Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Why bother going to college?

By Ryan Maloney, assistant women's volleyball coach

Head Coach Geoff Braun with Fredonia's four seniors in October

"We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely." ~ E.O. Wilson

Right now, you can go online and take a philosophy class called Justice from Harvard. It's the school's most famous course, and costs about $4,000. But you can take it for free.

Then you can take molecular biology from MIT, English composition and grammar from UC Berkeley, and statistics from Columbia. Again, all for free.

You may even think these classes are better online. You can pause the lecture, and the computer will adjust to the pace of your learning. If that weren't enough, the professors teaching these courses are some of the best in the world.

You might say you're going to college to get a degree, and for now you'd be right. The bachelor's degree is still worth a lot of money over the long haul. But techies in Silicon Valley and Cambridge will change that.

Say you want a job as a computer engineer. In the future, you'll be able to show what courses you've taken, what you did in those courses, and why it's beneficial for the computer engineering job you're applying for. All your credentials will be in an online portfolio detailing exactly what you know and why you're qualified.

This system will be much cheaper and take less time. One day it may eliminate bachelor's degrees, master's degrees, and PhD's. Notions of "applying to," and "graduating from," college could disappear as timelines for learning become more fluid.

Certainly there will always be a need for in-person learning -- biology students can't do dissections online and music students can't perform online. Netflix didn't put movie theaters out of business, and Amazon didn't put Wal-Mart out of business. But they sure changed things.

So, with all this information freely available, why bother going to college? A few ideas:

1) Mentorship -- We have the entirety of recorded human history in our pocket, but no idea how to make sense of it. The future of college will be, as E.O. Wilson puts it, "about putting together the right information at the right time, think(ing) critically about it, and mak(ing) important choices wisely." A good professor/mentor/adviser helps you do that. Find one on purpose.

2) Connection -- People trust people they know, and trust is a scarce resource. In the process of becoming well-educated, students make connections with other well-educated people who might help them later in life. [that sentence is worth re-reading, and acting accordingly.]

3) Initiative -- More than ever, employers value initiative. Those who lead by solving interesting problems get rewarded. Those who are excited to learn get rewarded. Those who make change happen get rewarded. Initiative is a learned skill -- one colleges will need to get better and better at teaching.

[h/t Kevin Carey]