needs. The conversation produced, not a partnership, but a crises of faith. I am a humanist by training, if not wholly by inclination, and the prospect of a dehumanized education was disconcerting. I wanted to believe, along with one of Wood's commenters that "students who can analyze , discuss, and write cogently about issues presented by, say, 'post-colonial identity studies,' s/he can analyze and communicate clearly about nearly anything, and that includes the complexities of the marketplace that Wood venerates," but that assumes students have engaged in analysis, not just the banking of information -- that students have engaged in discussion with other students that actually challenges and reforms their beliefs -- that students have actually been required to write, and that faculty have helped them through the successive drafts that make for cogent writing. Academically adrift and frankly my own undergraduate experience, and even more frankly what I have observed in the classrooms up and down the halls of every college I have administered. To do what the commenter suggests requires an enormous expenditure of dedicated effort, particularly with those students who are not academically inclined, who have no presumptive desire to "THINK FOR THEMSELVES," as the commenter loudly put it, at least not in the sense prized by academics where learning becomes an end unto itself. For the vast majority of students, education is not an end unto itself, but is merely instrumental to another end, employment. We should not dismiss employment, because education for the sake of education may well be desirable, but it is a luxury few can afford. For most graduating students, burdened with upwards of $25,000 in student loans, employment of the sort that repays the investment in education is a necessity.
To do what the commenter suggests is enormously labor intensive, and requires of faculty at each stage of the manufacturing process something resembling an apprentice-craft approach, in each classroom a dedicated faculty effort over-the-shoulder of each individual student, but higher education has become, whether we like it or not, a mass enterprise. Higher education has scaled up and out, the bubble has expanded outward, and higher education has done what it can to preserve the illusion of the craft approach, the dedicated effort on behalf of each student, but the student's experience is something quite different. The large lecture hall is something of a case in point, and it forms a ubiquitous part of every undergraduate's experience. Whether by default or by design it is a format dedicated to the banking concept of education, the dissemination of information, where the quality students most prize in the lecturer is not depth and breadth of knowledge, but rather their ability to entertain memorably. A good deal of the scaling up and out within higher education has taken place at community colleges, where now over half of all undergraduates receive their first college experience, and where one can still find pride in the small classroom, but most students do not encounter a full-time instructor, dedicated to the apprentice-craft of teaching, but rather an adjunct instructor. As higher education scales out further and further, absorbing more and more students, the adjunct faculty, who comprise the majority of the community college faculty, are of increasingly dubious qualification, particularly when one considers that the system must absorb ever greater number of students who have dubious academic ability, or at the very least who have little motivation to see education as anything other than an instrumental response to the real and pressing need for employment. Unlike Richard Vedder, I have not "long been a proponent of Charles Murray's thesis that an increasing number of people attending college do not have the cognitive abilities or other attitudes usually necessary for success at higher levels of learning" -- and I have not been a proponent in part because there are environments, other than the collegiate environment, where one can aspire to quite high levels of learning, and there are abilities, other than cognitive abilities, like empathy and compassion, that are more to be prized than analytical skills or rhetorical skills -- but I do agree that "as more and more try to attend colleges, either college degrees will be watered down .. or drop-out rates will rise" or more likely some combination of the two. The adjunct instructor of dubious academic skill meets the student with dubious academic motivation, and both think, "what the hell?"
Enter technology. Were I to sit down today with those eager Indian ed-tech entrepreneurs, I might be more inclined to sign up. The manufacturing mantra -- if it can be automated, it should be automated -- and a good deal of what a faculty member does in the classroom, depositing information with our students, can be automated. If one thinks of "the book" as a piece of information technology, my capitulation is not much more radical than asking students to read the text, except that the state of information technology today extends "the book" in ways that are, for most students, more engaging, and more interesting than print technologies alone. The text has become a multi-media environment, and more often than not, a well-designed multi-media environment, an environment subjected not only to a more rigorous set of instruction design principles, but an environment continuously improved by assessing its effectiveness in achieving the sorts of student outcomes that have been validated either by content experts in the discipline or employers or some combination of both. It is not my generation's film strip, and while it is easy enough to critique it for being "canned," as if that ended the conversation, I am not sure how that represents a condemnation relative to the scribbled notes of even the most sincere and dedicated adjunct X, drawn from the text, which he or she repeats over the course of 50 minutes to a room full of students distracted by Facebook on their phones. It not only can be automated, but the ethical imperative implied by the "should" in "should be automated" has another dimension when we ask whether the automated or the adjunct provides the better instructional experience.
While I might agree that it dehumanizes education, that it would be altogether better if each student had a teacher, expert in their discipline, dedicated to the apprentice-craft of teaching, nudging him or her toward improvement in the third draft of their paper, the reality of such an experience for the masses in an era of mass higher education is remote. I might also suggest that it opens the possibility that we might re-humanize education, that it might be altogether better if faculty were relieved of the mundane responsibility of information dissemination, if they could, in their one-on-one's, in their face-to-face encounters with students, focus on what is most valuable in education. Information is important, exercise of analytical skills is important, and there is no need to water down curriculum in either respect because the machine, with the infinite patience of a machine, can iterate and reiterate information and can provide multiple and branching opportunities to practice their analytical skills. Cognitive ability, and the extension of cognitive ability, is important, but more important and what is most often valuable in education, however, is neither information, not the ability to manipulate information -- what is most often most memorable is that moment of recognition. I am not referring to the aha! moment of discovery, although that can be exciting, but rather the sense that someone recognizes something significant in us, something of value, and then actually extends the empathy and compassion to actually value it. While that Master Card commercial goes through a litany of things that money can buy, and ends with that which money cannot buy, the priceless, higher education can engage in a market place transaction around information dissemination and receive a more effective and less expensive product than most faculty can produce on their own. Information technology, however, is not the end, but simply the pretext. Relieved of the tyranny of information dissemination, faculty might actually rededicate themselves to what is most valuable in education, that moment when a faculty member, even one of dubious academic qualification, recognizes something of value in a student, something before and beyond the market, that which is priceless, and both think, "what the hell!"
The whole education manufacturing paradigm is, of course, being challenged on any number of levels, and technology has contributed to those challenges. The typical higher education response to any sort of challenge is to absorb it as a program of study and crank up the assembly line. There are any number of programs in technology studies. In my own college, we have a whole division dedicated to digital technologies, and these assembly lines, these programs of study, ostensibly produce graduates with the knowledge and skills necessary to be a competitive product in a competitive job market. I say "ostensibly," because the effectiveness of the assembly line process itself is being challenged. Academically Adrift is one such challenge that has received wide attention, but it is a paean dedicated principally to the purpose of rescuing the current structures by improving the processes -- by insisting that the assembly line workers within each of the requisite stations do what they are being paid to do -- on the assumption that, should they do so, the results will be better. There are, however, other more insidious challenges. You have those like Peter Wood, for example, writing about the higher education bubble. He quotes the conservative columnist George Will's definition of the bubble as "what happens 'when parents and the children they send to college are paying rapidly rising prices for something of declining quality.'" In truth, the actual costs have not been rising, but as state subsidies for education have declined, the students' and parents' share of costs have been rising, but there is some uncomfortable truth in Wood's assertion that "tuition paying parents are buying prestige, atmosphere, identification with a community [and football team] and a conception of what it means to be an alumnus of a particular college more than they are buying what the college actually teaches. That's why so many colleges get away with teaching hot-buttered nonsense for $40,000 or $50,000 a year." The assumption behind Wood's assertion is that "quality" and "curriculum" are aligned, but that is like assuming that "quality" and "reliable transportation" are aligned in the production of automobiles, and that consumers are only, or are principally, concerned to purchase reliable transportation. They are, as a minimum standard, but we also know that automobile purchasing consumers, not unlike tuition-paying parents, are purchasing what they can afford -- a Caddy or a Chevy -- a Harvard or a community college. If neither the Caddy version or the Chevy version of higher education provide "reliable transportation" to educational outcomes, as Academically Adrift portends, then he status differentiation makes little or no difference and the bubble may well pop because the process itself is untenable.
Enter technology. Unlike manufacturing, we did not outsource education, though I suspect we could have. At one point in my career, while traveling in India seeking international partners, one private, for-profit provider of instruction assumed that we were there seeking ways to circumvent high labor costs (those pesky faculty unions). Their product was a set of highly mediated, highly automated instructional program in digital technologies. Students moved through well designed modules, were assessed both formatively and summatively, and setting aside concerns around the "college experience," it provided "reliable transportation" to a set of instructional outcomes well aligned with employer needs. The conversation produced, not a partnership, but a crises of faith. I am a humanist by training, if not wholly by inclination, and the prospect of a dehumanized education was disconcerting. I wanted to believe, along with one of Wood's commenters that "students who can analyze , discuss, and write cogently about issues presented by, say, 'post-colonial identity studies,' s/he can analyze and communicate clearly about nearly anything, and that includes the complexities of the marketplace that Wood venerates," but that assumes students have engaged in analysis, not just the banking of information -- that students have engaged in discussion with other students that actually challenges and reforms their beliefs -- that students have actually been required to write, and that faculty have helped them through the successive drafts that make for cogent writing. Academically adrift and frankly my own undergraduate experience, and even more frankly what I have observed in the classrooms up and down the halls of every college I have administered. To do what the commenter suggests requires an enormous expenditure of dedicated effort, particularly with those students who are not academically inclined, who have no presumptive desire to "THINK FOR THEMSELVES," as the commenter loudly put it, at least not in the sense prized by academics where learning becomes an end unto itself. For the vast majority of students, education is not an end unto itself, but is merely instrumental to another end, employment. We should not dismiss employment, because education for the sake of education may well be desirable, but it is a luxury few can afford. For most graduating students, burdened with upwards of $25,000 in student loans, employment of the sort that repays the investment in education is a necessity.
To do what the commenter suggests is enormously labor intensive, and requires of faculty at each stage of the manufacturing process something resembling an apprentice-craft approach, in each classroom a dedicated faculty effort over-the-shoulder of each individual student, but higher education has become, whether we like it or not, a mass enterprise. Higher education has scaled up and out, the bubble has expanded outward, and higher education has done what it can to preserve the illusion of the craft approach, the dedicated effort on behalf of each student, but the student's experience is something quite different. The large lecture hall is something of a case in point, and it forms a ubiquitous part of every undergraduate's experience. Whether by default or by design it is a format dedicated to the banking concept of education, the dissemination of information, where the quality students most prize in the lecturer is not depth and breadth of knowledge, but rather their ability to entertain memorably. A good deal of the scaling up and out within higher education has taken place at community colleges, where now over half of all undergraduates receive their first college experience, and where one can still find pride in the small classroom, but most students do not encounter a full-time instructor, dedicated to the apprentice-craft of teaching, but rather an adjunct instructor. As higher education scales out further and further, absorbing more and more students, the adjunct faculty, who comprise the majority of the community college faculty, are of increasingly dubious qualification, particularly when one considers that the system must absorb ever greater number of students who have dubious academic ability, or at the very least who have little motivation to see education as anything other than an instrumental response to the real and pressing need for employment. Unlike Richard Vedder, I have not "long been a proponent of Charles Murray's thesis that an increasing number of people attending college do not have the cognitive abilities or other attitudes usually necessary for success at higher levels of learning" -- and I have not been a proponent in part because there are environments, other than the collegiate environment, where one can aspire to quite high levels of learning, and there are abilities, other than cognitive abilities, like empathy and compassion, that are more to be prized than analytical skills or rhetorical skills -- but I do agree that "as more and more try to attend colleges, either college degrees will be watered down .. or drop-out rates will rise" or more likely some combination of the two. The adjunct instructor of dubious academic skill meets the student with dubious academic motivation, and both think, "what the hell?"
Enter technology. Were I to sit down today with those eager Indian ed-tech entrepreneurs, I might be more inclined to sign up. The manufacturing mantra -- if it can be automated, it should be automated -- and a good deal of what a faculty member does in the classroom, depositing information with our students, can be automated. If one thinks of "the book" as a piece of information technology, my capitulation is not much more radical than asking students to read the text, except that the state of information technology today extends "the book" in ways that are, for most students, more engaging, and more interesting than print technologies alone. The text has become a multi-media environment, and more often than not, a well-designed multi-media environment, an environment subjected not only to a more rigorous set of instruction design principles, but an environment continuously improved by assessing its effectiveness in achieving the sorts of student outcomes that have been validated either by content experts in the discipline or employers or some combination of both. It is not my generation's film strip, and while it is easy enough to critique it for being "canned," as if that ended the conversation, I am not sure how that represents a condemnation relative to the scribbled notes of even the most sincere and dedicated adjunct X, drawn from the text, which he or she repeats over the course of 50 minutes to a room full of students distracted by Facebook on their phones. It not only can be automated, but the ethical imperative implied by the "should" in "should be automated" has another dimension when we ask whether the automated or the adjunct provides the better instructional experience.
While I might agree that it dehumanizes education, that it would be altogether better if each student had a teacher, expert in their discipline, dedicated to the apprentice-craft of teaching, nudging him or her toward improvement in the third draft of their paper, the reality of such an experience for the masses in an era of mass higher education is remote. I might also suggest that it opens the possibility that we might re-humanize education, that it might be altogether better if faculty were relieved of the mundane responsibility of information dissemination, if they could, in their one-on-one's, in their face-to-face encounters with students, focus on what is most valuable in education. Information is important, exercise of analytical skills is important, and there is no need to water down curriculum in either respect because the machine, with the infinite patience of a machine, can iterate and reiterate information and can provide multiple and branching opportunities to practice their analytical skills. Cognitive ability, and the extension of cognitive ability, is important, but more important and what is most often valuable in education, however, is neither information, not the ability to manipulate information -- what is most often most memorable is that moment of recognition. I am not referring to the aha! moment of discovery, although that can be exciting, but rather the sense that someone recognizes something significant in us, something of value, and then actually extends the empathy and compassion to actually value it. While that Master Card commercial goes through a litany of things that money can buy, and ends with that which money cannot buy, the priceless, higher education can engage in a market place transaction around information dissemination and receive a more effective and less expensive product than most faculty can produce on their own. Information technology, however, is not the end, but simply the pretext. Relieved of the tyranny of information dissemination, faculty might actually rededicate themselves to what is most valuable in education, that moment when a faculty member, even one of dubious academic qualification, recognizes something of value in a student, something before and beyond the market, that which is priceless, and both think, "what the hell!"
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