Education as Hexagon?
In the previous article I’ve written about science, current problems in its current organization and economical model. In short, I discuss cost of the scientific infrastructure and come to the conclusion that huge monolithic scientific institutions mostly outlived their usefulness. Inefficiency of inner organization an communication processes in combination with flexibility issues (it is hard to create new groups inside large institution) forces us to search for new solutions. The solution, I discussed in that article is to bring back small separate research groups and use modern tools to provide efficient communication and common infrastructure. Works like micro-service architecture with a common event bus in web development.
Today I want to talk about much more complicated problem — higher education. There are a lot of problems with higher education both in post-soviet space and in Europe/US. I think that the main problem is lack of satisfactory economical model. Let’s discuss why it is so hard to create a proper economical model for education.
Perils of education
- Education is expensive. To put it mildly. Education is much more expensive than science. Even if we ignore all other requirements, you need highly qualified teachers and a lot of them. Also you need administrative stuff to manage those teachers (one of the failures of lot of post-soviet institutions is to ignore the need of administrative staff).
- Education requires extensive infrastructure. The previous article was about infrastructure costs, but it is much more important for education. You need dormitories, classes, lection halls, canteens, sport arena and a lot more. Some of those requirements are “natural” like schedule management, administration, etc. Some are “traditional” like requirements for in-person classes (we all know, that there is a remote education, though it is not a full replacement for in-person). Some requirements are meaningless. Like need to have a stadium for each university-grade establishment (at least this is the case in Russia, but I am sure there are similar limitations in other countries).
- Education is hard to grade. It is even worse than with sceince. You can somehow measure the effectiveness of science on a 5-year scale (there are no good ways, but there are some indirect indicators). For education, you need to wait tens of years for your graduates to reach their full potential. And even then, it is usually hard to separate the effect of education quality from personal motivation. Nowadays the immediate rank of university is usually measured not by its graduates, but by school achievements of people going into it (it works like that with Russian Universal State Exam, but similar systems exist in other countries). You probably can see the problem of this approach. In the end, it is all about reputation. And reputation is hard to accumulate.
- Education needs to be flexible. Maybe a century ago it was OK to get standard basic education for all people, but nowadays people need specialization and customization (at least when we are talking about fields, that require high qualification). Students need to be able to choose from different courses and different teachers. They also have to be able to adjust the program according to their own strengths. Some people require more theoretical knowledge, some more practice, some need more time for supervised individual projects.
- Education is a long time personal investment. The most important problem is the economical model. Education is the most profitable thing for its recipients. But the problem is that the profit comes many years after said education is being received. It means that the student needs to pay now to get hypothetical ability to get more money later. But they do not have it now. In order to invest something, you need to earn something first. Lets discuss it in a bit more detail.
A few more words about economy
Economical problem is actually the most dire one. Someone have to pay for education. Let’s see what options are there for that. Assuming students cant pay for themselves, which is usually the case (education is expensive!).
- Rich parents. Parents should invest in education of their children, but it does not mean that children without rich parents should not get a chance. Not because “unfairness”, but just because market looses a lot of potential highly qualified workers and the economy suffers.
- Getting education later. We actually have several such cases at SPC. People getting better education after some experience in engineering and being able to spend money freely. I think it is a very good scenario. The one people should try to follow, but there are not many people, who are wise enough to understand that the investment into education always pays off. Also they usually have to be able to pause their career development in order to be able to spend time on education. In our experience, they don’t regret it later, but it is a serious decision.
- Government. Government is obviously interested in getting highly qualified people, but there is a catch. Several, actually. I am writing it, being in Russia, when its dictator is at the state of war with all the modern world and its own citizens (I hope that both war and the dictator will end soon), so I am not inclined to put a lot of faith into government. Even if we discard it, governments are not known to be good investor (and education is the investment). Governments are good at standardization and getting minimal base. But we do not want need that for top-tier education. We need customization and the competition. Also there is a problem of “paying back”. Government wants not any education, but education profitable to government. It would not sponsor specializations that it does not need. And “needs” changes a lot. And the final point. Government pays something, but it never pays enough. It could not differentiate how much to pay. It will usually pay the same amount for all education “tiers”.
- Credits. Well, you can see, how it could go bad. Educational credits are a frequent practice in the developed countries. And it has its merits. The problem is that good education is really expensive. And it gets even more expensive, when credits are in play (the university could require an enormous price knowing that nobody will pay it right now, but only in a distant future). Also there is a problem of “expected profit”. People have to take jobs which pay well, and not that are good for their development. Because they have to pay the credit.
- Industry. The industry can pay for education of specialists that they require. It is a good thing, but it require some kind of conscience on their part. The usual mistake is to force people into signing some kind of obligatory contract to “pay off” the debt to specific organization after the education is ended. It never works well.
Summing up
Let’s sum up what we need from education system.
- We need flexible system with multiple educational programs with some kind of competition between them to ensure the quality level does not drop (since there is no clear way to control the quality, competition is the only choice).
- We need a way to provide a way to maintain the infrastructure.
- We need to funding both for infrastructure and the tuition fee itself. And not the money that people would expect to get back quickly.
- We need to provided more or less “fair” access to the education from different people based on their capabilities and not on their background.
It is not easy (maybe impossible) to get it all together simultaneously.
Solutions?
One of the first ideas that arises is to use a “network” system I’ve been talking about in the previous article. Small independent educational programs, each working with tens of students. Exchanging courses, competing, communicating and doing it all better. Sadly it does not work. The proposal in previous article relies on the assumption that infrastructure (communication, accounting, etc.) is cheap and getting even cheaper. This is not the case for education (at least in-person). If we take a small group of students (say, 20) and try to organize the educational process for them, we will soon find that the cost of infrastructure is significantly larger than the cost of tuition. It is very hard to find investments for such a project and it is just not effective. Using the same analogy as I used in the article before, it is a service with a very high resources consumption. It is OK if something very “heavy” runs on it, but not for “micro” services.
On the other hand, monolithic architecture encounters a lot of problems with funding and organizing flexibility and competition.
So let’s see if web architecture design patterns will provide any solutions again…
And of course there is. The architecture is usually called a Hexagon (there are other names and similar patterns, but let’s use this name.). The idea is that many small “applications” share the same standardized infrastructure. The global infrastructure cost is shared by all applications together, but they all carry on their purpose individually without a strong integration with the platform. So such hexagon could be easily replaced by another one with the same format (but different meaning) and the platform could be changed if needed without changing the format or meaning (which also means a competition between platforms).
Let’s see how it could work for education.
When we do an educational program, we actually need rather standard services from our “platform” (university for example). We need to be able to schedule a number of classes on the campus, utilities and communal services, fixed number of dormitory places, money management, standard bureaucratical maintenance like signing diplomas, etc. One of the problems with existing educational organizations is that the access to such “simple” things is not standardized. Meaning that you need to be “integrated” into the system to effectively work in it. Each interaction is based on the personal experience and connections. It means that you can’t just come and create new educational program or replace the existing one. Doing a joint program with two or more universities is even more tiresome.
Doing it this way requires additional important thing: the University should not manage how work is done inside the educational program, it should only select which programs it accepts. This removes a lot of micro-management problems that exist now.
And back to economy
I spent a lot of time on discussing the economical problems and my proposal still does not solve them. I do not think that any system could work without proper economical model. So let me explain, how I see the “best scenario” for the model I am talking about.
Obviously, no single method of funding discussed above is ideal. So why not mix it? I think that governmental funding should be there, but only for infrastructure part, it should cover buildings, safety and things like that. Things that could be standardized and do not require competition. Educational programs and tuition fees should not be covered by the government by default (there could be educational grants from the government). Those programs should be able select their own funding including grants, industry, credits etc. Since the programs are intended to be small, only ones with reasonable economical model would survive. And if some programs won’t survive, it won’t hit the whole “university”. So people, responsible for those programs could experiment with new forms. The platform also could require some money from its programs and provide extra services for money. If the platform quality becomes worse or too expensive, the program could move to another platform.
What is much more important, if the system works like this, there is no motivation for a system “misuse”. Like inviting more students just to get more money.
Teacher as a service
Finally there is a question how to get the number of good teachers to satisfy all those small programs.
Who said, that one teacher must teach only at one program? Several programs could pool resources and provide lectures for one course for a large auditory. When some in-demand teacher had reached their capacity, they could just rise prices. Higher prices would attract more good teachers and encourage people to start careers in the education. A good teacher with reputation could also always find work and migrate between educational organizations.
Conclusion
The system I described here is mostly theoretical right now and I am sure there are practical problems in implementing it. Probably the most problematic things are to devise those protocols of interaction between a platform and a program. Also changing funding rules traditional for specific countries. But still I think that system could be realized. We have some kind of “prototype” working at MIPT (with many reservations of course). I think something like this will be the next evolution of higher education system.