Gazing at the Golden Gate Bridge from across the San Francisco bay, I felt certain: This was where I was meant to be.
I was visiting the University of California, Berkeley my junior year of high school, and I didn’t even have to finish the tour before I knew I wanted to call myself a Bear (not the assless-leather-chap-wearing kind). So I worked tirelessly to tailor my application to the school’s requirements, toiled over countless drafts of admissions essays, and militantly maintained my top-tier GPA. And it all became worth it as I read those five words every college-bound high school senior dreams of: “Congratulations, you have been accepted…”
Why then, you ask, am I writing for the Oregon Daily Emerald and not the Berkeley Daily Californian? The answer is simple: My parents and I couldn’t afford the roughly $42,000 per year price tag.
This isn’t to say I’m unhappy with the way things turned out; after four years at Oregon, I couldn’t be prouder to call myself a Duck. But I still occasionally wonder how my life would be different if I had called Berkeley, Calif., my college-career home.
Yesterday, I got a small taste of what it might have been like as I sat in on a session of “Climate Change: Law and Policy,” a course at Berkeley taught by professor William Collins. For free.
Confused? Thank the Internet.
The business of imparting a college-level education upon the masses has become just that: a business. And a multi-billion dollar one, at that. Tuition is sky-high and shows no signs of coming down. Students and their families are forced to make sacrifices they can only hope a college degree will pay for, and still the specter of loan debt haunts many throughout much of their adult lives.
If you ask me, it’s only a matter of time before someone discovers a better way, and when that day comes, the American higher education system had better look out. As it turns out, the day may have already come.
As technology develops, the existing system begins to look ever more antiquated. I can take classes online, correspond with my professors via e-mail and Blackboard, listen to lectures via podcast, read entire books on a handheld digital reader, and even earn an entire degree online (though, admittedly not from any top-tier schools).
And, I recently discovered, I can take classes from schools such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Berkeley without ever leaving my desk and, most importantly, without ever paying a cent.
Academicearth.com is a recently created Web site that illustrates just how much potential the Internet has to change the institution of higher education. On it are posted video recordings of lectures from a number of Ivy-League schools, as well as screen shots and footage of entire course materials for classes in math, science, economics and literature. You can literally attend the entire “Physics 1: Classical Mechanics” course at MIT, lecture notes and all.
“As more and more high-quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves: What are the real barriers to achieving a world class education? At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning,” according to the Web site. “We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars.”
So … why am I paying more than $20,000 per year as an in-state student for a degree from the University of Oregon which, despite its charm, isn’t MIT or Berkeley? Why am I even paying to go to school at all?
Well, because I still need the official slip of paper that says I graduated from college. Because Academicearth.com doesn’t offer national accreditation. And because I can’t go to a keg party online. Colleges and universities will survive as long as they continue to offer things that can’t be found anywhere else.
But the Internet is remarkably adaptable, and has already shown unprecedented ability in transforming institutions that for ages seemed unshakable – take newspapers, for instance. No one would have believed 10 or 15 years ago that today newspapers as we know them would be on the brink of extinction. But people have grown tired of buying information – we want it free and we want it easy – and the Internet offers that.
This is exactly why Huffington Post writer Don Tapscott is worried about the university. Just like newspapers, he points out, universities are “in the business of creating and communicating information.” And, just like newspaper readers, university students are looking for a different way.
“The smartest students want to get an ‘A’ without having ever gone to the lectures. They understand that there are better ways of learning than being the passive recipient of a one-way, one size fits all, teacher-focused model where the student is isolated in the learning process,” Tapscott says.
For now, I think the university is safe. But when the likes of Harvard, Yale and MIT jump on board a potentially revolutionary new model, it seems only a matter of time before the old one crumbles. Probably not in 10 years, and maybe not even in 15. But if the university goes that long without drastically adapting to integrate technology and teaching so as to make learning better and more efficient, and therefore less costly, it very well could die.
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