A treasured colleague of mine, now retired, who reads this newsletter asked me last month what I thought of three-year bachelor’s programs.
The simple answer is that I’m in favor of them. The slightly more complicated answer is that I think that anything as fundamental as years-to-degree needs to be a design principle from the start. Meaning that I think a three-year bachelor’s should be either an opportunity for a new institution or the result of a comprehensive transformation of an existing institution’s curricular structure.
What I am against is the approach that Wesleyan University adopted where a three-year option was overlaid on top of the four-year option. In that case, it’s extremely hard to avoid communicating that this option is the equivalent of about-to-expire food that’s sold on a discount. You can’t shoehorn a three-year program on top of a four-year program without making visible a difference between who needs to count their pennies and who has money to burn. You shouldn’t have to attend a university where you are visibly sitting back in coach while you watch other students get seated in first class. Students bring pre-existing socioeconomic difference with them, and there’s only so much you can do about that, but one thing you can do is not compound it.
I also just think it’s a bad idea to overlay two different design architectures for a curriculum even if they both cost the same. You don’t want students who should be associating with one another, who are studying closely similar subjects and methods, to be out of synchronization because they’re working from two different calendars or working into two different kinds of spaces within the same campus or operating under fundamentally different rules. I’m not wild even about Honors Colleges within universities in that sense, though at least those trouble to make sure that all the students within such a program are on the same calendar and doing the same kind of work.
The deeper issue with these kinds of overlays, this kind of “here’s a university or college, here’s a fundamentally different way of doing university or college, let’s put that different approach over the top of what’s already there”, is that it seems to have a new appeal due to the way that self-proclaimed “disruptors” and private equity investors approach the idea of starting something new that is largely an iterative re-invention of something established. Namely, that this is bad, that this is not disruption, that this is not what entrepreneurs do. That you don’t iterate, you either buy-out and destroy or you do something that presents itself as radically new, as an Aphrodite rising from the waves, without any rooting in the old. You either acquire Sears at firesale prices, play with it the way a cat plays with a mouse, and then when bored, bite the mouse’s head off, or you make a Theranos. You don’t build a new kind of department store, you don’t invent a slightly better way to do blood tests.
In the case of higher education, this is why so many investors in ed-tech and now AI are so obsessively focused on penetrating existing institutions and laying some kind of cuckoo’s egg inside of its nest. They’re not about to start something new. Even the big for-profit online universities of the last two decades are mostly imitations of brick-and-mortar (including in the prices they charge), much as the anti-woke University of Austin is a kind of shadow or even parody of the institutional designs it wants to parallel.
You can have $120 million to make Juicero, but not a penny to make a modestly new kind of educational service, even something as simple as a relatively standard liberal arts institution expressly to offer a three-year bachelor’s. You can shove online courses down the maw of a brick-and-mortar or try to make a university run like a corporation, but you won’t try to create a radically new form of education from scratch. The one thing we don’t get any more from people perched on the high ground of the global economy is the “creative” part of creative destruction. It’s just carrion eaters all the way down now.
Think about it for a moment. There are a lot of modestly iterative restructurings of existing higher education that might find students. Reinventions of the idea of trade or vocational schooling. A program of study that is combined with apprenticeship in a profession in a more thorough way than internships or short practicums. Four-year programs that focus on thorough immersion in another language and culture while being based in the United States.
Beyond that, I can think of a lot of fundamentally new kinds of educational services. Google has been experimenting with the idea of providing on-the-job training, which is something many American workplaces used to do. That could be a huge market, but nobody’s going at it seriously because to do it right, you’d need a high-quality workforce of educators. You aren’t going to get very far if you send a minimum-wage grunt out to a workplace to train people for a CISSP certification—this is why a fair number of bootcamps and so on disappoint their customers, and even some six or eight-week programs at traditional brick-and-mortars fall short, because they don’t invest in people who both know the subject matter and who are good at teaching. But there’s plainly a ton of demand for this kind of education done right by skilled human beings.
Think of all the workplace training programs. Also mostly crap: they’re used primarily to prove compliance and protect against liability, not to actually improve how that workplace functions. You can buy a consultant to run a three-day set of workshops, but most of the time the people working that end of the gig economy are part of what you might call the glib economy. They can fill the hours but nobody’s assessing the outcomes. They’re usually hired so that someone who is already on staff can be claiming to do the thing they’re hired to do while also declaiming any responsibility for whether it actually got done. There is a ton of enrichment education that could be provided by a really skilled business or enterprise that understands how to teach and vastly expands what could be taught. Right now you can buy a better kind of enrichment from a skilled educator to enhance a high-end cruise than you can for the employees of a large company. Adult extension courses are an old idea, and they’re still floating around, but there’s tons of potential in the concept that is going untapped.
Imagine a consulting firm that assembles small teams of experts for short-term personal training and coaching. I once pitched to a friend who was charged with thinking about what to do with a university program whose original purpose seemed to be obsolete that you could create three-person groups of humanities, social science and science faculty who could help new start-ups and small businesses with their design, with their marketing, with thinking about their place in the culture or the local economy? Or that had a bunch of highly qualified teachers on call in multiple localities who could be assembled for six-week courses every time enough students signed up for a course listed in a huge inventory of possible classes, and the firm running the network had an inventory of suitable vacant office spaces that it would use that were matched to the locations of students and available instructors?
What if you could start a big nationwide enterprise like a reinvented chautauqua that went in-person to public high schools, senior living facilities, state fairs, etc. with performances and lectures, where the business model was to combine endowment income with foundation support and public investment, where the aesthetic range of what was offered was more diverse than something like localized TED Talks but was still very high-quality? My daughter’s high school every once in a while brought in an outside speaker who usually turned out to be some cut-rate local person working their personal networks and pushing their way in the door—there was some horrible crap thing about phone security and social media from some asshole who didn’t know much about either and had no idea how to talk to a bunch of 15-year olds about any of it. There are so many people with talent and knowledge and good presentation skills who could be brought into in-person settings and paid more than the spare change that is often on offer now.
There are modest design iterations and radical new networkings of services that are available piecemeal and often at low-quality that the people with capital to invest could be looking at. They don’t because they either want to break down the doors and steal something that’s well-established or all their money is dedicated to chasing unicorns.
"The one thing we don’t get any more from people perched on the high ground of the global economy is the 'creative' part of creative destruction. It’s just carrion eaters all the way down now. " ---Tim, I feel a gut-twitch recognition when you suggest that the tech-'Genii' ('sorta in the pop-trope of I Dream of . . .) can't really do the imagined "creative destruction" that might fruitfully upend some fundamental educational systems. All the "carrion eaters" do and can do with confidence is plug an academic program into one of their capital-harvesting models of increased efficiency propelled by some recognized ('evidence-based or historically-proven) system for simplifying what's complicated about the real knowledge professed by 'professors' to the point that poorly trained but eager consultants can offer standardized, generally understandable, and commercially/legally compliant substitutes for what the old university disciplines argued practitioners had to learn with long, cumbersome study.
You're an experienced academic. I'm sure there are areas of history pedagogy where efficiencies could be contrived (by very experienced historians) that wouldn't undermine the complexities and difficulties required to master the subject. But the "carrion eaters" you speak of only seem to be 'creative' in their fantasied or simply iterative efforts to make an institutionally recognized area of pertinent 'bankable' knowledge easier to transmit as information, easier for students to retain, and likely to make successive graduate classes who are baffled by other ways of engaging with thier knowledge skill set and are, as a result, satisfactorily 'compliant' to the industry that invested in their education.
The financiers bankrupt their capital acquisitions with debt, zero-ing out the value of the 'business' they've purchased with the conviction that (A) if the subject matter is genuinely valuable, a new business will rise to teach it 'betterly' and (B) that they are responsible for extracting the value from old capital for the benefit of shareholders but aren't responsible for real learning or the advancement of knowledge as an end in itself. Whatever-the-hell those ivory-tower aspirations are supposed to mean, understanding them isn't important for financial speculation.
You can see how Elon Musk itches to make the space exploration industry a no-bullshit, results-driven, cut-rate market disruptor (that's hugely supported by government funding). If Musk or his intellectual progeny were moved to take historical studies "to the moon" or "to Mars," you can anticipate what corners they'd cut. You know what kinds of prejudices would be endemic to their revised programs. An experienced professor sees some arguably innovative efficiencies and new ways of relating cogent historical studies to other fields of knowledge. What if the 'old-school' university traditions weren't preferable to education driven by financiers' expectations of how much debt the old diploma mills can burdened with because they were "the devil you knew" but because, for all their weaknesses, they did change over decades and did struggle to enlarge and refine the long-term scope of scholarship?