8/13/2019 Siege of Academe

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siege-of-academe 1/12

September/October 2012 The Siege of Academe 

For years, Silicon Valley has failed to breach the walls of higher education with disruptivetechnology. But the tide of battle is changing. A report from the front lines.

By Kevin Carey

Facebook  Twitter  Digg Reddit StumbleUpon Delicious 

It’s three o’clock in the afternoon on Easter, and I’m standing on a wooden deck in the

Corona Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, looking out toward Nob Hill. A man iscooking large slabs of meat on a gas grill as two dozen people mingle with glasses of

 bourbon and bottles of beer in the cool, damp breeze blowing in off the ocean. All of these people are would-be movers and shakers in American higher education — the historic, world-leading system that constitutes one of this country’s greatest economic assets—  but not one ofthem is an academic. They’re all tech entrepreneurs. Or, as the local verna cular has it,hackers.

Some of them are the kinds of hackers a college dean could love: folks who have come upwith ingenious but polite ways to make campus life work better. Standing over there by thecase of Jim Beam, for instance, are the founders of OneSchool, a mobile app that helpsstudents navigate college by offering campus maps, course schedules, phone directories, andthe like in one interface. The founders are all computer science majors who dropped out ofPenn State last semester. I ask the skinniest and geekiest among them how he joined thecompany. He was first recruited last spring, he says, when his National Merit Scholarship

 profile mentioned that he likes to design iPhone apps in his spare time. He’s nineteen years

old.

But many of the people here are engaged in business pursuits far more revolutionary in their

intentions. That preppy-looking guy near the barbecue? He’s launching a company calledDegreed, which aims to upend the traditional monopoly that colleges and universities hold

8/13/2019 Siege of Academe

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siege-of-academe 2/12

over the minting of professional credentials; he wants to use publicly available data likeacademic rank and grade inflation to standardize the comparative value of different collegedegrees, then allow people to add information about what they’ve learned outside of collegeto their baseline degree “score.” It’s the kind of idea that could end up fizzling out before

anyone’s really heard of it, or could, just maybe, have huge consequences for the market in

credentials. And that woman standing by the tree? She’s the recent graduate of ColumbiaUniversity who works for a company called Kno, which is aiming to upset the $8 billiontextbook industry with cheaper, better, electronic textbooks delivered through tabletcomputers. And then there’s the guy standing to her  right wearing a black fleece zip-up

 jacket: five days ago, he announced the creation of the Minerva Project, the “first new elite

American university in over a century.” 

Last August, Marc Andreessen, the man whose Netscape Web browser ignited the originaldot-com boom and who is now one of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture capitalists,

wrote a much-discussed op-ed in the Wall Street Journal . His argument was that “software is

eating the world.” At a time of low start-up costs and broadly distributed Internet access that

allows for massive economies of scale, software has reached a tipping point that will allow itto disrupt industry after industry, in a dynamic epitomized by the recent collapse of Bordersunder the giant foot of Amazon. And the next industries up for wholesale transformation bysoftware, Andreessen wrote, are health care and education. That, at least, is where he’s

aiming his venture money. And where Andreessen goes, others follow. According to the National Venture Capital Association, investment in education technology companiesincreased from less than $100 million in 2007 to nearly $400 million last year. For the hugegenerator of innovation, technology, and wealth that is Silicon Valley, higher education is a

 particularly fat target right now.

This hype has happened before, of course. Back in the 1990s, when Andreessen made his firstmillions, many people confidently predicted that the Internet would render brick-and-mortaruniversities obsolete. It hasn’t happened yet, in part because colleges are a lot morecomplicated than retail bookstores. Higher education is a publicly subsidized, heavilyregulated, culturally entrenched sector that has stubbornly resisted digital rationalization. Butthe defenders of the ivy-covered walls have never been more nervous about the Internetthreat. In June, a panicked board of directors at the University of Virginia fired (and, afterwidespread outcry, rehired) their president, in part because they worried she was too slow tomove Thomas Jefferson’s university into the digital world.

The ongoing carnage in the newspaper industry provides an object lesson of what can happen

when a long-established, information-focused industry’s business model is challenged bylow-price competitors online. The disruptive power of information technology may be our best hope for curing the chronic college cost disease that is driving a growing number ofstudents into ruinous debt or out of higher education altogether. It may also be an existentialthreat to institutions that have long played a crucial role in American life.

I’m here at this party and in the Bay Area for the next few days to observe the habits,

folkways, and codes of the barbarians at the gate —to see how close they’ve come toward

finding business models and technologies that could wreak such havoc on higher education.My guide, and my host at this party — he organized the event for my benefit — is a man namedMichael Staton. With sandy-blond hair, blue eyes, and a sunburned complexion, Michael is

thirty-one — old by start-up standards —and recently married. He’s the president and “chiefevangelist” of Inigral, a company he created five years ago to build college-branded social

8/13/2019 Siege of Academe

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siege-of-academe 3/12

networks for incoming undergraduates. But just as importantly for my purposes, he’s also oneof those people who has a knack for connecting with others, a high-link node in a growingnetwork of education technology entrepreneurs who have set their sights on the mammothhigher education industry.

One of the bedrooms in the house where we’re mingling and drinking was Inigral’sheadquarters for the first eight months of its existence, back when the founders were“bootstrapping” the company, which is valleyspeak for growing the business on their own

using credit cards, waitering tips, plasma donation proceeds, and other sources that don’t

involve the investment dollars that can shoot a start-up toward fame and fortune at the priceof diluting the founder’s ownership and control. The longer someone can manage to feed

themselves with ramen noodles and keep things going via bootstrapping, the more of theircompany they’ll ultimately get to keep— unless someone else comes up with the same idea,takes the venture capital (VC) money earlier, and uses it to blow them to smithereens. Thestart-up culture is full of such tough decisions about money, timing, and power, which are, intheir own way, just as complicated and risky as the task of building new businesses that will

delight the world and disrupt a trillion-dollar market.

« Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7  Next » Kevin Carey is the director of the Education Policy program at the New America Foundation.

 print 21 comments Facebook  Twitter  Digg Reddit StumbleUpon Delicious 

Feed the Political Animal

Donate 

Washington Monthly depends on donations from readers like you.

Comments

Post a comment 

  Adrian Meli on August 28, 2012 6:35 PM:

What a wonderful article-it put a huge smile on my face reading it. Lots of great ideasand wonderful innovation happening it in a space that needs it. I hope you do a

follow-up in a year on it.

  Atul Kumthekar on August 28, 2012 10:52 PM:

I think for a true pursuer of knowledge, all the western education seems meaninglessat a point. Albeit it may be giving good platform to connect. It may be good to lookalso at how Indian Classical Music is taught (traditionally) in India. Even in sciencewe see a good bond between a student and a teacher which is most critical. This maynot be possible in online education. One can even go back to Archimedes days andsee how he used to teach walking around - he must be doing his own thinking whileteaching ! All n all - it is the freedom, no fear or survival, is the key to good

education. Online education definitely provides some goals like education for all, freeand whenever student wants. I am doing some online courses on coursera.org and

8/13/2019 Siege of Academe

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siege-of-academe 4/12

quite satisfied except for the typical exam pattern they implement - probably out ofsome framework bindings.

  Bethany Schwecker on August 29, 2012 12:55 AM:

Thanks for this reporting Kevin.

Like many who have earned their expensive degree from an intellectually respectedinstitution and find that the value of the credential in the real-world of remuneration isfar less than the cost it took to acquire it, I'm very glad that future generations have afighting chance to get out from under these dark clouds--though I am naturallyenvious that I will not be able to participate in their joy.

I, like Adrian, very much would like to know how forward progress is being made inthis arena. Please do a follow-up in a year.

  Atul Kumthekar on August 29, 2012 2:51 AM:

Phew... read the entire article and thought may add few more points:

1. Thiels of the world can focus on wankel engine type substitute to IC engines ratherthan rockets and fuel. That will be more useful to mankind and will go in line with thescale, money, ambition mix !

2. The rail road example and getting obsolete of it may not be really related to openmarket capitalism but more related to car lobby! If this was not so, possibly we maynot have faced global warn(read -m)ing :)

3. There sure exist a world beyond scale, economy and ambition. May be US need to become 1000 year old culture for that! But to think of it, would any venture capitalisthave funded Right Brothers? The new things will even today and tomorrow NOTcome from out of venture capital world. I like the 18th century Europe scenario in thisrespect. So many innovations came in math, physics, chemistry not by venture capitalmechanism but by sheer desire and efforts in honest way. No fancy American collegeswere really required for all that. I think it is about creating the cult and hype of thistype. That is what we need. As aptly put by great Indian leader Gandhi - 'there isenough for everyone's need but not enough for greed' :) So one needs to think over as

to which world are we talking about when we think about change. Does the trickledown effect really work?

  Jeff  on August 29, 2012 9:50 AM:

Can I please have a wallpaper-size copy of the article's leading illustration? Rightnow?

  LaFollette Progressive on August 29, 2012 11:07 AM:

It's easy to imagine some very positive changes to the status quo emerging from this

new technology -- eliminating the de facto requirement that everyone who wants ahalfway decent white collar job must go into debt to earn a traditional four year

8/13/2019 Siege of Academe

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siege-of-academe 5/12

degree from a name-brand institution, and allowing anyone in the world to take high-quality individually-tailored coursework for career development, while preserving thelong-term health of institutions that still provide a traditional four-year liberal artseducation to those who actually want one.

It's also easy to imagine this going in a dystopian direction, in which slower-adapting public universities have to be closed or bailed out and reorganized by their states,many smaller private schools disappear off the map, the most prestigious schools start

 profiteering off of student loan dollars like the worst online schools of the present, the best research faculty stop teaching, and even the most prestigious schools becomelittle more than a series of powerpoint presentations delivered by adjuncts who earnvirtually nothing.

Frankly, the latter version seems much more likely, given the current direction of oursociety.

  mbk114 on August 29, 2012 12:08 PM:

A very interesting article, but I'm surprised that never once did I see the names JohnSperling, Apollo Group, or University of Phoenix brought up. It's unfortunate,

 because they offer a glimpse of what this new world of education is likely to look like- a system where most people participating are just simply going through the motions

 because of the ever-growing need to get that little piece of paper society values somuch.

Mr. Carey only partially addresses the key factor here, which is that of the credibilityof the degree -- or what he refers to in market-ese as "colleges with strong brandnames." On the surface it's easier to get a degree than ever, with UoP and its clonesoffering technology-assisted education in ways that accommodates the needs of theirusers, just like many of the people interviewed here are hoping to do (albeit at a lowercost). Yet these institutions suffer from a growing perception that their degrees do notreflect the same degree of intellectual development as those from more traditionalinstitutions of higher learning. Rather, it becomes something like a variation of thatold slogan about socialism: the teachers pretend to teach and the students pretend tolearn.

This isn't to say that technology, for better and for worse, won't play a growing role in

education (and I say worse because technology is a factor driving up the cost ofhigher ed that nobody is talking about). But that tipping point that Mr. Careydescribes at the end of his article is a lot farther off than he thinks unless the smart

 people of Silicon Valley devote some time to figuring out how to improve the validityof the degrees they would be granting. There already is a way to do this -- it's calledaccreditation, but it's the type of expensive process that would cancel out many of thecost benefits these people are trying to achieve. Until they figure THIS out, though,they're going to just be creating an e-version of the UoP model, with most of thestudents they produce ultimately having wasted their time pursuing a chimera sold bysome sharp people whose enthusiasm outpaced reality.

  Robert Arvanitis on August 29, 2012 6:36 PM:

8/13/2019 Siege of Academe

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siege-of-academe 6/12

The essence of teaching is when the one who knows, knows so well he can anticipatewhere the one who seeks does not understand.

In other words, the teacher must know the most complex subject so well, that they canmake it seem simple.

The real leap will occur when predictive analytics are sufficiently sophisticated toreplicate that.

  frank  on August 29, 2012 6:51 PM:

My daughter is 12-this gives me hope...

  TTT on August 29, 2012 7:26 PM:

The missing piece is for large tech employers like Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. to

unite and say they will hire, for entry level positions, people who have completed thefollowing 3-course certificate in MITx in the suitable field (computer science, etc.).

When these high-profile employers say that a Bachelor's degree is not needed forentry-level positions, then the last pillar holding up the sordid old edifice, is gone.

So the education that can make you eligible for an entry-level job at Google costsvery little, vs...

A degree in 'Women's Studies' that neither opens up jobs nor is cheap.

An easy choice.

  Paul Schantz on August 29, 2012 11:50 PM:

Fantastic article, Kevin! It captures a lot of the internal passion and excitement in theInternet industry that many in higher ed have never been exposed to. It's infectiousand perhaps a little frightening for some. Thank you for writing this.

  Louise Yarnall on August 30, 2012 3:32 AM:

I agree with the person fearing the dystopian vision, and the person worried thathiring managers will pick the candidates from brand name colleges and personalrecommendations rather than on evidence of competence. Disruptive change needs tooffer real opportunity to be meaningful. The most interesting aspects of teaching andlearning have to do with lesson and assessment design. It would be nice to see morefocus on how these new entrepreneurial models teach and how students learn fromthem. Making that part of the equation more transparent would make a strongcontribution toward solving many of the education problems we have: inequity,

 branding and creaming, impersonalization, poor teacher preparation. One size neverfits all, and really, one of the biggest problems today in education is the lack of toolsfor students and their families to customize learning based on the inherent talents and

 passions that all young people display. The more we learn about learning, the closerwe will get to transforming opportunity for all.

8/13/2019 Siege of Academe

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siege-of-academe 7/12

  Alan Contreras on August 30, 2012 12:07 PM:

Kevin, you have done a great job with this subject. As someone whose career has been based on evaluating colleges and determining the validity of degrees, I look atthe future and see a great deal of complication.

One key factor in moving knowledge from one person to another is the need to rely onthe qualifications of the provider. I am concerned that as we move away from asystem rooted in the concept of the "faculty," we move into something of a qualitativewilderness in which anyone can slap a label on a training packet and call itknowledge. Some of the for-profits do this already.

This is to some extent self-correcting over time, as the turkeys are seen to bearfeathers, but by then a significant amount of harm may be done. It is true that thegatekeeping functions of governments and accreditors are rusty and the processesslow and expensive. However, unless we adopt a purely libertarian view of

credentials, under which any employer must conduct significant research into thenature of the providers whose "graduates" are at the door, there needs to be some kindof screening or certifying function for credentials.

I do not think that these new models will have much effect on the bulk of traditional-age undergraduates. They will continue to want to go to physical colleges because thatis where they find mates and make friends. The issue is whether they will be able toafford it.

The era of subsidized public colleges is clearly over and won't be seen again, so thequestion is how to support student attendance at physical campuses. The only

 plausible answer is that colleges that succeed in generating private support willsurvive and many others will not.

I'm sorry to see that so many wealthy entrepreneurs do not see more value in reducingthe cost of traditional education rather than replacing it with something else. The newmodels will work well for some students, but not for many.

Alan ContrerasOregon

  William Senft on August 31, 2012 12:15 PM:

When you boil it all down, isn't the core problem/opportunity TESTING?

If there are assessments that truly measure knowledge and ability, administered withsecurity and integrity, then those who demonstrate their mastery will deserve to gainaccess to capital and employment opportunities. The industry winners are those thatcan provide quality curriculum and assessment and testing security and integrity.

The rest is up to the students - truly a merit based system for advancement that doesnot depend on playing the admissions game for a brand name university. The revenue

model in this new system will involve payment for access to courses and for testing.

8/13/2019 Siege of Academe

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siege-of-academe 8/12

8/13/2019 Siege of Academe

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siege-of-academe 9/12

The basic philosophical divide that Nick proposes is compelling, but I find it dubiousin practice. Relationships form the bedrock of Silicon Valley, and dictate the flow ofmoney. Is the entrepreneur a known entity? Are other investor friends investing?Broad category plays can only be so broad. Talent, while scarce, is still incredibly richand distributed across startups concentrated in the Valley. While some philosophical

underpinnings guide general investment flow, ties from college, prior employment,and friend networks dictate where the money goes.

Even Instagram, a startup that seemed to take off overnight, offers a good case in point: http://kevinfadler.com/post/21086254592/instagram-not-instant-success  

  Kevin F. Adler on September 05, 2012 12:24 PM:

The basic philosophical divide that Nick proposes is compelling, but I find it dubiousin practice. Relationships form the bedrock of Silicon Valley, and dictate the money.

Is the entrepreneur a known entity? Are other investor friends investing? Broadcategory plays can only be so broad. Talent, while scarce, is still incredibly rich anddistributed across startups concentrated in the Valley. While some philosophicalunderpinnings guide general investment flow, ties from college, prior employment,and friend networks dictate where the money goes.

Even Instagram, a startup that seemed to take off overnight, offers a good case in point: http://kevinfadler.com/post/21086254592/instagram-not-instant-success  

  Bro'Donnell on September 06, 2012 2:46 AM:

Fascinating article! Really enjoyed it and I'm excited for some upcoming disruption!

  John Beck  on September 07, 2012 11:11 AM:

Based on some of the other comments, this article seems to inspire hope in a lot of the people who read it. I'm not sure why, and I'm sort of scratching my head about the"golly gee" tone of the article and some of its premises. Has Carey suddenlytransformed into Dr. Pangloss? For starters, he writes glowingly of Wal-Mart; Wal-Mart has indeed brought us cheap prices for clothes and other products, its great"gift." The downside? Many of these products are produced by people working at

what reasonably could be called slave labor wages in impoverished countries. Thenthere's the 1000s of small stores across the country run out of business by Wal-Martand Wal-Mart's other great "gift" to the American people: the expansion of the lowwage, no benefit employment sector. To "Wal-Martize" higher education even furtherthan it has been through technology (the process has been well under way for decadeswith the growing use of adjuncts) will do in yet another employment sector that paysreasonably well. Don't expect these tech start-ups to create new kinds of jobs en massto replace the jobs lost in higher ed; Carey (and research supports this) makes clearthese companies aren't going to be major employers.

Mr. Carey is implicitly making the case that these entrepreneurs will solve the

 problem of rising tuitions and limited access to higher education. It's a curiousargument for him to make because it's so narrowly focused. In this article, the

8/13/2019 Siege of Academe

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siege-of-academe 10/12

education world seems to consist solely of expensive elite universities jealouslykeeping their enrollments small and thus closing out a multitude of top students acrossthe country (and world) who apparently can't get a decent education elsewhere. Thecommunity college sector (ironically, Carey's specialty)is totally invisible in thisarticle not to mention the hundreds and hundreds of public universities that provide a

solid education--even an excellent education to those who seek it--at tuition levels thatstill generally don't leave graduates with tens of thousands of dollars of debts.

The entrepreneurs Carey is describing are primarily interested in doing what intereststhem and in making money. They don't care if they devastate an industry whether it'sthe recording industry, publishing or higher education. We may not care either, but ifthe digitalization of publishing reduces the already minuscule compensation authorsearn even more, that may very well result in less quality published work, not more,and maybe that's a problem. As for the implicit message in this article that collegesand universities are slow to take advantage of the new technology, maybe so, but mosthave been moving online for more than a decade now. What these entrepreneurs hope

to do is cut the colleges and universities out of this market and make some money.Educators--at least the principled ones--hold values that limit how far they are willingto go in changing higher education. These entrepreneurs apparently don't adhere tothese values; for them, instruction is a commodity, nothing more, nothing less. Whyhave 1000s of teachers giving a lecture about the Declaration of Independence whenone good lecture by a professor at an "elite" university will do? Hire paper gradersand discussion facilitators (low paid of course) to do the grunt work and work onsoftware to replace them eventually. Heck, why even have a course that brings up theDeclaration of Independence? How does that pay off for someone? And who's goingto get this type of education in the brave new world? People who aren't brilliant and

 people who aren't rich, which is to say, most of us. People who are brilliant and people who are affluent will continue to get the real deal. And what will people dowith their online degrees as entrepreneurs work tirelessly to bring "progress" toindustry after industry? Wal-Mart beckons.

  doug k  on September 07, 2012 4:50 PM:

John Beck said most of what I was going to say. Kevin Adler makes the excellent point that college is more about the relationships established, than the education assuch.

Also this quote was illuminating:"one of its executives asks me how much money the United States spends per year toeducate a single student in K-12 education. About $15,000, I say. That’s more than

what it costs us per month to host the entire site, serving millions, the executiveresponds. "

Serving millions, yes, but with what ? flash cards are not an education nor yet ateacher. The glib Panglossians of online education mistake a twig of the tree for anentire woods.

I took one of the Coursera courses. Certainly it's an excellent option for those who

have no other access to the material, but it did not appear in any way to be teaching.With thousands of students, the lecturers might as well be reading out chapters of the

8/13/2019 Siege of Academe

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siege-of-academe 11/12

textbook. Any learning that happened occurred at random in the online forums andchatrooms around the course, not the lecture videos. Online courses are a fineresource for autodidacts but no replacement for teachers.

Post a Comment

   Name

  Email

  Comment (you may use HTML tags for style)

  Preview 

 

Post

 

  The Magazine 

o  Table of Contents o  Cover Feature 

  Blogs o  Political Animal o  Ten Miles Square o  College Guide 

  College Guide o  Rankings: Liberal Arts Colleges o   National Universities o  Master’s Universities o  Baccalaureate Colleges o  Articles 

  About Us o  Mission o  Masthead o  Contact o  Submissions o  Careers o  Privacy Policy 

  Archives o  The Magazine o  Political Animal o  Ten Miles Square o  College Guide 

8/13/2019 Siege of Academe

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/siege-of-academe 12/12

  Advertise o  Print o  Online 

  Subscribe o   New Subscription 

o  Gift Subscription o  Renew Subscription o  Subscription Services 

  Donate   RSS 

© 2011 Copyright Washington Monthly. Washington Monthly® trademark is registered in theU.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Design by Point Five, NY