Author, blogger and public intellectual Audrey Watters cautions that Silicon Valley is out to gut higher education as we know it.
She is neither alone nor unique in taking this stance. Harvard Biz School's Clay Christensen beat Watters to the punch with his application of disruptive-innovation theory to higher education several years ago. Christensen argues that never before was there a core technology that enabled ease of entry into higher education, until along came online learning. In all previous eras, you had to create a bricks-and-mortar campus in order to compete. Now entry is easy.
So is technological change inevitable? And is it good or bad... and for whom?
Let's consider the example of the atomic bomb. The bomb was developed by the U.S. during World War II for what I see as three reasons:
1. We feared that the Nazis were building one.
2. We wanted to win the war.
3. And, quite imply, we had the brains, money and other resources to do it.
Dr. Edward Teller later successfully argued for the development of the hydrogen or "super" bomb, ostensibly because the USSR was doing so. All this smacks of inevitability.
But, on the other hand, in the 70 years since WWII ended, no nation has ever used an atomic bomb on another nation.
This last fact suggests to me that we, as a species and as organized societies, are able reject technology that poses a great-enough (existential?) threat to our existence.
The problem I see is that we don't recognize the magnitude of this threat. I firmly believe that technology is destroying far more jobs than it is creating. But we blithely comfort ourselves that education will retool people to fill new jobs, that will appear to replace those being eliminated by what in effect is the relentless automation of human labor.
Now we are warned that technology is poised to gut the very institutions which are supposed to provide the education to create and fill all these prophesied new jobs.
So... If I'm right that technology is destroying more jobs than it's creating, what evidence is there in higher education? Well, for starters, we see that the 75:25 ratio of full-time, tenure-track to adjunct/contingent faculty of the 1970s has been reversed in the 21st century. This is not unlike the shift from good-pay, good-benefits manufacturing jobs of the 1970s to low-pay, poor-benefits service jobs of today. In fact, the analogy seems to me to be rather compelling.
What did we get in return for the gutting of our manufacturing sector? Cheaper goods from abroad.
What do we get for the "adjunctification" of our faculties? Actually, so far, not cheaper education for the most part. Somehow, it seems to me, we have gotten the worst of all worlds: cheap, part-time professors together with ever-increasing tuitions, especially at private colleges and universities.
Of course, one could argue that college costs would be even higher, were it not for the proliferation of part-time teachers. If so, that won't last long, as more and more adjunct faculty unionize and demand better pay and benefits.
However, students may realize real savings from the pressure on us "privates" to accept ever more transfer credits, life-experience credits, MOOC credits, etc. toward degrees. Will this help or hurt four-year colleges? That may depend upon whether we can make up in the volume of enrollments what we lose in duration of those student enrollments (from 4 to 1, 2 or 3 years) in our institutions. Just now that volume isn't there for most of us.
Can we, like feudal Japan, close our doors to these trends? Or will the Admiral Perry's on the high tech seas of the Fifth Wave force us to open our doors ever wider to technological innovation at our own expense?
I think about this a lot and will have more to say in future posts.
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