Ed Reform In the University Part 4
Differing Models in US Higher Education: Following the Clues
A. Stanford Universtiy’s Economic Model: Spend the Money!
Stanford spends $100,000 per student per year according to Caroline Hoxby. Even students with no financial support only pay 50% of that cost. So how does that work? It’s the Endowment. According to Hoxby, students are an investment. Stanford depends on students doing well and contributing to that endowment (which usually occurs about 30 years after graduation). Hoxby likens it to an intellectual capital investment. If the kind of education that leads to success can be done on the cheap, Stanford seems not to have gotten the memo.
In addition to the large budget, Stanford is an elite highly selective institution with other aspects that can’t easily be replicated. Its student faculty ratio is 4:1. It benefits from it’s proximity to the defense industry that served as the breeding ground to the Silicone Valley area. Courses are less standardized and more likely to involve important, but yet to be published research. The University hosts venture capital networks and have other connections with industry. Some student’s future paths are practically paved by the University. But that is not all. Stanford is not just preparing students for the future, but they are also helping create the future that their students will inhabit. The generalizability of this model is questionable, but we should be suspect of any approach that portends to educate students on the cheap with standardized materials and a lack of network socialization.
Here is video of Caroline Hoxby’s Stanford Presentation
B. Non-Selective Colleges and Universities: Spend just a Little Money
Caroline Hoxby’s Stanford Presentation also compared Stanford to typical non-selective tertiary education institutions. These institutions primarily depend on student tuition to fund their budgets. Course content is most often drawn from readily available standardized materials and that content lacks the extra curricular benefits available to Stanford students. It’s quite possible that non-selective institutions attempt to provide the same level of opportunity as provided by Stanford. It is possible that the students of these institutions lack the cognitive capabilities of Stanford students, but without the many extra benefits of the Stanford model, it likely can only provide a small fraction of the value regardless of the selectivity issues. Certainly the return on investment as measured by small endowments is substantially less and I suspect the economic value to the students is also reduced.
C, The MOOC Model: Spend No Money, Ever!
The evidence that MOOCs are producing radical change is slim. HBR reports that MOOCs are not a productive replacement for traditional courses.
(R)esearch revealed that only a small percentage of these millions were completing the courses, approximately 80% already had at least a bachelor’s degree, nearly 60% were employed full-time, and 60% came from developed countries (defined as members of the OECD). MOOCs seemed to be serving the most advantaged, the headlines blared, and most people weren’t even completing them.
This Cathy Davidson Article notes that the number of people taking MOOCs proves that there is a hunger to learn. But she asks: if MOOC are the answer, what exactly is the question to be asked? That question; is higher education valuable?
If the question is “is higher education worth it?” we know from the massive enrollment in online courses that the answer is a resounding, powerful “yes.” It is also significant that world history courses are enrolling as many students as Python. People WANT higher learning, Period. Whatever else one may think of MOOCs, that is an important game changer in the anti-higher education conversation that raged not so long ago.
D. The Apprenticeship Model: Does the Future Look Like the Past
McCarthy, Palmer and Prebil’s white paper Connecting Apprenticeships and Higher Education, advocates for growing an apprenticeship model (500k participants in 2016). They believably claim that apprenticeships result in graduates that are more job ready.
When employers depend solely on the education system to prepare their workforce, they often find that new hires are far from job ready. When they use apprenticeship instead and partner with a college for the related instruction, they can be more sure that trainees are learning firm-relevant skills as well as broad knowledge about the field.
I will make one critique; their implied model is like a bolt-on addition to higher education rather than an integrated model. I believe there are a set of Pragmatic learning theories well suited to developing an integrated model of higher education and apprenticeships. This set includes Situated Learning theory, Enactive Learning Theory, Rogoff’s apprenticeship in thinking model, Lave and Wenger’s Communities of Practice, Hagel, Brown and Davison’s Power of Pull and a host of theories relevant to this age of digitalization and an ondemand knowledge society. This model doesn’t fully exist, but the desire for an apprenticeship model that is more effective and more relevant is an opportunity to seek positive change.
E. Comparing Models of Higher Ed: Stanford and the Apprenticeship Model; making higher ed an investment
You might think that a theoretically integrated apprenticeship model is radically different from the Stanford model, but I believe that they shares many aspects if you look below the surface. These are some of the similarilties:
- Both models rely on instructors who are closely integrated with industry and where industry is headed in the near future.
- Both models involve students within Communities of Practice that span education and industry.
- Both models are less standardized and are better able to respond to individual learning needs and business and social development practices.
- Both models socialize students into a relevant community of inquiry.
In short a well designed apprenticeship model can be grounded in well respected theories of learning, can integrate a well developed Deweyian model of inquiry and it can potentially replicate the success and the benefits that acrue from the Stanford model; quite possibly with less expense. It is certainly a model worth pursuing.
