Stripped Down College

~ Laura

When we were in DC last week, we took a stroll through the Georgetown campus. We wanted to give Jonah a taste of a fancy college. He’s seen some of the public colleges where I’ve taught. He’s even sat in a couple of my classes. But they were public schools with 70s architecture and cranky Dell computers at the front of the room. Kids sitting on radiators in the back of the room. We wanted to show him ivy covered buildings and eager, over-achieving students. We wanted to give him a picture of what is waiting for him at the end of high school.

We wandered through the campus. We took a couple of pictures and sent them to my sister, who graduated from Georgetown many years ago. We walked into the buildings and into the classrooms, which surprisingly had no security guards. The classrooms were a combination of tradition and technology — old school blackboards and lecterns with built-in, touch screen computers. Steve and I groaned. At one time, we planned to be at a place like this.

We asked Jonah what he thought about the campus. He shrugged. His brain, which has been permanently altered from Minecraft, had already re-engineered the campus for maximum efficiency. He didn’t think much of the Hogwarts vibe or the ivy. He described his plan for a college campus with large modern buildings surrounding a circular green zone. I’m really glad that he’ll be starting his architecture program this fall.

The Atlantic has a long article this month about one for-profit, online college, Minerva College. It’s highly selective and not free, which sets it apart from MOOCs. The students live in dorms on a campus, but the faculty live wherever they like. Information is learned and conversation is facilitated through the computer.

The Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning. Lectures, gone. Tenure, gone. Gothic architecture, football, ivy crawling up the walls—gone, gone, gone. What’s left will be leaner and cheaper. (Minerva has already attracted $25 million in capital from investors who think it can undercut the incumbents.) And Minerva officials claim that their methods will be tested against scientifically determined best practices, unlike the methods used at other universities and assumed to be sound just because the schools themselves are old and expensive. Yet because classes have only just begun, we have little clue as to whether the process of stripping down the university removes something essential to what has made America’s best colleges the greatest in the world.

I think it would be silly to form an opinion on such an enterprise before it is up and running. Let’s see what it can do. If Mineva can provide a cheaper college that teaches kids about the same amount of material, then it’s worth a shot.

Published by Laura

8 thoughts on “Stripped Down College”

  1. People aren’t shelling out the big bucks for ivy-covered walls; it’s the crucial social capital and name-brand they’re paying for. I’m having a hard time seeing just who this method is going to serve. If it’s as selective as they say, then what is the advantage to those who could just as easily go the traditional route and get the social capital and name-brand?

    The college of the future, here in the US where we love credentialing and hate education, is going to be two-track: one track for wealthy kids who go to college immediately after high school, and another adult-oriented track that will be geared towards working-class adults who start with community college as a means towards pulling themselves out of poverty.

    Minerva might serve a niche market for the first group, for those whose future careers aren’t as dependent on social capital and/or who already have extensive family connections. I can’t see it working for the second group, and it’s the second group that is likely to grow.

    (the cost seems pretty damn expensive to me)

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    1. I’d have said three tracks — but maybe the track I’m adding is the “top-out-of-sight” class. There’ll be the Harvard-equivalent track, to which people go largely for the social capital/peer group; there will be the straight out of college group looking for credentials/social capital/skills, and there will be the working class group looking for skills/credentials.

      I don’t know which group Minerva is targeting, but I’m guessing the main users of the model that Laura describes here (I’ve read nothing about the plan) would be foreign students. The foreign students are used to a hierarchical teacher model, and thus, wouldn’t see the loss of personal contact/mentorship (one of the forms of social capital people seek, say, at Ivies, where getting to know and work with Larry Summers or Steve Kosslyn or Michael Greenberg or their equivalent sets your career trajectory). They are looking for skills and American visas. An online residential university might offer that, at lower cost, and with the visa. Their parents don’t have a college life to remember and seek for their children. They are, however, highly focused on selectivity, which a school could emulate by testing based selection.

      I don’t see the model being attractive to Americans, though attracting “star” professors with names (which, presumably, they have earned at another university or through other work, like business or law) might attract some. Those names would be a big draw to the foreign market, if they are sufficiently famous and have the right pedigree (which will include a prestige degree).

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  2. Off the top of my head…

    Carnegie Mellon
    MIT
    Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
    Northeastern
    Harvey Mudd (? Haven’t visited, but from its website, it seems to be modern, green, etc.)

    I think I see a theme in the list above… 😉 If you want a defined campus, with many modern buildings, around a green space. Not sure I can deliver circular.

    It’s highly selective and not free, which sets it apart from MOOCs.

    Every college would love to be highly selective and not free. At present, Minerva is neither. Right now, Minerva seems to be close to free, as: To seed this first class with talent, Minerva gave every admitted student a full-tuition scholarship of $10,000 a year for four years, plus free housing in San Francisco for the first year. So we’re left with food, books, and personal expenses.

    At present, it’s not highly selective. The article didn’t mention how many students applied. Yield rate under 50%. You need the denominator to be able to figure out the admit rate. They didn’t release the denominator.

    They make a big deal about their proprietary admissions process. Fine. If they really want a highly-achieving student body, they should have no problem publishing the average/median test scores of their admitted students. It would help parents trying to create a reasonable college list. They can claim their student body is highly capable. Fine. If it is, there’s no reason not to release those figures.

    I notice the founder declares he doesn’t want to accept federal financial aid: As evidence, Nelson points to the fact that the school will eschew all federal funding, to which he attributes much of the runaway cost of universities. The compliance cost of taking federal financial aid is about $1,000 per student—a tenth of Minerva’s tuition—and the aid wouldn’t be of any use to the majority of Minerva’s students, who will likely come from overseas.

    Bully for them. Except, you know, as a parent looking to pay to send my high-achieving children to university, the reports required by the feds are amazingly helpful–so helpful that I would never even consider a school which wouldn’t release that data. And I’m inclined to feel that the penalties for lying to the feds encourage accuracy. I wouldn’t trust data released from a school which didn’t receive federal funds.

    Here is a list of current reporting requirements: http://www.nacua.org/nacualert/docs/HEOA_Reporting.asp.

    If you want to run a highly-selective school on the level of the Ivies, you have to provide a level of transparency which parents of those students have come to expect. And planning to change cities frequently would render Clery Act reporting even less reliable.

    Without such information, a parent must conclude that the institution could be like this: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1999-12-30/.

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  3. “and the aid wouldn’t be of any use to the majority of Minerva’s students, who will likely come from overseas.”

    Yup, foreign students. Helps to avoid the reporting requirements, too, since the students are less likely to be savvy about the American reporting requirements. I see a new scheme by educational profiteers, one being developed since the federal student aid model of exploiting poor American students seems to be drying up. The problem with the for profit model based on foreign students is that you have to figure out a way of getting them to pay — attracting enough wealthy foreigners might do it. Wealthy foreigners who also have the qualifications (including English language skills) have other options, including the state universities. So, maybe a model that will be built on wealthy foreigners with inadequate English language skills and foreigners who pull together enough money to afford the lower tuition under the visa requirements? And, they can attract more of those students by altering the curriculum to require less language skill, including less writing and classroom discussion. A part of what a school like this is selling is the value of a four year US Visa, which is worth something.

    There’s a subterranean story out there about California art schools in San Francisco that offer something similar.

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  4. There are no “scientifically determined best practices” for teaching humanities courses. The delightful assessment practices that have been put in place over the last 10-20 years make this very clear. I suspect the same is true for social science, and it might even be true for the best science classes (that is, I am sure you can test very effectively whether someone has memorized a bunch of data, and somewhat effectively whether they have understood certain principles taught by labs, but beyond that?)

    I also wonder whether lectures are really “gone,” or whether they are replaced by beautifully produced videos of…. lectures. Also: if faculty aren’t on campus, how are they interacting with the students? Small online courses can be great, for sure – but they have to be small enough that faculty have time to help out and build relationships with the students (and this costs money, unless all of the teaching is outsourced to India or something). I wonder how many faculty would want to have that be their only mode of contact semester after semester.

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    1. Good point about the videos. The article implied that the model they’re developing at Minerva would involve outsourcing (and outsourcing to the “free” model, i.e. Kahn videos). I predict the model fails, or morphs the way Udacity morphed — to a corporate education model, with a focus on foreign students, potentially, to benefit from the residence/visa benefit.

      I like the idea of Kosslyn doing real life experiments on learning, in the sense of whether people will pay to be taught in the way that he thinks is best, and like that he’s doing it with adults and not with children with government money. I wonder if he’ll be influenced by the results of the experiments? To Thrun’s (Udacity) credit, he appears to have paid attention to his experimental results, changing the program to do what he thinks it can do, rather than ignoring the data and selling it to everyone.

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  5. I imagine there are a large number of people who would be very happy to conduct “classes,” while sitting in a vacation home about 1,000 miles away from their students.

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